Actually, thinking about it, 2008 as a whole has been doing its best to beat me to a pulp.
Anyway, two things.
First thing has two things you need to know about said first thing. One, I got a haircut today. It is extremely short. The jury is still out. Two, my roommate likes to try to convince his cat to attack me every time I walk in.
So. First thing.
Roommate: Get her, Puss! TJ: She’s not going to get me. Roommate: Get her! Get the muffin top! TJ: Don’t be such an asshole! That’s muffin HEAD! *stomps upstairs*
Internet, I have had the damndest time writing this post today. Not because it’s deep, or thoughtful or required massive amounts of research, nothing like that at all. I just cannot seem to appropriately put words to how overwhelmed I am – remember a couple of days ago when I asked if you’d ever met anyone HALF as awesome as me? Well, I am now overwhelmed by awesome. If there IS anyone out there approaching that halfway point, I think I have found her.
I’m probably just about the last person on the internet to hear about Julia Nunes, but holy crap am I glad I finally did. I cannot seem to get enough of this girl. On the off chance that you, Internet, have not been exposed to her yet, I feel the need to awkwardly gush all over your screens now.
When I first saw one of her videos I thought, oh, this is rad (yes, rad), I’ll post it tomorrow. But then I watched more and more of them, and it wasn’t a matter of posting one the next day, but which one to post. I honestly can’t decide.
This is the first one I saw:
As I said, I thought “Oh, that’s cute.” But later that night I found myself going back and watching more, coming across this one next:
At one point, when I saw one of the question and answer videos, she mentioned that she was getting the opportunity to open for Ben Folds, which I think is pretty awesome for a college freshman and her ukulele, and to the side, in the video info, she had dates and locations listed. Having no concept of date and time, I was briefly excited when I noticed she’d be playing at Wolf Trap in Virginia on May 28th, I believe. Of course, a split second later it dawned on me that not only was May over, but I had been babysitting that night.
While Noah’s parents went to see… Ben Folds. Damnit!
Well, Amalah did get to see Ben Fold’s fingers, which I do suppose trumps my belated 48 hour infatuation with Julia Nunes, who I wasn’t even aware existed at the time. Plus, I got to hang out with Noah who really isn’t THAT much bigger than a ukulele and he’s also blonde, so it’s kind of almost the same? No?
Anyway. Check out her YouTube channel, her My Space page, buy her CDs, you know, all that stuff. If you’ve heard of her before or get a chance to check her out today, let me know what you think.
And, because I can’t resist just one more, here is the video that won her a new ukulele:
Internet, you may think I’m a pile of crazy most days, that I make my sandwiches wrong and use sorely outdated slang words, but trust me on this one. Seriously.
Hi. How are you? I’m fine. A little tired. It’s nice here today. I’d like to get outside, but I wouldn’t know what to do once I was out there.
Anyway, do you remember me? I used to come around here a lot and write some pretty entertaining stuff. That hasn’t happened too much lately, and I am sorry for that.
I have been thinking about you a lot, though, Internet. When I’m at my desk, working eleventy billion hours a week, I think, “I wonder what Internet us up to,” or “I wonder if Internet remembers when I used to be funny.”
I’ve noticed though, Internet, that even though I’ve not been living up to my end of our deal so well, that you haven’t forsaken me. You still come here all the time, to poke and prod and see if maybe something interesting will fall out of me. And even when all your shaking produces no results except for half-assed, not particularly amusing anecdotes about what happens to me on the rare occasion I do get away from my desk, you still come back.
That’s why we’re friends, I think, Internet. You understand. You understand that sometimes I just suck.
Anyway, this is kind of awkward, huh? I just wanted to say thank you for sticking around while I go through this hellish busy season. It’s almost over now, and soon we can be together again.
For now, though, I wanted to express my appreciation, and I was thinking about how to do that. I could bake cookies, I guess, but they’d go bad by the time I got them to everyone. I could mail cards, but that’s a lot of stamps. And then I remembered – the best way to show someone you’re thinking about them.
It’s true, my choices have always been impeccable.
The evidence:
My Favorite Songs Through the Years
A list, by TJ
1. Kindergarten
No, seriously.
2. First grade, a tie.
Oh damn, I played the hell out of this song on the jukebox at the pizza place my mother used to take us to. Before that stinky brother came along. And we never had pizza AGAIN.
Very disappointed to learn I could not, in fact, grow up to be Debbie Gibson.
3. Second grade.
The dancing, the fashion! Still know all the words!
4. Third grade.
She didn’t used to be crazy. Or, at least, I was too young to know.I will give you tonight to consider all of this, and continue with 4th grade tomorrow. IT ONLY GETS MORE AWESOME FROM HERE!!
So the Deviant Lunatic guy has decided to challenge my musical taste, so here I shall display it for you. As I said in an earlier entry, if you do a similar post, link it here, and if your musical taste makes me want to cry badly enough, I will take it upon myself to create for you a CD of such awesomeness that you’ll never musically embarass yourself again.
ANYway. My musical taste changed a lot over the years, as does anyone’s, I think, but for the most part, stalled out my sophomore year of college. I still listen to the same bands I did then, have added relatively little new stuff, and in fact still, for the most part, prefer the albums of those bands from that time instead of anything newer, though most of the bands I like still do produce quality things that I enjoy. As far as adding anything new, I tend to listen to things that sound like the things I already like, with a few oddities thrown in here and there (Mika!)
If you ask anyone what they listen to, EVERYone, pretty much says “Oh, I like everything.” Everyone likes everything. Whatever, you all say that, you know you do. So rather than list off every single genre and every single band I’ve ever liked, I decided I’d just post some of the stuff that I most often call up on my MP3 player, though we all understand I have it packed with over 1000 songs and even as much as I will post today can hardly be considered a totally representative sample. However, they will be awesome.
Prepare to be excessively You Tubed. Those of you who can’t see videos at work, well… er, sorry? I don’t know how else to do this! And as for the You Tube links – a lot of the songs I will talk about have the actual videos up on You Tube, and some, instead, just have the songs used as background in other, people-made videos. I’ll embed videos only for the actual real ones, and provide links for listening only purposes to the others – I take no responsibility for the actual VISUAL parts of the videos that are just linked. Damn kids.
As I was thinking about this post, I was scribbling things down on a piece of paper in front of me while I worked, so I’m going to go with exactly what I have listed there, in the exact order that I have it, because doing it that way is easier than coming up with some kind of sensical arrangement, and this way I can claim it’s more “natural” and I’m going just off the top of my head. But we all know it’s laziness.
First of all – probably my favorite band, I even have a tattoo of their logo – Alkaline Trio. I’ve liked Alkaline Trio for a long time – since my sophomore year of college, I believe. The first song I heard was Maybe I’ll Catch Fire, and I’ve loved them ever since. This video, Mercy Me, is from one of their newer CDs, and I really enjoy the sound of this song. It’s slightly different form the older stuff in ways that only someone who is a big snotty elitist about “older stuff” can discern, and that doesn’t take away from how good it is at all. I hate those elitists.
I could probably fill this whole thing up with Alkaline Trio songs alone, but I’ll move on, after saying that you should also be sure to check out Every Thug Needs a Lady (formerly often used as a threat to my mother, to use it as my wedding theme, if she didn’t learn to lay off me about being single. She’s since learned) and Nose Over Tail, possibly one of the most romantic songs ever written, if you take some time to listen to it closely.Next on my list… oh, The Ataris. I used to be so insanely into the Ataris, before Alkaline Trio replaced them as the bandly love of my life. This song, right here, is pretty much their theme song, they end all their shows with it and often have someone from the audience come up to play guitar for them during it, and the whole place just blows up with the radicalness of it all.
You might know The Ataris a bit, as they actually had a couple of real live radio hits a couple of years ago with the songs In This Diary and their cover of Boys of Summer. Both good songs, but their older stuff was all that so painfully sort of almost emo stuff that teenagers and twenty somethings think actually mean something profound. My personal favorites include San Dimas High School Football Rules, of course, above there, and San Dimas, along with Looking Back on Today and I Won’t Spend Another Night Alone:
Those last three are the ones I sing, in embarrassing fashion, to the boy I babysit, when I get him ready for bed at night. I may work at an accounting firm, but I’m totally gonna be a rock star in one two year old’s mind.Dashboard Confessional – the one night I ever missed leading my Molten Core raid, pre-BC, obviously, I was right here:
And it was awesome.Saves the Day – another band I picked up that same year in college, and actually got a chance to see live at the 9:30 Club (I’ll finish that story, I swear). Now, this band I can honestly say – I have NOT liked anything they came out with since these two videos, but you can check out anything on the albums Through Being Cool and Stay What You Are. This song, At Your Funeral, was the first one I liked:
And I don’t think you can deny that that’s all kinds of great, but this is my favorite Saves the Day song, video included because of the muppet supporting cast – Freakish.
And!Can we really, possibly, EVER forget Mika?
Don’t worry.
It’s not Big Girls.
Even though I really don’t think there’s possibly a limit to how much I could enjoy that song.
Enjoy a bit of a Mika-change, for once.
A band that I absolutely was nuts over in college, that his since broken up, is The Get Up Kids. I can’t remember what song I heard first, I know that I just liked everything I heard, and I introduced them to my friend Brien. December of my sophomore year, Brien IM’d me and said “Did you hear the Get Up Kids are playing at the 9:30 Club?” (I’ll finish that story, I swear) and I said, “Yes :(, but I’m not going.” “Yes you are,” he replies. “I just bought us tickets for your birthday.”SQUEE!
That show was awesome, I’m sad I didn’t see them again before they broke up, and I was a little bummed through the whole show because they didn’t play my favorite song, Mass Pike… until the second encore.
DOUBLE SQUEE!
Mass Pike!
However, in this great big unfair internetty world, there is no suitable video of Mass Pike, at all, period. In fact, there seems to be a great dearth of anything by the Get Up Kids, which is a GD crying shame.
However, you may possibly enjoy this:
That’s a live version of Holiday, and as you can see, The Get Up Kids put on one heck of an excellent show, so if you’re into it, check out some of those other live videos You Tube is kind enough to link up for you as related content.Lastly for today, another band that I have a tattoo related to – Reel Big Fish. The tattoo is not their logo, it is instead one of their song titles, that I will not name, as it is kind of a personal joke and people tend not to get it. And get offended. And screw them. Anyway, I like a LOT of Reel Big Fish songs, and I couldn’t pick just one from the half a page long list I made, so I’m just gonna grab the first one on it and go with that:
I don’t know how familiar all y’all are with Mika. Personally, I was reading some forum or something or other, I don’t recall, about Queen, and someone posted a link to Mika’s Grace Kelly video on YouTube, saying that he seemed to be channeling a bit of Freddie Mercury, even referenced him in the song.
I checked it out and it was super catchy in a really obnoxious way, and quickly ended up on my MP3 player, and I listened to it every morning on my way to work. Little while later, I had my MP3 player plugged in to the computer, charging, and had Rhapsody open to move a couple of things around and fix a play list or two, since I had suddenly decided that a song that had been placed on there when I downloaded a 90s playlist needed to never be played again. Natalie Merchant, if I had known you were going to sneak onto the player buried deep within that playlist, I never would have allowed such a thing to happen.
Anyway, so I was playing around on Rhapsody and was getting ready to go to work, and since I liked Grace Kelly so much, I dragged over a whole bunch more Mika songs. On my way to work that morning, I played through what I had downloaded, and really did like it a lot. Whoever said that Mika was a like a trainwreck you can’t look away from was right. Except it’s not so much a trainwreck as a convoy of awesome crashing into a Rockette-style kickline of spectacular.
Person: What are you listening to?
TJ: Mika!
Person: What do you want to hear?
TJ: Mika!
Person: Put on something good.
TJ: Mika??
Everyone I have forced Mika upon, when I can trick them into getting into my car (not that they let me drive, but still, my car, my music) comes to the disturbing realization that while they seem to feel like they should be horrified, they can’t help enjoying it. It’s true. You can’t help but love Mika.
Anyway, so, right. I had been listening to Mika every morning on my way to work (I go through weeks at a time where I put the same song on as soon as I get in the car every morning), and one night I was playing around on YouTube and saw the “official” video for Mika’s new single, Big Girls.
And I made a decision.
Not only was the song all kinds of unspeakably awesome, in the “I’m going to sing this to myself all day and I don’t even care if it ends up driving me insane to the point that someone needs to lock me in the basement and feed me yogurt til the men in white coats come to take me away” kind of way, but I decided I need to be those women.
I’m not too sure if I need to gain 20 lbs, or lose 20 lbs. I know I need 6 to 8 more inches of leg. Both of those, well, I’ll figure it out eventually. I’ve also got to learn to make my hips wiggle like that when I walk, without looking like a scorpion has crawled up my pants. But do you see that redhead? I can see that the first thing I’m going to need is those blue ruffly underpants. Blue ruffly underpants are my first step.
Really, you think this is a post about underpants, and that’s why you’re reading it, but I really just want to infect the entire world with Mika.
So, I totally forgot this band existed until like, two days ago.
Which is ridiculous, because Rock Star Rob of soon-to-be, sure-to-be Stupid Hero fame introduced me to the awesomeness that is The Impossibles back in my freshman year of college.
And I sure did love The Impossibles, a whole lot.
So of COURSE, considering how much I loved them, this video is from their last ever show.
I haven't found a convenient, easy to update method of displaying a list of links to all of the blogs I read, nor am I interested in getting all wrapped up in the politics of who is listed and who is not, so here is a link to a single blog that I do, in fact, read, to be updated randomly and completely at my own whim, for no particular reason or reasons I DON'T FEEL I NEED TO DISCUSS WITH YOU, INTERNET, but you can rest assured that I would not maliciously steer you wrong.
Hello! I'm TJ and this is my blog. The picture is a joke, get it? Because I'm INSIDE the INTERNET?
I'm 30 years old and I live in Arizona with my husband and our two big dogs. I've been married for just over a year, and we have a 7 month old daughter named Penelope. You can do the math. It's okay. We don't mind.
Read my stuff. You'll like it.
I know that at some point, this section of my site will be out of date. I promise you in advance, I'm aware of that.
