Where do we go from here?

A picture from my balcony. Not anything fantastic, but its nice to look at.  :)

I've been doing some more thinking about my intentions in regard to this blog and I've tried to apply some of the theories that I have learned in my business classes. There are millions of active blogs out there and if I want people to engage with my content, buy my product if you will, I need to offer them something that is:

• Unique - Why read this blog and not another? What can I offer that others can't?
• Specialized - A shotgun affect will not work. I can't just talk about anything; appealing to everyone will appeal to no one.

I've toyed with the possibility of focusing on music talk. Or possibly on my ongoing interest in student productivity. Or maybe even a weekly rant. I love to rant.

So I'm asking all 43 of you (according to Google Analytics) what are the strengths of this blog? What are the weaknesses? What makes you want to read a post? What makes you click away and check your facebook profile instead? do you like long posts less often or short posts more often? Pictures or no? 

Eventually, I would like to have my own website that would act as a brand under which I could present all of my interests, endeavors, and accomplishments. A sort of Toph Portal. But my technical abilities are a limiting factor at the moment. For now, I wan't to do this blog better.

Where are your friends tonight?

Hey kids. Do you ever have a craving for something but can't figure out what it is? My life feels like this lately; I'm needing something but I just decide what it is. Sometimes it turns out to be big things like seeing my parents again or finding a place in the world but other times it simple things, like cookies and good songs.

Yesterday I bought some cookies and today I listened to LCD Soundsystem's (James Murphy's) latest contribution Sound of Silver. This has been one of those albums that seems to find me right when I need it. Like a pet dog (or parrot, or hamster, or whatever you're into) it's there when I need it and not when I don't. I'm not always in the mood for this type of music, but today I was thirsty for it and I didn't even realize it until the album came up on my iTunes-o-matic.

The entire album is exceptional but there are two song's in particular that easily drill into me whenever they come up. "Someone Great" paints the picture of new-fatherhood in a way that I have never heard. In this quite hackneyed genre, I hold Ben Folds' "Still Fighting It" and "Someone Great" in the highest regard but while Folds' version always makes me think of my own father, LCD's leads me to picture myself becoming a father someday.

But that's a song for another day. I'm currently listening to "All My Friends" which directly follows "Someone Great" on the album. When I'm listening to this song, see all of the pictures of my friends on facebook flashing trough my head with the beat of the song. The piano is played in such a way that it evokes images of four or five friends playing it together; there are jumps in timing and it sounds awkward at first but as the song goes on you begin to get more comfortable with the imperfection and at the end you realize that the piano track could not have been more appropriate. Murphy adds more and more tracks (drums, bass, guitar, vocals) and it's like more and more friends are being added to the march.

"You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan
And the next five years trying to be with your friends again."

Some of my friends are abroad as well, some of them back at Skidmore, and some of them have moved to places unknown. When you're away from home for as long as I have been, you begin miss things and people you never thought you would. When you're 10,000 miles away from the people who make up your life, those relationships fall into perspective. I'm not sure if distance makes the heart grow fonder but now that I've been here for a couple months I can say from experience that distance makes the heart more clear. "If I could see all my friends tonight!"

Please don't look at me

I'm quite alarmed at my ability to navigate the train network here in Sydney. From what little time I have spent in New York, I was convinced that no one really understand the subway there. It's impossible for a someone to be able to know which train comes in in which station on which track. I'm quite sure that the whole thing was designed by ferrets and that people in New York only hurry because they anticipate the subway dropping them off in a completely random, unpredictable spot on the island.

Sydney, however, seems have employed actual human beings to plan out the train system. 

Thats not my point though. The engineers who designed the interiors of the cars decided that the seats would have the curious ability to face both forward and backward. The back of each seat is on a pivot that allows it to swing over the top of the seat, effectively swapping the side of the bench that you can put your legs over. After work the other day I was one of the first people to get on one particular car and I chose the first seat I came to; this seat was facing north. As other people started to get on the train after me, they would walk down into the middle of aisle and pick a seat farthest away from the other people on the train. If I was person A sitting in position 1/60, person B would sit in position 60/60, C in 30/60, D in 45/60, E in 15/60 until people started to have to pick seats next to another person. Particularly interesting was that every person who started a new row stopped to flip their seat facing south. Soon, every seat other than the one I was sitting on was facing south, which meant that anyone who sat infront of me would actually be facing directly towards me. He're the kicker: people chose to stand for the duration of the 30 minute commute rather than sit in a seat that was facing mine.

I saddens me to know that 60 or so people will avoid any sort of connection with a person (even if its as simple as sharing leg space with them at all costs. At the next to last stop before I planned on getting off, a girl with a bouquet of irises sat next to me. When I asked her who they were for say replayed, "Someone." I pretended that she meant to give them to me (irises are my favorite flowers) but didnt have the nerve. I wouldn't have accepted them any way, I convinced myself. I don't take flowers from strangers.

Last night we went to a really swanky club. There were loads and loads of people there but the atmosphere was less "Call On Me" than other clubs we've been to. Which is a nice change. i ended up talking to this guy who pulled me aside to compliment my outfit. I was wearing a pink dress shirt with my dads argyle sweater over it. He told me that he would usually pick on "white kids" like me but that I somehow pulled the look off. This is a good thing because I'm not sure how I would hold up in a confrontation with a heavyset man of color. We talked about all kinds of things from living in Vermont to how The GZA's album liquid swords changed the rap scene. When I mentioned that Dr. Dre's album 2001 was my first hip hop purchase, he told me that he and Dre were longtime friends. I talked to this guy for almost 30 minutes. I found out today that the guy was Ice Cube. There were no two more opposite people in that club last night.

Here's a classic.

farewell to summer

We all went to Bondi beach for the last time today. The weather here is getting colder and colder every day and the beach will soon be too cold for anything more than walking on. Fall in Australia is not anything like fall in Vermont; there are no leaves turning colors and the air isn't crisp, just cool. It doesn't smell as good but then again, I'm in a city of 5 million people who have varying levels of hygiene.

I've recently discovered Cal Newport's Blog on student productivity. If you are a student, I beg you to take time out of chatting with people on facebook read even one of his posts. This guy really knows what he's talking about and provides easily understood tips for college students that are based on his experience as a student at MIT. For me, productivity is a constant battle and one that I seem to never win. I've read books and articles and subscribed to RSS feeds describing the newest hi and low tech tools for personal productivity and still I find myself writing to this blog and not working on the 2,000 word paper I have due next week. At this point, I feel like I could teach a seminar on productivity for the college student, if only I could be productive enough to actually do it.

Most of my stress (at least here at school) stems from procrastination. David Allen describes in his book Getting Things Done (which is required reading for everyone who has ever needed to do anything) that procrastination stems from two subconscious roadblocks. One, you don't see the ultimate value in completing the task at hand. Two, you doubt your ability to complete the task at hand with control and success. This is why gigantic papers often get pushed back until the night before they're due: I have no idea how to attack this paper and seriously doubt my ability to complete it with any semblance of quality. The solution? I cant write the paper because someone can't just sit down and write a paper just like someone can't sit down and paint a landscape. The paper is not a singular task, it is a project that is comprised of hundreds of little tasks that are much easier to comprehend, plan, and complete than simply sitting down and "writing a paper." Try this, think of the biggest "thing" in your life that is causing you the most amount of stress. This can be a letter of thanks you haven't written, a project you haven't started, treehouse you haven't built. Got it? Ok, now grab a piece of paper and write down the absolute first thing you need to do before any other part of that project can get done. Now write that down! Be as specific as possible. Now don't you feel a little better?

Today's track is called "Strange Answers" by Summerbirds in the Cellar off of their album With the Hands of the Hunter it All Becomes Dead. The title of the album, I'll admit, prepares you for a Thursday cover band like experience. Don't worry tho, Summerbirds is an amalgamation of Death Cab and Fisherspooner. But not the sad Death Cab, the good Death Cab. I'm temped to put up more that one of their songs because this is one of the most eclectic albums I've heard in quite a while. Enjoy!

peeing in church

I know this is going to be the second post talking about pee but I do it every day and its on my mind. You do it too, you can't run from it. Well you can, but you'd get it all over yourself.

Urinals here are essentially metal walls with drains at the bottom. I like this. It feels more natural to pee on a wall than to insert my junk into a big porcelain cup. I don't know why this is but men have always been and always will be impressed with the trajectory of anything and pee is no exception. This is why women are never allowed to operate trebuchets; their innate sense of velocity and angle were never developed as children. This is also the reason that most women are horrible drivers. That and they put makeup on behind the wheel. Let's be honest.

Today's song may be a stretch for you "I was brought up on the Beatles" folks but please give it the old college try. (Where did that expression come from? In my experience, college kids try as little as is physically possible without melting into the futon where they're smoking weed.) The new M83 album just dropped and I have yet to get my "I-don't-really-do-drugs-but-this-music-makes-me-wish-I-did" hands on it. M83 is a french band from france named after the galaxy of the same name. Here's a track off their (his) album Dead Cities Red Seas and Lost Ghosts. It's called "In Church" and I hope you like it.

kiss my feet

I was on Amazon today looking for some books. I just finished reading Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman and I wanted to pick up his latest book IV. I'm not sure if I would read this book even if I had it; I'm still chewing on the last one. I'm not sure if I like Klosterman, I have a few friends who geek out over him but there's something about him or his character that makes me think I might kick him in the shin if we were to meet. If in a post-apocalyptic world, knowledge of pop culture was used as currency, Klosterman would could buy himself one of those uber pimp LamBROginis. But he wouldn't, he's way too cool for that. Here's the essence of Klosterman's message: I know more about music than anyone on the planet, girls seems to like me/ girls seem to get caught temporarily in my ego and spend the next 2 years trying to break free, Kiss is the best band despite them not being a very good band at all. Klosterman is one of those guys you would kill to be friends with. He has so much to say. He's articulate beyond reason. He talks constantly, and that means you have to do less work. Everything is spelled out for you and thats freaking awesome. He's the kind of person you can have a conversation with and not need to/be able to say anything more than "I know exactly what you mean" and "That's exactly how it was for me" he's your man crush for about 200 pages and then you cant wait for him to fall asleep so you can feel good about yourself again.

ANYWAY I was on Amazon and I spotted this little message on the top of the page:

(Not: Christ...?)

Nope. Not Christ. Not even close, but thanks for asking. Good luck finding him tho, he's a shifty fella. There are some people who claim to have found Jesus but they never fully disclose his whereabouts. Much like Dick Cheny, Jesus is hard to pin down (in a figurative sense of course, he was eventually literally pinned down.) Perhaps he's under the couch. Or in the lint trap of the dryer. Who knows Amazon, who knows.

I'm listening to Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. I've had a lot of arguments with my friends over the merit of Fleetwood Mac. Most of them are of the unfortunate opinion that Fleetwood Mac is a silly band with little to no relevance who play simple music. If you also feel this way, you are most likely currently digesting the most recent Explosions in the Sky album, wearing Levi's 501s that are too small for you, and thumbing the phone number of your ex-girlfriend "just to catch up." Ill say it this way too: if you don't like Fleetwood Mac please punch yourself in the head. Rumours is one of the best albums of all time. Please, take a break from googling concert pictures of The Animal Collective and give this song a listen. 

When this album was released there was a deafening amount of infidelity and pain running within the band and thus the entirety of the album is devoted to this theme. At the time, guitarist Lindsay Buckingham had just ended a very long relationship with singer Stevie Nicks;  drummer Mick Fleetwood was having sex with Stevie; and bassist John McVie divorced keyboardist Christie McVie. If you listen closely at the beginning of the cut you can hear Stevie Nicks moan "fuck" under her breath and then heave a heavy sigh before the man she's having sex with hits the bass pedal and the once love of her life plays the first gentle guitar riff of what the band agreed was a "perfect" song.

I has a shirt/peeing

I just purchased a shirt from a really nice store. i feel good about this shirt because it is a nice shirt and i know i will wear it. i was able to attain this shirt for $80, which may seem like a lot of money to some of you, but I'm filthy rich and i could afford it. i would have purchased a more expensive shirt, but there was none. i bought the most expensive shirt. now that i have this shirt the most expensive shirt that they have is less expensive than this shirt. its simple logic folks. oops im poor now.

When a woman announces that she needs to go to the bathroom she has a very specific window of time in mind: now. See:

Tina: "Oh man, I gotta pee"

Translation: "I need to physically have my ass on a toilet in no fewer than 30 seconds"

It's almost as if her bladder was wired into a pressure release value and as soon as enough urine was stored up in her small intestine she snaps into what I like to call "Toilet Tracking Mode." When you're in the car, this means pulling into the nearest KFC. If you're playing Monopoly, this means an extra $500 from the bank while she relieves herself. And if you're in the space shuttle, well, they use diapers. Men on the other hand, operate in an entirely different manner. Let me illustrate:

Bill: Oh man, I gotta pee.

Translation: "I just remembered that I was going to pee when I was in the kitchen yesterday but I didn't because there were Doritos and I love Doritos."

Now, I don't judge. You can't judge. It's impossible to judge.

Today's song is a little tune by a band named Shearwater. If you're looking for something you can ignore (a la John Cusack in High Fidelity) this have a listen. If you want something to rock out to, listen anyway and then slam on some Rihanna or The Chain by Fleetwood Mac. 

HINT: right click and "save as target" on a PC and option click on a mac. 

Also, please comment on this post and let me know how you like Shearwater. Of course, you can also say anything else you like. Select anonymous if you don't have an account and you can post immediately. yay for the internet!

this is the story of how we begin to remember

My sister is in Rwanda right now in an attempt to adopt a child. She lost a son (along with a womb) a year or so ago at birth and she's turned to Rwanda, which currently has over 650,000 orphans, to extend her family. She's much more eloquent and accurate regarding her situation than I am so i will refer you to her blog if you are interested in hearing more of her amazing story. 

Song of the day is from Paul Simon. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. im not sure what it means.... This is for you Jess!

Cattle, sheep, and emus

what's the plural of emu? this weekend i stayed on a farm with a wonderful family. I could go into detail about wrangling cattle, herding sheep, and driving ATVs but that was certainly not the highlight of my "Farming Weekend". for two days, and for the first time since i have been here in australia, i felt like i had a home. this family was so welcoming, so generous with what was theirs. in the wake of a difficult friday afternoon, i dont think i could have had a more rejuvenating weekend. at one point, the sun was setting and i hiked out onto a high hill in the middle of the 2700 acre farm, listened to the bush and watched the sun go down. i know the picture is trite and not very interesting, im sorry. I now have come to terms with my surroundings. this is all real to me now. those who i love are far, far away from me but this is ok; there is much to love here.

With such musically critical (read: obsessed) friends, i take on a certainly amount of risk when posting a song every day. To this group of people my musical maturity is so retarded I might as well have recently discovered the Rolling stones. To each his own, but hopefully at least one person can get something from my pick here. dont pass this song off as novelty or silly; you'd be missing it.

please leave a comment and let me know how this finds you

i have a pony

i dont but i bet i got your attention. 

as you can see, my experiment below went horribly. even worse is neither of my parents said anything about it. which leads me to believe that they're not reading this either. which is kind of sad. but im over it. mostly.

i think what im going to do now is post EVERY DAY and advertise the hell out of this space. hopefully, if i can get people to come, i can also get them to stay. i hope to take the scope of the posts a little wider; things that are on my mind. hopefully these things will also be interesting to others. there's only so much you can say about being in australia. cha know?

i know ive already posted a picture like this but i like this one alot. i made it by taking 3 bracketed photos and putting them through a program that detects the properly exposed parts of all of them and creates a composite. pretty cool. i need a tripod here tho.

ok. until tomorrow, ill leave you with a song for today. Ive been getting into this band recently tho i know i should have done it sooner. they influence a lot of the "indie" bands that are hittin the waves today. "can you hear the arcade fire? check it out. (hint: if you right click and "save target as" you can just drag it to iTunes. With a Mac, just hold option and click)

Poll: are you reading this

Ok, so I've got this blog. and i have been paying marginal attention to it. After long consideration, i have determined that this is because im not sure how many people are actually reading this. i suspect that its just my parents and my sister, who i talk to on the phone often. i started this blog so that people in my life could keep in touch with me and my experiences. if those people are not reading it, then i dont think im going to keep it up. However, if i find that even a few of you are infact checking this regularly, ill be reinvigorated to jump into this thing with both feet. 

So here's the plan: if you check this page with a decent amount of regularly, please post a simple comment on this thread. if enough people care to watch the show, the show will go on...

bondi beach

im not happy with the way this bloginator machine uploads pictures. ill research a more gracefully method. sorry for the detached picture.

Tonight, we eat kangaroo

You heard it right kids. this evening yours truly has monster plans to fry up some roo and eat it raw. raw fried roo is a specialty in these parts and im not about to insult the natives. which reminds me, australian natives are very tiny, spindly men (and they're all men, no one has EVER seen a female aborigine) who line the subways selling semi-authentic finger-paintings on cardboard. I say semi-authentic because cardboard was extremely rare 10,000 years ago. so were fingerpaints until crayola beat out roseart in the aboriginal market. 

ive got some pictures here i wanted to share with you. first of all, is the picture from our balcony in sydney. please look at this picture, look out your window, cry and repeat.

So there's that. ive also got some pictures of my friends in one of the rooms here. hopefully you can get an idea of the size and layout of the room and perhaps the seriousness of the people im hanging out with.

The top picture there is of Kramer sleeping on a coffee table that is about 2x2 feet. he's 6'3"

I also have a great picture of Bondi beach. this is the beach that inspired apple computer to make the first imac in the color "bondi blue" Wikipedia has a good article here for those interested.  We've been going here for the past three weeks. my pasty skin isnt going to tan itself now. 

Im about done hanging out and doing nothing. i can tell my brain has become quite numb and i can count on having some trouble getting it going again. like a bad lawnmower, its going to take a few rips and some swearing at to get started. ill post again tomorrow with a scholastic update. i dont want to let my first day at school to slip past my memory banks. maybe ill lay out my outfit the night before school starts like i did last yea..... when i was a little boy. roo ho!

intro: sydney

apologies for the delay. as i hope you can understand, iv'e been inundated with distractions here. but ive taken today to collect my thoughts and memories and put them up here. im going to aim to post on a weekly basis. lets start at the beginning. 

the flight was wondrous. i was sitting in an exit row, on the aisle, and no one was sitting next to me. you really ca

nt ask more for a 14 hour flight. 

if you ever get a chance to fly Quantas, take note of the kind staff, the excellent food, and the free drinks. after the flight, we were all loaded into buses and taken to resort in Noosa in Brisbane. there we spent 3 days in a summer camp like atmosphere. except there were kangaroos. lots of kangaroos. they're very friendly. except whe

n they pummel you in the face. i tried surfing but it didnt work. im too tall. we watched a lot of cricket. before i explain cricket, let me first share my opinion on the culture of australia in general. australia is a little boy in big american pants. everything about the culture indicates that it wants to be just like america but cant. the music is all american, all the magazines are american, everyone reads the newyork times. but the people are very different, they seem to be acting it all out. they love their culture, their way of life, but they seem to hold america as an ideal. that said, let me explain the oddity that is cricket. cricket is a lame version of baseball, which is a lame version of a sport in the first place. they only have two b

ases, they throw the ball half the distance, they use a paddle instead of a bat, and they bunt they ball instead of actually hitting it. its as if you redesigned baseball for retarded lemurs.

we're living now in sydney at a place called unilodge. its a converted department store thats located very close to the city. our view is amazing. check it out in the pics.

oh man this bench

ive been sitting on this bench in LAX for four hours. well, i got up to go over to throw my tissue away but that was it. 

i suppose this is the inaugural post to my blog. i'll be honest, i dont really want to write a blog, my hesitancy is made manifest in my neglect for proper capitalization and punctuation. thats not the only reason; im also cripplingly lazy. also, not using caps seems to have reached south beach diet popularity with today's graphic designers and im not about to miss that bus. 

its not that i dont want to compose a record of my travels, thoughts, and accomplishments but i regret that the only vehicle that can do this and reach enough people for it to be worth my time is a web page. That said, im going to try to make this blog as rich as i can. ill try to post videos, pictures, and maybe even some braille if i get around to it. blind people read blogs too you know. also, i take issue with the word blog. for those of you who have stowed themselves away in a crate in their attic since 1996, "blog" is short for "Web Log." this is indicative of an extreme laziness that can only be toped by my unwillingness to capitalize the first word of this sentence.

darren: i started a web log

frank: eff that

darren: eff what?

frank: can't you take up something that doesn't take such a damn long time to refer to?

im playing some sweet flash games right now. if you have not already, check out DTD. it will most likely eat your soul like one of those things (i cant recall their names right now but pictures something that could/might dine on a soul or two from time to time). i also just downloaded Wingnuts 2. ive wanted to play this game for a while now but i was looking for the right excuse. 16 hours in coach sounds like a good enough reason. 

my butt is totally asleep at this point and i think its dreaming of pooping. which may sound crude but i dont know what else a butt would dream of. except for maybe other, younger, more shapely and  butts. 

it's 6:49 and my plane leaves at midnight. im waiting to wait. wish me luck.