Just realized something...

I have five followers on blogspot? Wow. Wonder if any of them read any of this...

Alright, so as of recent I have declared myself a Facebook ban. Tristan, the Caucasian, has changed my password and will not tell me until the end of finals. Granted, yes, there will be other things to distract me online, but I feel Facebook will take a load off my short attention span.

With this week being Week 9 of Winter Quarter, I feel I've really gotta buckle down and study. I'm so behind that I think I'm going to need to deprive myself of sleep - and I feel I'm ready for that. The 24 Hour Film Dash has really thrown off my sleeping schedule and in a way conditioned me to be able to withstand staying up with minimal sleep. Terrible for my health? Probably. But hey, it's college - and at least I'm not resorting to Adderall or Ritalin - or any drug for that matter - to aid me in my studying. Though, I have read that neurologists do encourage brain enhancing drugs...

... I'll look into that later. For now, I need to bloooooooooooooooooooooooog. Cause I miss you guys. And I miss writing. And I miss looking for an excuse to ignore Italian homework.

It's odd. Since the 24 Hour Film Dash, it has indeed awaken something inside of me. And lately, I've been in a real Jazz binge - been getting a hold of some Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, and the list goes on... I'm ingesting all of this music and all this knowledge of jazz, hungrily.

I can't help it. I miss it. I need to pick up an instrument. Thing is, I don't have the time for that so I've resorted to just... listening. And learning. I need to find somebody on campus I can talk jazz with. Sure, my knowledge merely scratches the surface, but jazz is like a drug to me - it's intoxicating and I'm on it constantly. You know what I've fallen asleep to for the past couple nights (aside from Radiohead and Kings of Convenience)? Stan Getz and Bill Evans. Dave Brubeck Quartet.

All this jazz... I admit, it makes me feel pretentious listening to it. (But as I've always said people who use the word pretentious are a bit pretentious themselves...) But hey, I also feel like it makes me... classy. If there's anything I can say that I've taken away from Philip Ruiz, the band/orchestra director/conductor of Diamond Ranch High School - it's class. Either in one form or the other, I feel like I need more class in my life. Come to think of it, I've always felt an amount of class playing Jazz during 0 Period. And considering the people life has forced me to interact with - I've come to the realization that class died a long time ago. When? I don't know. Nevertheless, I think I'm going to try to keep it alive. Through jazz. Ah, listening to it again...

And trust me, listening to jazz is one thing. But to play and make jazz? It's a high that I miss. A high that I need.

Maybe next quarter... Or this summer...

Maybe...

Oh, and this is most likely going to feed into my Facebook notes... so those of you reading this, no I have not been on Facebook. It's just that my blog feeds into my notes.

Alright, enough about ze jazz. More about my Italian.

Later!

Usually late night like these...

most especially in Diamond Bar, California - I look outside my window and start to worry as I can see the sun rise beyond the horizon and over the hills.

But then I check the time, and realize that it's just light pollution.

Reminds me of the camping trips I always take several times a year. It's weird, but one of the reasons I don't like camping is because it reminds me of my own mortality. I blame it on the night sky; being able to see all those stars, staring into the infinite. Subconsciously I feel how small I am against the vast measureless darkness that we call the universe, and how my existence doesn't really mean much in the indefinitely broad measure of things. And then I start to feel a need for the city life again; man-made walls surround me, protect me from this constant reminder of the nihilism rooted deep within my mind.

I take comfort in hearing the freeway outside of my bedroom window at home. It's not right outside of my window; it's at a distance - a mile or two - far away enough for it to be soft white noise but close enough for me to know that there are people riding man-made, 12 tons of raw power out there on the road. Even at night. I grew up with that sound, slept to it, lived with it. I guess I take comfort in the inventions and constructions of the human mind - although, not so much the creator of all these artificial creations.

But by all means, that doesn't mean I don't enjoy camping with friends. I just enjoy the city more. I'm a city boy, and I grew up that way. I like my concrete walls, and I like to decorate them with artistic, creative practices and cultures of all sorts - both inventions of the human mind. It keeps my mind busy and helps me forget that I am really just one person amongst the canvas of trillions of lifeforms on this planet - and quite possibly, one against the trillion trillion trillion in this universe - struggling for survival. I am one being against the billions of humans on this planet trying to find meaning. God, that's so fucking scary.

I write this after a late night spent at another midnight screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. My thoughts came to a nihilistic approach as I rode home from the theater in Claremont, looking outside towards the artificial night sky done by light pollution. My thoughts - they traveled to the many camping trips I've been too, and the many nights where I've just lied there in my sleeping bag or my air bed - and look up towards the fabric ceiling of my tint and think to myself, "There's a thin layer of fabric between me and the infinite that is the sky, space, the universe - staring right back at me."

And then I fall asleep letting that thought haunt me for the rest of the night. And hell, my life even. I've just never really communicated these thoughts to anybody because well... fuck, it's quite a buzzkill for a thrill-seeker like me. But it haunts me still, to this day...

Random observation

I've been keeping tabs on several blogs of people close to me lately, and I've come to realize that people have different writing "voices" than their real voices. Not much of a realization come to think of it... Well, what I've noticed more is how different everybody writes compared to how they speak. I mean it's one thing writing for papers, but for blogs - the way they speak online differs greatly to my interaction with them outside of the 'net. And then I compare my writing online to my own speech and I find myself more verbose online. In real life, on the other hand, I'm more vulgar and blunt.

Wow, that was a worthless paragraph. On another note...

I've been listening to a lot of Ska lately. It's odd, the genre never really interested me but the hat I'm wearing kind of makes me feel impelled to listen to lots of Reel Big Fish and skank my way home. Luckily, I got a hold of several gigs of Ska from My White Friend - as he insists on being called - Tristan.


Reel Big Fish

Mmmm... 'scuse me as I listen to ska covers of 80s music...