totally cracked out on coffee and impatient for the day to really begin, and by begin i mean work to end and J and i to be on the road on the way to portland for dinner with my pops and then the bright eyes show.

where have the recent days gone? how is february half over? i am full of the standard questions and refrains. there was a luna show last week, but it sort of made me miss all the other luna shows, and a night or two out with q, and so we left early. (this also had something to do with the way it seemed like the band were just going through the motions.) J's band played on saturday and got slightly screwed by the other bands, who decided at the last minute that J's band should play last instead of first. it was still a good show, but by the end i was so tired i felt sick. i fell asleep in the booth at the venue and our friend dave, when i asked why no one woke me up to help move stuff, said, "i thought about it, but you looked so cute and peaceful!"

then i went to portland, as previously mentioned, to meet up with toby. we stomped around powells and the pearl district and wound up having a very small world moment when we stopped for lunch at paragon, a place i'd heard of before - but i forgot that i'd heard of it because one of J's sisters works there. as she was bringing us our lunch, someone tapped on the window. my thoughts went like this: "why is that man tapping on our...OH! it's my father!"

he waved, and kept walking, and i felt a little dizzy for a second with the strangeness of all those aligned factors.

what else? we watch firefly and go to bed early. i continue to like to cook things that involve no recipes, just throwing stuff in a pot, but if anyone has an easy pesto recipe, i wouldn't mind a copy (my current favorite: pesto pasta with spinach and shrimp). i still feel a little awkward around one of my roommates, and am trying to practice just not disagreeing with anyone at home about much of anything, since it's not that important anyway.

i bought myself an encyclopedia yesterday. just a single volume one, not the $1500 true brittanica, but still enough to thrill me. i thought i wanted a dictionary, see, but then, the further i got into the system of the world and the more i wished for a cast of characters, the more i realized i wanted a dictionary that would remind me who james stuart and sophie of hanover and george louis were. which meant an encyclopedia. which is really quite fun, if you are like me and find some glee in chasing one reference to another through entry after entry.

and there's more: i have two pieces in the paper that comes out tomorrow, a book review of french women don't get fat and a preview of the jason webley show. i won't link our website - a little too reluctant to have anyone trace me back to here, y'know - but if you don't know by now where i work and you have any interest in reading said pieces, just ask for the link. i'm actually feeling pretty good about the music one despite the rustiness of the music-writing part of my brain; the person who edits my stories said she'd give me a marked-up hard copy so i could see what she'd changed, but the next day i had an email in my inbox instead: she didn't give me a hard copy because she didn't change a thing.

(just a small pat on the back to myself, there.)

ok ok. i gotta go look at pages and hope there are no mistakes. and maybe go for a walk. or find something to do. it's wednesday, the paper's about to go out, and i want to be on the road already.