leftovers

My car hasn't been starting and it's stressing me out. I am able to get it started with a jump, but otherwise it just makes a very pathetic attempt to start and doesn't go any further than that. The lights do still come on, so I don't think it's the battery. Tomorrow, Dylan will jump me in the morning and I'll drive it to the shop. I don't want to dwell on the negative, so I'll talk a little about the holiday weekend. We drove up to Granada Hills on Thursday afternoon to Dylan's sister's house for the first portion of Thanksgiving, which consisted of appetizers and the singing of "happy birthday" to Dylan before we finally had to get back on the road and head to Victorville. We finally got there in the evening and I was so starved by that point, I probably could have eaten the entire turkey by myself. The meal was prepared by a guy named Oscar who looked scary but was very nice. He did an amazing job with the food. Afterwards we...

It is with no small amount of restraint that I attempt to tell this tale without going completely overboard and writing a full-fledged novel. It was, after all, The Thompson Twins who became my first "favorite" band. Although I had dabbled in collecting beginning with Tiffany (I collected all her cassingles and kept them in their own separate carrying case), the Thompson Twins are what started a lifetime of hunting and gathering pop music relics. My earliest, haziest recollection of the Thompson Twins takes place back when my cousin Travis and his family moved out to a very large ranch house and I was helping him unpack, or more likely just obsessively snooping through his belongings. I remember being particularly interested in his "Dynamite" magazine collection. "Dynamite" was one of those full color pop-culture/eductational rags that cool grade schoolers ordered from one of those Weekly Reader type book club pamphlets. Although the magazine was s...

The title of this blog entry is the title of a song. Actually, it was a poem written by my Grandma Irene, and back when I was in high school I put the song to music for her, and recorded it with me singing the vocals over a keyboard preset beat and some really cheesy instrumentation. Last July, just a few days after I had flown to Kansas to visit her and the rest of my family, she suffered a major stroke and is now in a nursing home. She can't really speak or communicate very well other than basic functions like smiling or touching people's hands. My aunt Sharon lives in the same town where my grandma is staying so she visits her often. When my mom and her siblings were cleaning up my grandma's old apartment, Sharon had found the cassette tape that contained "Daydreams of Youth" and played it for her, much to my grandma's delight. Sharon came up with an idea that I could transfer the song onto a compact disc and design an insert for it so it would look l...

I was raised Methodist, and in the town I grew up near, most people my family and I associated with were also Methodist. My grandparents went to the same church I did and we were all very active in it; my grandpa had help build the church and my parents both taught Sunday School, as had my grandma. I think I'm one of the few people in the country, or at least one of the few gay people, who wasn't traumatized by religion. In fact, to be honest, I had a pretty positive experience with my church in general. The worst I can say about it was that it was usually pretty boring and, as a child, it seemed incredibly "uncool" at times. I did go through a couple phases in my childhood where I began to wander down that road of becoming a jesus-freak but luckily it never went too far or lasted very long. I'm always very proud of the fact that even at a very early age I began questioning (and hence, understanding) religion. Once when I was at my grandparents house, I hel...

Only in LA: I just read that yesterday, David Lynch sat himself at the corner of LaBrea and Hollywood Blvd., with a cow on a leash, and a giant banner of Laura Dern that read "For Your Consideration." There was also a banner that read "Without cows, there would be no cheese in the Inland Empire." Inland Empire, of course, is the name of Lynch's new film, starring Laura Dern. I haven't seen the movie yet (as far as I know the only local screening was at the Arclight for $20 a pop) but I do plan on seeing it eventually. I became a fan of Lynch's through the early 90's television series Twin Peaks and have watched every movie he has put out since then. (I will write my "how I fell in love with: twin peaks" blog sometime in the future). I really wish I would have found out about Lynch's impromptu meet-and-greet a day earlier so I could have actually gone and met him. My office is very near to that intersection and I could have use...

Celebrating the new democratic majority of the house (and now the senate!!! woo hoo!) has been a fun and exhilirating experience! In the few short years since I've been actively participating in my country's politics and government this is the first time I've felt like there was good news or hope for the future. When I first became aware of politics, it was because of my anger over the state of the nation under George Bush, who I had previously only thought of as incompetent in an embarrassing yet harmless way. Then I started to pay attention (thanks in large part to my boyfriend Dylan who opened my eyes alot after we started dating) and realized that it wasn't funny, and it wasn't just embarrassing; it was dangerous. When the dire situation in the white house even starts to spread out through the most innocuous sources of pop culture, it's time to say "Houston, we have a problem." After learning the facts, I was still naive enough to believe ther...

Today is November 7, Election Day, and the first thing I did after leaving the house was voting. I proudly wear my "I Voted" sticker and a red and white shirt today (I don't own a full on "stars and stripes" shirt, thank the lord!). Obviously I voted primarily for all the Democratic candidates, and I researched my choices for propositions and what not by consulting the Stonewall Democratic club's website as well as the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce (whose Legislative Action committee I'm supposed to be serving on, but haven't made it to a meeting in some time.) Anyway voting is fun and exciting especially when good news is forecast, so I'm anxious to see the results tonight. I was once a very apolitical person, having gone through the various phases of making up excuses for not voting: "my vote doesn't count," "I don't know anything about politics," "the elections are rigged anyway"... etc. Until I final...

This post goes out by special request of Brandon, so even though this memory is a little fuzzier than others, it's no less important to me. Just forgive me if the chronology is way off. Not that anyone other than myself could really ever know. First, let me say that The Dream Academy is a different type of band than many that I have grown to love over the years, and is also one of the few that I've never had the opportunity to experience live. Whereas most of the bands I like tend to be in a new wave/dance/rock vibe, The Dream Academy is more classical, ethereal and mellow. Of course, Dream Academy takes those elements and applies pop sensibilities to them, as evidenced in their (only) massive hit, "Life In A Northern Town." The way in which I was introduced to this band is still part of one of my fondest childhood memories. Growing up in a relatively poor household on a farm, money was very limited and although I never really felt it was much of a constrain...

Or "When bad things DON'T happen to bad people." Los Angeles is like the worst parents anyone ever had; Hollywood, West Hollywood and North Hollywood are like spoiled latch-key brats constantly vying for whatever attention they can get. Living in Los Angeles, it's impossible not to witness sycophants in action on a daily basis. The definition of Sycophant is: "a self-seeking, servile flatterer; fawning parasite." Usually, a person is a sycophant because they believe it will serve as a stepping stone to their ultimate goal; stardom, riches, power or love. In most cases, the sycophant identifies a person who has obtained a level of one of the aforementioned desirables which the individual is jealous of and would like to claim for themselves. They believe that by associating with (a.k.a. licking the ass of) such a person, they will somehow by osmosis inherit some of that person's wealth. To break it down, I'll give an example. A person wants to be a ...