So this morning, the second of the new term, I head out for the usual 15-minute walk to the metro and decide that I'm bored with every song on my crap Blackberry.
I decide I want to listen to "Lux Aeterna" from the Requiem For A Dream soundtrack. See below.
As you may be able to tell, Lux Aeterna is a little... dramatic. Which can every once in awhile make for an amusing start to the day. You go into a little cafe next to the Ferrocarril to get a quick cup of coffee and it sounds like I am preparing to serve coffee to The One True God Jehovah The Almighty, in the last coffee shop in all of eternity.
It's a little upbeat.
Anyway, so because I don't have the song on my phone I try to play it on YouTube. Which fails because Blackberries are crap. It would have worked on the iPhone, but no. So now I'm just pissed and search for "YouTube not working on Blackberry 9700", which provides some tips. None of which are successful. I'm now more than halfway to school and give up, saying I'll put it on before class. But I get to school a minute before the session, sprint to get terrible coffee from the machine and forget about it.
Our Global Marketing professor starts the session and twenty minutes later plays a Sky Sports ad. A Sky Sports ad featuring... freaking "Lux Aeterna".
Another great song, this one a single The National wrote for indie film "Win Win", a small movie about a wrestling coach and a kid he ends up having to take care of that looks... actually pretty good.
Amazing video a classmate just posted, commenting on how quickly school is passing us by. Used to listen to this constantly in 1999, tooling around DC in the CJ with the top down and the system up. Such a great year.
Check it out. Not many videos this quality anymore.
Funny how random conversations will bring up the random minutaie of life that you'd never expect to miss. And still don't really miss. Not really. But yet somehow still remember with great fondness and nostalgia. Such as, let's say, for example, Mountain Dew.
I mean, we all can agree that the stuff is awful. It rots the stomach and tastes like pure cane sugar melted, diluted, and run through a Moroccan squeegee. It contains more chemicals per gram than a gram full of pure chemicals. And it's the color of modern Hell. But damn if the resulting four-hour caffeine high isn't a thing of singular joy.
You can't see, you can barely think, you stumble around knocking over plants and people and animals, but you do it with supreme energy because you've got a metric ton's worth of super-caffeine condensed into half a liter of nuclear-colored shmeg coursing through your arteries at a tripled heartrate. All you want to do is drink more of the too-sweet stuff to keep the high alive. I've never not finished a bottle. This includes the big party-sized ones. And the 20oz bottles of Mountain Dew Lite? Fuck off, those things set me on benders that find me curled up naked in a ball in my basement a week later, washed out and shaking, not knowing who I am or where I came from.
So as I was saying, si, realmente no te pierdas "El 'Dew" tanto. But it's always amazing how often in one's life not being able to physically have something makes it desired all the more.
Amazing time this last weekend with Stacchetti, Elsner, Carl and a few others.
This past Friday we flew from BCN to Dusseldorf, took the train to Elsner's home town of Dortmund, checked into a hotel, then headed out into the city for some schnitzel, Krombacher, carnival and one hell of a Dortmund vs. Cologne football match. I've never seen 44,000 fans of anything so fired up. The crowd didn't stop singing and setting themselves on fire the entire game, and then late night out in a Dortmunder club was also a terrific time. I'd forgotten about their little drink punch-tickets.
Saturday morning Thomas and I get up and grab some schnitzel (yes I know why I'm fat) at Cafe Alex, then jump on the ICE to Cologne. Which we apparently weren't supposed to do. I guess we had tickets for the more regional RE train, so the nice conductor politely kicks us off in Bochum. Where we get on the wrong train again, getting ourselves kicked off in freaking Duisburg of all places.
After being there back in early 2008 with such a different life and perspective on the world, it stuns me how much a universe can change in 32 months. On the train the day before I'd said to Elsner, "The weirdest thing that happened to me in this area? Fog coming in during New Year's Eve a few years back so thick you couldn't see the road if you were standing on it." And he remembered the exact night, having been only a few dozen kilometers away.
The random coincidences never seem to stop. And for that, Life, I love you.
Anyway, we finally get the right train from Duisburg to Cologne, and the thing is packed to the balls with carnival-goers. The "ladies" in the first pic below have fake'uns filled with schnapps, and were willing to pour shots from taps on their nips. We make it to our hotel in Cologne, get in costume, then rage straight through from Saturday night through to Monday until finally passing out on the plane back to Barcelona. Never shown up to a security gate that lit. But man, such a good time.
There's really nothing about Germany that's not to love. A few lessons learned:
Everyone is just nice as hell. Fifty people must have stopped to ask if I wanted to come with them to a party.
Maybe it was just Karnival, but Cologne people seem happy and productive, concerned with their future and careers, yet definitely know how to kick back.
Though maybe not the healthiest, I do love the food. Those guys are döner ninjas.
The women really are wonderful.
There are still no laws about drinking in the street or on the Ubahn (metro). Carrying a couple Erdingers into the U at one point, six Bavarians got all excited telling us what a good choice we'd made. Carrying a couple 'nother Erdingers in the U later, a Cologner tells us what a bad choice we made, but in such a very nice way.
So on Tuesday Billy Frickin' Gallagher shows up in my neighborhood of Gracia. I'd actually gone to the airport to surprise him, but his place got in half an hour early so we missed each other. Great to see the guy. We went out for a breakfast of trikinis and then he crashed while I got some work done. Pretty good times out with school folk at Lolita Tuesday night and the Gato Negro across the street Wednesday.
Thursday Ken and Kyle get in and join up. Nuttiness ensues. Not entirely sure I remember everything that happened but I know we went back to a college bar Ken knew at least twice, an underground club with Bill and Alex once, a gay bar Ken wanted to see with nothing but biker dudes at least once, and visited the top of Mount Tibidabo, where we both checked out the extremely hi-rez view and I chose to both be the one who lives.
By the time they were done we'd written most of the script to Muppets Eleven, created more than a few 90's boy-band album covers, discovered the true meaning of "Skeletor", and found out why certain people tend to love Nutella more than others.
After heading out of here on Sunday the three of them flew to Morrocco, where apparently they made their way across the desert on camels while sipping on mint tea. Jealous. Hopefully I can get you guys to all come visit London sometime this summer.
And Bill, maybe you got this but I didn't: the category was "top movie love songs".
Currently Reading
George R. R. Martin: A Dance With Dragons Only finished the second chapter, but yeah, back in A Song of Ice And Fire. No idea how good this new fifth installment out of the alleged seven-book series will be, but hoping "really damn good" seeing as how the thing's 1,016 pages long and easily the largest hardcover book I've ever owned. This one may not make it back on the plane.
Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games Went with some light reading for the first few weeks of summer after ordering a dozen or so books off Amazon.co.uk. This one turned out to be great -- the story of a girl in a far-future version of the US, where the regime requires 24 contestants between the ages of 12 and 18 to battle to the death every year until there's a lone survivor. The story's told through the viewpoint of "girl on fire" heroine, Katniss Everdeen, a skilled huntress from having to hunt to feed her family, and determined to survive. Not the deepest reading but you can burn through it in a day or two. Entertaining as hell. (****)
George R. R. Martin: A Feast For Crows (A Song Of Ice And Fire, Book 4) Long and full of mud and sorrow. Still a great read full of great characters, but due to Martin's decision to split the stories of "Feast" and "Dance" into two separate books -- by character -- this one gets delegated to featuring all the less-loved folk, meaning there's no Jon, Dany, or especially Tyrion. Here's hoping the just-arrived #5 gets the momentum of the story established by #3 back on track. (***)
George R. R. Martin: A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) And on to the third one. Which despite the smaller form factor weighs in pretty hefty at almost 1,100 pages. Everything's burning, main characters are developing in new directions, the Kingslayer's on the move, the world's in turmoil, John Snow's in the thick of it, and Danny's on her way over with a few friends to wreck some shop.
So glad it's winter break and there's a fireplace handy. (*****)
George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 2) Ended up powering through the last 240 pages of A Game of Thrones this past Saturday and Sunday, found it almost physically impossible to put the thing down. Cannot wait to see how HBO's audiences react to a few of the major plot twists when the series premieres next year.
Volume 2 picks up roughly at the exact same point the prior volume leaves off, and returns to the same mix of already-loved characters while adding in a good number more.
Shit got real at the end of the last one. Can't wait to see how much further this one -- and the next four -- take this bizarrely familiar world. (*****)
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