Last night was Jamnesty, a concert at BJs put on by Amnesty International. The bands were One Punch Mickey (an Irish punk Flogging Molly-type band), The Pacemaker (difficult to describe, but the word unbearable comes to mind...David Byrne of the Talking Heads in front of a bad Radiohead-esque kind of noise, rather than music), and Hot Beats & Spinach (a jam band that covered Rage's Bulls on Parade, and also featured a brief attempt at Zeppelin's Moby Dick).
Before Jamnesty, I went to the post office to apply for my first passport. Barring some unforseen calamity, I'll be going to Prague on January 2 with a few friends, most of whom are in Amnesty with me (Matt, Kristen, Stephanie). I may or may not be going as part of the official Eurosim group, depending on whether or not there is a spot open for me. However, the Eurosim conference is only four of the thirteen day trip, so while those guys are doing that, then I'll be wandering the streets, hopefully with a little money in my pocket. Basically, the airfare was much less expensive than I might have thought (approximately $565), and I always talk about wanting to go to Europe (and if I can spend hundreds of dollars on Robert Plant tickets, I can probably take 500 to fly over the Atlantic). My dad had said something to me about sending me to Europe when I graduated, but who knows if that was actually going to happen (or who would go with me, for that matter), so it was all just too good to pass up. We may also go to Germany and possibly elsewhere while we're over there.
After the passport application process (if I had a scanner, I would share with you my atrocious photograph...alas, I do not), I went with Stephanie to Buffalo for two reasons. One was to pick up campaign mail for Lori Cornell, the Democratic candidate for County Clerk. The other was to get Stephanie's car, which was left at her friend Keller's house with a flat tire. We picked up the mail, which filled my entire back seat and trunk, and then went to her car. I successfully changed the tire (a first for me since Driver's Ed) and consequently had the rare opportunity to feel almost like a real manly man.
Tonight at six, I'll be at Fredonia Democratic HQ for some phone-banking duties until 8pm. I may have the pleasure of seeing Abe for the first time in a long time - he mentioned that he will be in Fredonia tonight. I have all the ingredients for a nice pre-game warmup at my apartment (beer and pretzels) - except furniture, that is. But probably what will happen is that Matt (King) won't come up tonight, Matt (Dunning) won't come by, and I'll only meet up with Abe much later. Perhaps I'll get my ironing done in the meantime.
Today, I got my Nixon paper back from Dr. Filipink. This was the paper that caused me to stay up all night Sunday, until 5:30am before getting up at 8:30 and finishing it at 11:30am, and skipping all my classes on Monday in order to sleep. (I received an A, much to my surprise, with the enlightening commentary of "Good" written above the 'A') I also made things awkward for myself with Dr. Rankin, for whom I also had a paper due on Monday but didn't turn in until Wednesday. Awkward because I had given Rankin some Zeppelin bootlegs after he expressed some enthusiasm about the band after an email I wrote to him, telling him about Plant's song "Freedom Fries" (Rankin had brought in a Daily Show clip that mentioned the Freedom Fries debacle in Congress during the anti-French period in the lead up to the Iraq War). So basically it looked like I was asking for favoritism, even though it was a simple matter of me procrastinating and doing the paper that was worth more (20% as opposed to 10% of my grade for the respective classes), and I felt like a jerk.
By the way, the Washington Semester is still not finalized, since my application for the program was saved on a disk that I used in my home computer (which is from 1999), and when I tried to open the files on that disk on the computers here at school, I was informed that it was not formatted. This doesn't make a lot of sense, since they're both PCs, but the Word program at my house is on Office 2000, not 2003 like on the school computers. I don't know if that's why I'm having a problem or what, but hopefully when I go home on Saturday, I'll be able to access the disk in my home computer and email the relevant information to myself so that I can use it here at school. I also need to pick up my second letter of recommendation from Dr. Maulucci.
Anyway, I'm going to go get something to eat before going to Dem HQ. Probably nothing healthy. I'll probably go to Wendy's for something quick.
No comments:
Post a Comment