So I saw the Crystal Method last night in Asheville at the Orange Peel.

DJ Bowie performing the opening act. He mostly just mixed a bunch of dubstep and drum n bass, which I don’t care for, but he wasn’t too terrible.

Hey, it’s Ken Jordan! He looks farther away in this picture than he really was. I was about 2 feet away from him at this point, but actually got to see him face to face later on in the show. Sorry about the terrible quality; it was really dark.

The visuals were pretty lame, but fun.

I’ve never seen anybody twiddle knobs as fast as this guy.

Ken answering a phone call on stage.

And my tasty linguine soup with hot sake.

Oh, I stopped at Wonderland before the show and found a vortex bowl. I’m excited to try it tonight because I hear the plumes it creates are crazy thick.

The hardest part about writing down what I’m thinking is coming up with a title. I’m pretty sure WordPress requires a post title before publishing. This brings me back to the days of designing crazy layouts on pitas. I always just used the date for my post titles then. But anyway – avast ye, make way for a boring post.

Right now, I’m not sure if I’m in a good patch in my life, or not. I’ve probably thought more about myself and the world in general in the past 4 months than I have in my entire life. I’ve been slowly trying to teach myself how to deal with situations that I have little to no control over, and it is pretty difficult. I remember back when I was younger, I cared so much what people thought about me and I really wanted to be recognized for something – anything. Now, I don’t even care, but my life at this point does feel like a waiting room. I have, hopefully, about a year and a half left of school. The idea of not finding a job right after school terrifies me because I want to be stable. I don’t want to end up living with one of my parents and working a dead end job like everyone else I know. I want to be able to live the life I’ve always wanted to since I was young. Not finding a job is a very real possibility, but I’m trying my best so that this doesn’t happen. One of the qualities that I like about myself is that I’m extremely independent; it’s done more good than harm, for the most part, so I don’t see it as a bad thing anymore. I’ve recognized that I’ve lived about a quarter of my life (or so I hope) and I really want to do as much as I can with the amount of time I have. I think this idea is due in part on why I’ve wanted to take so many risks over the past few months. I don’t think I’ve made enough mistakes in my life and the ones that I have, I’ve learned from greatly.

I am pretty excited about Moogfest, though. The lineup hasn’t been fully announced yet, but I really hope a lot of good artists will be there – ones I actually listen to. I also hope that tickets aren’t expensive; I’m sure a lot of free shit will be given out and I love free shit. I’m going to see the Crystal Method live next weekend and I’ve not listened to them since I was in middle school. Their past couple of albums have just not been that good, but from what I hear, their shows these days are amazing so I’m really looking forward to going.

I’m also going to buy myself an iMac.

Chillax. I’ll still use my ThinkPad, but things have gotten to a point where using Linux has not grown past anything but a great OS for a server, and if I dare say, a novelty on the desktop (or laptop in this case). Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux to death. I’ve been using it since 2001. I started out with RedHat and moved from it to Mandrake, to Fedora, to Slackware, to Debian in 2006. I can build a custom kernel, patches or not, like something fierce. Frankly, I’m tired of how capricious it is. I’ve used a myriad of distros, and while some are better than others, they all essentially work the same. I’m tired of using VirtualBox to perform tasks in Windows that can easily be done in OS X that cannot be done in Linux. OpenOffice sucks and I have to use Microsoft Office. Gimp feels like a bucket of rusty nuts and bolts. There are no seriously good audio players – they’re all either too slow, terrible at managing playlists, ugly, or defective in some other way. I’m tired of using drivers that just cut the mustard. More is needed than just the minimum in functionality. There are other reasons as to why I no longer feel like dealing with Linux on a daily basis anymore, although they are trivial, but they’ve piled up over the years. I’ll still try to work with it on my server, but for now, I’m going to have to switch over to OS X come mid-August. Yeah, I know I’m a heretic. My 18 year old self would carve it into my arm.

I do start school again in 3 weeks. I couldn’t be happier.

…when you can no longer listen to a certain artist or group because you were going through a very rough patch at the time you discovered it. It’s awful. It’s like smelling something for the first time in your life since you were a kid and then remembering what it was like at that point in time not having to worry about anything and enjoying everything around you. Nostalgia. It makes me wonder about what I’m currently taking for granted.

Peaches and Cream :D

I’ve felt so indifferent about a lot of things lately. I used to have so much care for the smallest things, but I just don’t anymore. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but almost everything seems trivial now. School has even gotten to the point where it’s trivial, although I’m doing better than ever and I’m not even trying. I’ve felt strange for the past couple of weeks and I can’t quite describe it. I’ve thought about all of this a lot lately and I’ve wondered if it’s because I’m depressed and I don’t think that’s the case. I’ve finally been able to sleep decently these past few days and my appetite hasn’t changed; I was able to eat three platefuls of raw spinach last night.

I used to be so sure of what I was going to do when I was finished with school and I don’t feel that way anymore – for certain reasons. I don’t feel that things are hopeless, but I feel like I’m walking down a corridor heading toward thousands of doors – some locked, some not. For the past two years I’ve not had to think much about what I’m going to do with myself when I no longer have school, because everything seemed to make sense then.

I once heard that a system administrator is the 21st century version of a ditch digger; it was something I scoffed at. Recently, I was told by someone in the industry that it’s not something you want to do your whole life; you’re supposed to have something else lined up. I don’t exactly have that, but the more I think about it, there seems to be some truth to all of this. That’s not to say that I’ve changed my mind about what I want to do when I’m finished (I sure as hell don’t want to program), but there’s always the question of “what if?” I think a lot of this worry stems from my fear of incompleteness. I came across this while talking to someone and it’s kind of strange. I realized that numbers ending in 9 really make me uncomfortable, so much that if I am able to control it, I will increment whatever it is just to make it complete. Maybe this will come in handy at some point. The way things work out is pretty funny.

This week is my spring break and I don’t have much planned other than to swap out my piercings – the bar in my conch for a hoop, and the bar in my tragus for a super-duper titanium one. Oh, I’ve been listening to Mujuice lately. He’s pretty good.