Rooney

I had the day off work yesterday, and only one class to distract me from the gym, so I had a good chunk of time on my hands to fill with spending money I do not have. So I ventured down to the Euge to go and see Rooney at the Wow Hall. The Lashes and Everybody Else were opening for them at this show that only cost me a measly 12 bucks. So far so cheap, but of course we have to stop and get dinner before the concert and that was about 10 dollars more dumped at Red Robin, which was very tasty by the way. I love their BBQ sauce, or just any decent BBQ sauce.
Before any of this had even happened the first place we rolled into on our journey was my haven, my home away from home, the place where all my dreams come true, and this magical place was Best Buy. Kevin and I have wasted an entire summer in just the music aisle alone, and not to mention many hundreds dollars a piece on CDs and DVDs and such. The rest of our money from our intense labors of that summer went to Taco Bell at least once a day and blackjack in the smoke-filled casinos of La Center Washington followed by La Conga paid for by the big winner of the night, what a glorious summer it was. If I could ever escape Best Buy without spending a cent it would be more difficult than me denying the pleas of Jessica Alba wearing her stripper outfit from Sin City and beckoning me to bed. I only happened to spend $9.99 on the new Taking Back Sunday CD, Louder Now. I had just seen them in concert around the beginning of the term and they played most of the new songs, and I enjoyed them thoroughly. It was marked down to this low price only for a few days so how could I let this deal escape me. It was out of my hands.
We arrived at the concert at nine sharp when the website had indicated that the show would get going. This turned out to be false information and we had arrived an hour late for this eight o’clock show. Arriving just in time to miss Everybody Else and wait a half hour for The Lashes to start their set. The crowd was very sparse in this venue that looked like the shrunken version of my elementary school gym, or maybe I had just gotten bigger. It was a very intimate setting, which is good for these types of bands, but it did not have the intense atmosphere that I am used to from the Portland venues. Brittney and Kathleen liked the calmer surroundings but I guess I miss the chaos inherent to rock concerts. The Lashes were excellent and made me want to get a CD, but I was reminded by some part of my brain that I still had to pay rent so I was able to restrict myself. Rooney hit the stage and it started off very calm but turned itself into something very much unexpected.
Rooney blew me away. This is strange because anyone who knows their music would say it is very good to chill out to on a sunny day when laziness is the order of the afternoon, but live they just rocked me. Their guitarist did some things that I thought not possible, and I would have swore that he would have destroyed a few strings during his beastly performance but the man just bent that guitar to his will. I was just entranced by his playing and could break free, and it was glorious. I felt like I was staring, and since I was merely three feet from him I was worried that we would make eye contact and he would think I had a crush on him. I do have a man crush on him now, but in a completely heterosexual manly way. If you ever get a chance to see Rooney live you should make the trip. I believe we just missed them in Portland but keep your eyes open, I know I will.

Hero Worship

As you stroll though your local grocery store with your gallon (or multiple gallons if you are me) of milk and your loaf of bread, and deposit them on to the conveyer belt to be purchased, the images of celebrities are impossible to be missed but never particularly caught my eye. We see it everyday, a new embarrassing picture of a half naked celebrity on some beach we have never seen with some new lover that we have never met, and we read it. We see it so often that it has faded into the background of our daily life. Hours of television and radio, thousands of pages of print, and countless web addresses to learn what our betters are up to. We do not even question why it all exists because it just does. I want to ask that question of why we all care so much, why we must worship the famous. The religion of the media has us all following blindly what we could see in the people around us. Adultery, fluctuating weight, surgery, injury, babies, and any other occurrences that happen to these celebrities are happening to someone you know right now. I had this discussion with my friend Kathleen the other day, and it has really started my brain grappling with an explanation for this.
I think that these people we know are too real and already damaged in our minds. We see these stars on the silver screen at the peak of their attractiveness and flawless in motion and speech. America loves to see train wrecks. We love to see you at your worst, and this is amplified by the perfection that is in the people involved in entertainment. It is not exciting to know that your neighbor has gained weight because they were never that attractive to begin with. The pedestal to fall from for your average man or woman is a truncated version of the height of the platform for the famous. The higher you are the more spectacular the fall and the more people are drawn to see the spiral into immense pain. There is still a piece lacking from this explanation. How do we feel connected enough with these stars to talk about their lives over the lives of those around us?
I see us as Americans having more connection with our television than we do with the people that surround us in our jobs, at our schools, and in our homes. This is a huge change in people’s attitudes toward their neighbors that resulted from the population shift into the suburbs and out of the cities. There is no sense of community. As a college student I know this very well. Even if I walk up the stairs right behind the person who lives across the hall I will not make a sound or an effort to engage them. Back home in Milwaukie I knew none of my neighbors except for the ones which I attended school with, and neither of my parents knew any of their neighbors except if they had a quarrel that pops up when living near eccentrics (the neighbors of my parents, take your pick). We are becoming more and more secluded from our communities so it seems that our only acquaintances are with those people that flash across our TV screen. They replace the whispers of the neighborhood with the pages of the tabloids because that is who we feel comfortable with. All the people around us have just become the unimportant extras that crowd the scene of the busy street to hardly conceal the star of the film and their interesting life that we have paid to see.
I am a cynical person this I know. Many people feel that this hero worship is a waste of time, and this give me hope. Still, everyday I hear one person talk about Brad and Christina I die a little on the inside, or it just makes me want to projective vomit all over them. The funny thing is that if I did spew all over them, the next story they would tell might involve me and their friends who were there to see the pyrotechnics. So if you know someone who needs help back to reality just blow chunks all over them and nudge them back into the real world, for all our sakes. Comment on this, I want to hear what people think about it.

What’s a Gym? Oh a Gym!

Lately I have been getting many comments on my tendency to spend numerous hours of my time at the gym. People are worried about my physical health and maybe my mental health in relating to the thought process behind wanting to work that hard. Yes I am at the gym for about three hours a day, and yes I know that is a long time. I think peoples real concern is that I might have set a goal for myself that is too hard to reach. The truth of it is I do not have a goal. I go for the fun and relaxing experience that comes from pushing my athletic abilities.
As many former high school athletes know it is a rough transition from the massive amount of activity in daily practice and games to the norm of cheap beer and the deep couch groove of your average college student. Some people make the transition to this new life style with ease and have the gut to prove it. I, on the other hand, did not see this as the direction I wanted to go. If I did not have to work to pay my rent for this year I would have joined the OSU crew team and tried to have made something of myself there, but I did not have the time. That may be an option for next year, but for my time in college as of so far I have just hit the gym. I need to be doing something active and pushing myself or I will loose my mind.
I have found that not too many people relate to this idea. Most people want to be planted in that couch so deeply a person would need dynamite to jar them free. People are lazy and habits are hard to break, unless they are beneficial. So I love how no one talks to the person about being lethargic, and the ghastly outcome that is in store for those who waste their life in junk food. Four people who I know have come to me speaking with concern that I may be doing too much! Where is this concern for those who have bonded to the sofa? Do we fear dropping the self-esteem of the obese? Do we shy away from venturing into the area of political incorrectness when we call out the “fitness impaired”? I like the concern but I think it is misplaced. I think that we find it much easier to give advice and concern for ones safety to those who we know do not need it, and hide it from the people who might get upset at being pointed out as lacking.

My Current Beef with OSU
Oregon State University has made me angry beyond a chance for reconciliation. Two things especially have driven me to the point of insanity. These two things are the new developments with cheerleading and the new bus routes. I hate the bureaucracy that cannot even see what the student who fund it really want. I am not one for a protest out in the streets that is run by ASOSU (the group of students voted on in a popularity contest to represent the student body to those in charge) which just seems to want its own extreme views to be taken in by those in charge without regard for what the majority of the student body thinks. I guess this is how things get done in our nation on all levels of government leaving the common member of the society powerless against those with extreme views.
The cheerleading incident is not as bad as people think but it has set back the status of cheerleaders which they have worked so hard for over the years. Every cheerleader I have ever known has only wanted respect for what they do. The difficulty, the training, and doing it all in a skirt provides them with pride as athletes. Nothing will be changing in the cheerleading program after next year other than the elimination of stunts. The uniforms will be the same and their will still be cheerleaders, but all they can do now is lead cheers. These girls have some skill that gave them the edge to be cheerleaders in a Division I college. Now the position of cheerleader can be filled with any pretty face a body that will make those little skirts look good. This change turns them into meat to be undressed by the eyes of every man in the audience. They no longer have a specialty that makes them more than eye-candy. The University says it is doing this for the safety of the student-athletes, but it is demoting them into just students in skimpy uniforms. I had given cheerleading the label of being a competition only after seeing the complexity, and with much begging from a friend to participate in the stunts themselves. This respect will all be lost They might as well just sit down in the Beaver Dam or grab a seat in Reeser because now all they do is cheer, and that is exactly what your average fan does at any of our sporting events. Sports are dangerous. Let these girls keep their dignity and respect they have earned.
The changes to the buses have now put me in a more horrible mood when I roll into class every morning. I do not have a fully functioning car, or a parking pass that is out of my financial range. I have to depend on the bus to get me to and from school, and sometimes to work and back on the weekends. I live fairly far off campus. I choose this location because I got a much better apartment for the money I disperse monthly, and because I could ride the bus, that ran every half hour to campus, right outside my apartment. Oregon State decided that they no longer wanted the traffic of the buses running through campus so they forced the city to bypass the campus. Seeing as most of the population of Corvallis has business has with the campus this seems quite odd. So now for me to get to school on time I have to walk four blocks to catch the bus that will now drop me off on the outskirts of campus making me walk another six blocks to get to class. The disruption to the routes has added difficulty to every part of my commuting. I used to be able to catch either of the two buses home from campus right outside the bookstore. One of them still does but the other is now about four blocks up and over off campus. This would not be a big problem other than the busses run at very inconsistent times, like all busses do, making it very hard not waste more of my day waiting for a bus that might take an hour or more to get me home. These two stops were very vital to many people around campus and always serviced many students who’s tuition goes to partially fund the buses. This is just another example of the University ignoring the needs of the students in order to remedy a problem that only the image conscious members of the highest circles of college management even recognize as disruptive.
This might just be what is grinding my gears but I think this is a real problem. I am sure the deeper I involve myself in investigating the stupidity the more agitated I will get. I will let it go now to save my sanity, but I am sure they will force something new to my attention that will prove even more that the administration is running a business rather than a place of learning and advancement of the students who attend it.

Well as it is very obvious right now I have succumbed to the lure of yet another way to spend my time on my computer. I suppose my first blog should get every reader up to date as to what is going on in my life. The term is going well so far for me with next to no busy work from all my classes. This is good because anyone who knows my work habits has seen how the importance of little worksheets and paragraph long writing assignments really can escape my mind. My class on the Roman Empire is the most interesting to me since it is the center of my love for history and the professor, Dr. Ferngren blows my mind. For everyone who has not heard yet I have decided on a major. I will be having a double major in liberal studies, focused on history and sociology, and education with a minor is exercise physiology. My main goal is to teach ad if my mind wonders on the way there I will just be a long winded personal trainer.
My job on the Q team (very inside joke about working at Qdoba) is driving me insane. New policies pop up every week that push me farther and farther into a loathing for coming into work and dealing with the drama and not to mention customers. It is not the customers fault that they get hungry but man is makes me angry sometimes. I am on the look out for a new place of employment but quitting will be difficult.
Quitting would be easy if I just moved. It seems slightly drastic but it would just be a perk for an idea I have been having for a transfer of scenery to the campus of University of Oregon. I have always been a beaver but it seems that it would make more sense for my schooling to be at a primarily liberal arts college rather than a school with a focus on engineering. I also still have more friends, including my best friend, going to UO even after the five plus terms here at OSU. It has really been on my mind after these last few weekends hanging with Kevin and friends at UO. I shall look into the logistics of this change but it sounds like I might suck up my pride and make the trip. I really have not clicked down here with more than a small group of people and I think the school will just have more to offer.I will try and update this everyday and add things of more interest but this writing was just to give an idea of what might soon be the focus of a future blog that will be me ranting about one of these subjects that is driving me nuts.