USA USA USA (and London)

so I was actually assigned to make up two playlists for the magazine here at school. best assignment ever. the first one - the theme for this issue is "travel" - was a list of songs about various cities, and this is what I ultimately ended up with:

1. "Waterloo Sunset" - the Kinks
2. "Dirty Water" - Dropkick Murphys (Boston, of course)
3. "New York, New York" - Ryan Adams
4. "Washington, DC" - the Magnetic Fields
5. "Hotel Yorba" - the White Stripes (there actually is a Hotel Yorba outside of Detroit, it turns out)
6. "Graceland" - Paul Simon (Memphis)
7. "Proud Mary" - CCR (New Orleans, yo)
8. "Houston, TX" - Deer Tick
9. "Skyway" - the Replacements (Minneapolis <333333)
10. "Olympia, WA" - Rancid
11. "Portland, Oregon" - Jack White and Loretta Lynn (so fucking weird and I love it)
12. "Save Me, San Francisco" - Train
13. "Los Angeles" - Sugarcult
14. "Santa Monica" - Everclear

honorable mention: every Fountains of Wayne song about New York and North Jersey (but dude, there are eight million songs about New York, I could make several volumes of CDs of just the NYC songs on my iPod); every Dropkick Murphys song about Boston (they're pretty much the only ones who write about this fine city, aside from, uh, Jonathan Richman); every Green Day song that mentions real places in the Bay Area (fffff I want to go back and see them all so badly); every Chili Peppers song about Los Angeles (aka every Chili Peppers song that isn't about sex or heroin); every Clash song, and every other Kinks song, about London. also, "Good Morning Baltimore" from Hairspray. that one was tempting.

anything really obvious, or anything less obvious but still awesome, I missed? I feel like there are probably a ton.

watch me leave it all behind

One of the most exquisite feelings I’ve ever had is the one of realizing you are in a place where you’ve never, ever been before, and you have time to explore on your own terms.
I’ve felt it driving around Pennsylvania, up mountains and through corn fields; I’ve felt it racing across trails in the Rockies winding ever higher; I’ve felt it when I found myself, rather by accident, in a part of Boston I’d never seen before, alone, on a cold sunny morning when I had no obligations until the afternoon.
It is a feeling that I’ve imagined could go on forever, as long as I keep moving into that which I have never seen before.

i want to go (back) to there

Places I Miss, Ireland edition, because I feel like it (click to make any of the pictures bigger as usual):

the first picture I ever took outside of North America...our hotel door in Galway. that place was sweet, though. maybe it was just the places we stayed but I think standard Irish hotel rooms are bigger than American ones.

legit rainbow.

Oscar Wilde was chillin' in the middle of town so I thought I'd say hello.

CHEESEMONGERS.

the town square, which was way too pretty.

Galway is pretty much The Town of Random Splashes of Color. random houses in the middle of a row are suddenly blue or red, random little pennants and things. it's lovely.

sky over river = one of my favorite things in the entire world

see? random colorful houses.

western Ireland looks a bit like the end of the world, in general. in an awesome way.

we didn't walk on footpath. well, we did a bit but we also walked on rocks.

nnngh ocean

lol Tom.

people in Galway match their cars to their houses, apparently.

though this one was a bit off.

if you weren't aware, I have a serious thing for rivers.

Joe fucking Strummer on a chair. wot?

this would get hella epic if I did the whole trip, actually, so we'll just leave at that because that's all the best ones from Galway.

and this has all made me want to reread A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. why am I such a pretentious literary ass?

social media saturation ftw

so I currently have:

a Tumblr, which is like Twitter for non-retarded people (although I don't really like it that much, honestly), mainly to connect with people here at school;
a Livejournal, mainly to talk to people I know through various fandoms;
a Blogger...blog, for shit I don't feel like posting on LJ, for the two people who actually read it, haha;
my old Xanga, which I'm never getting rid of because it's hilarious, and I actually posted on it a couple times in the fall for the hell of it;
and now I'm thinking about getting a Wordpress blog to post writing-related stuff. as in fiction I am trying to write. but I'm afraid I'll get one and then that'll completely jinx my writing brain. my writing brain is very susceptible to things like this, and it starts and stops being useful completely of its own volition.

possibly a problem, as I want to be A Writer, but not even really the most pressing obstacle, considering the issues I have with things like, you know, plot. oh well.

[this is a public service announcement, this is only a test]

take note.

sometimes when you think, "I just need to be alone" - not all the time, but sometimes, you're wrong. what you actually need is to hang out with people around whom you can relax, in sweatpants, and laugh at stupid shit until you feel better.

tonight we're gonna give it 35%

"My heart is anywhere but here,
and how tired I was from the past couple of weeks,
From the past couple of years.
Well, it hit me all at once,
On a balcony overlooking nothing,
With snow falling all around."
- AM!

I just don't know what to do. or where to even start. I don't know how to fit. and I find it so much easier to just be alone. takes so much less effort - just a simple moment of giving in. or giving up, I guess I should say.

s'laters, Pennsylvania, you had better be beautiful and springy the next time I see you.

so, I went home, and I came back to Boston, which I keep almost accidentally referring to as home. good to be there, good to be here.

this semester on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights I am working at the newspaper office in the city section, having a group guitar class, and working at the newspaper office in the sports section, respectively. add in the fact that I have only one class on Wednesdays, giving me all kinds of time to skate at the rink on the other end of campus...fuck yeah, college.

someday soon, I will figure out what kind of writing I actually want to go into; I will either give in to the fact that sports basically own my life and the fact that the universe really wants me to be a sportswriter, or catch up musically with the rest of the world and go back to being a rock critic like I always wanted. or maybe I'll eschew them both with a firm hand and be a novelist. (as if I could ever write something with enough of a plot to fill a novel.)

you know, I'm pretty happy. there are of course things I want (Red Sox tickets! a way to instantly lose ten pounds! an actual hockey team to play on!) but I'm pretty happy with what I have.