Re:Creation

miraculously, i purchased my first car on saturday. it is a beautiful machine, and i love it. click here for pictures of a car of the same make, model, color, etc…

my parents were in town friday and saturday helping me look for it, and my dad’s finely-honed negotiation skills, guided by the good grace of god, landed us a truly unthinkable deal on the car. i won’t go into it, but rest assured there was indeed evidence of the invisible hand at work. rock.

importantly, the car is under my name, and today i purchased my own insurance with progressive. thus, for the first time in my life, i have a car (and a nice loan to go with it, of course) and insurance under my responsibility. i am glad for this next step into adulthood–i’m 20 years old, so it’s about time. time to catch up to friends like josser who’ve been working through these responsibilities on their own for years.

also, the car has a manual transmission, which i have since had to learn, and i am really enjoying that new aspect of driving.

more good news came today: the Splendour Hyaline cds have shipped! they’ll be at my door in less than a week. i suppose i should start working on splendourhyaline.com.

in other music news, i’m headlining a show at the coho on march 13th. details to follow (but if you want them you should sign up to my e-mail list, go to www.jonathanlipps.com for instructions).

disc on spin: how to start a fire | furtherseemsforever

in answer to all of your questions: song b. (that’s a link, for those not prone to figuring stuff out)

i know it’s more fun to read about my adventures with girls (of which there are a lot, of course), but i have some more mundane announcements.

1. starting next quarter, i will officially be the new kitchen manager for beefeater’s dining society here at suites. what is that, you ask? i tell: all the people who live in suites eat at one of four eating clubs: beefeater’s, bollard, avanti, and middle-earth. which club you eat at is determined by where you live in suites. for instance, this year i live on the third floor of griffin, so i eat at bollard. anyway, these eating clubs have a club manager, a kitchen manager, and a financial manager, who together are responsible for running and managing all aspects of the club. i applied for one of these positions, and was assigned kitchen manager, as i said. what that means is that i will be living in suites next year, will get free board, and will have to work a certain number of hours per week making sure my club (beef, as they call it), runs smoothly. as i was looking at a sucky year going unpreferred in the draw, this is a blessing and a step-up. the job starts in april and goes through the end of my senior year!

2. parent’s weekend is this upcoming weekend, so my mom and dad will be visiting! it will be great–and they’ll be helping me look for a car, so lord willing if we find a good deal i might have a car soon!

3. i have had really strange eating habits the past two days. yesterday i gorged myself on starbursts to the point of sickness. today i’ve eaten probably 10-15 of those little chocolate candy bars, like kit kats and stuff. plus another 20 or so starbursts throughout the day. and i had a huge dinner. enormous, i mean it. now i just ate more candy while typing this blog. it’s really scary–i’ve never been this ravenous in my life, where i don’t get full. i know i will regret eating junk food later this week when i climb worse and have more zits. but oh well.

4. yesterday i did so many pull-ups it’s not funny. anytime i was bored of work (which was quite often), i ran and did like 10-15 pull-ups on the bar in our shower. i must have done somewhere between 1 and 2 hundred over the course of the day. between that and eating only junk food i’m feeling kinda weird.

5. last night, i was directed, by someone who will remain anonymous to protect his/her reputation, to www.emogame.com. i spent a few hours playing this game. honestly i’m really not sure if it’s had a horrible impact on my life or not. but anyway, the premise of this internet arcade game (somewhat a mix between like the old simpsons arcade game and a role-playing game) is that the get up kids have been kidnapped by steve tyler of aerosmith (i won’t tell you why, because this blog is only rated R, not NC-17). and then you, who are in control of various emo-band frontmen, like chris simpson of mineral for example, have to work your way through numerous levels killing yuppies and hippies and sell-outs and all manner of un-emo people. in the process you discover what makes emo so special (i won’t ruin that surprise), and are able to boost your score through various emo quizzes throughout the game. now, before all you little emo-kid friends of mine run off and play this game, i want to make a rather large disclaimer: the game is about as offensive as something can possibly be. i myself had to turn it off after seeing so many little cartoon people screwing each other in the background (of the screen, that is–it’s actually an integral part of the plot). there’s all sorts of cartoon graphic violence and sex of various disturbing positions. for that reason, i’d recommend not playing the game, if you are of weak constitution. but, if you can handle it, the plot really is quite funny and there’s nothing like playing chris carabba and using his “special power”, MEGA-OVARIES!! it’s simply fantastic. enough said. oh, postscript: if you are not pretty seriously into emo music, i’m fairly sure that 95-99% of the value of this game will disappear (flying straight over your head).

virtual disc on spin: american football | american football

for the first time in my life, i took a girl on a date on valentine’s day. the first 12 or 15 years i was either oblivious to the option of doing so, didn’t care, or would have been denied the opportunity by parents. in fact, during those years i don’t think i ever even gave a girl a serious valentine card. i received my share, of course, and some from girls i liked, but it always seemed dumb. then again, i was young.

of the two girls i’ve dated starting at the age of 16, i was only going out with one over valentine’s day. that was last year, when i was dating emily: we went to england with my family (see the post from 2.19.2002). you could say the whole thing was a valentine’s trip, since it happened before and after the day, but we didn’t technically go out on a date, if i remember aright, since we were traveling.

so maybe 20 is a bit late to start figuring out what valentine’s day is all about. i dunno. actually i think that’s a pretty dumb sentence, honestly. forget it.

anyway i asked out mackenzie, and we went to dinner and a movie (look at the post from 2.8.2003 — she went with me to junior formal last week!). and then coffee and hanging out and tv and and and….it turned into quite a long date, but very fun. unfortunately, we were both sick to different degrees the entire evening: as for me, i could barely talk and had a fairly consistent cough, which made things suboptimal. no worries, though.

for the record, at no time were we sitting on the couch alone watching romeo and juliet, or any part thereof.

off the record, i have to say it’s a pretty decent movie once you get past the fact that it’s valentine’s day and you’re watching freakin romeo and juliet.

conclusion: the night was low-key, low-stress, and i had a wonderful time. i hope all valentine’s days from here on out are as nice.

but sorry, no more details for your gossip-hungry ears. i know you are all asking “do you like her? does she like you? are you guys dating now? tell tell tell!”, but it will just have to wait. and mark “the rebel” rogers, no more rebel comment posts from you about girls.

it’s final: daniel urban, joseph carucci, and i will be traveling to the united kingdom for spring break.

we leave on march 20th, return on the 27th, and have spent $330 each on transportation from san francisco to london and back. quite a good deal. now it’s all about finding in-country transportation and lodgings at a bargain.

plans for what to do while in the uk are not firm (or even existent), but ideas include visiting such places as london, oxford, bath, edinburgh, cambridge, and dublin.

now, back to the drudgery and toil of winter quarter. let’s all just pray i’m alive in time for the great spring break adventure.

new cds that came in the mail today and made me happy:

american football | american football
sunny day real estate | how it feels to be something on
the gloria record | a lull in traffic [ep]
the gloria record | the gloria record [ep]
belle & sebastian | the boy with the arab strap
living sacrifice | reborn
sixpence none the richer | divine discontent

and hooray for 4 posts in one day! all you un-friends out there (alex zane) will have a hard time catching up.

AIM ceased to work on my part of the stanford campus sometime this afternoon. when it went, it left a huge gaping whole in my heart. i was forced to actually do work and go to class instead of obsessively (or is it compulsively?) checking away messages.

now, hours later, i’m feeling a little bit freer, a little bit lighter, as if a great weight has been taken from my back. although, if i did it again i wouldn’t stop cold turkey. serious addictions are not to be toyed with and we’re all lucky i didn’t go drown myself in lake lagunita.

…and speaking of rapidly [cf. my last post], here it is! i had the distinct (actually it was kind of fuzzy) pleasure of seeing the sunrise this morning, as i was up at 5am to drive a friend to the airport. now i’m debating whether to catch a few hours of sleep before my long day of classes, or instead to just fall asleep in class.

in other news, splendour hyaline CDs are being made as we speak and should be shipped to me in the next week or two. also, i’ve been looking at taking out a loan and trying to get a car. i decided i really need one out here this year. last, dan, joey, and i will be heading to the UK for 6 days over spring break. we hope to visit a number of places in england, and maybe spend a day each in edinburgh and dublin if we can swing it. i’m looking forward to that adventure!

i am paralyzed by music, and i love it–the state of complete and utter disability to do anything but sit and allow my ears to be two thirsty mouths. each beautiful song is a spiritual feast of the most fundamentally real kind, as i internalize the form of beauty itself and thus meet the one whose playground is platonic heaven.

the conclusion being, of course, that it is more important to listen to music than to perform any of the academic gyrations they ask us monkeys [students] to exhibit, like reading abstruse philosophy.

i wonder, though, about this, for without such philosophy i would not have been able to make an analogy to platonic heaven, nor to really understand transcendence (inexplicable supervenience?). such considerations of paradoxes must wait for the morning, however. and it approaches all too rapidly.

i just got back from junior formal. if you don’t believe me, come to griffin 302 and take a look: i’m sitting here in my dress slacks, black square-toe docs, and wifebeater undershirt, dress shirt and tie strewn on the floor to my left (incidentally, according to hanes, i am not wearing a “wifebeater” but an “a-shirt”. according to my dad this selfsame article of clothing is a “guinea tee”. perhaps hanes is too uncomfortable with and my dad too old for the unpleasant connotation of the name. i prefer to think of the name not as being built up from components with a determined semantic value ["wife" and "beater"], but being an english primitive, the fact that it sounds phonologically similar to said semantic components a complete accident. more interesting to you all is perhaps why i wear this particular style of clothing at times. this is a great topic for discussion, as it involves themes of pride, insecurity, frivolity, and toned muscles. tonight let’s just say that i was out of regular undershirts. and this was in fact the truth).

junior formal was held in the carnelian room atop the 52 stories of the bank of america building in san francisco. needless to say, the views from the event’s two admittedly-crowded rooms were nothing short of spectacular. before arriving at the dance, we sat to a late dinner at 8:30pm at the cosmopolitan cafe, an upscale live-jazz type restaurant. the food did not disappoint, and everyone ate to his or her utter satisfaction.

of course, food, dancing, and skyscrapers are all purely secondary considerations. what makes or breaks an event such as this is, obviously, the date! and, while i can remember plenty of dances in the past years, i feel that i must have particularly lucked out on this one because of my date. i had the privilege of taking the beautiful miss mackenzie wallace, a student at santa clara university. she looked stunning in her red dress (of course), proved to be an interesting conversationalist (for me, this means taking in stride my off-the-wall and irrelevant comments, my propensity to focus the attention on myself, and the random gibberish noises i make occasionally), and didn’t even like dancing! three very admirable qualities. she also smelled good, which is something i’ve noticed about girls in general but they must do something special for dances. or something.

but now is the sucky time when everyone’s gone home and i’m sitting awake at 3:45am trying to resurrect the experiences of a few hours ago and put them into blog form. honestly i would have liked nothing better than for the night to have continued indefinitely. i don’t know exactly what that means, but i think it was because of a combination of (1) enjoying my date’s company and (2) dreading the thought of having to get up tomorrow and work all day, and all the next day, and all the next days until next weekend. either (1) or (2) would have sufficed as a reason for the wish on its own, and so their concurrence lent fuel to the frustration that time moves forward without much in the way of stasis.

still, i think this is a key area of my personality in which i can grow; namely, that i always want a good experience to last forever, mostly out of a fear of returning to the baseline of the normal. i can’t seem to internalize what i think is the correct view: good experiences are good partly just in virtue of the fact that they are not forever…if they were, wouldn’t they lose the very distinctions which make them good? due to the failure of truly grasping this, i have a horrible problem in coming down off of any kind of ‘high’ in experience, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual. i tend, in fact, to get immediately frustrated for a short time after one of these events because i haven’t let go, or really believed it to be over. kind of like a kid on one of those little rides outside of k-mart–the helicopter, or the horse, or the racecar–the quarter’s long spent, and the pistons long still, and yet the tyke keeps gyrating and balancing, pretending the wind into his hair and denying reality the chance to catch up with his fleeing it.

of course, the last thing i wanted was to turn this blog into a pity party or another tedious recital of things i want to change about myself. who cares? not me! (maybe this is a problem). at any rate the fact that i’m writing right now and trying to hold in my lungs the spirit of the fun time i had tonight shows that it was, really, a fun time! so i can stand back, package it up, smile one more time, and give it to god for safekeeping. hopefully that will solve all my problems and clear my mind enough for the sleep which i desperately need, having been awake for about 21 hours. that being said, adios y que el les bendiga.

virtual disc on spin: it’s hard to find a friend | pedro the lion