The Trip

Road Trips are the shit. I'm sure many of you have been on many, but as of 2 days ago I was a road trippin virgin.

Me and some graduate friends of mine wanted to go to Six Flags Over Georgia during the school year but thanks to bad weather and poor planning that trip went straight to hell. Randomly my friend asked if I wanted to go to Six Flags on Friday and I was sorta pissed cuz I had work and knew it would be hard getting out but did and felt happy. My next order of business was somehow getting in touch with Kimberly cuz Six Flags is right outside Atlanta! After many many failed attempts I got through and I had planned to pick her up or something half-way through the day, never happened. But she did invite my friends and I over to her house for like pizza or somethin.

Well while preparing to ride one wooden roller coaster we were asked to get out and they told us due to "inclement weather" we are closing the ride, for now. Only instilling a sense of false hope that it will soon open. One of the workers advised us to just go home so we started walking and then a monsoon started raping us as we ran to the van. We were completely drenched and the friends mentioned us just going home cuz we were all soaked and shirtless(with one girl) and that it would be odd, this shirtless redneck looking crew from alabama arriving at the doorstep of a beloved tasper. After much debate we they insisted on me visiting Kimberly so we did. Luckily Kimberly lives in the South and has a true sense of "Southern Hospitality", not that you guys don't but you know. She dried our tops and offered us other shirts and fresh brownies, mmmmmmmmmmm. I was stunned to see Kimberly was wearing her TASP shirt but it was ringless guys. After all that debate about the rings at TASP she goes and defaces our shirt by removing all rings. jk It was nice although we did leave a little late, 10:20 Alabama Time(Central).

After almost being run off the road by a huge-ass truck, having a crazy female truck driver flashing her lights at me b/c I was going "too slow", and witnessing a crazy woman pushing her truck on the INTERSTATE with no warning lights on or anything, I had made my first and longest to date road trip. Quite a memorable one, obviously.

I start school on the 18 of August, pretty damn soon. But I know most of you won't be starting until much later. When DO you suckers start school?????(I love writing in Georgia)

Europe

So, for the last three and a half weeks I have been in Europe--Germany, mostly, but recently Italy too. Soon I depart for a two week trip with a friend from Paris to Prague. I have very infrequent access to a computer but I've been trying to catch up on the blog (with marginal success). So, for a brief overview--or shall I say preview, as I certainly plan on posting more later: I got rained out of Nabucco at Verona which reallz sucked, peaches are good in Venice, as I think David hinted at, it seemed to me Rowling borrowed pretty much all of her climactic visual images/setpieces from The Lord of the Rings, and does any one have any idea what is up with German keyboards switching the y and the z keys? Now I am off to the oldest brewery that I know of for dinner. Since 1042 or something. Go German beer.

A Mirror Factory

To Julia: You really started something!

My summer has been strange, TASPers. I feel as if the person I am has changed a bit, and not really for the better. During this time, I also find myself asking myself questions that have always bothered me, questions which I have never bothered to confront.
First of all, this is my first summer without anything to do. Yes, it seems that in order to balance out the impending excitement of college life, my summer has become analogously dull. All I do is sleep, work, drink coffee, and work out. Yes, dears, I would like to say that I have been reading like mad or trying to learn Vietnamese or having awesome conversations with intelligent people.
I would like to say this, but this is not the case. I spend the majority of my time these days trying to sell a woman a cheap pair of sunglasses or plucking my eyebrows or pirating hip-hop music from the internet. I watch more tv than ever before, and not quality tv. I watch reruns of late 90's sitcoms and sometimes Elimidate. I have become, esssentially, an anti-intellectual.
This makes me uncomfortable as it forces me to question exactly who I am. I say I love to write, but seldom find time to do it anymore. I like to think of myself as interesting and perceptive, but the majority of things I say these days involves such shallow, generic things as clothing or electronics.
I miss feeling creative and alive. Or do I? This summer has its share of creature comforts. The television relaxes me, doesn't make me question my intelligence or values, doesn't make me uncomfortable. There is no deep comtemplation involved in buying a new outfit...
I apologize for what I have become. I suspect that my college classes will pull me out of this intellectual morass whether I like it or not. I can only hope it will.
Drop me a line if you guys ever want to. I can always turn the television off.

love,
josh



ps: I am excited and all, but deep down I have a lot of fear that I will feel very inferior at college.

I guess it's my turn...

After reading Julia and Paul's posts, I realized how much I missed talking to all of you. I've been quite lonely in a way for the last few weeks (months?), and it's such a relief to just listen to you guys, to hear you and know that I can also be heard.

I have begun to accept the reality of my unemployment, though I am just 1/3 through the longest summer of my life. As you might expect, I have had a lot of downtime to do a lot of thinking and reading. (Light in August in 2 days? Yeah, lots of time.) Thankfully I've had various events at my church almost every day for the last couple of weeks, including "teaching" toddlers at our week-long Vacation Bible School, meaning I took them to the bathroom and caught them before they escaped and ran out of class. It was surprisingly enjoyable.

Today, I went to a picnic downtown organized by some of the kids in my UofC class from the Chicago area. It was decent, but also a reality check: out of about 25 people present, 3 were black and 1 was Asian. The rest were really white kids from the suburbs. Nothing wrong with being white and from the suburbs, but it was a serious culture shock for me, coming from an urban school where white people were a sizeable minority (except in advanced classes, sigh) and every other ethnic group under the sun was mixed in to create a really interesting, completely unrealistic diversity. Tasp was some preparation, though the white majority there hardly counted - if you don't count the Jews, the foreigners, and those with parents of non-white American ancestry, the already flimsy majority status disappears.

I guess the reason this irked me a bit is that I know I am outside of the culture of sameness that prevails among most of my future classmates, meaning that I may not become great friends with everyone living in my house. I suppose it was only because of my naivety that I unconsciously assumed things would be like last summer. There will certainly be some significant similarilities. However, I am starting to resign myself to the possiblity that I may have to go some time, at least for the first few weeks, without having instant access to a truly kindred spirit*. (Jessica and I'll probably live across campus from each other.)

I suppose loneliness is the foe I face most often nowadays. I've had almost no contact with friends from high school, so with peer contact at a minimum, it's easy to bring a lot of false and ridiculous charges against myself. Though it's a relief to have let go of that horrible depression-induced pain in my chest (the result of Tasp-withdrawal/guilt + college woes), my thoughts let me know that I still have a long way to go. However, just talking to you guys a little bit, knowing you actually care about stuff that I might otherwise think was horrible, is a serious relief to me.

*For those of you who have been missing out on life and don't recognize it, I'm stealing Anne of Green Gables' way of referring to a close friend. Gotta give credit where it's due.

I will soon lose WISE

Not the club, but my teeth. Yes the day has come for the extraction of my wisdom teeth. It shall be Monday and oh how i dread that day. Have any of you gone through this ordeal yet and if so was it excrutiatingly painful or just a walk in the park?

A Theo life update-Tomorrow I get to go to orientation for UAB, I hope it doesn't blow. And have you guys every seen a cd explode because i sure did. By the way before I tell the story, it goes with the laundry incident under idiotic moments in Teddy's Life File. Anyways so I cracked my Incubus CD in half, but not the full diameter just the radius(from the outer edge to the center of the disc-not that any of you needed to know that). So I knew immediately I should try and copy it to my computer, not so easy. The sound was much lower and obviously meant that it wasn't spinning at the right speed. So I attatched some scotch tape to the top of the cd(thinking it would help). Little did I know I had created a household bomb. 5 seconds later the cd speeds really fast and makes a high pitch noise then BAM. I open it up-i had to pry it open, and there are shards of cd everywhere as if it was made of glass and u just dropped it but all over the cpu. I had to unplug and vigorously shake it around to get all of the pieces out. To top it all off the catastrophe occured on the fourth of JULY aka the incubus firework.

Any Future Factotum?

Has anybody thought about applying to be a factotum whenever we're eligible to do that? Maybe it's the desperation of unemployment that makes me look forward to possible future income, but the thought occured to me for the first time today. Six months ago, I probably would've laughed at such a prospect. Now, it's within the realm of possibility. After all, they do get paid pretty well, haha...

#2#2

It's been a disappointing year in mo-town--lost the championship, lost thousands of jobs, Michael Moore still comes from there--but it's surely been a fabulous year for our favorite Detroit boy. That's right: Happy B-day B-Max!
May your championship hopes be as high as the Spurs.

Unlikely Recommendation

Just in case anyone hasn't already seen it, I highly recommend The Diary of a Mad Black Woman for your viewing pleasure. I remember being slightly sick when I first saw a billboard for the movie featuring a large black man dressed as a woman in a housedress. After I watched the movie yesterday, I realized that the worst thing about it was its advertising; it's not at all what the "Big Mama's House"-type ads would lead you to believe. It's very different from anything I've seen on film in several ways, so go see it! There, I'm done.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AMERICA!!!!!

Just thought I'd slip that one in there.

...and to wish happy birthday to our very own born-on-the-Fourth-of-July-er, Matt, see Michael's post below...

It's That Time Again

To our first 2-birthday TASPer...

Viva Matt!
Viva year upon year!

Quote of the Week..and I now have gmail

Actual recent conversation between caller and 911 dispatcher in Aurora, Colorado:
"The house is burning down!"
"Well, that's not my problem."

On an unrelated note: I have gmail, so...yippee! Ladies and gentlemen, get ready to modify your address books! :) It's davidjiang57@gmail.com.

Oh, and it was just Restaurant Week here in NY (and some other cities too, probably). I had some ridiculously good food. Other than that, life goes on. "Happy summer", everyone!