There Is No Kevin

Another year passes. What have I learned?

You can't trust the music industry. Paramore? I can't even listen to them any more. How far and hard the mighty fall. Just scroll down a few posts and you can see that i really, really adored that band. I haven't quite pulled down the posters yet, and I will probably listen to them again eventually, but it will never ever be the same.

Social networking isn't quite the end of humanity as we know it, but i feel so much better now that i have opted out of the whole facebook thing.

Ke$ha and Lady Gaga also don't spell the doom of humanity, but they come dangerously close. Tik Tok is a damn good song, and i can't help but respect the Gaga as a fully committed artist, but i also can't help but worry at least a little bit whenever i see a film clip or flick through a youth grouper's ipod.

Hipster bashing is way way passé. Having said that though, i just can't connect with a lot of the 'hip' pitchfork and laneway bands out there. At least, I can't connect with them in the same way i connect with Underoath or A Day To Remember. Local Natives and Foals though? They are ace. Give me more of that stuff!

Why do they keep making crap movies? The Tourist, Little Fockers, Grown Ups, Marmaduke, The Bounty Hunter, Knight and Day, Killers, Love and Other Drugs........the list is seemingly endless! It's almost enough to negate my faith in humanity that i experienced with Inception and Toy Story 3.

Tumblr is the best thing ever.


Just a few thoughts.
More will follow.

n_n



Currently:

When did we become so photo-obsessed? The proliferation of digital compact cameras in modern life clogs the information superhighways with debris and throwaway shots of faces and arms extended in an attempt to capture the our faces in the moment [it has become something of a gross information overload]. Dark nightclub, early bushwalk, on the beach, chilling with your girl/boy, travelling the sights of europe, at the cafe with mates, playing wii, sitting at home doing absolutely nothing..........take a photo. Post it. Tag it. Comment it. Forget all about it.

I write this just because i am backing up all the photos on my hard drive so i can delete some and make some space. In the years of 2006 and prior we had 6000 photos on our computer. This past US trip in 5 weeks, we had 7000 photos ALONE. Between the years of 2007 and 2009, we have about 17,000 photos now. You know what? I'm going to make a graph...

*45 minutes later*


According to this trend, I will take approximately 24,276 photos next year. This equates to approximately 1TB of hard disc space. (That's 1000GB). Now this is actually not unreasonable, as there are a large number of important 21sts coming up...in fact, i consider this something of a challenge! 24,000 photos in one year? too easy. But let's look even further in the future!

If i get married by age, let's say 25 (wishful thinking perhaps? hahahahaha), in the year 2014, there should be about 770,219 photos in that year, which equates to 3.08TB of memory............stop and ask yourself, how much computer memory does it take to hold a man's life?

********************

The point of all this, is that i'm just backing up photos from my iphoto library all the way back from 2007...and frankly i am astonished at how many photos there are!!! So i made a spreadsheet to pass the time while burning the DVD backups. (It's gonna take 10 DVDs or so to do it...)...I don't usually make spreadsheets for fun.......unless they're about quantum wave mechanics!!!!!

The real burning question i have is what on earth are we supposed to do with all these photos? It's not like our parents' photos, which they keep in little plastic baggies hidden away behind the towels and linen. One day we are cleaning the house and we stumble upon these precious sepia memories and we laugh at the fashion and the hair. We handle the photos with care, lest the silver halide come off on our fingers or our fingerprints blemish our grandparents' immaculate wedding scene skin. We respect and cherish the past, because it is precious in its scarcity.

Maybe 50 years from now, when our kids are cleaning our houses, they will stumble upon our old facebook pages, or our old hard drives and look back with that fondness of nostalgia we seem to treasure so dearly...they will look at our awkwardly posed faces and camwhoring and be in awe of a world so foreign to their own.



somehow i don't think this is likely.

It's been a week since we were in the land of the free/home of the brave and for the most part it's been good. I did miss a lot of uni, so there is some catching up to do there- most of which has already been covered in a few days...does this speak to the quality of the honours year in my particular area of degree?...probably haha.

However, the more important thing has been catching up with friends and the wollongong mode of life.

While it always seems like nothing ever changes when you return from a long holiday, you do return with brand new eyes (paramore @ soundwave!!) and things do take on something of a new light. People's faces look that little bit friendlier, the sky looks a little bluer, and even uni work seems less of a drag with each passing day (well, kind of...). This is simply another example of cliched proverbs finding perfect application in real life- that absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder.

Our final days in the US were spent wandering the streets of New York, missing a connecting flight in LA, and gaining a bonus day in LA which we spent at a beach and an airport. As I have shared with some people already, we spent so long in New York we almost felt like it was our 2nd temporary home, so by the end of it we were sick of tourist things and were basically walking miles and miles between meals.

I wanted to go to a hip hop dance class- drop-in at 10:30 for $18- at a pretty well-known dance centre courtesy recommended by a friend (thanks Laura!) buuuuuuut unfortunately by the time my family got ready and we left the hotel it was too late. We had no plan that day. We decided to walk south a couple of miles towards chinatown for lunch and figure it out from there. I saw some people lining up for MTV show It's On With Alexa Chung. Taking Back Sunday were playing the Monday after we lef the US, but i didn't know that at the time. I asked the girl in line: "what are you lining up for?", "It's On With Alexa Chung" sounded like "Race On With Electrons Song"or something..."Uh, ok".

The day consisted mostly of walking through the heat and doing some last minute lower east side shopping.

Chinatown lunch was awesome- great malaysian place called Nyonya. Funny how we had to travel all the way to New York to find great authentic malaysian food. That night, Sara and i did manage to attend a Blue Man Group performance off-Broadway in an intimate venue called the Astor Theatre- the original home of Blue Man Group. It was beautifully unique, entertaining and even poignant at moments- it blew me away. Definitely something to take the family to. Or judging by the couple making out in front of me, a prospective spouse. We had late night pizza afterwards.

I miss late night pizza.

Heck, i miss late night anything. Wollongong is so dead past 9:30. And no, wollongongnightlife.com.au does NOT count.

Obviously, the trip has given me a lot to think about. Still mulling them through my head. And will be for a while i think!

In the meantime, i soothe the drudgery of everyday life with quality hang outs with quality people and the smooth smooth taste of bubble tea.


(:

The week back from Malaysia saw heat on our fair city like we hadn't experienced in a long time. It felt even more intense than the Malaysian heat! This could be because of our lack of air-con, and my house is fairly well insulated as such. Although the rumours of a 47 degree heatwave in the west didn't fully come to fruition, it was hot enough for us to sweat long into the night.