June 5-6, 2001 — I'm scared you might drown me

I would have posted a journal yesterday, except that my evening consisted of getting home, eating, checking my email, lying down for an hour, brushing my teeth, and going to sleep.

I should be doing the same tonight in an effort to preserve my sanity (and to perhaps prevent myself from swearing aloud at the frustration of it all each and every morning when my alarm goes off), but here we are.

I've had a hard time concentrating at work these days. I spend far too much time thinking of things that I'd rather be doing and of projects of my own that I'd rather be working on. Today I worked out in my head most of the coding that I would need to do for a project that I'm trying to setup in the fall. Will it happen? I'd normally say, "Probably not," but given the abundance of free time that I should (theoretically) have come September, it might work out after all.

The Bran Van 3000 site is still chugging along, sucking back three or four gigabytes of transfer each day. I was watching the "Drinking In L.A." video again today on my computer, and I couldn't help but smile. I remember how excited I was to first receive those emails from Rob, the drummer, and from Liquid, one of the MCs, during those first few months. After a rather painful start to 1997, I was more than willing to take my victories where I could find them, and I found most of them in a fan site for a band whose album I bought based half on my love for the lead single and half on its lead member's professed love for The Smiths on MusiquePlus. Interesting how these things work out...

Speaking of things working out, that project from these last few weeks that I hadn't been too keen on keeps getting better and better in its demise. I had worried that perhaps the work I had done would eventually be used in some offhanded way, or that I would have to finish the job because it was decided that this offhanded way was a reasonable solution to the problem, but it looks like they've been convinced to start from scratch and to leave me mostly out of it. I am all for both of these decisions.

While allowing my eyes to become unfocused and then focused over and over again as the radiation from my computer screen slowly inflicted untold damage on my well-being, I took the time to listen to Radiohead's Amnesiac through a few more times. While I maintain that the limited edition CD is the pinnacle of compact disc packaging, I was hoping for something a bit... well, louder, I think.

I hadn't read anything about the CD since it was dubbed "Kid B" by the fan sites, so I was still under the false impression that it would be a bit more conventional while still being a progression from OK Computer. Is it a bad album? Certainly not -- it has at least four or five songs that are completely brilliant and that I've had stuck in my head for most of the day. Am I as excited to see them live as I was after I first heard OK Computer? Not really... (And getting back to MusiquePlus: Claude Rajotte can also take the credit for giving me the final little nudge I needed to get into Radiohead by giving OK Computer a 10 on 10. I'd read about it for months and was pretty sure I'd buy it, but that review had me in the record store the day it came out looking forward to listening to it for the first time on the bus ride home. My other Radiohead memory involves my father saying, "Why haven't you bought their album yet?" when Thom Yorke was at MuchMusic giving an interview in support of The Bends. A good call, that.)

In any case. While Radiohead can really do no wrong at this point as far as I'm concerned, I often wonder if they'll ever be able to make me feel that way again, with or without guitar solos, and with or without "another OK Computer. Not that I won't cling to those days as well as I can through limited-edition CDs...

My bedtime drifted by twenty-five minutes ago. Sweet dreams.