My baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster - two great big humps and then I'm gone...

It's now been well over a month since I drove up from Orlando (after my Universal vacation) to Atlanta to see Grinderman at the Variety Playhouse. The holidays and my own procrastination got in the way of me doing much blogging. It was an amazing experience, though, so I do want to tell you all about it!

The second I found out they were coming, I made arrangements to buy tickets. I woke up the second they went on sale and bought them. And after that, the event sort of got pushed to the back of my mind. But, as it drew closer, I did get really excited.

Grinderman is the new(ish) project of Nick Cave, of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds fame. This band departs quite a bit from the style of the Bad Seeds, and it honestly took a bit to grow on me. I'm probably not the target demographic for Grinderman's music. But after several listenings, I learned to love it and now I find myself frequently listening to their two albums while I'm in the car.

I wouldn't say that Nick Cave is my idol or that I have a celebrity crush on him or anything weird like that. But, I do admire him. More than any other artist. Ever. I have a huge amount of respect for the man and all the work he does. In addition to being a musician (since 1973), he is a songwriter, an author, a screenwriter, and an actor. He has also done several lectures. The man is not only talented, he is very intelligent and very eloquent. I am just blown away by the work he produces in each field he has attempted. So, having the opportunity to see Nick Cave live in itself was amazing to me.

Grinderman produce a far heavier sound than that of the Bad Seeds, complete with dirty-old-man lyrics, and though I can get why some people say that Grinderman is a throwback to Cave's days with The Birthday Party, the two bands really are apples and oranges. Both are great, but both are separate entities and it was very easy to see that in live performance.

Anyway, the night of the show, I ended up going by myself. I met someone in the front row and chatted to him for much of the show. We both seemed to be in awe that we were actually standing there. Before the show started, security kept telling everyone in the front row to keep the area of the stage in front of the monitors clear (there was no press area between the crowd and stage, because photography was not permitted). However, I wasn't quite prepared for Nick Cave standing directly in front of me, occasionally brushing me/stepping partially on me with his huge shoes, or towering over me with his huge, lanky frame.

From the very beginning, I was impressed. These guys are pretty old - Cave is now 53 and Warren Ellis, his right-hand man, is 45 - and they still put on an amazing show. They had so much energy and were so into every single movement they made, every note they produced. It was one of the most amazing things (not just concerts) I have ever seen.

I wish I had enough words to really do justice to the experience, but I don't. They were playing in (I think) Nashville the following night. And had I not had obligations at home, I definitely would've made the drive. It was that great.

The only photos I've seen from the show were taken by a fan. There was one fan chosen to be the official photographer at each show. Here are a few of them, taken by Jeffrey Shipman. You can see the rest over at grinderman.com under "images".

So, I guess in closing, my recommendation is to check out the albums and to see the band live if at all possible. I think they're done touring in the U.S. for now, but future tours may occur. I know I'm hoping for a new Bad Seeds album and tour - it would be nice to see both sides.

That's it for 2010. On to 2011! May the beginning of this new year suck significantly less than the first half of 2010.

Wizard Land, Dear Readers...

After having about 10 days of relaxation at the beginning of November, I headed down to Orlando to meet up with my mom for a week. She was there for a conference that is held every three years in Orlando (of all places), and as is customary, she was staying a week longer to have a vacation of sorts.

While I was there, we took some time to go to Universal, because I hadn't been there in a very long time. In fact, the only proof I have that I may have once been there (when I was 7) is a photo of me on a bike with E.T. in the basket. My mom made me take one when we there this time too. It's fairly embarrassing. But anyway, the point of this was that I didn't remember anything about having been there before.

We spent two days checking out both Universal parks and it was mostly enjoyable. I got to see Doc Brown hanging out by the DeLorean, a cute sculpture of the Lorax hanging out with all his trees, and all of E.T.'s friends.

But the highlight was probably the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. I'm not super obsessed with HP. I hated the books when they first came out and just couldn't really get into the whole thing. I started reading all the books last year, though. I'm not finished with the last two. But I found myself really enjoying them, and even though I'm not obsessed, I do have my geeky moments. While I was not crazy enough to stand in line for two hours to visit the wand shop and get my own wand, I did enjoy the little park. I even left with two souvenirs - a sweet girly hoodie and some candy from Honeydukes.

I wish I had more to share about it. The two rides I went on were pretty cool, and the castle was really awesome to walk through. I'd say it's worth checking out. I think it would've been cooler if they'd saved the money, spent more time, and made it into its own bigger theme park. It would've been awesome to see a full-sized Hogwarts (the castle at least).

Anyway, here are a few pictures from the trip:

Chillin' with the conductor in front of the Hogwarts Express.

Hogsmeade

Ohai, Hogwarts!

I'm mildly irritated, but not by Black Friday, but we'll talk about that too.

A few days ago, I got a friendly reminder e-mail from Borders (the book store) telling me that my rewards earnings would expire the next day. So I figured I would redeem them and buy a movie or two. We don't have Borders stores in the area, so I had to order online. I pondered my choices and finally selected two items. They were in my cart and all I had to do was check out. After many error messages, improper page loads, and three and a half hours of waiting and wishing borders.com would explode in hell, my order FINALLY went through. This was very frustrating, but in the end, the mission was accomplished, so I thought I'd just forget about it. And then I got another e-mail from Borders yesterday.

It reads:

"Hello,

We are reaching out today to our most valued customers to inform you that we received a huge response to our recent reminder for Borders Rewards members to redeem their $10 in Bonus Bucks. Such a huge response in fact, that the Borders.com customer experience was impacted. If you were not able to redeem your $10 in Borders Bonus Bucks online, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. Please look for additional exclusive rewards and incentives throughout the Holiday Season.

Thank you for your patience,

Mike Edwards

CEO, Borders, Inc."

Now personally, after much frustration and time-wasting, I made it through. But this is the dumbest customer relations letter I have EVER seen. Mike Edwards, this is what your letter should have read:

"Dear Borders Customers who give us tons of money each year,

Our site is completely inadequate and non-functional. Fuck you, though.

Mike Edwards

CEO, Borders, Inc."

It wouldn't have been such a slap in the face if you didn't send an e-mail to everyone telling them, "omg go use your rewards coupons RIGHT NOW or else you will lose them forever!" But the fact that you were unable to anticipate the sheer inadequacy of your own site (which is actually pretty miserable to use on a normal day) before you sent this mass e-mail and then, instead of correcting the situation after you realized you messed up, just telling your customers, "It's too bad that we fucked up" just kind of blows my mind.

And now every time a new Borders coupon shows up in my inbox, which is typically at least once a day, I feel so much irritation due to the past offensive e-mail. There's not much I can do about it aside from ceasing to give them my business. But it is what it is.

ANYWAY...

Today was Black Friday. I haven't gone out to actually compete for wares in a few years and I didn't want to today because I've basically been feeling like shit lately. But then a few days ago, I saw a list of fun, limited issue records that were coming out. Among them was a Grinderman 12" which I absolutely had to have. And I didn't get. There were only 500 sent out. My local store got two and neither of them were attainable. However, my BFF across the country scored me a copy, so it's all good. I picked up something for him at my local store, and two things for me. One was a fairly not-in-good-condition copy of The Cure's live show at I-Beam (San Francisco, 1981) - the sleeve has some pretty hefty damage and the record appears to have one or two surface scratches, but we'll see how it goes. I'm not a super serious collector, so I don't care *too* much, but if it's really a total wreck, I will probably take it back and have words, because it did not come to me cheap.

My second purchase was made on a second trip to said record store. I researched a little and decided I wanted it. "It" is a vinyl issue of Clem Snide's "Your Favorite Music". It's a good album and apparently was not released on vinyl before. The one I got is marbled light blue vinyl with a light green label - very pretty. Overall, I was happy with my purchases considering I didn't really plan to purchase anything on Black Friday.

So, I hope everybody had an enjoyable Thanksgiving and I hope no one got trampled trying to buy a new toaster today. Please try to be sane for the rest of the holiday season.

October Travels

I am not sure what really happened that caused me to be a month behind in sharing some exciting/fun/interesting to me things, but somehow, this is the position I am in. Some of the time I've been spending trying to sort out my home life and get my act together, and some has been spent trying to catch sleep between all the things going on. Anyway, here I am, and although a lot of what I have to say now is about stuff that happened like a month ago, I'm going to try to cover everything over the next few days.

Let's start with the end of October.

October 28, I headed to Nashville to see Rifftrax Live: House on Haunted Hill and meet some Twitter people - one in particular, a friend, Doug (@watchout4snakes), but we also briefly met Tracey (@euphoriafish) there too. I'm new to the meeting Twitter people thing and I'm mostly antisocial, but my AYCJ travels sort of made me a little better at it, so why not. As far as the movie goes, House on Haunted Hill is one of my favorites, and I really enjoyed the entire experience. I would say more about it, but my best recommendation would be to buy the DVD when it's released. Anyway, it was my first time in Tennessee, making it my 6th new state in under 2 months. The drive there was terribly long (about 9 hours), but I saw some amazing scenery along the way. I, sadly, missed the opportunity to stop at the American Museum of Science and Energy (yes, I'm nerdy) on my way back to Charleston, so I'm sure I'll return to Tennessee again in the future for a visit.

When I got back from Nashville, I had one day of rest. Then my friend, Angela, and her boyfriend, Greg, arrived from New Jersey. The next day (Halloween), we headed to Atlanta to see Jónsi (of Sigur Rós fame) at the Tabernacle. It was a long drive there and we were all pretty exhausted from too many accumulated car hours over the previous days. However, we managed to talk ourselves into getting all done up in costumes and going to the show. It was well worth it. It was an amazing show, but also kind of a weird experience for me. Sigur Rós and Jónsi are artists whose music I'm used to listening to by myself and in my own home. I don't recall ever listening to either in the car or ever intentionally with other people. For whatever reason, this music has some weird emotional effects on me. So, it was just strange being in a room full of other people experiencing the performance. But it was a really great one and I'm glad I had the chance to see it. (I have a video from the show, but I haven't uploaded it yet, so I'll have to share that later.) As far as costumes went, lots of people were dressed up - my favorite was a group of people dressed up as characters from Fantastic Mr. Fox - very clever and cute and well done (sadly, no photos of this).

Since these two trips, I've had some more travel and some fun experiences. Those stories, however, will have to wait for another day.

I hope everyone had a happy and safe Thanksgiving today.

AYCJ Summary

I guess I never actually posted a link to it over here, but my short little story about my JetBlue AYCJ travels posted over on Michael Musto's blog a little over a week ago. Click here to read.

It's Fall! Or Autumn! Or Both!

My first few days back in Charleston were hot and unpleasant, but since then, it's started to feel a lot like fall. I've been sleeping with the windows open at night and I've had to start bringing my Meyer Lemon tree in at night because the temperature has been dipping down into the low 50s. I'm happy. And because it's getting cooler outside, it means I get to start eating more warm meals and fall-flavored things. And drinking lots of hot beverages.

In honor of all of this, I took time away from doing absolutely nothing to bake some cupcakes. And, let me tell you, they are awesome. They're vegan pumpkin chocolate chip cakes with cinnamon icing. The icing, despite the obviousness of this statement, tastes exactly like cinnamon rolls. The recipe is here for those who are interested.

Trip Stats

I also wanted to give some brief numbers. Before I forgot. But I did forget, so here's a second post!

The trip was 28 days long.

I visited 5 new cities (but Seattle twice) in 5 new states.

I traveled through 8 airports.

I took 14 flights.

I stayed in 8 homes.

I bought 66 records.

I did laundry a total of 2 times.

I spent less than $400 (excluding my parking fees at Charlotte-Douglas).

I'm home.

I haven't updated since I've been back in Charleston because, as expected, I was very unhappy upon my arrival. I feel aimless enough because I've spent the last month without a "home" and without any real obligations, so the fact that when I returned back to all of that, I was also returning to a place I pretty well despise weighed very heavily on me.

However, I'm slowly starting to settle back in. I haven't had a full day of rest with nothing planned since I've gotten back. I'm still trying to fit that into my schedule. Much of my time has been spent catching up with friends, unpacking, and cleaning up my apartment.

A mere two days after my return, I attend Kulture Klash here in Charleston. It was the first year that I had made it out and I was kind of excited. Some of the art on display was nice and some of the stuff going on throughout the night was pretty interesting. And I got to hold a chainsaw, so my evening was made.

Nearing The End

The end of my All You Can Jet month is drawing very near. Tomorrow will be my last round of flights and then I will drive back to Charleston Thursday morning. I have to say, while it will be nice to sleep in my own bed, I'm not looking forward to being back there. I was unhappy there to begin with, and now it just seems like a chore to have to drag myself back into it all.

I spent a few days last week in Austin, TX. I really liked Austin, but I feel like I could have enjoyed it a lot more than I did. My hosts, while good people, were just not very helpful in giving me ideas of what I should see or do. Add that to the fact that I was getting tired and starting to be a little burnt out on hopping around from place to place, and it just makes for a fairly uneventful trip. I did manage to take a short little hike thing and buy some (read: a lot) of records. So, despite the fact that the trip could've been much better, I'll call it a success.

It was hard to put Austin after Salt Lake City, because SLC just was sort of a crazy experience all around. I liked it there quite a bit, but I don't think I'd want to live there.

I had a flight booked from Austin on Saturday morning that would take me to San Francisco, Long Beach, and finally put me in Seattle at about 8 p.m. However, there was a mechanical failure on the plane that was to be flying in from San Francisco the night before, so that morning flight was delayed by like 4.5 hours. This would've made me miss all of my connecting flights. So I spent the entire day Saturday sitting in the airport until I could catch a 5 p.m. flight to Long Beach. Because JetBlue would not help me in any way to get me to Seattle that night, they put me up in a hotel in Long Beach, which wasn't so bad. But I was still irritated about losing a few hours.

When I finally got to Seattle the next morning, I was exhausted but very happy to be back here. I like it here. A lot, really. I have a feeling similar, but of course a little different, to the one I have when I'm in New York. Something clicks and it just feels safe or like home or something. It's really strange. So I'm glad that I decided to come back here and finish out my trip in a city that makes me comfortable. I was even able to see the people who hosted me when I came to Seattle earlier on this trip and catch up on their lives. They're such nice people and I'm so glad I got the chance to meet them. But, even though being here is a happy thing, I know it will be very heartbreaking to leave. Especially to leave and go back to Charleston.

This trip as a whole has been a major event in my life. I've learned a lot, seen a lot, met a lot of new, great people (and learned to have a bit of faith in humanity), and just had a fantastic time along much of the way. Like anything, the trip has had its ups and downs, but in the end, they were all very worth it and I'm glad I didn't just throw in the towel at the first sign of things not going as planned. Looking back, this all came at a time when I really needed it, and it has slightly changed a lot of things for me. It'll be strange to see what happens when the traveling is completely over.

I've got a lot on my schedule for the remainder of 2010. But the one thing I've learned from all of this is that I definitely need to get my shit together. I need to figure out what I'm doing as far as finishing college or going to culinary school goes. I need to make a conscious effort to get in with a particular company that will allow me a job I can tolerate and that will allow me to pay my bills while also giving me the option of mobility in the future so that I can get out of Charleston and go some place that will make me happier. So, yes, there will be fun things to update on, even when all this exciting jetting is out of the way. But, at the same time...I've gotta put my game face on. I think the end of this trip is really the start of some new chapter or something of my life in a way. It doesn't mean drastic change will occur right away, but I have the opportunity to grab a little bit of control back and try to fight for a better situation for myself away from the Southeast.

So Little Time!

I have neglected to post an update about my whereabouts since San Francisco. After I left California, I headed to Salt Lake City for a few days.

Salt Lake City was a lot of fun. It was nice to have a break from "big city" life for a few days. Most of my time there was spent among nature instead of skyscrapers, and it was just very enjoyable. Even the part where we got stuck on top of a mountain when the brakes went out on the so-called pedophile van (it was just a really sketchy van, ok). Luckily, I had my AAA card with me, so that worked out well in the end.

I had nice hosts in SLC, too, which helped to make the time more enjoyable. And I also met some other CouchSurfers! There were three staying with my first host when I arrived - two guys from Australia and a girl from Houston, TX. All nice people, and I'm very glad I had the chance to meet them.

Tuesday night, I left Salt Lake City and now I'm sitting on the floor at JFK waiting for my plane to Austin, TX. I have no idea what I'm doing in Austin, but I'm sure I'll figure it out as I go. Right now, the first thing I would like to do is nap a little. I wasn't able to sleep on my flight because of screaming babies. I'm not even going to get into my feelings about that. But I'll leave you with a picture of the dodgy, awesome van.