big events in the real world

for once i feel legitimately vindicated in my 17 point scale absence. since we last spoke, my world has exploded. by world, i mean my friends, my teams, and myself, and by explode, i mean that the last two weeks have been crazy ridiculous.

my friends

1. alex got married and headed off on his honeymoon
2. sean finally left on his honeymoon
   
3. my roommate got laid off
   
4. beth and her roommates got a tentative eviction notice
5. the other andrew and some of beth's roommates (i.e., whitney and nora) confirmed that they were beginning new life adventures in sunny california while others (i.e., joel & sara, mari, my parents) set off or prepared to set off for trips to china
   

my teams

1. the sonics drafted kevin durant and jeff green and signed wally szcerbiak, delonte west, general manager sam presti, and coach pj carlesimo
2. the sonics traded ray allen and rashard lewis
3. the muckleshoot indian tribe is considering the possibility of the construction of a new sonics arena
   
4. the mariners are still winning, and at 50-36 are only 2 games out of 1st place in the west and 1 game out of 1st place in the wild card race
5. after jj putz and ichiro, a pair of sports bloggers may be the leading MVPs for the mariners this year; perhaps i'll explain more later
   
6. the others, my amazing soccer team, are 0-3 with an ever climbing goal differential and potential for success

myself

1. i finished the text for the first issue of that silly newsletter that i mentioned a few months; i'll post a link when it's all fine and dandified
2. i spent the last week or so in ocean shores with the s.o., her family, and my family; it was the first meeting of the two clans
3. i have a new job! i am the assistant creative writing editor for the other journal; i'll explain more later
   

if life slows down and gets ordinary again, i'll be sure to visit more frequently.

andrew david. "the wize young iguana listens patiently to andrew's list" san ignacio town, belize.

the reason i didn't blog tonight

i'm getting tired of looking at that last post every time i boot up the internet, so i thought i'd shoo it further down the page by writing a sentence or two about why i'm not writing:

1. first, i toured alex's new house and ate at his neighborhood BBQ joint. fans of the blog might remember alex because of his vast collection of music (somewhere between 3,800 and 4,016 songs) which i nabbed and subsequently rated. during our afternoon chat i was shocked to learn two things: (a) alex is renting his two-bedroom ballard house for an insane $600 a month and (b) because of financial problems (i.e., working as a mars hill intern, having an upcoming wedding this month, and being alex), he is no able to keep current with the indie music scene. still, he let me borrow the shins' latest album.
   
2. i'm breezing through dick staub's the culturally savvy christian: a manifesto for deepening faith and enriching popular culture in an age of christinaity-lite, the next book that i've been asked to review for imageupdate. i have to finish skimming the book and writing a one-paragraph blurb by thursday morning.

andrew david. "conversations in spanish I: but what if he's this tall? can he still ride the octopus? yes, sir, it is right over there, in the field." san ignacio town, belize.

886 to go

there is christmas music wafting up through the air ducts. that's right, i live with a guy who listens to christmas music on october 1st. what the goose???

well, i too have my strange musical habits. perhaps the most extraordinary of these unusual tendencies is my analytical assualt on alex layton's mp3 collection. in the summer of 2005, alex allowed me to copy his exhaustive music library onto my new laptop. with the addition of this generous earful, the total number of songs on my computer was 4186.

if i were to rank my friends (and perhaps my acquaintances too) in terms of their musical acuity, alex would be somewhere in the top ten. however, we humans are fallible (and sentimental), and everyone likes to listen to a little crap now and then. thus, despite the impressiveness of alex's musical taste, many of his songs don't strike me as worth the 5mb it takes to keep them alive.

soooo...in order to purge my system of musical malcontens, i elected to rank EVERY single song using the itunes five-star ratings system. while this is a daunting project, the quirkiest piece is yet to come.

in the download-happy world of the single, the prevailing musical mood seems a bit against the concept of an album. still, i continue to embrace the idea that songs are significantly connected in a web of meaning. perhaps i give too much credit to the music industry, but there's something tragic in the disassociation of the chapter from the book. therefore, i will not delete the musical atrocities until i have determined that the entire album is bad.

now, one more word about my methodology: while i support the concept of the album as an important, undivided entity, i have been listening to my unrated playlist in--gasp--random order. at first i rated albums song-by-song, but i soon found that by the last third of an album i was influenced as much by the previous tracks as the song itself. because i was afraid that this manner of rating might make me miss some gems, i adopted the unbiased method of listening to tracks in random order.

wow, it took a lot longer to explain that than i thought...

beth the s.o.. "andrew summiting the highest mountain in the world" cypress island, wa.
by the way, that's the andrew that spends his time ranking music not the andrew that spends his time thinking