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| Hard finding people willing to go out and drink in the 2k4 with me - I ended up at one shitty party sipping from my flask and fending off ugly desperate girls from out of state before I could take no more and started bar-hopping towards the Brooklyn Brudge - my usual midnight changeover hangout. After a couple beers at a couple bars, punctuated with well-timed swigs of scotch and random conversations with fellow lonely drunks, I wound up there. |
| Where'd the year go? Busy working on the Oneaday Year-In-Review, among other things, hopefully up soon. Got resolutions? I certainly do. |
| E. called me this morning at 3:30 (jus' a little past midnight Seattle time) crying - apparently her time in Seattle isn't going too well and she can't stay at the place she's staying too much longer. So I spent the day sweating bullets trying to get in touch with old hometown peeps to give her a way out, stomach chewed up with worry and stress. But it all, thankfully, worked out, and now she's off to Canadia to carve some powder and be missed by me. |
| Basically completely totally dead today, body achewoody and painstaking from being crammed hard into airline seat and ill-fed, jet-lagged time-zoned creak, crank, unmotivated but work needs! to! be! done! so I dood it. And then I went to bed and stayed there. |
| Up at 5:45 in the morning, driven to the airport and crammed onto a plane back to NYC, leaving E. there for another week to do more snowboarding and awesomeheimering. Kissing her goodbye as I stepped out of the bedroom this morning broke my wee heart near in two, but she needs more of a break from the city and it'll make me all the happier to see her when she gets back. |
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How to learn how to snowboard: 1) Fall on your ass. 2) Repeat. |
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How to get into a snowmobile accident: 1) Learn how to drive a snowmobile. This isn't very difficult. You press the gas thing and it goes and you don't press it and it slows down. There's a brake, too. The handlebar things steer it. 2) Drive that snowmobile all to hell around Cle Elum, Washington, with your mom, stepdad and girlfriend who's from Minnesota and knows about these things. 3) Get kinda into it and start speeding over little hilly bumps and stuff. Go flying. Whang your tailbone moderately hard on the seat. Stop for a second and drink some schnapps. 4) Go over one of those little hilly bumps at ~30mph. Feel the snowmobile lift completely off the ground. Notice that as it starts to return to earth, the inertia will keep your body moving away from the ground! Fly off of the back of the snowmobile and tuck and roll as it zips off of the trail and rams into a bush. 5) More schnapps. |
| My Mom's side of the family has traditionally done all of our Christmas stuff on Christmas Eve - then, the next day, I'd be shuttled off to my Dad's side of the family to do it all again. However, since Dad moved up to Alaska and I moved to NYC, that doesn't really happen all that much anymore. So tonight was the big night - presents, family-of-family, et cetera. Me and E. and Nao went out to Pho Bac to try to pre-fill so we wouldn't gorge on Xmas sweets and booze (good in theory, failed in execution) and then gifting, thanking, occasional wincing, and to bed! |
| It's weird being in my old hometown with somebody who's never seen it before - the alleyways and shitholes that held meaning for me are just alleyways and shitholes, and places I never gave a second glance to are fraught with new excitement. Squired E. and her old school friend 'round town, finished the last of the Xmas shopping and then there wasn't all that much else to do after that. |
| First day jetlagged but we managed to get abed fairly early and up again to wander 'round town - I made a couple stops at my usual haunts and bought a batch of old whiskey labels for unknown purposes. Being on vacation is almost impossibly nice. |
| I'm on a plane now. E. and I woke up far too early and trucked out to Newark to catch a Continental 'cross the continent. This is her first time ever on the West Coast so I'm pretty excited to show her around. In front of her is a bald old moron who keeps twitching and jostling his fully-reclined seat and she's just about to start hitting him in his dumb fat bald head. We land in about an hour. |
| If anybody's curious about that secret project I was talking about, it was a commissioned painting and you can see it here. I'm not as happy with it as I could be, of course, but a man makes a million mistakes and I'm still running through them. I get on a plane soon. |
| Spent another night in last night finishing up some shit - good feelings, but I can't shake the stress that I'm going to be on a plane and out of here in under 48 hours. Will I get all the crap I need to do done? At this point, it's not looking too likely - there's going to be a few things falling by the wayside. What I need to do is make sure those are the least important or damaging ones. Also I have something like $300 in the bank and that's not making me all too happy. Augh. |
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Kthor: oh christ ????? hezron: i am going to make an RTS based on magnolia Kthor: i am making a music action game around the master and commander license Lelio: driving miss daisy: vice city Gibbs: I'm making a House of the Dead clone based on The House of Yes Kthor: super band of brothers Gibbs: easy, medium, hard, or extra hard rider Lelio: mulholland overdrive Lelio: how dead is this joke? |
| After an epic slog of a workday getting holiday cards ready to mail and fail, E. and I went out for Vietnamese food last night and then, pho-sated, crawled back to Queens where I drank a quart of Tecate and we watched the Simple Life and made out. Now I'm going to be drawing non-stop for the next 72 hours or so, but goddamn if it isn't always worth it. |
| Was up until 1AM last night painting and drawing but oddly enough I still feel pretty refreshed and relaxed today - I didn;t stress, ate a decent meal, exercised a step or two and slept like a baby all night. Maybe the worst of this nonsense is over. I rarely feel as good as I do when I really get into a productive art-making zone - unfortunately, it's impossably hard to motivate me there on most days. Who knows why that is? |
| Six days until I fly west - have to finish secret-project, a week's REBE, holiday cards, shopping for people, guest episode of popular webcomic, Mauled #2 story, secret project #2, clean room, office christmas cards, gifts, end-of-year accounting, band practice, suicide, et cetera. Holy crap, this is gonna be rough. |
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E. and I had our first ever "relationship talk" today, trying to surface some things that have been eating at me for the last few weeks. So we sat down and hashed it out - basically she's leaving NYC, probably, sometime in the future. I'm not. And that's that. But I want her to leave - I want her to go back to school and finish her studies so she can get a better job than her 9-5 office slave stuff - she's made for better stuff. So instead of worrying about where we're going, my early New Year's resolution is just to enjoy where we are while I can. And I think that's good enough. And then I saw a Guns 'N Roses tribute band made up of kids ages 5-11. |
| Band practice with yet another permutated line-up - Mr. JPL on guitar (most recently seen in the Security Squid a while ago) and then Quinn on drums, me now back on bass and Leela singing, still. And, surprisingly, it went fairly well, despite introducing yet another new person to the material. Now if the center can hold long enough for us to nail things down, we may be coming to a small, sticky rock club near you sometime in the future. |
| That's a bit better - actually managed to get out of bed on time for the first time all week, out the door and on the train and to work early enough to sneak in my personal shit before the bossenheimer saunters through the door (oh shit, he just did) - lots of that to do in the next week before I get on a plane back West, dragging E. by the ears with me. Nervous as hell. I hate Christmas, but I guess I love it too. Kind of like everything else in the world. |
| Lord, am I a fucking wreck today. Once every few months or so, an old switch clicks over in my brain and I get bitchy, cranky and generally unpleasant to be around for like 24 hours, and I think now's that time. It's pretty lame - the littlest things make me mad, and then I get mad about getting mad about stupid little things, forever and ever amen, until I'm just a jerkwater crankhole with no redeeming features cursing to himself about how unfair existence is. So I went home and worked out and ate a healthy meal and tried to let it evaporate away. |
| Goin' to drink free scotch courtesy of Mr. Chivas Regal tonight - expect woozy, slurry updates as events warrant. Life is very hectic and very dull at the same time. |
| Trains were all gmbrxl'd and rangle tangled on the way home to Queens tonight - snow seeping into sensitive parts makes for all sorts of chaos, resulting in me getting off, on, off again and on again four different trains before I finally made it home. Once there, I watched the Simple Life and drew until my little cold hands warmed back up. Pre-holiday doldrums - bad reading, boring writing, you have my apologies. |
| Redesigned the frontpage today as an initial salvo in my ongoing war against actually accomplishing anything. Busybody workywork to distract me from actual impending doomlines, as usual. I haven't bought a single Christmas present (unless you count plane tix for me and E.) and I'm at a lack and a loss as for what to get anybody this year. Any suggestions from you? |
| Another snow day - I ran some errands but mostly just stayed in and painted and played guitar all day. The radiator in my humble home is hissing up a storm, and since it's placed right next to my bed it makes it very difficult to rouse out. But rouse I did, work I did, and then re-retire to bed I did, all in pajamas and a big grin. |
| It kept snowcipitating all weekend, so I stayed in for most of the AM watching it come down - slept in late, went out to brunch with the roommate and then back home to draw and coccoon. Later that night I hit the Chengwin DVD release, walked in and was confronted with my googly mug up on the big screen - apparently I'm an "easter egg" or something. Then meeting E. for drinks and wrasslin' in the snow all the way home. |
| As I look out the window, snow comes pouring down from above, the wind lifting it into crazy espadrilles of motion, the outside getting coated in gentle white. I'm thinking I'll inflate the old inner tube and go for a sled down the steepest hill in Queens this weekend - I'm thinking I'll find some unspoiled powder and build a big dirty snowman - I'm thinking somebody who's not careful is gonna end up with a snowball creasing their dome. I'm thinking snow day. |
| Report from The Apple: greatest movie ever crafted by human hands. Way beyond the territory of "bad movie" and into a transcendent experience totally demolishing all known aesthetics. E. and I could not keep from screaming at pretty much the whole Goddamned thing, but most especially the ending, which lends new meaning to "Deus Ex Machina" and made us slap our foreheads in joyous consternation. Best movie ever. |
| Tonight, I see this movie. Will I survive the experience? Or will it make me turn gay in 7 days, like in "The Hole?" Or what? |
| Good lord, did the chill come down - the winter months are officially upon us, as the temperature seems to have dropped a solid double deuce overnight, and when I kip up out of bed and run out to get my laundry I'm iced to the bone by the frosty sorocco blowing through Queens. I hustle back inside with fresh-dried clothes and whip into them, leaving E. snug in my bed and blissfully ignant of the bad times outdoors. |
| A new month is upon us - I'm flying back to my ancestral homeland (AKA the land of wind and ghosts) later on in the month, so of course I'm trying to cram 31 days of New York living into 24, with limited success. Filling store orders this week - get 'em in by 12/15 for shipping by Christmas, free stuff-and-junk with every order - and finishing a couple enormous (as per usual) projects that have laid fallow too long. It's cold outside - that's good, it'll stop me from going out there. |
NOVEMBER
all content (c) 2003 k. thor jensen