Avoid the Noid

When I lived with this guy Dan, I was a bit more inspired to cook. He was vegan (and so was I at the time) and cooked almost every night. We shared food and that saved me a lot of money. Then he moved out, and I went back to a vegetarian diet, and slowly I gravitated towards laziness.

Then, when I moved to my current neighborhood, I found myself the good fortune to be near several pizza places that offer 90 cent slices. At least once a week I'll grab a slice, even if it's late at night. It's cause I'm lazy. I'm not spending much money, but I don't really need to eat pizza all the time, and I'm sure it's not that good for me.

I only recently started dabbing up excess grease with napkins. I always thought it was weird to do that, but then I tried it and discovered that it made the pizza a much more pleasant experience. Plus, grease leads to acne and I've always had a bad acne problem. People said when I turned 20 that my zits would go away on their own, but it hasn't happened.

I even took Accutane, this crazy experimental drug, for about a year and a half when I was in high school. Accutane actually shrinks your oil glands. I guess it worked, but I've been off it for a few years and now my acne is swinging back around.

There were two cool things about Accutane. The first were the little cardboard tabs over each pill that featured a pregnant women with the International No/Not sign over top. It was to emphasize why you should never get in the same room as Accutane if you're pregnant, but you could also steal the art and make cool anti-reproduction propaganda with the image (if you're like me, and you feel that overpopulation is a serious problem the world needs to deal with. Stop reproducing, now!).

The other cool thing is the list of side effects. They ranged from rectal bleeding to suicide. Except for extremely chapped lips, I was exempt from all of these. My little brother just started Accutane, and my parents are really worried about him being depressed (especially cause there was a suicide incident in the news last week).

Scour exchange is really fun. It's like Napster, only you can also get video off it. I've been downloading Mr. Show episodes and weird video clips. Stuff like the Bud Dwyer suicide, guys getting hit over the heads with shovels, and people cutting their fingers off. This type of filesharing is really what the future of the Internet is. I wonder how long we'll have it before someone finds a way to ban it.

Personally, I think the Internet rules right now. It's still not as fun as it was 5 years ago, but now that I can download Coyote Ugly and Spaceballs without having to go to the video store, I now know the true meaning of the word convenience.

Spending just under $200 per month on food isn't that bad, either. I enjoy what I eat, and I still have money to run a label and buy books and stuff. Currently I have so many books to read that I've been trying to sit inside as much as possible and read them.

I actually started writing a story last week to enter a fiction contest, but the deadline came, and I didn't have it finished. It basically concerned a guy who starts noticing things. It was to contain biting commentary about the uselessness of a college degree, and it also implemented a dream that I had where Bablicon and I were sneaking into people's houses and hiding under the couches in front of them, just for kicks. The problem was I only had one idea of what the character would notice--yellow spots on his sheets--and I couldn't think of anything else for him to discover.

The story was inspired when one day a few weeks ago, I noticed that there were yellow spots on my sheets. Someday I might finish that story but I don't know if fiction is for me. Writing about records gets boring though, and I'm not into poetry.

Speaking of music journalism, I went to see Almost Famous basically to see how they did Lester Bangs. The movie was pretty disappointing, despite featuring Mark Kozelek, as they did Lester too positive. He was too nice and not nearly self-deprecating enough. The film was way too Hollywood for me. I'll probably watch it with my Mom someday.

Next issue I'll probably write about music again. Maybe I'll do some live show reviews, since there's a bunch of them coming up. Or maybe I'll just ramble on about waffles or something. Thanks for reading.