time constraints

Often, I manage to convince myself that I am too busy to do something like blog. Or that I am too busy or in too much of a hurry to clean up. Or that I am too busy to read my scriptures, or pray, or do one of many important things that I should be doing at any given time. This is a fun game to play, but it's disingenuous to the highest degree. I work maybe eight hours per day, then arrive home to waste several more. I meet up with friends, and we shoot the breeze for a few hours, then end up doing whatever we had planned to do. I go to bed too late, then sleep for five or six hours until I have to get up to work again. 

What I'm getting at here is that I need to start organizing my time better. So what that means, I'm not sure. Maybe I'll buy an iPhone, maybe I'll just start scheduling everything in my computer, with alarms and other neat alerts to keep me on my toes and doing all of the assignments that I am supposed to. I'm going to buckle down and graduate in April. I'm tired of being an undergraduate. I may not be very much fun for the next seven months or so. It's not that I don't love you, it's just that I don't love undergraduate studies. 

i am so unbelievably sorry. i made a promise, and then i didn't keep it. i feel awful. i haven't been bloggin every day. i haven't even been blogging every week. you've been coming here, hoping for something fresh and new, and you've been disappointed every time. maybe you were looking at your own blog and thought "oh, i'll just click on through to see if rob has written anything clever" (91.43% of the traffic here) or maybe you were just thinking of me. i disappointed you. every day for the last two weeks you have thought, just a little bit "darn, nothing." even if you didn't know you were thinking it. well now there's nothing here but an apology for not writing anything. i don't know if that is much better, but i hope it is. 

i'm fascinated by sunglasses. i want to own one hundred pair. even if they were all cheap ones from places like urban outfitters and target. the bigger the better. 

i went to seattle this weekend and took 128 photographs on chemical film. i'm going to write a great story about the trip on my other blog, the one that i said would just be about trips. it's triplogblog.blogspot.com

as dp would say, 

you're the best. 

keep coming back, i'll try not to disappoint you so often. 

album review: re-arranged

mates of state are an interesting band, a couple of people that love each other, animals, and singing together. they are coming out with a new album soon, and i happen to be on the short list of people that get an advance. that's not true, but i still have the new album, called re-arranged. since i got it i haven't really stopped listening to it, and i wasn't much of a mates fan in the past. this album feels good, like summer love and happiness and the type of sadness when even though you are sad you know that things will get better so it isn't so bad. 

for some reason when i review records i care a lot more about how it makes me feel than anything else. a good example of this is the arcade fire/david bowie "live at fashion rocks" EP. when win butler sings "children, don't grow up/ our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up" i care every time, because he means it, and i know what he means. that sounds stupid and corny but it's that emotional connection that i believe makes great music truly great. the mates of state album isn't really on that magnitude, but the opening track "get better" sweetly says "forget all your politics for awhile" and reminds me that sometimes, you just have to go outside and love summer. and that's what i'm going to do. 

new album

mates of state- get better.mp3

another favorite

mates of state- nature and the wreck.mp3

tickling the late night keyboard

the new death cab for cutie album leaked. it has some highlights and some low points. the highlights: "cath...", "long division" and "i will possess your heart" "grapevine fires" are all pretty solid songs. long division sounds like it could be off of the photo album, in a good way, and cath is just a solid song overall. i like i will possess your heart because it is an attempt at something different. 

the low points. up to this point there had never been a death cab song that i really hated,   there were some that i didn't love, but never one that i found completely unbearable. "no sunlight" changed this for me. it feels immature, thrown together, and is just bad. it sounds like an attempt at radio pop gone awry. "narrow stairs" doesn't cohere as an album. there is no common thread, no common sound, it is just a collection of tracks. it's disappointing because i really like death cab, but this time around they just didn't get it together. pitchfork is going to destroy this album. 

in other news, the cut copy live show is one of the coolest things that i have seen in a while. one member was playing a tiny korg drum machine and just rocking out as these huge beats roared out the speakers. hundreds of people crowded the dancefloor of the urban lounge and exploded at every crescendo and climax, the whole place was pretty much going wild. i'm going to blog about a great opening band on tunesday, but this was a great show, one of the best i have been to since arcade fire last year. the energy as well as the proficiency were awesome. 

i've become addicted to playing tiger woods golf again.