No Longer a Kid...

So I haven't posted in a bit. I've been jetsetting around the globe. Actually just to florida for last weekend and then I was busy this week. I realized something when I was down there and also during my subsequent return to the basketball court on tuesday: I'm getting old(er). I take aleve for my aches and pains. Aches and pains. Things that not long ago were non-existent to me. Things reserved for seniors with arthritis. My brother and I decided that as much fun as it was laying by a pool getting dark (too dark for anyone to marry says my mother) we needed to tackle the Atlantic Ocean. And by tackle I mean get railed by wave after wave. We hopped on some boogie boards to have a little fun and proceeded to get wrecked. The ocean is much stronger than lake huron. And saltier. There was one very large swell that knocked both my brother and I to the ocean floor (lucky for you the moment was captured on camera (above), that's my boogie board - you couldn't even seen any of muki or his board because he got wrecked worse than I did). I banged my right arm, shoulder and head on the ground but somehow amidst my thoughts of my impending death, managed to stand up and right myself in the 4 foot deep water. As much fun as that near death experience was I felt the effects for days and I still have a crick in my neck.

I then played basketball for a couple hours on tuesday to appreciate the nice new york weather. The problem was that though I have been running at the gym a few times a week, nothing compares to the strain all that jumping puts on your body. Sadly it was only the third time I have balled since moving to NYC and I felt it the next day pretty bad. I remember the days not long ago when I could try and flip off of a fence and land on my back and not feel any pain at all. Even more recent I remember freshman year of college when I tried to to do one of those bad ass run up the wall and do a backflip things only to land on my face and knee, yet still, 10 seconds later I was fine.

So why now, after almost a week, does my shoulder still have a lingering dull pain. Part of it is because I haven't done things like that in a while and my body wasn't prepared for it, but sadly it's also because I'm too old to have my wolverine mutant power of superhealing work as fast anymore (sorry if i got a little nerd-technical on you). Rather than succomb to my old age I am going to spend this summer tumbling. Doing somersaults down hills, trying to regain the ability of the back handspring, climbing trees and most imprtantly, jumping off things I shouldn't jump off of. As a kid I lacked sufficient power to properly do some acrobatics I always wanted to do, now that I'm bigger and stonger I feel like I should be able to do these things. Right? Right. I hope.

As always get your feet off the ground and reach for the stars. Go big or go home. Pain heals, chicks dig scars and glory lasts forever. Carpe diem. Your heart is free, have the courage to follow it.

hallelujah hollaback
-M, p & z

oh ps - speaking of getting wrecked by waves...I have always had a ridiculously strong obsession with wanting to surf but the problems are many, First off I'm pretty sure I'm petrified of the ocean. I mean sharks, whales, jellyfish - I've seen Planet Earth, what's not to be scared of right? Second and more importantly I am not the best swimmer ( i blame my father- to teach me to swim he took me out in the lake to a point where i couldn't touch and he held me and then looked me in the eye, let go and said, 'swim!' I cried) My question is, how silly would I look as surfer if I wore a life jacket? Honestly. I mean one of the best things about surfing is looking cool right? So would it ruin everything if I wore one? Let me know because when (if) I move out to LA I'll need an answer to this question.

here's us discussing our plan of attack

The Soundtrack To My Life...

So I was sitting in the bar the other day when I heard the Def Leppard song "Pour Some Sugar On Me." Like most people my age, the song is a life long staple, it's one of those songs that you have always heard for as long as you can remember. It got me thinking how much my life has changed in the last 20 years but there are still songs like that, that I've been singing forever. I remember the moment I first heard that song in 1987 when I was 5 years old at my day care. One of the older kids (he must have been 9 or 10) had a walkman and a Def Leppard tape. He let me listen and I loved it. That song, along with many others by bands like Poison and Bon Jovi got me through the late 80s.

Then thoughout the 90s as I grew up, music changed and so did I. Bands kept coming into my life, but unlike a lot of people who get rid of cds or get sick of cds and sell them, I kept mine. I have kept every cd I have bought since they first started getting popular when I was 9. I remember my first cds. It was Sept. 15th 1991, my 9th birthday. My dad took me to Kmart and I got a discman and 2 cds: Bon Jovi's, 'Slippery When Wet,' and Kris Kross' Totally Krossed Out. I still have both of those cds along with every other cd I have bought and burned since then. I have lost a couple here and there but for the most part they remain intact in a collection of almost 700.

It's amazing to look back on songs and see how they have changed or not changed as I've gotten older. "Pour Some Sugar," for example, used to give me the biggest rush in the world. I would immediately go outside after hearing it to hop on my skateboard while the song was still fresh in my head. Now the song has a similar effect, only it has turned into me standing on a chair at the bar, drunk of my ass, singing along with all the other people who remember what it was like to hear that song in 1987. I got thinking about all the songs that I have heard in my life and how many lyrics I know to songs I don't even remember until I hear them playing on some random jukebox in a dive bar I stumbled into. Music, for me, has the ability to take me to the point in time when I first heard the song or expose a feeling or memory in me that I had all but forgotten. When I hear Bon Jovi's 'You Give Love a Bad Name," I think of how much I used to love that song (and still do) but also the memory of me sitting listening to the radio with my fingers on the record button (before I had the cd) just in case I heard the song on the radio and my brother making fun of me for declaring it 'my favorite song in the whole wide world."

I'm not sure what it is that I love about music so much but I assume it is it's ability to capture a moment in my life. As if that cd not only has digitally recorded that song but also a specific memory of mine. It moves away from 'What's your favorite song?' to "where were you when you first heard this song?" Sometime's it is whole albums that bring the memory or just the idea of a certain band. My old roommate Bill and I had a particularly dark few weeks in the late winter of 04 when we got sucked into Elliott Smith's "Songs From A Basement." That album blew our minds away and we stayed there in the dark for weeks playing Halo and not really having too many happy thoughts. To this day listening to Elliott Smith reminds me of the depths of those few weeks and the relief that Phoenix's album "Alphabetical" gave us.

The cool thing is that there is so much music in the world that there will never not be something new and exciting and mind altering for me to hear. New memories to have. I'll hear a song tomorrow that I've never heard in my life and it will mean something to me. I bought Vicious Vicious' new(ish) album a couple days ago and put it on for the first time as I began to write this blog and I love it. It is very good an will no doubt inhabit my cd player for the next couple weeks and as I listen to it a year or two from now, I will likely remember my first spring in NYC and listening to it on my ipod as I walked through Chelsea.

As always, get your feet off the ground and reach for the stars. Go big or go home. Pain heals, chicks dig scars and glory lasts forever. Carpe diem. Your heart is free, have the courage to follow it.

get your tunes on
-M, p & z

oh ps - i stopped myself from rambling a lot on this blog so expect some return to music discussions along this line coming soon. it might not be succint but it stayed on a single topic, eh?

Spring Is So Not In The Air...

First of all, what is with this weather. I thought it was supposed to start getting warm. I blame Bush. Good thing next week I am escaping to Florida for some much needed golf and sun. I am the least dark I have ever been. Speaking of which, after watching lots of Scrubs over the last couple months I would like to be referred to as Chocolate Bear. So a couple quick things to mention. The Pistons clinched the #1 seed in the Eastern Conference. Home court until the Finals is pretty huge. Also congrats to MSU, the new National Champions in Hockey. I gotta tell you though, nothing ruins a national championship like hockey. I was in East Lansing for the game (though it was in St. Louis) and no one seemed to care. It's funny how a school like BC (a college hockey giant) can care so much about something that seemingly no one at MSU cared about. Anyways, it's something to brag about.

I finally signed up for netflix 2 days ago and got my first movies today. This means that I will now be watching even more movies than before which is semi-ridiculous because I watched too many as it was. I got my frist 2 movies already and I've already watched 1. So far I'm very impressed with how easy it is to deal with.

I guess I am not really in a very pensive mood right now but I'll blog tomorrow or something.

As always, yadda yadda yadda.
-M, p & z

oh ps - anyone moving to nyc or la in the fall? I may be looking for a new roommate here if i decide to move out to brooklyn or if i move to la i'll need someone out there as well. Did anyone see The Last Mimzy like I told you to? Or Friday Night Lights like I asked? Seriously, if you're bored go online to nbc.com and you can watch all the episodes for free. Whatdoyagotto lose?

the pic is from the last time i was home. tell me lake huron isn't the greatest backyard...

More Reviews...

So before the season started I picked the east to finish like this: Pistons, Bulls, Cavs and the Heat in the top 5. Right now, the Bulls are hot and I really want them to get the number 2 spot so we can meet them in the conference finals. Nothing could excite me more that a conference finals with our old rivals. In order for the to happen we need to beat the Cavs this sunday and then have the bulls match whatever cleveland does for the rest of the season. Anyways, with less than 10 games left in the season it's getting to be a pretty exciting time.

I'm going to start giving movies a rating system. It's going to be out of 10 points and there will be many things taken into consideration including: acting, direcitng, cinematography, soundtrack, originality and of course enjoyability. The difference between this ranking system and others is that it will be by genre. For example most movie critics go see some innane kids movie like Firehouse Dog and then have the idiocy to compare it to TMNT. My ratings will be specifically applicable to each movie. For example I would give the 300 a 7 and Talladega Nights an 8. I don't think that Talladega Nights is a better movie than the 300 but I think as far as a Will Ferrel movie goes, it's an 8. It's hilarious. But as far as all the hype and for how cool 300 should have been, I only give it a 7. Generally people expect a certain something from a movie which is usually why they choose the movie they do and that is what I'm going to rank, whether it lives up to what it should be.

That said I saw a couple more movies that I'd like to review. Blades of Glory and The Last Mimzy. I'll start with Baldes of Glory. To me I felt like the whole time I was waiting for the next one-liner. There were no really hilarious moments and I never really cared what happened to anyone. The difference between this and Talladega Nights was that in the latter, Will Ferrel actually was Ricky Bobby. I believed the whole thing and I cared about what happened to the characters in the movie. In this movie it's almost like it's just a sketch on SNL. I don't believe any of it and the whole time I am just waiting for Will to say something funny like when he tells Heder that his skating was like "cirque de so-lame." I have used that line about 50 times since yesterday. Overall I'd give the movie a 5, Will and John have some hilarious zingers but it's a disspointment.













After that was over I movie hopped over to The Last Mimzy. I have been wanting to see this since it came out but every time I want to movie hop to it I usually have to wait an hour. Anyways this movie was really something special. I had heard mixed reviews, generally good ones saying the film was an instant classic and others saying the director was reaching. I for one, agree with the former. This movie truly makes me want to be a little kid again so I could see it from a more imaginative perspective. It mixes ET, The Explorers and a little bit of Alice and Wonderland perfectly into an amazing movie. I really believe it is up there with those movies. It has all the imagination of The Explorers but it's so vivid and real that it reminds me of Close Encounters. I'd give this movie a 9, and the kids they got to play the leads are perfect not to mention the little girl is cuter than a puppy licking a kitten.

Anyways, thats all for now. As always get your feet off the ground and reach for the stars. Go big or go home. Pain heals, chicks dig scars and glory lasts forever. Carpe diem. Your heart is free, have the courage to follow it.

hallelujah hollaback
-M, p & z

oh ps - hopefully people actually listen to some of my reviews and take my advice. i highly reccomend the last mimzy if you liked ET and The Explorers growing up. If you don't remember the Explorers then go to imdb and check it out. also friday night lighs has its season finale next week, it really is one of the best shows on tv so check it out. you can watch episodes online if you are bored at work.

Best City Ever?...

So San Francisco passed a ban on using plastic bags. In place they have either paper, a reusable cloth bag or a mild plastic that breaks down easily in composting. How cool is that. Since moving to NYC I have been increasingly aware of the damage that plastic bags cause due to the amazingly large quantity they give out in stores here. They will always double bag you simply because most people walk to the store and they don't want you to have your bag tear and all of your stuff ome out. I remember back in the day Kroger used to give you 5 cents for every bag you brought back to help reuse them. Thinking back on it, they were 20 years ahead of the times. I stopped using grocery bags a couple months ago when I bought a canvas bag at whole foods. I can take it into any store and have no need for any plastic bags at all so when I heard about this ban I was overjoyed. San Francisco has always been one city I could see myself living in, though I haven't been there in probably 15 years. I don't know a single person who doesn't love it out there. If there were any place outside of Michigan to steal my heart away it would definitely be SF.

So we are now into April and aside from one setback (which gave me the runs) I have yet to eat any meat but chicken so far this year. Surprisingly I don't miss other meat anymore. I went through a rough patch a month ago when the steakhouse downstairs (literally downstairs) started keeping their door open and wafts of succulent steak entered through my windows. People have expressed their feelings about my chickenatarianism. Most don't care, others think it's stupid and don't get it. So to explain a little bit: I don't agree with killing animals. Morally speaking, I think it's wrong. I think all animals have an equal right to life as any other living creature. That said, chicken is my holy grail. It is the greatest tasting entity to evolve on earth. It is easy for me to give up every other meat, just not chicken. I was a vegetarian before for a few months and the one thing that broke me was chicken. For some reason when I tell people that I only eat chicken they get defensive. They think that I am attcking them when I really don't care what they do. They come up with elaborate theories about how the only way to get protein is from meat (which they know isn't true esp. when many legumes have more protein than any meat). I wouldn't try and get people to stop eating any meat (except for veal) unless they didn't want to. It is the same as trying to get people to recycle or drive less, however if people want to do those things that would rule.

Did anyone care about the NCAA tournament this year? Quite possibly the least I have ever been interested in a basketball tourney in my life. Wow, Florida won. I get to see that overrated guy with his wildly long hair. It's no surprise my roommate and I found ourselves watching not only the season finale of The Hills over the game but also the lame Live Afterparty where they answered some questions. I'm just glad OSU lost. Watching college basketball is about as fun as watching the WNBA, I really could care less. Don't get me wrong, I love MSU and would have felt differently about this tourney had they not lost to UNC, but seriously I have no interest in a tourney with no story lines, no famed cinderella teams, no one to root for other than a No. 1 or a No. 2 seed. The best team won. Who cares.

That's all for now. As always, get your feet off the ground and reach for the stars. Go big or go home. Pain heals, chicks dig scars and glory lasts forever. Carpe diem. Your heart is free, have the courage to follow it.

hallelujah hollaback
-M, p & z

oh ps - I talked about Mika on here a while back and his cd finally came out last week. I said he I liked him because he reminded me of Queen. Well his cd is no different, if you like Queen you will like this cd. Actually sometimes it almost seems like he took one of their songs, changed the words to update it but kept the tempo and the content pretty much the same. For example his song Big Girl (you are beautiful) is suspiciously familiar to Queen's Fat Bottomed Girls. Anyways, it's a good cd. worth a listen.