Funny story. I was walking into the kitchen to make myself some Hot C Power (a refreshing hot lemon drink) when something very surprising happened. First of all, there’s this thing I do when I pick up pots and pans. Don’t ask me why, but I tend to do a little flip thing with them. A twirl in the hand, if you will. Just picking them up to put them away, or something. Strange perhaps, but the kitchen is by and large my domain and I’ll do what I’ll damn well please to the god damn pots and pans.

In any case, I walked into the kitchen and saw what I thought was a clean empty pot sitting on the stove as it is wont to do. Turns out water is see through and this time I saw right through it. As you can guess, I…I did my flip thing. Seconds later I had gone from whistling dixie or whatever the fuck I whistle to standing in complete and utter shock, much damper than I had been before, and suddenly inspired to take a photo of my reaction.

So here you have a couple of self-portraits that hopefully convey the bafflement and recognition of my own ridiculousness that I was feeling at that moment when I flung a big pot full of water at myself.

First the photographic guitar heroics: Ben and Joel playing Guitar Hero during the winter vacation back in Iowa. I was a bit skeptical about the game at first, thinking that actually being a guitar player would, I dunno, fuck me up or something. But now I honestly wonder if playing the game more wouldn’t make me a better guitar player. Doing well on the difficult settings is really, really satisfying for me since I can’t actually do anything difficult on the real guitar.

Now the auditory guitar heroics: I took an optimist test. Well, an optimism test, I guess. I got a negative seven. That seems low, right? “But hey,” the director of the workshop at which I’m taking this says, “most people get a negative score the first time they take the test.” I still got the lowest score in a room full of people. On top of that, I took it the next day on the internet while trying to be a bit more optimistic about things and got a negative nine. So I wrote a song about it.

Note that this is a rough copy and I may record another if Cassie stops taking my headphones long enough for me to record multiple tracks. Also, I do not snort coke despite what the song says.

I’ve been busy. I took a trip to America. Cassie is legal now. Phew. I’ve come back to find that I’m teaching kindergarten again and that I should really probably study for that GRE I’m taking in less than a month. These added pressures have led me to make a somewhat large purchase of several CDs and website membership to genkienglish.com. It’s basically just some dude who is, god knows why, really into doing the job that I do very well. I figure if I’m going to be here another year and seven months (and I am) I sure as crap am not going to suffer if I don’t have to. That means having someone else make up stupid songs and lesson plans for me.

These pictures were in Fukuoka on Christmas day from a hotel room where I lay crippled from a back injury. It was terrible. I woke up one morning to find myself requiring a handicap parking sticker but instead required to haul heavy luggage and travel for 48 hours.

Prior to making this post I downloaded all the recent pictures from my camera to my computer, and promptly swore to never use this computer again to edit photos. The version of iPhoto is just too stupid. Unfortunately, Cassie’s computer doesn’t have X11 so I can’t run Gimp. I refuse to go any lower that than program, so I’m currently downloading Photoshop CS3 Beta (!), which would be awesome if it worked/is real.