I wrote this post in 2015. The year is now 2019, going on 2020. Anyway, I was looking at my website on a whim and decided to post these edits I had queued up to post later. It’s now 4 years later. Maybe I’ll get back into this.

Right now I have the theme song of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” stuck in my head. This is awesome (because it’s catchy and fun) and at the same time, it is agony (because I am slowly going insane — repeating the lyrics over and over and over in my head… UN-breakable! they alive dammit! it’s a miracle! females are strong as hell! … times infinity). I don’t know how I got into the habit of getting one song stuck in the front-loading washer of my mind. It’s a thing that every hearing-abled person on earth goes through at least once in their life, I think … given the excess of catchy song hooks and melodies out there.

In 5th grade I remember my uncle getting me a refurbished Discman for Christmas one year. My brother used to have a giant CD collection, from those old Columbia House Music catalogs. My first CD was Space Jam, and I remember playing R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly” over and over and over again. This may have been the start of my infinite loop song habit.

(2019 edit: holy crap do I wish I had listened to Seal’s “Fly Like an Eagle” over and over and over again instead. Yikes, I wish we all knew about “Surviving R.Kelly” two and a half decades ago.)

These days, I listen to Spotify on my phone. I’ve been a Spotify subscriber for a while now, and in their earlier software builds they didn’t have the option to replay a song. What I ended up doing is making a playlist devoted to playing one song over and over and over ad nauseum. Well, I made two. One I devoted to my “get psyched for an interview” song, Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.” I listen to this song over and over like a mad man before a job interview. It’s my ritual. So far it’s had about a 30% success rate for interview success. Which is decent.

(2019 edit: I do still listen to “Don’t Stop me now” before job interviews)

The other playlist used to be any one song I was fixated on. It was Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” that one summer that song came out. Songs in that playlist have a good propensity to become songs I get sick of, given how much I overplay them. These days, Spotify has finally integrated single song looping so that playlist does not get used so much. But I still single song loop.

So there’s not really anything I can take out of all this, I have no idea why I put myself through this glorious infinite song loop hell, when there is so much good music to listen to. An old discman habit.

I wrote this post in 2015. The year is now 2019, going on 2020. Anyway, I was looking at my website on a whim and decided to post these edits I had queued up. Maybe I’ll post some more.

Without further ado, here’s a list of things I didn’t like about living in Chicago back then:

• January
• February
• Wrigleyville on weekends
• Crime in certain neighborhoods is real bad, and we’re too pre-occupied by politics and red tape to figure out how to solve it.
• The Circle interchange. Hope you don’t have to drive through it in the next year.
• Actually, any merge or interchange at all. All highways should never let you switch to other ones. Straight lines and exits all the way, baby.
• The fact that people go to Navy Pier for things that aren’t boat rides or the theatre.
• Only a small part of the city smells like chocolate. I wonder how much a house in the factory’s smelling area goes for.
• Parking can really suck, depending on where you live. I guess you can rent a garage space, but what am I supposed to do with my lawn furniture in the wintertime besides use them for dibs?

2019 additions:

• taxes are too damn high
• the city is broke, we need chris traeger and ben wyatt to whip the state and city governments into shape! hmm parks and rec was still finishing up in 2015. The good old days…
• I think I was still driving to work when I wrote this. I commute by train now and there’s too many people on the train and not enough de-odorant users
• people who don’t leash their dogs
• the slight depression induced by our sports teams

I didn’t have a chance to have my graduation photos “professionally” taken for me so I stole my cap and gown after graduation and took some self-portraits back at home.  Lucky for me, the rental place didn’t charge a late fee upon return. Also, why the hell didn’t we get to keep our caps and gowns?

My nieces were stand-ins so I could get the lighting right.

I had my mom do the shooting since I didn’t wanna have to bother going back and forth with a tripod. Autofocus all points spray and pray. Not bad for her first time.

I look tired. :-/

Here’s some personal snapshots and hip-shots from my trip to New York and Boston last month. I forgot my camera at my cousin’s house the one day I did everything in NY, so I’ve only got mental photos of that stuff. Womp womp.