March 2014 – Of bytes and other addictions

I couldn’t have said it better

One of the best scenes ever:

“Um, thank you. I’m not much for public speaking. Or much for speaking. Or, come to think of it, much for the public. And I’m not very good at lying. So let me just say that, in my experience, high school sucks. If I had to do it all over again, I’d have started advanced placement classes in preschool so I could go from eighth grade straight to college. However, given the unalterable fact that high school sucks, I’d like to add that if you’re lucky enough to have a good friend and a family that cares it doesn’t have to suck quite as much. Otherwise my advice is; Stand firm for what you believe in, until and unless experience proves you wrong. Remember, when the emperor looks naked, the emperor *is* naked. The truth and a lie are not sort of the same thing. And there is no aspect, no facet, no moment of life that can’t be improved with pizza. Thank you.”

2 sugars and a little cream

It was a not so fine morning today. I wasn’t feeling all that well and all of a sudden my best friend in the whole wide world decided to question our bonding process. After all this time it is still very hard to determine why we are still so close… Our story is really a rather boring one I think. Nothing extraordinary with how we met, at least not to my knowledge. We were just two teenagers trying to get away from our boring-ass town. It was a on Xmas night, I was bored and had too much to eat and I was just passing in front of her house so I decided to stop by. That was the point were it all started. One stop on a night drive and I was hooked and even after all this time the question still remains “what made us that special that even after all this time we are still best friends?” I have given this a lot of thought and I came to a simple conclusion. It’s all about the coffee and how you take it. We know exactly how the other takes his/her coffee, what he/she likes and what one would prefer to avoid.

There are two things I say make us work. The first one being that we hold a very very deep admiration for one another (at least I do for her). It really impresses me whenever she gets into a conversation about what she does. I really don’t know that much about her professional world for that matter but I sense passion for the subject in her and that’s what you really want to find in someone, passion. It’s like whenever I hear her I know something mind blowing is about to be said. She has the capacity to make her world so simple even though it’s not. Make connections where you thought no connections could ever be made. You just want to go an read everything about the subject just so can participate in those conversations. She also has this Socratic way to her which makes talking with her all the more interesting.

The second thing is that we managed to grow our friendship from the school yard to the real world. We went from talking about expectations to talk about realities. Back when we first met we focused on what we wanted to do, all the places we would like to visit and the places we wanted to drink coffee at. We talked about how it would be great to end up in the same city and just be completely awesome in it. Neither “Friends” nor “Will and Grace” would have anything on our life experience. It turned out that we ended up in the same city and we were indeed awesome but in a not so sitcom kind of way. I started noticing how our conversations shifted. It was no longer about what we were going to do when we grew up but rather about how the real world can be very sucky. The conversation grew up with us. It was all about what would happen if we actually failed. What would happen if we didn’t finish college, what happens once we graduated. And even to this day we are still intrigued with those kinds of subjects.

I can summarize the two previous points into one very simple and cryptic phrase: we are such good friends because we know how we like our coffee. It goes without saying that we go the extra mile just to make it perfect and I’m very happy with that.

Queens of the clockwork

A couple of weeks ago I decided to give Queens of the Stone Age another chance. I’ve always liked their sound. “Go with the flow” is an awesome song and every time I listen to it I really want to go with the flow, and something similar happens when I listen to “No one knows”. Then I try to get the fact that I thought “Little sister” was about incest but in fact was about being in love/dating a prostitute. Anyway I like them I just don’t love them… or I didn’t know I loved them.

Back to the story, I was pretty much getting fed up with my repeating playlist returning from the gym so I decided to turn on the radio, the old FM. And boom that’s when I heard “Smooth Sailing” for the first time and not just that, the first phrase that came through my ears was: “I blow my load over the status quo”… That’s some rock and roll, that’s the most badass thing you can probably sing about on the radio. At first I didn’t recognize the voice but then it dawned on me, it’s Josh Homme. I was a bit skeptical because it didn’t sound a lot like Queens of the Stone Age, well not like the Queens I remember, I never cared for “Era Vulgaris” and the only song that I really liked from “Lullabies to Paralyze” was “Little sister” but “Song for the deaf” was a solid record, granted I couldn’t listen to it in a single sitting but it was good. It arrived in my hands when I needed some soft hard rock and now this was happening again. So I’m in my car thinking that the song is awesome and that was probably going to be it, but then the next song on the radio was “Kalopsia”. The DJ was going through the whole new album

…Like clockwork is the sixth studio album by Queens of the Stone Age and, SPOILER ALERT, it is awesome. The sound, the lyrics, the riffs, the drums everything is a great experience. It’s an album that’s meant to be listen to as an album not a set of songs but rather a whole story of ups and downs. So go ahead an listen to what I consider the best record in 2013.