-arriving at work to find oil pouring out of the bottom of my car like water from a hose
-listening to Wale's (pronounced Wah-lay) Seinfeld-themed "Mixtape About Nothing" over and over again. "The Freestyle" on this just makes me happy (“on the first day of school, teacher couldn’t say my name / now I got the whole nation screaming ‘Wa-le!’”) and Wale is one of the few rappers whose intelligence and wit have me perpetually smiling. Julia Louis-Dreyfus puts in an appearance, and he gets serious on a couple of songs. Plus, he drops the following rhymes, some of which I’m mangling because it’s so intricate:
I’m the best even when I’m cynical
Angle these beats like a pinnacle
Whenever my pen is on
ain’t nothing here minimal
counting my bread like a brunch at a synagogue
that’s a whole lot of bagels
see me off at the bay to San Quentin in a beige coup
a very bad man, you can ask babu
I get signed/feld with these rhymes/skills
I’m larry david
give me my paper
this will cost more like jerry sein’s neighbor
my costanzas stand like phantoms or maybecks (??)
you won’t get Elaine if you can’t rap
I hate rap like Kramer hates blacks
still it’s no label wale ain’t past
and now I’m on a lead one, everybody gasp
now, mark, get me a check and some debt
-getting into a shouting match with the downstairs neighbor over water damage that allegedly occurred 14 months ago
-watching a man walking a dog yelling at this mentally disturbed lady who occasionally roams the neighborhood. "Shut up! People live here! No one wants to hear you yelling your crazy things!" To which she replied, "I live here. This my home. Wherever I go, that's my home."
-talking to a co-worker about a break-up. Co-w says it’s still a bit raw and he hasn’t been advertising this. I say, half-jokingly, “Yeah, it’s not like you have to run out and change your ‘status’ on your Facebook page right now or anything.” He replies, dead serious, “Oh no. I did that several days ago.”
-remembering how much I love the song "Freedom '90" by George Michael. I think if I ever do karaoke, it'll be a toss-up between this song and "Unbelievable" by EMF. I think most songs that try to portray stardom as a stifling condition end up alienating the listener, but I love that "Freedom '90" does the opposite by inviting the audience to break the chains as well. There's nary a sneer in sight, and if you remember the video - Linda Evangelista in a bathtub, lip-syncing the vocals, as a closet full of "I want your sex"-era leather jackets is blown to smithereens – I think it gets harder and harder to hold a grudge against the song. Of course, as someone who thought he had outgrown pop when the single was released, I hated the song for a long time. I can remember the exact moment when I realized I loved the song: I was in the backseat of an idling car in Ipanema. We were picking someone up or something, waiting, listening to the radio. I hadn't heard the song in a couple of months at that point - and as the first piano chords fell into place around the drumbeat, something clicked, and I've secretly loved the song ever since. I listened to it twice this morning for the first time in five years or so, and my love for the song is so complete that I’ve now decided to go public with it. [Editor's note: Public? By writing about it here? Please. I've seen your google analytics traffic numbers...]
-making it one whole week without facial hair, this being only the second or third time in the past ten years that I have shaved all of it off. It feels good.
-remembering the Radiohead debacle at Nissan via an interesting piece on popmatters.
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