Thing I will do when I graduate, part six

Spy on the neighbors more.

Thing I will do when I graduate, part five

Finish reading


so I can start reading


or maybe


Also, it is about damn time I finish this:

Thing I will do when I graduate, part four

Work on my fitness. Perhaps I will even pump some iron so I can look kind of like this guy:

Thing I will do when I graduate, part three

Finish reading this.


Because of this.

Yep,



(for those of you who hadn't heard)

Thing I will do when I graduate, part two

Hang with this dude more. Perhaps even worship at his feet.

(Click the link. CLICK THE LINK.)

Thing I will do when I graduate, part one

Watch Bill Murray Stripes because Ted told me to back in May, then followed up today. I want to stop disappointing him.

Can I graduate?

To answer your first question, this is the second time 3EB has been featured on You Know How I Do. I like them a lot more now than I did 16 months ago. I'm always 10 years behind. I have even taken a liking to going to Pandora and listening to a "Never Let You Go" station I created. If you ever liked The Box, this is Pandora station I would recommend.

Your second question is likely something along the lines of, Can you, man?
Yeah, probably.

(I will update you soon on my life of leaving my house at 5:30 a.m. and not coming back home until 7 or 8:00 p.m., and sometimes not until 1:00 a.m.)

Say "no" to vember

Part 3: the comeback

My favorite band...

Yo La Tengo plays Salt Lake City this evening. I don't think I'll be going on account of it being at Urban Lounge (shows don't start until 10 or 11) and me having/getting to be at my internship at 6 a.m. tomorrow morning. Grown man business. Thrice I have seen them, though, and they have disappointed not once. Even when they played the stupid Twighlight Nights (or whatever it is called) at the Gallivan Center, it was enjoyable.

The above songs are from Yo La Tengo's most recent album, Popular Songs. It's great. After 20+ years and 15-ish albums, they still throw out quality albums with some fresh tunes, always managing to do something a little bit different.

James, I hope you listen to these and learn, and like.

Feel the rhyme

and I keeps one in the chamber in case you're ponderin'

Happy Labor Daylight

Woof

?uestlove, Spin (June 2008)

"By 1996, '97, some hip-hop gatekeepers were like, 'Okay, we'll let you play some of our reindeer games.' And at that point, an underground hip-hop scene had formed, inspired by the Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito [radio] show at Columbia University. That's sort of when Rick Nichols said the only way that our music was really going to make sense was if it was contextualized and compared to something else -- we basically got to do some Moses/Noah-type shit. So we made this list of everybody in hip-hop we needed to associate ourselves with. We went to our A&R and said, 'Look, in order for us to work, we have to have a movement. This is more than just a single and the right song.' So we spent all of 1997 and all of 1998 building. That meant us going to Common saying, 'Yo, don't you wanna be on a real major, where they spend money on you?' And he's like, 'Oh yeah.' So our first priority was getting Common off [indie label] Relativity, bringing him over by any means -- that was number one. Then, [Geffen] signed Black Star, plus Mos Def and Talib Kweli separately. And D'Angelo and I had cemented our relationship, so it was starting to look like a movement. Then, the second wave of the alternative hip-hop thing arrived in 1999. A lot of it was the commercial backlash to Puffy, a lot of it was the promise of something new. Erykah Badu comes through, Jill Scott. Suddenly, we make sense."

I really can't wait for Nathaniel to come to town

Can you believe these characters? Way out of line! Way out of line!

Adderall, my aim is true

Ah, July 26. It was ten years ago today that I landed in Canada -- one of the worst days of my life. I had just seen my family after 19 days away from them and I was now in a place that had side-wards traffic lights and big, circular bales of hay sitting on the medians of the highways. Thinking about it now, it was probably bales of weeds -- Edmonton's way of sprucing up. Anyway, I hated Edmonton for seeming so close to Utah but appearing so odd -- even though most things were similar. I hated my mission president, who suddenly became the authority figure in my life. Then, his wife told me that I needed to learn to clean out my shower with a squeegee. Yeah, a squeegee. Her tone was a bit off-putting, as well.

Over the next few months, all of that changed. It took some time, but I became a pretty good missionary. I loved my mission president, and developed a close relationship with him (aka A.P.). I came home eight years (and 15 days) ago motivated to make something of myself.

Now, my plan was to be good at school, but to kind of drag it out. I thought finishing college meant getting a career, and getting a career meant getting a boring life. But, the plan wasn't to be finishing up school as a 29-year-old. I was hoping to be done by about 26, or thereabouts. Folks who are 26 are old and boring anyway (to 21-year-old me), so I figured it'd be a great age to be finished.

My first class was a computer course. Fellow named Orgil or something taught it. He was a George McFly type, only a bit on the ornery side. Our first assigned homework was to read the first chapter of the book. A breeze, I thought to myself. Little did I know that chapters in textbooks are 48 pages long for some ridiculous reason. Still, I was going to give it the ol' College Try (literally, and I literally mean 'literally'). Twenty minutes in, I was two pages in, and I hadn't learned anything. It was frustrating. I tried a few more times, but to no avail. I strubbled, I mean 'struggled' in that class. I thought it might just be the adjustment to both being home and my first semester of college. By my third semester, though, I figured out that I probably had ADD.

I didn't do anything about it, though. There were a lot of reasons. I wanted to learn to control my mind. I didn't want to have excuses. I didn't want to be one of those people who think having a 'problem' makes them interesting. I didn't want to take a drug that in any way altered or controlled my brain. I thought that I just needed to work a little harder on focusing -- if that didn't work, then I'd see a doctor. But, I didn't know what doctor to see. Do normal doctors know how to deal with this? I also figured that this was one of those things that a lot of people went to the doctor thinking they had (as an excuse or a 'problem'), so the doctor would just brush me off or something. Also, I admit, that I was worried that I would end up NOT having ADD. Then what would I do? Did it mean I was stupid?

Anyway, I chipped away at school. I'd sign up for two or three classes and endure the ones I didn't fall behind in. Me and classes that talked bout ethos, pathos and logos lasted a month, tops. In a semester, two classes was the norm, three classes was a feat, one class was not an unheard of occurrence.

In 2005, I saw the error of my plan to take my time in school. I remember realizing this at this party at the house of these douchey acquaintances of some of my friends. They were done with school and doing what they wanted (even if those things they were doing were lame things). A graduate doesn't necessarily need a career, I learned. So, I decided to get a little more serious. And I did. My course load didn't increase, but my aim became more true.

In May 2008, my little sister graduated. That's when I got depressed. The best case scenario would have me graduating a year from that day(ended up not happening). I would be graduating at age 29. That seemed to old for someone who had been in school since 2001.

Fall semester 2008, I took two of my most difficult classes. They were they first classes I had taken that actually required the students to use the textbooks. There was no way to get by without them. I knew this about one of the classes, Mass Media Law, before it even started, so I was prepared. I worked harder than I ever had, and I struggled. I passed both, but it was torture. It was the first time in my life that I wondered if I was stupid.

Lisa (with whom I have this blog) talked me into getting tested for ADD. I hated feeling stupid, and I also figured that a married fellow needed to have all of his wits about him, so I finally went in two days before I got married.

Just as I had worried about, the doctor was skeptical. My family didn't have a (known) history of ADD, which I guess is crucial. She told me that ADD is something that doesn't just pop up, it starts affecting people when they are younger. I thought about it, and traced it back to when I was in elementary school. I just hadn't realized it until then. She still wasn't convinced. Then I mentioned two things: 1) I'm still in school and have been for eight years and 2) I spent four hours packing for my honeymoon and got practically nothing done.

That lit a fire. She pulled up two tests on her computer, and I ADD-aced them. The tests aren't really accurate assessments, but I was looking pretty severe. So, she prescribed Adderall.

I'm surprised how much things changed. Paying attention in class became possible with a little bit of effort. Studying a textbook became easy without much effort (most times). I was better at buckling down and getting my job done at work. As I mentioned, before Adderall, it took me hours to pack for vacations. A few weeks after I started on the drug, Bryton and I moved out of my old house in less than two hours. My eyes were also opened to how much I hated the way hipsters dressed. Seriously. I also was able to conclude that dudes who wear V-neck shirts are the new douchebags in the world.

Adderall is a controlled substance, though, so it isn't without its downside. Sometimes, like right now, I can't sleep. Occasionally, I am really sensitive about stupid things. Other times, I am moody. Oh, and I have a tendency to zone things out: If I am talking to somebody, or watching a show, and someone else comes and starts talking to me, I have noticed -- or they have -- that I am not at all paying attention. (I think I have improved this a lot in the last few months.)

But overall, Adderall is a pretty good drug. It doesn't automatically give me focus. I still have to work for it. After almost 29 years of my brain roaming if it wanted to, roaming around the world, it can be hard to reel it in. I need to do a lot more training of my new capacity to focus to I have less times where my mind goes nuts.

This is long, and I apologize. I've been meaning to write my little Ode to Adderall for about five months now. I knew it would end up being long, and therefore would take a lot of time to write, and that because of its length, hardly anybody would end up reading it. Oh, well. I needed to write this love letter so that Addy new my true feelings.

I've befriended my camera

The kids that are hip, they wear hair on the their lip, they throw down their razors and don't give a...

Mustaches probably should have stopped at irony, eh?

Wow.

Ten years ago today, I went into the MTC (never to return).