In Memoriam.

More evidence that this is the year of the LORD’s favor:

I was sorting through the mail and bills that accumulated while I was in Shanghai and found a letter from the UC Regents at Berkeley. What do they want with me now, I thought.

I opened up the envelope. They cut me a check for 200 bucks because of a class action suit regarding some kind of tuition error. Manna from heaven.

To be zarkin’ continued. Must sleep, back to work tomorrow.

The favor of the LORD is upon me. Check this out:

I went to the book store to buy a Moleskine planner. Last year my friend Jean gave me one and it was probably one of the most useful presents ever! Now that 2009 has come around, I needed to get a new one.

The problem is that Moleskine products are priced about 100 times more than they’re actually worth (sheets of paper). I was ready to shell out 12 or 15 bucks for one of those suckers. The price I’d pay for a little trendy organization.

The store that I went to didn’t seem to have the calendar version. They had Moleskine sketchbooks, music books, graphing paper, tour guides, wide ruled, and every imaginable version EXCEPT the daily planner/journal. What the junk, is what I thought.

Finally I found one; it was unwrapped and unlabeled and buried somewhere behind the rest. It was the only one I could find, so I took it to the register. “How much is this,” I asked.

The flaming dude behind the counter didn’t know, since it didn’t have a label or barcode. He said “It’s $7.50″ but I knew he was making that up because all the other ones were $10.95 or $12.95 or thereabouts. But I didn’t argue.

He punched in a few numbers, the serial number, maybe, and it came out to $3.75! Huh?!

Crool. This is the year.

Truly he taught us to love one another,
His law is love and his gospel is peace.

I’m just kind of proud of this picture I drew/painted for Uran’s birthday. I actually ground the ink from a stick on a Chinese inkstone.

(click to enlarge)

I finally considered turning on the heat in my house after seeing the indoor thermostat read 49 degrees Fahrenheit. Unfortunately, I found that I can’t use the control pad because it’s out of batteries and I can’t seem to find any AAs lying around. I guess it’s time to put on another pair of pants.

I am the cheapest punk kid you ever met.

Earlier this week I purchased Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. It was on sale at Target for $6.50. Generally I don’t buy movies if they aren’t less than 4 or 5 bucks, but I was in high spirits and I’ll watch anything by Tarantino. I was tempted to buy its sister grindhouse picture, Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, but I decided against spending the extra money.

Something about Tarantino’s movies just kind of does it for me. Like the part in Pulp Fiction when they call in the Wolf. What a neat character. He wears a tux, does everything to exacting standards. Nobody questions him because he knows exactly what to do all the time. I love how he’s cold as ice but still lets butterfingers Vincent Vega drive his Acura, then threatens the crap out of him if he messes it up.

Anyway, when I opened up the DVD case, there was a coupon, for $5 off Planet Terror, inside. This film also happened to be on sale at Target for $6.50, and today was the last day it was on sale. So I rode my bicycle back to Target (spending zero dollars on gasoline) before they closed and bought the movie for $1.50.

Both times I had a Target gift card. There’s still 65 cents left on it now.

Check out this hilarious picture a kid drew for his vocab work:

Haha look at how he drew the Sith apprentice bowing. Hahaha.

A lot of movies I want to see this season:

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (Derrickson)
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (Boyle)
THE WRESTLER (Aronofsky)
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD (Mendes)
VALKYRIE (Singer)
DEFIANCE (Zwick)
DOUBT (Shanley)
THE READER (Daldry)

and most importantly…

GRAN TORINO (Eastwood) and THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (Fincher)!

I went to the local Salvation Army today. I browsed through the tweed sport jackets but they just weren’t happening for me. Didn’t jibe with my style.

On the way out, though, I rifled through their bookshelves and found two books: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (won a Pulitzer), and The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch (hardcover). They were both brand new. I asked the guy at the counter, “How much are the books over there on the shelves?”

He said, “I’ll give them to you for 99 cents each.”

!!!

The entire store, by the way, was 30% off. So I got them both for $1.38. Seriously, I rule.

Oh, check this out: another article I photographed for UCLA Today. They didn’t credit me this time. Arar. By the way, the sidearm she’s carrying is a Glock 17.

I swore off tech and gadgets long ago, but I had to bring this up. I just got these new headphones because at church now we use in-ear monitors instead of stage monitors. Since most rock-a-philes think the keyboards are for wussies, they usually turn me down in the main mix, which poses a problem when I can’t hear myself play.

Hence me getting some in-ear monitors.

So I got these fancy noise-isolating thingies from Etymotic Research and they are pretty sick, I have to say. The site says they retail at $150 (holy moly who would pay 150 clams for some headphones?!) but I scored them on Amazon for $50. Also, I had two $25 coupon codes, so actually they were free. I rule. Anyway, stuff sounds good in the new headphones. I can turn the volume way down on my dinky little old-school Creative Labs V100 (iPods are for squares) and the audio still comes in really clear because all the ambient noise is blocked out. I took them out on the bike today and even on the 101 they sounded fine. Neat.

Also: This Watchmen mobile game tie-in to the film looks cool, but I’m afraid that it’ll make Alan Moore go postal on Dave Gibbons and the suits at DC Comics.

I’m always kind of mesmerized by the fountains of contradictory discourse that come from Eminem’s mouth. On the one hand, I’m super annoyed by his nasally, high-pitched songs that flaunt his ego and his puerile fascination with misogyny, violence, and base bodily functions.

On the other hand, he can bust these awesome, transparent rhymes about his convictions and struggles with life, death, and family, which I totally dig. Like this song, for example: