Here are some pictures from a budget showbiz pizza-like place I went to before the hollydaze:

It is so rainy here, I don't buy that Atlanta is in a drought. Not for a minute!

Oh, ps here's what it looked like outside of my window yesterday afternoon:

a-brewin'!

It's completely sunny today, and there's snow on top of the mountains. Snow that I would like to ski on top of. I was thinking earlier that I would really like to be part of a "power couple", but I am missing both the boyfriend and some power. Well, I have my own office, maybe there's some power there. But still, NEW YEARS RESOLUTION.

All the men in this town are fucking pointless.

"Jill has already read 56 books." Facebook makes me sound like I'm the Book-It program. I made it all the way through "The Human Stain" now where's my personal pan pizza. Dammit!

My office window faces the west, I can see the weather coming into town by way of the mountains and boy it does not look good. It's the meterological equivalent of horsemen coming over a hill, I'm fighting the urge to run to the other side of the building. It gets a little closer every time I move my head to right. It's going to raaaaaaain. Good thing I have a ton of errands to run tonight. Hey, guys, I'm going/coming home in two days count them one two days. I've been slightly on edge all week, the result of which is a diminishing bottle of vodka. Downing that shit as soon as I get home from work. I thought "if I can get past my doctor's appointment I will be okay" or "if i can get past this presentation I will be okay", well I am past both of those things. And I don't feel the slightest bit okay. Weather is part of the problem and drinking is part of the solution. Part is part of the party.

It seems kind of arbitrary that we capitalize days of the weeks and months of the year, as they feel more like abstract measures of time than a proper nouns. I guess that would be "day": "Friday" as "person":"Jill" but why not "day": "friday" as "tree": "elm". Fry-day. I haven't updated in awhile, have I? Do you know why, it's because I have been lost in the downward spiral that is facebook scrabble. You'd think I'd be getting better at facebook scrabble, but I keep losing over and over. I'm not good at word jumbles either. I think in entire phrases not individual letters. Is why. Anyways!

(dancing is very serious business you guys)

ichat transcripts take 8

russ: have you seen the mad amount of bad headlines written about the zeppelin show last night?
russ: "fans give zep whole lotta love"
Jill: HAHAHAHA
russ: "band still climbing that stairway"
russ: "it's been a long time since they rock and rolled"
russ: I HAVE MADE NONE OF THESE UP
Jill: "doing more than just rambling on"
Jill: i made that one up
russ: "Plant proves there's still a bustle in his hedgerow"
russ: i made that one up too
Jill: "led zeppelin 'comes from the land of the ice and snow from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow' TO ROCK"
russ: "fans squeeze zep's lemon, juice of rock flows"

NEW CHRISTMAS WISH:

I'm attempting to augment the supposed less-than-stellar reading level of this blog, as ascertained by the internet mega-widget "blog readability test" which gathers said information from both a syntactic standpoint and rudimentary analyzation of lexicon, including frequency of multisyllabic words and a tendency to present oneself as a pretentious asshole through an over-use of the passive sentence structure and tendency to drop commas as though they were the names of douchebag celebrity friends.

EDIT!

Nope, didn't work. Still high school.

I rode in a car with Erin to Los Angeles last weekend. On the one night it decided to storm over death valley, I rode in a car straight through that mess. I did some shopping and some drinking and some looking for parking. A lot of looking for parking, actually. I had a conversation with some paparrazi waiting outside a club. I did some late night walking and early morning drinking. I ate some sandwiches. I purchased a one-way ticket home via burbank airport. I took one picture, it is of a dog wearing a sailor shirt:

And that is why I was not on the internet for all of the weekend. Here's something I was trying to do with my computer screen, but didn't work so well:


sort of transparent!

Here are some of my upcoming travels:

This weekend: LA with Erin (just for the hell of it, I guess).
In Two weeks: Lake Charles for a commercial shoot.
In Three weeks: Atlanta for Xmas and New Years.
In January: I would like to either go to SF or Portland one of the weekends. Maybe both, if Virgin Airlines is still running those awesome specials.
In February: Birmingham for a wedding. This is just for one weekend, I'm not planning on spending all of February in Birmingham.

PLANZZZ

I really really want Melanie Griffith (this is a link) and Stevie Nicks to collaborate on something. My friend sent me a myspace message about that possibility after I posted about wanting this majestic tambourine (this is also a link) for my birthday. Imagine the magic! Imagine the flowing velvet dresses!
Anyways, my attempt to reply to said message made my internet crash n burn, which was probably just a kink in the myspace system, but I prefer to interpret it as thus (via ichat transcript):

me: If only melanie griffith and stevie nicks would collaborate on something.
could you imagine the magic?
erin: wow that would open a new door for melanie
erin: literally
me: oh shit replying to that made my internet shut down
me: MY INTERNET COULD NOT HANDLE THE IDEA OF A STEVIE NICKS/MELANIE GRIFFITH COLLABORATION
erin: internet said, simply, NO.
me: it sure did

It sure did.

I'm constantly amazed by how good the writing is on musical blog Said the Gramophone. I know the "writing on an mp3 blog" bar isn't very high, and of course poetry misses the entire point of the mp3 blog (which is to get a something without paying for that a something), but the following passage tells me more about a song than an entire back catalog or biographical diagram ever could:

Whatever you're doing, or watching, become suddenly expanded, it grows to the size of the room, and you can see all the empty space, all the little hairs you didn't know were there, and all the little scabs, the healing, the flesh. In terms of a "single" or a "hit", it isn't that, but this song isn't interested in that, it wants to walk around, anonymous and dark orange, looking for God.

p.s. the song in point is boring as hell, unless you really enjoy jamming out to hymns. not the point! not the point at all! There was something else, oh yes! I'm also impressed by these movie titles:

"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"
"Diving Bell and the Butterfly"

I'm not sure when I developed such a fear of flying. Or maybe it's just a hatred of flying. It's probably a little of both, wrapped up neat in a headache-shaped package. It never used to bother me. I used to take pictures out of my window seat of americana from thousands of feet above, I used to catch up on all of my reading and writing, I used to dare the plane to crash because that would really be something wouldn't it.
Nowadays I can't get the phrase "flying death-tube" out of my head. I can't have a drink because more and more airlines are demanding exact change and really who has exact change anymore. I can't wrap my head around the physics of taking off and turbulance patterns, and how turbulance isn't actually just someone walking heavy down the center aisle. Reading gives me a headache, I'm not allowed to turn on my ipod during takeoff even though I could really use the music as means of relaxing (my ipod has nothing to do with your flight transmitters thankyouverymuch), and the people are getting wider and meaner.
I still like the idea of flying, I love everything encompassing a vacation, it's the mechanics that are becoming troubling. The routine. The more settled my life becomes, the more I need valium. Why the panic, well why not.

Anyways, here are some pictures of puppies:

elsa.


buster.


momo.


reuben.


bonus picture of elsa and dad, because I like the picture.

This is pretty great:

Rap Represented in Mathematical Charts and Graphs

My favorite, which is huge and is going to mess up my blogflow I just know it:



Whatever, so completely worth it. Everyday I'm hustlin'!

I'm sure most of you already watch it, but "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" is now one of my favorite shows thanks to last weekend's dvd-a-thon. Here's one thing that made me Laugh Out Loud (as the kids are saying):

We have a Trader Vic's now. Unfortunately they decided to Vegas douche-fy it. Because god forbid you open a bar on the strip that's not ultraloungey. Here's a little taste:

Yeah, you can still get a Menehune juice but you have to drink it at one of those stupid light bars. AND. It's right in front of the Bellagio fountains. You can't go anywhere here without being reminded of where you are, and how awful it truly is. I give this town another nine months at the most. I give this town an entire gestation period before moving to the Pacific Northwest, or Pittsburgh.
So I watched a lot of television while lazing on Sunday, I watched three kids movies: Pippi Longstocking (the original, hilariously dubbed Swedish version), Space Jam!, and Dinosaur. Here's some of a cupcake, one with dinosaur sprinkles:



I don't know what else? I really don't want to buy a ticket home for Christmas. Airfare is going up and up. Every time I get a paycheck there's always something big waiting to take a giant chunk out of it. And they are taking their sweet time on the paperwork for my raise, because god forbid anyone operate in a timely manner.
This is neither here nor there:



I'm going to try to start writing in this thing more than once a week.

I don't like it when the sun goes down at four-thirty, it makes me think I'm working even later and even harder than I actually am. Which is grumpify-inducing. Yeah, I'm churnin' everyone's goddamned copy today. This weekend I saw some movies, three movies to be exact:
"Factory Girl" (WARNING THIS MOVIE HAS JIMMY FALLON IN IT I DID NOT KNOW THAT BEFORE PRESSING PLAY) which I don't really have much to say about save the parenthetical warning. It was exactly what I expected it to be, which wasn't that much.
"The Darjeeling Limited"- my favorite part was the peacock feather thing. Oh, Wes Anderson let's get married.
"The Deerhunter"- not the band, the movie starring meryl streep. I had never seen it before. It made me want to rock back and forth in the corner.

Those are my astute movie reviews, thanks film studies minor!
I would like for ad writers to go on strike with the television writers except here are my demands: no more assholes in the ad industry. Let's put a cap on the hiring of opportunistic assholes. And also I have several scripts involving giant talking triangles I would like produced.

Thank you and goodnight. Oh wait, it's only five? Right, it's only five.

Here are some random pictures that have nothing to do with Halloween.

This is just to show how messy my house is right now. I've been living off the coffee table. My desk here isn't in much better shape. I'm so busy!


I dunno, I was just playing around with my camera settings.


Banjo, as emo as ever.

Ok, carry on.

Here are some Halloween pictures:

costume one


erin and jack the ripper! jack the ripper!


costume two


Nevernude Tobias!


Look, it's the Beauty Bar. Look at all those scenesters.

Ok, that's all.

As no one here seemed to know who the hell Patty Hearst is (or at least on saturday night they didn't), I have added a second costume to the repertoire:

Yeah, this is going to be entirely too easy. Pictures coming um...sometime after Wednesday.

I'm bored, when can we start drinking? Where is my art director? Here's a meme:

"These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list."

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby-Dick
Ulysses
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha (really?)
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury*
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being*
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: A Novel
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
Catcher in the Rye*
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow(probably next on the list)
The Hobbit (sorry, guys)
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I'm not sure what "unread" means, maybe it means hey, I can't read this book it's too thick, or maybe it means why the hell would I ever read this book. I'm thinking it means both, otherwise why would "Wicked" be on there. Isn't that chick lit?

There's really no way around the look you're going to get when the dentist asks "have you been flossing". There's no way around it, I floss every day and I still get the look. (The floss isn't working anymore, I'm going to have to step it up a notch.) I have my first cavity, I'm going to have my first filling in a few weeks. The dentists here are cold and to-the-point, I'm used to the sort that are my parents' friends. The kind that I grew up carpooling with. There's something to be said for growing up in a town where everyone knows everyone, something very calming to be said for that, is all I'm saying.

I have so much to do before my art director leaves on Friday. He's going to work in Pittsburgh, I'm going to have to find a new art director. Or maybe I should go work in Pittsburgh, too. I've never been there. Yet another sight unseen. Like Honolulu, or Prague. I'm halfway through a script that's never going to be finished.

I can't stop listening to Andrew Bird. This is fantastic stuff, you guys.

Four Score and Seven Beers Ago...

One of my favorite things about Halloween is how the costume shops have managed to sexify every single women's costume ever. I was just in one to pick up my hearst-machinegun and I think my favorite one was "Sexy Bee". Anyways, a great idea for next year (note to self) is: Sexy Civil War Re-enactors. Yeah, we thought of that after the fact.

What's your favorite over-sexified women's halloween costume?

oh HEY YOU GIIIIIZE
I finally meadered down to the fashion show mall and purchased an ipod, a nano, a mint-green nano ipod that I named "the rural juror". Because I am a little obsessed. Now I just need I guess an itrip, even though the static on those things in the las vegas area is ridiculous.

Isn't "the fashion show mall" the dumbest name for anything ever? I think so.

Everyone had car issues this week. Erin had a small oil fire under hers, and my art director was in an accident but he's ok. And by "everyone" I mean "two people". I just watched the aqua teen movie, which was funny but would have been funnier if I had, ya know, been on painkillers. But I guess that could be said of anything. I love that Tina Fey had one line at the very end, the only female voice in the entire movie. Oh hey, last night I saw Rilo Kiley at the Joint, here are a few pictures. (note how me and J.Lew have the exact same hair):

Are you guys listening to "In Rainbows"? Cause this is good stuff.

No, I'm not going to upload it, go the site and get the download you cheap bastards. This ain't no communist state.*






*it kind of is, a little.

Oh and also, this is probably my favorite thing that's been on a Family Guy episode since god knows when:

Your search - "late night salmon grab" - did not match any documents.

Suggestions:
-Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
-Try different keywords.
-Try more general keywords.

Oh hello, it's monday. Cue the monkey posters that say I HATE MONDAYS. But really! I have so much work to do here at work! I had one of those weekends where all the dramatic action happened after I left the scene. Like some serious shit. The combination of anger and stupidity is the worst cocktail ever, and it sure does floweth freely. Anyways. ANYWAYS. Here's some pictures that have nothing to do with the aforementioned anything:

bonus cat picture:

Saturday night we did this bachelorette thing for a friend of mine, I took some pictures. Actually, I took a lot of pictures but I'm only going to post the somewhat interesting ones here.

This dude was trying out a move that one of my friends recognized FROM THAT MYSTERY SHOW ABOUT PICKING UP WOMEN. So hilarious. This town = douchebaggery central.







Here's a bonus picture of my office window: