Jet lag's a drag.

I'm still on Iraq time, and the difference (11 hours) is still wrecking havoc on my internal body clock. I get really sleepy during the late-afternoon/early-evening, usually falling asleep soon thereafter (I actually slept through much of the first half of last night's unbelievable game) and then wake up in the wee hours of the morning, unable to fall back asleep.

Also, there's been a lot on my mind lately. Family, friends, Iraq, NYC, USC, the Lord's direction and purposes in my life, and thoughts--some good, some bad--about who I am and who I'm becoming. That's a pretty broad scope, I suppose, but such is my mental landscape right now. When you're out in the desert, away from the enormity, complexity, luminescence, and claustrophobia of the city, everything flattens out; you can see for miles and miles. Every time I come home, I feel that this change in the physical landscape has the same decompressing effect on my thinking. My mind wanders quite a bit here, most likely (as I wrote about here) making up for the desert's lack of stimulation and excitement.

I miss a lot of loved ones right now. I miss my friends and family back in New York, I miss my friends from USC. I miss USC. I really do. I read through an entire box of old notes and cards from old friends and ex-girlfriends the other day; it was nice to reminisce, but it was also very painful. I see everything about my college experience through the lens of the painful experience that followed soon after, and it taints everything. It's hard to read those old letters, notes, and cards and not wish that my life now didn't feel so completely different and foreign to the way it was back then, a mere 3-4 years ago.

But enough delving into the sob story of my life. On the flip side, the last two weeks have found me once again inspired in my songwriting. I absolutely hate the uninspired time during the process--when you hit a dry spell for months at a time and can't come up with a decent melody/lyric/chord progression to save your life--but it's great when you're able to come up with four or five decent ideas in a matter of days (hours, even). Plus, a few vague song ideas I've had floating around for years have started to coalesce just a bit, and that's a pretty cool feeling. It's times like these when I feel good about the songwriting process.

Speaking of songwriting, check out Thom's Profate page on myspace. He's just uploaded a few new songs, including one that he wrote for/about me ("Brothers") which was probably the nicest, most touching going-away gift I've ever received. He's an incredible guy, and one whom I am honored to call "brother." Thank you, Thom.

As for myspace, I myself am on the brink of giving in and signing up. Will someone please talk some sense into me and dissuade me from doing it?

Alright. 4 AM. I think I'm finally getting a little sleepy again. Lousy jet lag.

[UPDATE - 8:04 AM] OK, so I lied. I couldn't fall asleep after all.

Random, random things to share at this late hour:

1. This is Sick - I've come down with a cold. Again. Second time in the last three weeks! This doesn't bode well for my trip back west (which commences in three days).

2. Facial Hair - Because I've been staying at home a lot recently, I've neglected to shave for probably over a week now. There's a part of me that wants to let the Grizzly Bear Adams continue to grow so that I have a full-fledged version by the time I get to Northern Iraq (in roughly 20 days). That, and I've toyed with the idea of not plucking my eyebrows so as to let them reunite...many of the Kurds I've seen in photos sent from the school are sporting wicked unibrows, and, well, it might be a nice gesture of solidarity (however insignificant the gesture might be) to grow the unibrow myself.*

But going back to the beard: if I do continue to let it grow, I'll end up sporting it on my trip back to LA next week, and that may just freak people out. Thoughts?

3. "You should be in my space. You should be in my life." - A couple nights ago, I stayed up late perusing MySpace profiles of old friends. If you're on MySpace, and you and I are connected socially somehow, there's a good chance I read your profile. It made me unbelievably sad, though. There are so many folks with whom I used to share my life, and with whom I have since pretty much lost contact. Now, you'd think that would make me jump right in, sign up for MySpace and reconnect with friends, right? It should, it really should. Sadly something's holding me back from doing it--probably the fact that I feel so sheepish about having lost touch with so many dear friends in the first place. That, or the fact that I really dislike the online social networking phenomenom.

4. Music, Books, and Memories - I spent the entire day clearing out my room, going through various odds and ends and deciding what the fate of each should be. Since I'll be bringing very little with me when I go abroad, I'm getting rid of many, many possessions, and arranging for the rest to be put into storage. More than anything else, the bound-for-storage items mostly appear to be CDs, books, and "memories" (meaning ticket stubs, playbills, tons and tons of photos, cards and notes--I'm one of those packrats that doesn't throw a single card away--and assorted knick-knacks).

5. "Choices" - The worst class I took last year at NYU was, hands down, the "Discovering Your Dream Career," a crock of a one-day seminar that I would've hated all the more if I actually had to pay money for it (thank God for tuition remission!). I didn't like it 'cause I felt like it was a very impersonal and very inadequate approach to get each person to the point where they could recognize what they wanted to do with their life. And, well, you know me: I went in hoping to nail down the ONE thing that I should focus my life on, and I came out with the same laundry list of careers and dreams to pursue. Lousy class.

While cleaning the room today, I came across the writing exercises that we did in the class to "help" us discover our "true passion" in life. One of these freewriting exercises, titled "Choices," caught my eye. Even though I wrote rather sloppily and in vague, unspecific terms regarding the things I wish to do with my life, it's a pretty good manifesto of what I see as my life's purpose. And even though it was a poorly-constructed, off-the-cuff freewrite from a year ago that was never meant to see the light of day, I'd like to share this statement with you.

( it's behind the cut )

*Having re-read #2, I think this may be the first time such a (ridiculous) statement has ever been uttered.

I'm about half-way through my crazy month-long concert-hopping endeavor, and this week's shows have not disappointed. A few thoughts and recollections, now, about the pair of Webster Hall shows attended by yours truly:

Interpol - Sunday Night: I raced into Manhattan after the post-sunnyside@seven social hour, and thankfully made it to the venue within minutes of Interpol taking the stage. The place was absolutely, ridiculously packed--I felt lucky not to be completely up against the back wall. Interpol takes the stage, and the crowd goes into a frenzy. A serious frenzy. The last time I saw folks get this fired up for a band was at last year's Franz Ferdinand show at Roseland, and before that, when the Beatles played the Ed Sullivan Show back in '64 (or was it '65? I can never remember anymore).

It was a good set, though I started to get a bit bored during the last third of it. They played nearly every song off of Antics (still my favorite album of '04), and several off of their 2002 debut, Turn On the Bright Lights. The band played proficiently--almost as if they were in a trance--making sure not to get too visibly excited about anything. That said, the whole act did seem to have a sort of pretentiousness to it. Don't get me wrong, I loved that they were all rocking out in their suits with skinny ties (someday I'd like to be in a band that wears suits), but the incessant chain-smoking throughout the evening and the very limited amount of stage banter (not to mention bassist Carlos D seemingly striking a certain pose--head turned, chin up, eyes closed, lips in a self-assured cig-holding sneer--every possible moment; unrelatedly, it hit me at some point during the evening that Carlos D really looks like the hipster version of George McFly)...well, I think maybe it was all a little too cool for me.

But overall, a great show, and one that I enjoyed thoroughly: the music was excellent and translated well live; the stage lighting was, hands down, some of the best I've ever seen at a rock show; and the band pretty much had the audience eating out of its hands from the moment it took the stage. The band members may not have appeared overly excited, but their electrifying music certainly made up for it.

The Decemberists - Tuesday Night: Last night I retured to Webster to see The Decemberists (and like Interpol, this was my first time seeing them live). I got to the entrance and found my friend (and NYU colleague) Jay working the door. He hooked me up with a VIP pass that put me in the lounge on the left-hand side of the balcony. I could look out over the entire floor, and I had a pretty great view of the entire stage. By the time the band took the stage, the floor was again packed (though not as much as it was on Sunday night).

If Interpol was the epitome of cool and calculating, the Decemberists were anything but. Stage banter would go on for minutes at a time, often delving into very silly comments ("It's so hot in here, my water's sweating" violinist Rachel Blumberg said at one point, holding up her bottled water), and various band members would often take a few minutes to re-tune their instruments between songs, allowing for a rather awkward bit of silence here and there.

BUT. In the end, these guys put on one of the most entertaining shows I've seen in a long while. The setlist contained many songs off this year's Picaresque, the stand-out performances including "The Engine Driver," "We Both Go Down Together," "The Sporting Life," and from Her Majesty, The Decemberists, "Song for Myla Goldberg" and "The Chimbley Sweep." All of these songs sounded like faithful and energized interpretations of the lush album versions, and the positive crowd response seemed to intensify with each number. They closed out the main set with a daft performance of "The Chimbley Sweep" that stretched the 4-minute song into something of a 15-minute romp on (and off) stage. Words don't do it justice, but in the course of those 15 minutes, lead singer Colin Meloy (who looks like Charlie Sheen with glasses and an MA in English) did the following things: he picked up a cell phone that was left onstage, called a random number, and had the audience scream for the receiving party; he crowd-surfed for a few seconds; he then waved his arms over each member of the band who, in turn, fell down and played "dead" on the stage (all the while still playing their instruments, breaking out into short renditions of "Smoke on the Water" and that Jewish song where people shout "Le Chaim!"...someone help me out here?); he then turned to the crowd and did the same thing until everyone in the audience was playing dead, and then--and only then--did they finish the song, already being played at a raucous, breakneck speed.

I won't even go into the encore, except that it involved a huge paper whale and the drummer pounding a detached tom in the middle of the stage as hard as he could, as if part of some tribal ritual. By the end of the show, the crowd was going absolutely nuts--it even seemed to eclipse the noise level of the crowd at the Interpol show two nights prior. Again, a serious frenzy.

I really enjoyed both shows, though I think you can tell which one I preferred just a bit more.

Last week started with a brief but unexpected and wonderful reunion with a friend from college, and ended with a fun-filled evening with that same friend and her other friends on Saturday night...an evening that ran well into the morning (I made it home around 5 AM, the latest I've been out on the town for quite some time now).

And, you know, it was really really nice to see Cindy again and hang out for a while in the City (we also met up for sushi on Wednesday), but there was more to it than that. It was the discovering of a friendship that was never truly realized before, if I might be so corny as to put it that way.

See, Cindy and I weren't particularly close at SC--our friendship stemmed from our working relationship in which I was her supervisor--but we did have some things in common (over-involvement on campus being one of them), and we seemed to enjoy each other's company for the most part. But that was it, really. We didn't even bother staying in touch after I left LA and moved to NY (two years ago next month).

But in the course of a few hours this last week--mostly in a group setting, mind you--we were able to find something that wasn't there before. A connection. It had always been right underneath the surface, I suppose, but we never got that far during our time at USC to find it. We found it in our deep mutual admiration, which we were finally able to express to each other this last week. That, and we discovered that we share some similar experiences/feelings in our post-college lives, and that can have a bonding effect on people. It did, especially when combined with the respect and admiration we discovered that we share for one another.

So yeah. Like my friendship with Rachelle (who passed away in March), I consider this unexpected, deferred friendship a real blessing. If I've learned one thing in the past two years, it's that relationships are so transient--the whole "people come and people go" deal. And, having grown way too cynical in this regard, I've come to believe that it's mostly "people go," and moreover, that it's "people go...and don't ever come back." But sometimes, sometimes they do come back, and often they're the ones you'd least expect to, or the ones you'd least expect to connect with on a certain level. It balances out the negative quite nicely, and it makes you thankful for every person you become acquainted with in some capacity. Because you just never know. And because...oh, I don't know...it's late, and I should stop waxing philomasophical.

Moral of the Story: you never know who will unexpectedly come back into your life, and that might just be one of the sweetest things about life itself.