Shout Out to My Roomies

Last night my roommates and I (minus Todd, who is on vacation in Utah) stayed up most of the night just talking and hanging out, and it made me really appreciate how cool they all are. When I was at the University of Utah I hopped around among a lot of apartments and a lot of roommates, some of them good, and some of them so bad that I packed up and moved out after only a month because I was absolutely incompatible with them. The four of us - Todd, Micah, Seth, and I - are so different from each other that we would seem like a strange combination, but I think we've got a really great dynamic going on and I can honestly say that they are my favorite roommates ever.

So after a little over a year living together, I thought I would give a shout out to my roommates:

Todd:
• He keeps everything in order - takes care of the bills, always gets the mail, keeps the kitchen in good shape. He's a good example for us too - I really admire the way he diligently wakes up each Saturday around 4:30 a.m. so that he can go do his volunteer shift at the Detroit Temple.
• He likes to take on these fun little projects around the apartment. He wanted a nice dining room table, so he found an old one on craigslist, sanded the crap out of it, and then put about a dozen coats of polyurethane on it (Hence the name Polly/Paulie). Currently he's working on a way to get around the new lock on the main dorm of our apartment so we don't have to buzz people in when they come to visit.
• He goes off on these little Apple sales pitches at the drop of a hat (he's got stock in them, you see).

Micah: (Wow, I really need a better picture of him)
• We're from basically the same hometown and went to the same high school, but we were a few years apart and didn't know each other then, but it's cool to be able to bust out the Bountifulisms. Plus, it's great to have a buddy with whom I can watch/talk about the Jazz.
• He's helped me cultivate a respect for America's Funniest Home Videos and NASCAR. He watches every race from start to finish (always with a little nap tossed in the middle). It may look like they are just driving around in an oval for several hours, but he's helped me understand the nuances of race strategy. I've even picked out a driver that I follow - Brian Vickers, because he's got my first name and the last name of a famous opera tenor, he races in a Toyota Camry (just like my car), and he always finishes right in the middle of the pack so I didn't feel like I was just jumping on a popular racer's bandwagon when I picked him.
• We share a room and Micah occasionally talks in his sleep. Usually it's just little things like "Okay" or "Why, yes!" Sometimes, however, he busts out a classic like "I'll talk to you later!" or "I'm a super soccer star!" or my all-time favorite, "So, is that an old-fashioned game suit?" (I'm not kidding about that one. I wrote it down right after it happened at 5:30 a.m. because I knew I would think that I dreamed it in the morning.)

Seth:
• He shares my enthusiasm for ancient Nintendo games. He is currently training to set the world record for most points on Contra, and he's starting to get really good. (Editor's note: soon after this posting, Seth played a perfect Contra game, beating it without ever dying.) The organization that reviews record attempts sells t-shirts that have your world record printed on them, so we're thinking about ordering some so we can be twinners.
• He likes to join me in my excursions to get free/cheap stuff. Yesterday, for instance, was the try-out run for a new location of Panera near our apartment, and it was supposed to be invitation only, but went and managed to talk our way in. It was a fundraiser for an Ann Arbor food bank, so we had to donate five bucks to get in, but then they gave us vouchers for twelve dollars worth of food, so we both got sandwiches and bread and cookies, but they gave us a bunch of other free stuff (free tote bag - booyah!), so it was an event well worth crashing.
• Whenever I've got a car problem, he always volunteers to help me out with it. Next project: replacing the brake pads and rotors on the front wheels.

I don't know if the four of us will stay together after this school year, but we've had a great run together so far and we still have many scrapbook-worthy and/or blog-worthy memories to come.

P.S. - The only thing we need is a name for our apartment. In the past I've lived in Melrose Place, The Wood House, and my favorite, The Crack Den. If you have any ideas for a cool apartment name I want to hear it.

Oil Portrait

In a previous post I mentioned that I had had a watercolor portrait done as a prop for Così Fan Tutte by George Van Hook, a local artist in based in Cambridge, New York. All six of us in the cast got to be good friends with George over the course of the five weeks we spent in that small town, and just before we left he offered to paint an oil portrait of each of us. This was a once-in-a-lifetime offer that I simply couldn't pass up, so I went to his studio and sat for him for about two hours. It was such an incredible experience and it is something that I can hold on to for my whole life to remind me of Brian at age 27. Here is the end product:


So now the question is: what do I do with it? I need to get it framed, but then what? I don't know how I feel about putting a portrait of myself up on my wall, declaring to all that enter, "BEHOLD ME IN MY GLORY!" (Although by posting it on my blog I guess I'm pretty much doing the same thing.) My whole apartment is completely undecorated (if you don't count the bull horns Seth put on top of the T.V.) so it would really stand out. If you have any suggestions of what I should do with my painting, please comment below.

P.S. - It's a shame that when the portrait was done I hadn't yet picked up my free John Deere hat - I could have been immortalized in that.

Score!

I've written in the past about how much I love getting free stuff, today has been a bonanza of free stuff. When I opened my box of Frosted Mini Wheats this morning, there was a free pedometer in it! It's got a picture of Tucan Sam and everything! I'm not sure if it's the best quality - before I left the house this morning it said that I had taken 703 steps even though I just sat at the table watching Saved by the Bell as I ate my cereal - but it was free, so can't complain. Plus, I bought two boxes of Frosted Mini Wheats, so I'll have another free pedometer to look forward to in a few days.

After I taught my class I headed over to Pierpont Commons to use the computer lab, and stepped into the career fair, a.k.a. the motherload of free stuff. Almost all the students there were dressed up in suits to impress the recruiters, so no one at the booths was even paying any attention to me as I brazenly walked right up to the table and grabbed their swag. Among my haul were such items as: two t-shirts (from Rolls-Royce and some submolecular research group), a bunch of pens, a USB drive that I can plug my camera's memory card into (yay - no more clunky wires and draining my camera's battery while I pull pictures off), a roll of chapstick (courtesy of Bain & Company), and a John Deere hat (now I can look just like Utah Jazz coach Jerry Sloan!).

My only regret is that I'm now in my (gasp!) eighth year of college and I've only now discovered the splendors of the career fair. So if you know of any upcoming career fairs or other events with free swag (the Oscars or Emmys, for instance), give me a call.

Editor's note: Later last night after posting this I scored once again - I enrolled for my new free health and dental insurance plan! I guess that GEO strike I participated in back in March was worth it after all.

Revisiting Highway 61 Revisited

Editor's note: This post turned out way longer than I intended. If you just want the gist of it, scroll down to the "Potbelly" graphic and read from there.

When I was a teenager I used to save the receipt for every CD that I bought because I thought that I if I ever got tired of it, I could try to return it for the full price instead of selling it used and getting ripped off. Back then, the backing inside of CD cases was always black, so I would pop it open and stick the receipt behind it (I lamented the day when CDs switched to clear backs on all cases and my receipt-saving days abruptly ended). I never even attempted to return any of my CDs because I was just too attached to them, but saving the receipts was not useless because each those receipts are now a chronicle of when I discovered certain artists.

By the receipt in the CD case of Highway 61 Revisited, I can cite November 4, 1995 as the day I discovered Bob Dylan. I remember the day clearly: I was at Salt City CDs, my favorite teenage music store haunt, just right next door to the Tower Theater. Bountiful never really had a cool record store and this was before we could drive, so we used to take an epic-length trek with much walking and several bus transfers to get out to the funky neighborhood of 9th and 9th in Salt Lake (it was considerably less funky when I went out last Christmas break - it looks all corporate and Disney-fied now). Back in November '95 I was just coming out of my all-Aerosmith-all-the-time phase and I needed some new tunes to fill the hole in my soul (little Aerosmith humor there). I saw Highway 61 sitting on a specials rack and I had heard "Like a Rolling Stone" a few times on the radio and liked it, so I took a chance and bought the album.

Over the next year I accumulated a flurry of receipts of other Bob Dylan albums - I just couldn't get enough of his stuff. But unlike my many other teenage musical obsessions (there was the all-Beatles phase, the all-Zeppelin phase, the all-Floyd phase, etc. with accompanying t-shirts and posters, of course), Bob Dylan made me want to go out and make music. I would listen to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan or The Times They Are A-Changin' and I was astonished that someone could say so much and make such incredible music with just a voice, a guitar, and a harmonica.

So I went out and bought a harmonica and a contraption to hold it up in front of my face while I played my guitar, and I learned me some Dylan tunes. My first performance came in my 9th grade English class. We had to read a biography of the person of our choosing and then do an oral presentation about them. I naturally chose Dylan and for my project I busted out "Queen Jane Approximately" on my guitar/harmonica. Soon after that I played Dylan at retirement homes (my harmonica fell down during my performance and I had to stop and prop it up again - fortunately the most of audience didn't seem too aware of what was going on), church talent shows, my junior high Madrigal Variety Show. The zenith of my Dylan performances came when I was a sophomore at Woods Cross High and I sang "John Wesley Harding" at the talent assembly in front of the entire school.

But in high school I started to take music more seriously, doing things like taking voice lessons, being in the school musicals, taking music theory classes, and being a member (read: president) of the Madrigal choir (while I'm tooting my own horn, I was also my school's Music Sterling Scholar). With all this concentration on "real" music I pretty much stopped playing the guitar and Dylan stuff altogether.

It wasn't until I moved out to Michigan that I really started playing the guitar again. When I was all moving all my stuff into my apartment here I found my guitar among my things - I had hardly remembered even packing it. I pulled it out for the first time in years and found that I played about as well know as I did back then (which is really not saying that much). I'd forgotten how fun it was just to sit around and jam on my guitar, and I started playing quite a lot.

Soon thereafter my ward here had a talent show and I whipped out one of my old Dylan guitar/harmonica standbys, "To Ramona." After all the years of studying and performing opera, oratorio, art song, and other "real" music, I had forgotten how much fun it is to play these little four-chord Dylan tunes.

Let's speed this narrative along... there is a sandwich chain around here called Potbelly where they have live music during busy hours, and last fall I gave myself the goal of working up enough material to play a set there. Last week my roommate Seth had some coupons for free sandwiches there, so while we were there I asked what I would have to do to play there. They scheduled an audition time for me, so on Tuesday I went in at 3:30 p.m. when the place was absolutely dead and I played for the general manager and a few of the lower down managers. The told me, "Why don't you play us three songs and then we'll talk a little." So I played through three songs and they all just went about their business. So I kept playing. About ten songs later, I went up to the counter just to remind them that I was still there, and they said they let me keep playing because they liked me. I still don't have a definite date set that I am going to go play there because I told them that I wanted a few more weeks to work up more material, because I basically exhausted everything I had prepared in about a half hour. But be sure that when I play for real I will let y'all know about it.

But I was proud of myself for the way that the audition went. The whole time I was playing there were only maybe 6 customers total, and they were not paying attention to me at all except for at the end of songs, when they would give light applause and then go back to their conversations. But in a strange way, that was very comforting to me. It was like they were just accepting me playing as a given and enjoying it without overly scrutinizing me. I've never been very confident about my guitar playing ability, but when I made mistakes in my set, I could see that nobody noticed or cared and it wasn't a big deal. What a difference from the "real" music world I usually inhabit, where you know that everyone in the audience will pick up on your every mistake. This was just about having fun.

I tried to mix up my selections (I played some Beatles, Beck, Radiohead, Shins, some Brazilian stuff, a song from Buffy, even something from Sesame Street), but of course the bulk of my set was Dylan - it just had to be. I just printed out three more Dylan songs so I'm off to start learning to them.

P.S. - Thanks to my brother-in-law Lance for donating his old nylon-string guitar to me when I was about thirteen. It's the same guitar I still play today.

Road Trip Blogbligation

My sister Emily recently coined the term "blogshaustion" to explain the exhaustion one experiences when there is simply to much to blog about. I think I'll coin another term here: "Blogbligation" (It's a little tricky to say, but I think it will catch on.) It's the feeling that you are obligated to blog about certain events. Example sentence: "I feel blogbligated to go back and write about a few of my recent road trips." Now that I've got my first week of classes out of the way I can afford a little blog time.

In reverse chronological order:

Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes:
All summer long I kept getting Facebook invites from my friends back in Ann Arbor to go on camping trips to Sleeping Bear in Northern Michigan, but I had to decline because I was off in Brazil or New York. I can't complain because I was off doing cool things, but after a while I started to get pretty sad that I was missing out on fun activities back home, and Sleeping Bear sounded especially cool. So despite my exhaustion from several months of non-stop travel this summer, I couldn't turn down a trip to the sand dunes last weekend.

I went with Maggie, who is miraculously not sick of traveling with me after three weeks together in Brazil, and her friends Carrie and Eduardo, the latter hailing from Araçatuba, Brazil, which is not terribly far from Campinas. We eschewed the whole camping thing in favor of the Traverse City Super 8, which was fine by me. The dunes were as cool as advertised, and we took a monster hike up and down huge sand-covered hills that eventually dumped us out on the beach. Lake Michigan is incredibly beautiful, clean, and clear, and we spent a couple hours chillin' at the beach.


New England Resort Town Tour with the 'Rents:
My parents came out to see me in Così, but they flew in and out of Boston because they got a killer deal. After the first weekend of performances I had four days off, so I drove out and met up with them in Cape Cod, and we gradually made our way back to Cambridge, New York. I found it funny that most of the places I went with my parents in that span were all resort locations: Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Newport R.I., Lake George, Saratoga Springs.

Highlights of the trip included a trip to the "summer cottages" of the 19th century's mega-rich in Newport, Rhode Island. Although they referred to them cottages, they had a lot more in common with palaces like Versailles. Here are my parents, dwarfed before the gates of The Breakers, owned by the railroad tycoons of the Vanderbilt family:
We also went to Bolton Landing on Lake George in New York, where my great-great-great-great-grandfather John Tanner lived before meeting the Mormon missionaries in the early 1830s. We were able to see his original house, which has been turned into a bed-and-breakfast. However, judging by the amount of cobwebs we could see inside as we peered through the window, I'd say it isn't really in operation any more. We also tramped through the woods a little bit and found a stream where John Tanner, his whole family, and dozens of others where baptized as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The site is known as Mormon Rock, and a few years ago some of my distant relatives paid to erect a marker there:
New York City, Take Two:
I went to New York City for the first time last year as part of an insane East coast road trip. I was only in the city for about 20 hours, and I did not come away with much fondness for the city. On that trip I went to a small gathering with some friends in midtown Manhattan, and they spent the last 20 years living in an apartment about half the size of my place for about $2,000 a month, and all they could say is how much they loved it and what a steal it was. I seriously felt like they had been brainwashed. As I walked the streets, I didn't get a sense that anyone actually lived there or belonged to a community at all - it was a city full of strangers zooming around at maximum speed. To me it seemed like the city was an elaborate joke that was being played on its residents, tricking them into thinking they were privileged to pay a fortune for their little cages.

But this summer I decided to give New York another chance, so on a day off I took the two hour drive + two hour train ride down into the city. I went straight to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which was closed on my previous trip) and spent a couple hours there. Then I decided to spend the rest of my day seeing a different side of the city, so I went down to Greenwich Village, Chinatown, and Little Italy. Going to these three places completely changed my mind about New York. These felt like real neighborhoods with real people living in them with a real sense of community, and it was really exhilarating to be there.

I headed back to Times Square on my way back to Grand Central Station, and I was there as Michael Phelps swam for his sixth gold medal. It was so incredible - as soon as his race started, all of Times Square just stopped and looked up at the giant screens. The collective anticipation and national pride was incredible. When he won the race handily, everyone in the crowd went crazy. It was truly unforgettable.

Now that I've fulfilled my blogbligation I'm feeling a lot less blogshausted .