These Are a Few of My Favorite Things...

When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I'm feeling sad, I simply remember my favorite things and then I don't feeeeeeeel soooooo bad.  I watched this movie a lot growing up; it was my mom's favorite.

Favorite Movie: Garden State

Favorite Band/Musician: Sooo hard to choose just one.  I go through phases and I usually enjoy different music depending on the season.

Favorite Color: Green (they say geniuses pick green.  I am proof that is bullshit, lol)

Favorite TV Show: currently it’s a toss-up between How I Met Your Mother, Big Bang Theory, Modern Family, New Girl, and Whitney.  All-time, it would have to be The X-Files (I’m a huge nerd.  Deal.)

Favorite Season: Autumn.  I love to watch the leaves change color, and I have the strangest desire to rake them into giant piles to jump in J.

Favorite Hair Color: For myself, my natural color (it suits me).  And for a girl, what can only be described as chocolate brown.

Favorite Smell: Suave Dry Shampoo and Volumizer (don’t ask), fresh garlic (yummmm), and old books

Favorite Book:  This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  I read it in high school, I LOVE the main character, and there is a lot of poetry incorporated in the book.

Favorite Candy: Trolli Bright Crawlers and Sour Patch Kids

Favorite Food: Pepperoni Pizza.  Steak is a close second.

Favorite Animal: Doggies!

Favorite Sport: Hockey.  I played when I was a little kid and loved every second of it.  I also used to watch hockey games with my dad in his room.

Favorite City: Philly

Favorite Quote: “The sound must seem an echo to the sense.” –Alexander Pope

Favorite Poet: Robert Frost.  I own several first editions of his works.

Favorite Poem: Hard to say.  For now we’ll go with My Lost Youth by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Favorite Beer: Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat.  Very excited to try their Summer Shandy

Favorite Subject in School (back in the day…): English (shocker)

Favorite Holiday: Halloween.  Candy and costumes, how could you go wrong?

Favorite Memory:  I forget

Favorite Fast Food Restaurant: Pizza Hut.  My mom used to take us after school for personal pan pizzas.  It’s a wonder I wasn’t a chubby little kid.

On Tap: Going Rogue

Hello fellow beer lovers, welcome to another edition of On Tap.  Though this post is a day late, I promise the wait was worth it.  Monday allowed me the time to go out and add several new beers to my repertoire, in addition to the ones I sampled throughout last week.  Let’s not waste any time, shall we.

We’ll start with this week’s “winners”.  Yesterday was trivia night at the Market Cross Pub in Carlisle and in addition to schooling some of the locals (I’m really bad at it), yours truly enjoyed some tasty new brews.  First, I perused the draught list and sampled Rogue’s Chocolate Stout.  I was very excited because I had been wanting to try a chocolate stout for awhile now and I finally got my chance.  I must say, it wasn’t quite as good as I was hoping but was still a very good beer.  Overall, the stout was smooth, creamy and had a slight coffee aftertaste.  The only thing I didn’t like about it was that it was fairly bitter at first blush, but that quickly melted away so I am willing to overlook that fact.

The second winner of the week is another from the Rogue family, Rogue Dead Guy Ale.  After my first success with the Chocolate Stout, I figured, “Why stop there?”  If you like that natural, smooth beer flavor without all the hoppiness, then this beer is for you.  This beer was, in a word: delicious.  I did however, seem to be able to taste the alcohol content more and more as I got closer to the bottom of the bottle; not sure what that’s about.  Regardless, Monday was a good night.

Now, on to the losers.  Last week I paired a couple of my favorite shows with the last of my second Wegman’s create-your-own six-pack.  Well, all I can say is thank God for How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory.  The two beers in question were Yuengling Bock Beer and Leinenkugel’s Red Lager.  The Bock was very bitter and metallic tasting and was in general, a huge let down.  It was my first bock and I think the fact that it was Yuengling may have had something to do with my bad experience.  The Red Lager actually wasn’t too bad, but it was far below the high standards of some of the other Leinenkugel beers I’ve had; it doesn’t hold a candle to Sunset Wheat.

Well, that’s all for this week’s edition of On Tap.  Join me next week when I hope to discuss some of the following beers:

Fuller’s London Porter

Blue Moon Spring Blonde Wheat

Magic Hat Vinyl

Lost Coast Indica

Out to the Movies

I know that Monday’s are usually when I do my On Tap segment, regaling you with tales of the previous weeks adventures in beer, but truth be told, I didn’t drink that much beer last week.  I’m hoping to change that tonight, though.  I thought I’d switch it up a bit (don’t worry, On Tap will be back tomorrow) and, in light of the Oscars being last night, do a movie-themed post.

First things first, the following is a list of actors who I could watch in just about anything:

Ryan Gosling

Zach Braff

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Jason Segel

 I love movies, but like with music, I can be a bit of a picky snob when it comes to what I watch.  I just don’t want to spend an hour and a half of my life in a movie theater or on my couch unless I think it’s going to be worth it.  When I do find something I like though, I could watch it over and over again and never get bored; there’s always stuff you miss the first time around.  Anyway, here is a list of just some of my all-time favorite movies (in no particular order):

Casablanca (classic!)

Garden State

The Royal Tenenbaums 

Little Miss Sunshine

Juno

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Sunshine Cleaning

Me and You and Everyone We Know

Broken Flowers

The Door in the Floor

The United States of Leland

Blue Valentine

Lars and the Real Girl

Spring Forward

Thumbsucker

Stranger than Fiction

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

American Beauty

Things I Want...

…but could never pull off.  Often I’ll be watching a TV show or a movie and I’ll see something that I absolutely fall in love with, but that I’m sure I could never wear/have.  This is a brief list of the things I wish I could pull off.

Ryan Gosling is the man and when I saw him wearing this jacket in the movie Drive, I just thought, “God, that is totally bad ass!”  I would probably look like a total loser in it, but I don’t care.  I wish I had it.

 Back before Christmas I was playing around on the internet looking for new sneakers and came across these.  I saved the image to my computer because I liked them so much.  My shoes are usually pretty plain, but a part of me has always wanted a funky pair of kicks.  The best part, they’re green, which is my FAVORITE color J.

 I wish I had Chris D’elia’s hair…like, for serious.  I tried to grow my hair out freshman year of college, but eventually got impatient and got it cut because I felt like I was starting to look like the 5^th member of The Beatles.

Well, those are just a few of the things I’ve coveted recently.  Sometimes I wish I weren’t so afraid to be myself and just go ahead and buy/do some of this stuff.  One day, maybe.

Getting Personal

Sometimes I hate who I am.  I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but that’s just how I feel sometimes.  I hate what I’m capable of.   I hate that I’m not as dedicated as some people.   I hate that I’m lazy.   I hate that I have a tendency to start things and then never finish them.  I hate that I’m quiet and shy.  I hate that I find it hard to be myself around people.  I hate being a social chameleon, changing who I am to make other people happy.

I know all of this is probably a bit of an over-share, but I don’t care; it is what it is.  And I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing.  I don’t know about you, but I always love when an author gets personal, it makes them easier to identify with and relate to.  It reminds me that they’re just like me, human, and that they have flaws too.  And that yeah, sometimes they hate themselves.  Besides, if you’re reading this blog (then you’re one of three, max) you’re probably one of the few people who might actually be interested in what I have to say.

I figured I’d spend today’s post getting personal, talking about my life long before the blog.  Sometimes I feel like it’s good to reflect on your life, like maybe it helps give you perspective.  Anyway, so if you don’t already know, I have a fairly unusual (and I’ve been told sad) family history.  Growing up, my dad worked two jobs to make ends meet; he’s been a janitor his entire life.  Now some people would think less of him for what he does for a living, but I’m not one of them.  To me, he was doing everything he could to try to give my family everything we needed, even if it meant that he wasn’t home a lot or that when he was, he was usually tired and stressed out.  One of my best memories I have as a kid is going to work with him at the local YMCA.  Sometimes situations at home would dictate that he had to take my sisters and I with him while he worked the night shift.  He would open up the Y and let us run around and explore while he did his thing.  I have some great memories of playing with the toys in the daycare facility, chasing my sisters around the track in the upstairs gymnasium, and exploring the empty building for signs of life.

Now even though my dad worked two jobs, we barely made ends meet.  You see my mom couldn’t work; she was diagnosed with lupus when she was younger and suffered from a host of other ailments.  Her social security check was a help, but it still was just enough to help keep our heads above water.  As a result, I didn’t have the things other kids had growing up.  I got use to wearing the same clothes for years, to the point where they were practically falling apart and I looked like I belonged in a bad 80s movie.  We never had a computer growing up; in fact, I didn’t get my first computer until sophomore year of college.  I spent countless hours freshman year in the computer labs.  It wasn’t until my buddy Joe gifted me an old clunker from IITS that I finally had a computer of my own.  I’m still reminded of my humble upbringing, every day in fact.  You see, another thing that my family couldn’t afford was to buy me new shoes every year.  I was always wearing shoes that were too small for me and as a result my toes have this funky curl to them; a constant reminder of where I came from.

Well, that’s all I feel like sharing at the moment.  Perhaps I’ll share more sometime, hoping that maybe by reading it you (or I) might gain some perspective.  Enjoy the beautiful weather outside.

Besties

I was thinking last night about the important role music plays in my life.  You may not know this about me, but I tend to relate how I’m feeling or whatever’s going on in my life to the songs in my vast collection of music.  Whenever I’m in a funk or feeling down, I just throw on my iTunes and let the music do its thing.

I tend to go for music with good lyrics; there aren’t many songs I can just listen to because I enjoy how they sound (I’m a bit of a snob).  That’s not to say that I never listen to silly music.  In high school there was a time when I listened almost exclusively to pop punk bands like Blink 182, Sum 41, and New Found Glory.  I still have a bunch of them in my music collection and will put them on from time to time, but for the most part I tend to enjoy songs that go a little bit deeper than rebelling against “the man.” 

One of the things I like most about music is where it can take you.  The best songs evoke something, stir something deep inside of you and fill your head with beautiful, funny, sexy, and sometimes sad, images.  For example, when I hear Ghost by Neutral Milk Hotel, I envision a motorcycle stuntman preparing for the jump of his life, realizing as he prepares that he will likely not survive.  Great songs also stir the passion inside us.  For example, whenever I hear Say Anything’s Alive with the Glory of Love I think of a guy showing up to a girls house, with that song blasting, walking up to her and the two of them just ravaging each other, National Geographic style.  I’m weird, I know.

The list below is of my all-time favorite songs.  It was originally only suppose to be 10 songs long, but I quickly realized that I would be leaving out some gems so I expanded the list to the top 20 in my collection.  Some of these songs I’ve had for a long time and others have only recently come into my life.  This list will most definitely change over time, but as of right now, these are my favorites (gush!), in no particular order.

Elliott Smith – The Biggest Lie

Say Anything – Alive with the Glory of Love

Iron & Wine – The Trapeze Swinger

Cursive – From the Hips

Josh Ritter – Come and Find Me

Neutral Milk Hotel – Ghost

Nick Drake – Parasite

Nirvana – All Apologies

The Shins – New Slang

Sufjan Stevens – Casimir Pulaski Day

The Weakerthans – Left and Leaving

The Shins – The Past and Pending

Coldplay – Don’t Panic

Bright Eyes – At the Bottom of Everything

Bon Iver – Skinny Love

The Beatles – Across the Universe

Beirut – Nantes

The Morning Benders – Excuses

The Postal Service – Such Great Heights

Vampire Weekend – Giving Up the Gun

Friends

I’ve been thinking a lot about the people in my life lately and I’ve come to the sad conclusion that I don’t have many friends.  By friends I mean the people who really care about you, who think about you when you’re not around, who would do anything for you.  By friends I mean your brothers from other mothers, your sisters from other misters, your “family.”  Don’t get me wrong, I know a good number of people, but I’m not sure I would categorize many of them as my friends. 

There are very few people in my life that I see on a fairly consistent basis.  I don’t talk to many of my high school friends anymore and none of them live in the area.  The same can pretty much be said for my college friends although I do manage to keep in contact with a few of them.  But I don’t get to see many of them very often and I generally get the impression that they have little interest in seeing me.  Sometimes it feels like I’m reaching out for something that isn’t there anymore and that I’m just kind of this annoying headache to them that they don’t want to entertain for a day.

It just sucks ‘cause I think I’m a pretty laid back guy.  I consider myself to be fairly entertaining, I have a sense of humor that’s all my own, and I’m the kind of person who just wants to make people happy.  I’ve been trying to think of ways to remedy my situation and I keep coming up empty.  Most of the people I work with are either way older than me or they’re not exactly the type of people I would typically be friends with.  Besides work, I’m hard pressed to think of a way to make new friends. 

The whole situation just has me in a bit of a funk at the moment and I’m just hoping that something will come along to get me out of it.  Music usually helps…

Lua by Bright Eyes