East Coast Blog Times, One Year Later

Two days ago was my one year anniversary of moving to New York. It's also fitting that this weekend I'm going to Lollapalooza with almost all of the people who came to Coachella last April, as that was the catalyst that made me set the moving-to-the-east-coast ball rolling. A lot has changed in a year: I've gone from sleeping on a couch in a stiflingly hot room to sleeping on a comfy full bed in a windowless room with a water heater, HVAC unit, and washer-dryer combo in the closet (but hey! central AC!); from being a full-time job-applier to full-time latte-slinger to full-time small business employee specialist (woo! insurance! awesome!); from negative income adding to negative net worth to positive income not adding and sometimes reducing negative net worth (workin' that 401k like nobody's business); from adventures on the vast expanse of MTA tracks to the vast wildernesses of Vermont (along with other, less wild but fun places like Milford, CT and Red Bank, NJ).

New York is a crazy place, man. Shit's always going, in most every sense of the word. It might be too much sometimes, but more often than not it's pretty great. Thanks for being good to me, looking forward to another fruitful year of business.

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What To Do If Your Child Is Stressed

This article makes me upset -- upset because with all of our "advances" in modernity we've managed to impose upon children those things which strip our childhood away (is adulthood really much more than being stressed and learning to cope with it? Yes, but no, not really I say). It makes me upset because every day there's new advice/rules/techniques/books/whathaveyou coming out about how to parent "better" and for what? I'm not naive enough to assume that stressed out kids is a 21st century phenomenon, and maybe it's important that people are asking them if they are, in fact, stressed, but what I get from the article is that we are forcing our kids into stress. Kids as young as 3 are saying they're stressed! They just learned to talk, why would they know that word and be able to associate it with an emotion? Why must we bring them into it?

For more on how modernity is ruining parenting from the perspective of a 24 year old with no interest in having kids and a general fear of anyone that has a malleable head, see: this post.

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"What that has done though, is that it’s made me (and PROBABLY Neil and Chris, though we’ve never discussed it overtly) hungry to stuff every record we ever made up everybody’s ass. The whole goal of our band has always been to subvert expectations within the very small wiggle room of our sound. I mean, I’m no dummy. The Lawrence Arms aren’t revolutionizing anything at all, (even though some of those bands I mentioned above may have been) but we tried to make a pop record when we’d never previously written a song with a chorus, then a weird, weird record that would shock the shit out of anyone who thought that we didn’t think things through or pay attention to craft, and then we decided to make a super jagged punk record that embodied everything we’d ever stored up about loving punk rock once we'd been written off as pussies. Then we made a record called Buttsweat and Tears. Ha!"
- via Bad Sandwich Chronicles

One of my favorite musicians and bloggers (writers? does the distinction still matter these days? is blogging not the new long-form writing of the 21th century?) talking about three of my favorite records, proving that punk rock is not just power chords, snotty attitudes, and socially deviant subcultures. Posting this mostly to save for myself, but partly to show the smarts of 3 people who do a good job of fooling people into sounding like they're just out to have fun (though, really, they're probably just doing that at the end of the day).

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MUSIC!