You might like a band called Dropping Daylight. The name is cheesy, and the music is more groomed for mainstream radio, but it still rocks and there is still plenty of banging pianos and wailing vocals. Instead of buying the cd and wading through some radio-friendly watered-down tracks, go to iTunes and download these songs:

Tell Me
Take A Photograph (my personal favorite)
Brace Yourself
Soliloquy
Till You Feel Something

The album is called “Brace Yourself.”

I’ve never been an obsessive grade-checker. I usually wait till my friends tell me that our grades are posted to log on and finally check. Call it apathy, call it laziness, call not giving a damn. Yes, I know that last one means the same thing as the first one. I only bring this up because when I finally decide to get off my ass and check grades, the system is overloaded. All I need to do is make sure I passed my classes so I don’t have to worry about not graduating this semester. I’m thinking the system is overloaded because all the 1Ls are frantically checking to make sure they at least made a B or something. Some of them might be checking to make sure they passed so as not to jeopardize their GPA and possibly get kicked out of school. While I sympathize with their plight, there is more riding on my not passing than their not passing, so I therefore have no patience for the overloading of the online grade web site.

1Ls, get off. I want to graduate this semester.

My TV is lame and old and I don’t have cable. I don’t watch TV. I just watch DVDs. Or I go to friends’ places and watch there. Have you heard of this HBO series called Rome? I’m already a sucker for historical fiction as it is. When they put it on a screen with cool battles and hot women I’m sold. Or bought. Whatever. It rules. I watched about five hours of Rome with a friend yesterday and I want more. Thank goodness he borrowed the entire first season on DVD. There goes my studying for the week. As if I were actually going to read.

Oh yeah, and 24 is back on too. Jack Bauer is my hero.

In other news, I’ve had a sorry excuse of a flu for a few days now. It’s not even a full-blown flu. I might have had a fever for one night. But I’m congested and generally lethargic. I know that’s not exactly a new thing with me, but it’s normally not this bad. I think it might have something to do with the mono I had last year. Doesn’t mono never go away? I don’t know. I think it just makes whatever illness you have that much worse. Or long-lasting. Oh well. Bring on the Rome episodes!

Is it me, or are whales talking to each other in the background of Little People by The White Stripes?

This book is rocking. Really entertaining. I haven’t gotten very far yet, but there was one passage I wanted to share.

Background: a teenage boy in India discovers Christianity, and adopts it. He then discovers Islam, and adopts it too. The imam, priest, and pandit find out about the boy’s religious whoring and confront the parents. His older brother finds out too, and says to his younger brother:

“So, Swami Jesus, will you go on the hajj this year . . . Or does Mecca beckon . . . Or will it be to Rome for your coronation as the next Pope Pius. Have you found time to get your pecker cut off and become a Jew? At the rate you're going, if you go to temple on Thursday, mosque on Friday, synagogue on Saturday and church on Sunday, you only need to convert to three more religions to be on holiday for the rest of your life.”

One of my girlfriends from college got married last year (not to me) and she left a message on my phone that she had some interesting news for me. I automatically assumed she was pregnant. So I called back and left a message. We tend to play phone-tag a lot. I said that I had a pretty good idea of what the news was, but I’d just wait for her to tell me. Since her resulting email was so funny, and I don’t think she’d care if I posted this, this is what she said:

"I am guessing you think my news (based off your voicemail message) is something a lot more serious then what my actual news is. I was just going to tell you I got hit in the face with a volleyball and got sent to the emergency room because my jaw locked shut."

I resolve to make no more new years resolutions. I always either forget about them or break them by the end of January. I resolve to make resolutions “on the fly” as needed. Perhaps that’s what some people call “making good life choices.” I obviously don’t know too much about that.

So here are a few of the new and improved “on the fly” resolutions:
1. I am not a crammer. Cramming does not work well for me. I will actually have to act like a 1L and stay caught up with the material . It kind of sucks. But my grades this semester have sent me a clear signal: my short-term memory is not what it used to be.
2. Ok so that’s it. If I keep listing the other things I have in my head, they will really start to sound like actual new years resolutions, and I already resolved to not do that.

I was at a bar and someone in my group said, “that tastes like fermented curry!”

In other news, my three-week stint at the firm is over and I head back to Houston on Monday, but not before causing a little more damage this weekend. I’ve also rediscovered the awesomeness of Fish and Chips. If you’re ever at a pub and feel like something other than standard tex-mex or chicken strips, try the Fish and Chips. It’s really good and will give you horrible breath. You’ll be a favorite at the table.

I’ll miss zipping around in my friend’s BMW. Yes, I have gotten better at driving manual, but I’m still no expert. I either over-rev the engine or kill it when getting into first, and shifting to second will give you whiplash. After that, I’m golden, but most driving takes place in gears one through three (though this car is a six-speed, so I spend most of my time in fourth).

The cool part is that my friend is thinking of moving to Europe for a while after he gets back from his vacation there. He’s thinking Munich. That sounds good to me, because I can continue to “watch over” his car while he’s gone. I can’t wait to call my insurance company and say, “Hi, I’d like add a monstrosity of a BMW with a V8 to my plan. And oh yeah, I’m male, single, and have no kids. How much will that run me?”

My friend gets back sometime tomorrow so I better start cleaning this place up. Ironically, it was messier before I got here; I vacuumed and cleaned the kitchen floor as soon as I arrived, which are things I don’t think he’s ever done. But in the meantime, stuff has managed to pile up everywhere. So I might spend today in cleaning mode. Cross your fingers.

Do you ever get that feeling that you’ll be out drinking for the unforeseeable future? This always happens when you’re about to move out of one place and into another, or when friends are moving out of one place and into another. For me, all of those things are happening, which means I’ll be getting ‘see you soon’ drinks, ‘welcome back’ drinks, and ‘it was fun’ drinks for someone who is leaving Houston. Not that I’m complaining. I just feel like the bartenders at some of these bars are starting to recognize me. And that is a scary thought.

Seventh installment of the “things that happen to you while” series.

For those not wise to Texas talk, The Valley refers to the Rio Grande Valley, or more generally, the area around the border. My friend Ricardo is from Edinburg, a smallish town in The Valley with about 50,000 people. I’ve known this guy for almost 10 years and I have yet to visit him in The Valley, so I figured it was about time I made the trip. So I hopped on a plane to McAllen (the closest airport) to spend four days exploring the bosom of the Rio Grande Valley.

I’m hoping you picked up on the bosom reference above. I’ll give you one hint: a coffee can and the pacific ocean.

Large quantities of beer were consumed and some excellent Tex-Mex was had. Note, however, that not all the tex-mex was good. Proximity to Mexico does not automatically result in higher quality levels of tex-mex. There is no correlation. Case in point: the first restaurant we went to served some pretty lame tex-mex. My mom makes better tex-mex, and she’s basically Polish. No matter. The rest of the tex-mex we had was good.

We managed to make a trip to Mexico, or rather the tourist area for buying souvenirs and whatnot called Nuevo Progreso just across the river. I have never seen so much useless shit for sale. I have also never seen such amazing prices on alcohol. Bottles and bottles of liquor at ridiculous prices. Otherwise, it reminded me of my time in Russia: children hawking all kinds of knick-knacks, low air quality, overcrowding, etc. It was not a pleasant sight. Kind of depressing actually. Keep in mind we only saw the shops on the tourist strip. I can’t imagine what it was like off the main road.

After Mexico, we stopped by South Padre Island. It was my first time there. Yeah, I know. What took me so long. I don’t know. I just never made it down there. It was kind of deserted since we were there in the off-season. It was kind of a ghost town. We did have some good seafood though. Or, actually, my fish po-boy was good. Ric’s shrimp platter was not that great. He wasn’t too keen on eating “shrimp poo.” The shrimp were not de-veined. Sorry bud.

To my surprise, minor league hockey is huge in The Valley. We saw the Rio Grande Valley Killer Bees battle the Amarillo Gorillas and beat them in overtime. It was pretty cool. I haven’t seen a hockey game since I was a kid and this game reminded me how much fun hockey is to watch. It’s like football on ice, but the players are allowed to fight until one guy falls down. And the overtime shootouts are awesome.

Ric also has a small radio-controlled helicopter that totally mesmerized us every minute that we were at home. This thing is incredible. I have to get one. You can only use it indoors because it’s made of Styrofoam and any wind will blow it clear across your yard into someone else’s yard, or a tree, or a street, or who knows what.

We also watched a lot of movies, one of which was Nacho Libre with Jack Black. You have to be a Jack Black fan to like this movie. It is absurd and over-the-top in a way only Jack Black can pull off. He plays a Luchador, a Mexican wrestler. I took to calling him Luchador Grande because, well, Jack’s a tubby guy. Ric happens to have a little dog named Chato who liked to bark at me at every opportunity. He was a sprite little guy who could have been a wrestler if he were a person. So I started calling him Chato Grande in honor of his wrestling potential.

And that’s my Valley story. Hope you enjoyed it. Actually, I don’t care. I’m a Luchador and I’ll do an eagle jump off the ropes and take you out.

To all my friends who have been asking me whether they should buy Windows Vista when it comes out, I wanted to make a public announcement: No. Don’t buy it. Stick with XP. Rule #1: never buy the first edition of any Microsoft software. Wait till they patch the hell out of it or release updates to fix all the holes and bugs. Rule #2: do your research. Read reviews. Don’t fall prey to the hype.

For 99% of you, XP is good enough, and you already own it. You won’t need to overhaul your computer to install anything and you already know how to use it. You will probably have to buy more memory to run Vista. For the law students among you, upgrading to Vista could cause problems if you plan on taking exams on your laptop. There’s no telling if ExamSoft will work. Also, there’s no telling if you’ll be able to take the Bar on your laptop. And if there’s one thing you don’t want to mess with, it’s your chances of passing the Bar. If you’re strictly a “type exams” kind of person like me, you don’t want to risk having to write all those essays by hand.

The other strange thing about Vista is its licensing. If you don’t activate the software, it will stop working. I don’t think Microsoft has ever done this. Activation is usually an option. Read the use terms yourself and see what I mean. The other issue is that you can only install Vista on one “device.” What’s a device? What happens if you get a new motherboard? A new processor? A new hard drive? That might be a new device, and you’d have to buy Vista again. This problem is not unique to Vista, but I was hoping they’d clarify the question for Vista. I guess not.

If you’re curious, you can find the use terms to most Microsoft products here.