Whew, what a weekend.
She all started on Wednesday, with the eclipse. I basically only watched the part where the moon turned orange, which was neat (it looked like the sun, but I could stare at it!), but I quickly lost interest and decided to join Davis and Kristy down at the Poetry Slam at Floyd's. The end of the night saw Shayne, Brook, Shayne's cousin, an assortment of other poets whose name I can't recall, and myself getting drunk in the parking lot for several hours. Shayne pulled out his balls again. It was HILARIOUS (seriously it was).
Thursday saw me learning how to use Ableton Live under the tutelage of the esteemed Mr. Cam Cumming, moping around my house for awhile, and then rocking on down to Hush with Kate (<3!) to catch Keoni and see some old friends. All in all, a worthwhile night.
Friday saw me daytripping around town with a group of people I shall not name for confidentialities sake. And we were most certainly NOT high on psychedelics. Ahem. A In my book, Friday marked the first day of spring, as it was warm enough outside to wear only one sweater, the sun was shining, and it was all in all a prime day for spontaneous wackiness. We hiked around all over town, told fatal puns, threw around the frisbee, checked out rich people neighborhoods, and got in touch with nature. It was the first time I've felt the oppressive weight of winter ease off of me. I'm ready to fuckin' GO OFF. RAARGH. It's also the first time in months that I've had fun time adventures through Beacon Hill, and I highly anticipate many more to follow. In fact, one happened the very next day! I will tell you about it shortly! The end of the night found me working at the Sunset room (big shocker there) for DJ Dust and Natron's monthly progressive house/trance night, Lucid. It was a slow night, as the last few Lucids have been, which is downright criminal, because they've all been fantastic nights of music, and I'd personally like to see them continue so that I might have somewhere to play in the near future (the music I play out is considered progressive psytrance, in case anyone was wondering). On the upside, I had the entire dance floor to myself. It is a fun and exhausting exercise to try and occupy the entirety of the dance space. Lots of sweeping movements and large steps. Try it some time!
Saturday saw me attending the first official Returning Saturn (the DJ collective I'm a part of ) crew meeting, which was held at Mr. Immink's house. I'd been looking forward to this all week, because it was an opportunity to hang out with a bunch of friends that I currently hold in the highest regard, all of whom are just as passionate about electronic music as I am, and plan out awesomeness for the next several months. Oh, and get crazy drunk and eat pizza. Later in the evening, we packed up Chris' DJ equipment and went to a bitter single's party, which Returning Saturn provided the musical entertainment for. I unfortunately had commitments at Sunset again (argh) and had to leave around 2, which also meant that I never got a chance to DJ. But by the time I left, I managed to get in a couple quality make-outs with some very attractive ladies (I don't mean to brag, but jesus, I haven't gotten any play in like 3 goddamn months, let me take my moments where I can), and the guys had managed to get a bunch of non-rave going people rocking out to psytrance. I was so proud *sniff*. As much as I was choked about leaving such a great party, Sunset was also going off that night. A packed house, quality tunes, and more cherished friends. And a long fucking night. Not only did I work from 3 am til 6 am, I had to stick around after the party ended and facilitate an after-after hours private birthday party that ran from 6am 'til noon. Some of these people just will not go down, I tell ya. By the time that ended, I was already in the advanced stages of sleep deprivation, and I had a Sunset crew meeting to attend later in the day anyways, so I just decided to stay up for the rest of the day and wander around downtown. I ended up meeting with Jessie, Abby, and Kevin in Beacon Hill and climbing trees and generally being pretty weird and silent because I was sleep deprived and completely socially drained from the previous 3 days. So I went home, caught an hour of sleep, went to the crew meeting, hung out with some friends afterwards, and finally crashed around midnight.
Which brings us to today. I'm gonna straight up admit that I had no idea how I was going to make rent this month. I completely failed on all levels to do any job hunting this month, and going into the weekend, I had one dollar to my name. So I was pleasantly suprised when I woke up to find my remaining tax forms from Camosun that I needed to file my tax return. With great haste, I made my way down to H&R block and had them cut me a cheque. And man, what a cheque. Whereas I thought I was going to get maybe 500-600 back, it ended up being around 1150 after they deducted a (small) fee. Between that and the 100 bucks I made at Sunset over the weekend, I'm out of the red for the time being. And feeling pretty darn good. I spent the majority of the day putting together my first promo mix, which I'm going to call (and I can' tell you how proud I am of this name):
"Progressive Psy Goes Boink".
That is awesome, go on, say it. I'm hoping to post it up here and on Facebook within the next week, and maybe make some CD copies (with artwork!) as well.
With my financial worries temporarily dealt with, I'm also free to go over to Vancouver this weekend and attend Justin's birthday. See ya soon buddy!
And thus ends the recap portion of this post.
ANDREW'S PERSONAL SHIT CORNER:
At the Sunset crew meeting that was held a few weeks ago, Jay introduced us all to a friend of his that does career and goal planning, and had her run us through some goal-setting strategies. A lot of it was pretty jargon-y and kinda made me roll my eyes (I don't like being sold common sense), but I decided to take it seriously anyways, because goddam do I need some goals. So, without further adieu, here is the list I came up with for the year:
Health:
1. Make my back not hurt
2. Get my teeth fixed
3. Exercise regularly ( i had this worded in a much more specific fashion, but you get the gist)
Personal:
1. Make a demo so that I may get booked at the Entheos festival
2. Get over my relationship fears
3. Draw and finish a picture at least once a week
4. Write something at least once a month/actually maintain my blog regularly
5. Get into Shambhala without paying
6. Figure what I'd like to go back to school for - Perhaps even go back to school!
7. Pay off half my student loan
8. Throw an event at Sunset
Professional:
1. Obtain a job that is unobtrusive to my personal interests and does not make me effin' miserable (I'd specifically name a place I'd like to work....but I haven't figured that out yet.)
2. Establish some kind of independent income/side business, or work towards having the schools needed to maintain one
The trick to the exercise was to make goals that were measurable and attainable in a timely manner. So some of those are probably a bit too vaguely worded. But I think I got the point across to, uh, myself, so there. Encourage me to achieve, or something.
As I touched on earlier, I'm starting to feel the shitty, oppressive weight of winter lift from my shoulders. Part of the reason that I opted not to find work for the last four months (the other being that I'm a lazy asshole) is because I need a helluva lot of personal time and space during the winter, because I traditionally become very, very depressed around this time of year, for no reason in particular (well, no personal reason anyways, the winter pretty much just sucks and nobody can deny it)and I require a lot of personal time and space to myself. This winter in particular was a very powerful exercise in coming to understand who I am as a person, and realizing aspects of my personality that I had been repressing for years because I was afraid of being judged and also coming to terms with some of my nastier side.
I also spent a lot of time being very quite and sullen around most everyone I know, to varying degrees, and I thank everyone for their patience with that. I've barely had the energy to get out of bed most mornings, let alone interact with human beings, be they close friends or not. So if I've seemed unfriendly, it's because I went through about a billion little personal crisis'/revelations between August and now, and I've been dedicating what little energy I have to trying to process them. And yeah, I've been depressed. So there. I'm hoping that within the next two months, I'll have fully opened up communication with everyone again (well, as fully as I'm ever able to communicate, anyways).
This is going to be a good year. And it's going to be an epic summer. I can feels it!
To close, I would like to show you a draft of the logo that Justin has been designing for ol' DJ Dodd. I was going to wait until it was completely finished, but I'm so happy with how it's turning out, and so appreciative of the time he's put into it, that I gotta show ya:
