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Lazy Sunday
2005-04-17 - 6:40 p.m.

Gotta love lazy Sundays. I have yet to do anything remotely real today and I don�t care. I�ve been alternating between sleeping and reading. Do you think I could find anyone willing to pay me for this?

I went with Lovely Roommate to UC Davis�s Picnic Day yesterday to see the Battle of the Bands. So, this particular battle is probably different from most you may have heard of. This is a Battle of the Marching Bands. Basically 6 or seven bands show up, including my alma mater Marching Lumberjacks, and they take turns playing. No song can ever be repeated and there is a time limit to how long you can take to come up with your next song. We had the Davis band, obviously, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, Stanford, and my Humboldt State. It lasted for 10 hours, people. We got there around 4 and it was in full swing, we left to get dinner then came back, we went to see a Paul Taylor show at the Mondavi Center, and came back� and it was still going. At that point, of course, only two bands were left and it was very close to the end, but STILL, 10 hours of marching bands. Only, if you know anything of these bands (You may have heard of the Stanford band) they are not playing Souza here. I heard Green Day, GnR, Britney Spears, Spongebob Squarepants, and Alabama all played by marching bands. It was so much fun. The �Jacks held there own, too. They were there in their �Kiss our axe� t-shirts with hardhats and red suspenders and their Drum Major had a green Mohawk and was decked out in a wife beater and doc Martins. They fit perfectly standing next to Stanford whose Drum Major was dressed like Prince. They were the ones who played Alabama�s �Elvira� and the Spongebob Squarepants theme along with �America, Fuck yeah!� from Team America and a 25 minute version of �Louie Louie� during which everyone, including the kazoo player (yes, our band has a kazoo player) and half of the Stanford band had solos. It was awesome.

We also got to augment to evening by seeing the Paul Taylor performance I mentioned earlier. Wow. It was so beautiful. I really love modern dance. It affects me much more than ballet. Ballet is beautiful, but it just doesn�t seem to be able to convey the raw emotion that modern can. What I especially love about Pal Taylor is how masculine the male parts of the pieces are. It is so powerful and he uses the natural difference between how women move and how men move and turns it completely to his advantage. He never even tries to get their movements to look the same, even when they are doing the exact same movement. Amazing. The first piece literally blew me away. It was Cloven Kingdom and it is about how humans try to cover our innate animalness with social niceties and all, but at the core we are animals, and even those niceties are animal in nature, and that is not a bad thing. It was so beautiful.

So, that�s about it. I finished book #8, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I loved it. I�ve had really good luck picking good books lately. Granted, when most of the titles you are choosing are Pulitzer Prize winners, you are hedging your bets a bit. I just liked this book, I can�t really say why. Think just because the people felt so real. Amazing characterization in this book. It�s about two cousins, one from New York, one who escapes from Czechoslovakia during the Nazi regime, who decide to write comic books. It�s more than that, of course, but that�s the basic plot. I highly recommend it.

when we last left our heros� - in our next exciting installment�