tupacodaman88's Xanga

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:19:46 GMT

this is a pretty cool song from this musical called "into the woods"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsFx5835Qrg

it's been an interesting semester. I remember thinking at the beginning of the summer: "will I actually hang out with the people I'm about to spend all summer with once school starts? I hope so, but probably not". and it's been true. did NOT see matt quitting the band though. I did not think my schedule would be that tough. comp sci especially has been a surprising amount of work.... props to people who major in that stuff.... one class is enough for me, can' imagine taking multiple comp sci classes.

also, can't believe I didn't drink coffee until this year. it's definitely helped a LOT in keeping up with things.

I've always been skeptical of other people doing the things they say they will do, and these past few months haven't made that any better. one thing I've tried so hard to do is not be the "czar" of small town in that I don't want to do everything, because obviously I don' have enough time, and more importantly, since the president of a student group should be getting other people involved as well. I'm thankful overall for the efforts most of the people have put in, but it really is sad how little respect navid has for things in general. by little respect, I mean he doesn't take things seriously and half-asses things a lot. but yea anyway... it's stressful to think that all that small town does depends on me... the past president, colin, was a cool and great guy and got things done, but he wasn't trying to expand what we were doing. we didn't do much in the fall, and all we did in the spring was get ready for one big show. what sucks though is he made it SEEM as if he were really busy and that that's why we didn' meet often or do other things. I'm not as good at doing that and I think some people think I'm slacking off when we've done a ton of stuff already... though I am pissed that my friends who were going to work on the site, as well as the student group who was going to help them, can't be depended on for anything... but yea... open jam sessions for anyone on campus... a show with over 300 people attending throughout the night.... open studio hours, mixing tutorials... so much crap is going on... but there's still more I could be organizing... hopefully going to get this nationwide contest going soon... more on that later. wish there were more student bands. once I graduate there will be no one who has anywhere close to knowing as much as I do about pro tools/recording/mixing. and only one active student band (two others are working on that though). ugh

and then same thing with panda force. back to square 1. should just call it "david munoz and the panda force" at this point. but w/e. I hope I have enough energy in the next few weeks and over winter break to write and record some bad ass midi parts so the new dance sound can finally get started. should be a fun next semester if this goes right

freaking tired of "group projects". it's dumb when some group members don't feel like putting in any work and don't put in any work ever, or even worse, they come back and try to change things to make it seem as if they are contributing when really they're just making things worse... this dumbass girl in the musical class is sooooo bad at everything... hasn't contributed anything at all. i wrote around half the libretto (the entire story+dialogue and whano) with Lujing, the keyboardist from the other band in our year, Tauri Wind, who's a really cool/funny guy. a lot like Randy but less stuck-up. anyway, we've written all the music and lyrics to this point. she was going to help with lyrics but I swear she cannot read or write music. and she sends us lyrics hours before we're supposed to present. ugh. most incompetent person I've mett at duke

this week's been interesting. hope I don't mess this up :)

Friday, October 30, 2009

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:23:45 GMT

awesome. as tall as lions and mute math are playing in charlotte next saturday. definitely need to try to make it out there

as tall as lions new cd is soooo good

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EWE57kuN6U&feature=related

www.myspace.com/astallaslions (they have "into the flood" you can listen to for free jason. it's the song from their EP that I couldn't send because it was protected since I bought it from iTunes)

acoustic version's almost as good as the cd, titled "you can't take it with you"

so wow. I thought the studio was awesome. but recently got access to this place, the smith warehouse, that has over $20k worth of keyboard/midi recording stuff. I don't know why the studio isn't over there.... much more secure plus we could use that stuff :). anyway, need to talk to nate and figure out how do-able my idea for the future panda force is. though I unfortunately haven't had time to continue working on the three songs I had started, I will hopefully in two weeks have a ton of freetime once second round of midterms is over. the idea is to have navid on drums and then me and aidan switching around on guitar/bass (or both being on guitar) and then having a laptop connected to the PA during a live show playing pre-recorded guitar parts. much poppier. see this as me "selling out" haha. sort of. I did want to do a side project that was more electronica based, and since we can't exactly do all our songs now with only 3 people, might as well do this. btw we can still play: end of the world, smoke and mirrors, and may 21st (which are my favorites/the ones I think are best so awesome :) ), as well as new riff and the nightmare. we can probably add in albatross and carbon copy too, but dunno if it's worth it haha. f b's would be good but it'll be tough to make it sound as full, so probably won't do that.

but yea. after devine's and seeing how many people will come to a show on a thursday night to listen to popular music, I realize this idea'll be even better. it'll be like stella, but even better haha. only problem is getting the time to come up with all this shit. but aidan's excited too, which he hasn't been since we left the studio, so it's just a matter of spending some long saturdays at the warehouse playing crap.

I hate the group work setting. so freaking lame. seriously. I admit, I don't know everyone in the lab as well as everyone else does, and there is a weird age gap/"distinction" between me (undergrad) and everyone else who lives this stuff 24/7, but .... talking to each person one on one is so much better than having everyone interact at once. as I mentioned in an earlier post, if mckell (awesome post-doc who's 35) and brandi (two years older than me, really nice and friendly) aren't in the lab, then it's just super awkward having any conversation. cuz it's like, you sort of want to hang out and talk with people, but you really need to work. and yea.

so while i'm not getting any sleep, I am at least getting almost everything done. I've pushed myself musically in writing what I have for this musical. pushing myself to write this new music. as matt said, it's really ffustrating to play with people who don't take music nearly as seriously as you do. but whatever. as long as you're growing as a musician and writing good new stuff who cares?

still looking for some girl I can take seriously

Monday, October 26, 2009

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:29:03 GMT

now-friday= helllllll. so much crap to do. until then... yea

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 03:02:04 GMT

meet the new panda force bassist (at least for the near future) :)

it's weird when you see the ugly side of someone

Monday, September 28, 2009

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:23:50 GMT

When I keep giving up without getting anything in return, is it so strange that I've become so apathetic towards people? When every time I try to help someone or something I'm taken for granted, is it so strange that I get angry towards people? I'm happy by myself but have it all drained away by others. no one I care about talks to each other unless I go out of my way, and few go out of their way to talk to me. everyone's lost the fire inside and is living in the hedonistic present. or, perhaps, I have lost my mind in this cycle of 4 hours of sleep and continuous work. but whatever, I'm happy when I'm working at lab. I'm happy when I'm teaching myself the piano at 3 am Tuesday morning after finishing a comp sci assignment. I'm happy after running ten miles or working out. I'm happy when I'm drumming to my music in the band trailer at 1 am Sunday morning. I'm happy by myself, and though I do wish I could find someone who enjoyed any of this as much as me, the outlook's grim. I've lost the other three friends who should be there with me to partying/drugs/girlfriends/apathy, though I've tried my best to save them, and any girl who's interested in anything I just mentioned I've distanced myself from, though I've tried to fix that all. But I've got my music and my mind to keep me company.

to do list over fall break: massive reflective post on everything going on in my life and random people

kings of convenience: INCREDIBLE band

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:28:03 GMT

as if life wasn't already full of work... even if matt quits the band I can't be distracted and need to keep working on everything.

this can't possibly be senior year

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 07:34:10 GMT

ddddammmm. good thing I didn't hear about anything going on this weekend really since I ended up just staying in friday and saturday doing all this reading and programming crap. sadly I have to make it to friday. gonna be a loooong week.

last week before tailgate, we grilled some burgers and stuff. these random drunk dudes walk by and were like "YEAHHHH LOOKS LIKE YOU GUYS ARE HAVING FUN! HOW MUCH FUN YOU HAVING ON A SCALE OF 1 TO 15!!!". And I was like mmm I'd say like an 11 or 12. and they were like "DAMMM MUST BE SOME GOOD BURGERS!". so random. but yea. as frustrated as I do get, I think my average would be like a 10. I do get pissed, and I do get sad, and that's probably closer to like a 2 or 3. But that's not THAT often. Also random thought: everyone has a natural facial expression. Or at least they do in my mind. Most people are just like neutral, not really smiling or frowning, but then some people have like natural "death" looks. this one girl at the crossfit gym literally looked so damn intensely sad it made me feel sad just by looking at her, haha. it's like greg melton part 2 or something. I notice that I usually grin just the slightest bit. I wonder if people notice that. you can see it on my Duke card. which is hilarious by the way. I had an old picture where somehow my hair is huge and I have a pretty full beard. basically looks like I'm either a hardcore rocker or that I've been in jails for years. I thought I lost it so I got a new picture. If you look at one and then the other, I literally have the same smug little grin, so there's this hilarious "photoshop" effect, where it looks like someone just airbrushed a beard and put some huge hair on me.

a few weeks ago, this really cool and funny post-doc who works in my lab, McKell, was making fun of the lab, as usual, by saying how people just come in and out like ghosts without saying hello or goodbye. "Where'd Dave (not me) go?", someone asked. "Oh, he just sneaked his way out. That's the Huettel lab for you". He made a good point. Everyone likes each other in general. Well, besides this one other post-doc who has the longest name ever: O'Dhaniel Mullette-Gillman. Or ODG (though I think it should be OMG) for short. I'm one of the few who doesn't think he's annoying. But yea, if it weren't for McKell, we would just sit there in silence. As evidenced when he went to visit his family in Utah for two weeks. For some reason, most people in the lab prefer working with the shades pulled up and the lights off. So that was creepy enough. And then no one really talked to each other. So you could say McKell is either a great distractor, a great talker, or is good at creating good team chemistry. I think some combination of all three. What's for sure is that the lab would be boring as hell. But anyway, I thought about what he said and decided to see if I could get everyone to start saying "bye" when they left. It was interesting to see who picked up when. Two of the girls picked up immediately, but everyone else took a while. Finally, as of Friday, everyone was now saying goodbye, see you guys tomorrow, or something of the sort.

Monday, September 07, 2009

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:21:58 GMT

navid asked me "what's up with the band lately? why can't we communicate"? I wanted to answer: "well, aidan's too busy sleeping/being with his gf/smoking and returns texts/calls randomly, matt's been hanging out with all his friends who weren't here for the summer and being too busy sleeping/being with his gf/smoking/, and I'm making sure that I get all A's in all my classes, as well as working on my independent study and working on new non-panda force material for myself and for the musical theater class I'm in. I assume you've been busy with class/your gf/working/making yourself magically busy 100% of the time. but whatever. if I'm not on top of my shit, no one talks to anyone else, besides matt and aidan about smoking and random run-ins around campus. I wish that everyone pretended like they always gave a crap instead of selectively, if at all." but it was at the end of the Small Town meeting and his gf and other people were still around, so I said I don't know, let's practice this week and meet tomorrow.

still don't know what to do with the cd. matt wants to rerecord everything. aidan wants to rerecord most things. I think vocals/drums are fine and that everything else needs to be rerecorded. navid's somewhere in the middle. it's too bad nate didn't care as much as he thought he would. he cared a LOT about a few songs, but not about all of them, so two of them sound pretty good, but none of the others sound as good as they should. parts are missing, shit sounds bad or is wrong or over quantized to the point where it seems unnatural, and yea, bad times. fuuuuck

senior year's here, and dam is there a lot I want to do before graduating. I realize now that without me there would have been no small town last year and won't be this year. and there never would have been a panda force. I admit that throughout the past few years I've gotten very disillusioned at the state of one, or both, but then I realize that I just have to suffer through it and make things get better. I hate people when you have to get work done. if it were all me literally it'd be great. I like everyone else in the band/small town but it's annoying how little initiative people take towards life. just do whatever feels good is what most people go by in college, especially now that it's senior year. for me, I'm just trying to do everything possible for the band/label/my gpa. nothing else, though anything else that happens would be nice. I guess I should have seen it coming after freshman year. that I would hide myself behind this wall of music, schoolwork, and exercise. that no one would care to get past it, and that whenever I tried to leave that it wouldn't feel right and that I would mess up somehow. no time to slow down and wallow in the past like I always have. gotta suck it up and be a statue.

Monday, August 31, 2009

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 01:00:22 GMT

wow, way too much crap to recap from the past few weeks, but for now:

had a great birthday, wish it'd been on a weekend, but thursday night isn't bad. it's pretty funny how big a deal people make out of birthdays though. when I left lab, another coworker was just coming in, and as I said "c ya guys" she said "happy birthday", and of course cuz every day's the same when you're working, no one knew it was my birthday and everyone but one person rushed to say happy birthday before I left.

it's been a busy frst week of classes. been going out more, meeing new people, pretty fun. not going to be super optimistic yet because we all know how that goes. whatever happens will happen, but I will definitely try as hard as I can to get a 4.0 with all of my classes. might sleep like 4 hours a day, but that's ok. last year as an undergrad (how weird), might as well have fun while keeping grades high

wish people were more responsible/actually responded to texts and calls...

didn't think it was possible, but I've now lost almost 20 pounds since the summer started and haven't felt better physically. I wasn't even overweight before, it's just that I wasn't this in shape. don't know how people let themselves get overweight

Monday, August 10, 2009

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 03:03:37 GMT

http://www.datingish.com/709282788/you-can-love-anyone/

I dunno, I saw that article and was glad someone has a similar viewpoint. This is one of the reasons why I'm different from most people. If I spent any time of my life with you, I want to get to know you better. While people might describe me as a pessimist, I don't see why. I believe that most people are good and happy people inside and that most, even if they aren't at the moment, are closer to being happy than they might think. with that said, I'm happy I have so many great friends, and I appreciate all of them, but at the moment there is no one that I know that I can see myself loving more than I already do. so in that sense maybe i'm a bit cynical, though I do appreciate the thoughts

got a lot to write later once work is done. one more week til roswell! then back to school

Your mouth is hiding
You've got smiling eyes
Softly dividing
What they see in your face
From what you feel like inside