ghostlight's blog

Hi honey, how's Boston?!

Okay, let's try this again.

Once upon a time I decided this should be some sort of travelogue, but that requires one to actually travel, which requires one to have (a) time and (b) money, and I don't have much of the latter because I am soon to be without much of the former.  Everyday I think about just hopping back on the train and poking around in New York or Boston for the day--I know enough of the latter to get around, I think, but New York is a mess in my head.  And why does it take less than three hours to get from Baltimore to New York but ~five from New York to Boston (on the regional, because I do have to pay a little [$5! my poor wallet] for the Acela)?  I was always under the impression that New York was relatively close to Boston but I guess it's sort of halfway.  And that shows you how much I travel, and why this will not necessarily work.

In the meantime I've been kind of hooked on the Dismemberment Plan, which is unfortunate because they broke up three years ago.  I guess it's taken almost that long for them to really grow on me; I'll be the first to admit that they're not for everyone.  There's a certain amount of spasticness and discord and chaos present in almost every D-Plan song that can be jarring to the wrong ears.  But the lyrics are irrepressibly clever and I'm really a sucker for anything danceable anyway.

That, and Travis is cute.

So in this post I present to you:
Five of My Favorite Dismemberment Plan Songs Which May or May Not Be In Any Particular Order and Also Maybe With Accompanying Commentary If I Feel Like It.

The Dismemberment Plan - The Ice Of Boston

01.  The Ice of Boston
Easily my favorite D-Plan song ever.  Partly because of lyrics like:

Mainly because knowing about that would involve knowing some pathetic, ridiculous, and absolutely true things about myself that I’d rather not admit to right now.

But mostly because of this: 
Woke up at 3 A.M. with the radio on, that Gladys Knight and the Pips song on
About how she’d rather live in his world with him than live in her own world alone
And I lay there, head spinning, trying to fall asleep, and I thought to myself: “Oh, Gladys, girl, I love you but, OH!  GET A LIFE!”
Brilliant. And hilarious.

The Dismemberment Plan - The Face of the Earth

02.   The Face of the Earth
I don't know what it is that I like best about this one.  I mean, clearly it's a great song.  But it's somewhere between the opening strains and the lyrics about little details like the "fingers hooked around my belt" and the idea of only knowing someone for a short time but grieving when they disappear.  Or something like that, I guess.  :D

Already this is getting all disorganized with the pictures and all but oh well, deal with it.  (Please~!)

The Dismemberment Plan - The City

03.  The City

All I ever say now is good-bye.

Just listen until you get to that line.

This is the hard part.  I'm so skewing my Last.fm data.  Okay, we'll go with

04.  The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich

The Dismemberment Plan - The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich

Because it's frantic and fun to sing and fun, period. 
Joe got caught on board a boat with seven tons of opium / in a Singapore harbor--color us embarassed!

05.   Superpowers
The polar opposite of The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich, both lyrically and in

The Dismemberment Plan - Superpowers

terms of Travis' vocal quality--much deeper, subdued, that they almost don't sound like the same person.  I think this was also the first song I ever heard by the Plan so it has a warm fuzzy place in my heart.  :)

I've got to stop now or I'll be here all night.  You can hear mostly everything they've done at the website, if you can put up with the RealAudio. 
Or you can do like Joel did and just find a torrent somewhere.  :)

Anyway, other songs I love but can't be arsed to put up here: 
Bra, The Things That Matter, The Love War, Do The Standing Still, One Too Many Blows to the Head, What Do You Want Me To Say?, The First Anniversary of Your Last Phone Call, A Life of Possibilities, Memory Machine, I Love A Magician, Time Bomb, Ellen and Ben, Gyroscope, Girl O'Clock (oh man, Girl O'Clock), Back and Forth, and Close to Me.

I think Maaya had the right idea with just doing text links.  I feel like I made this with Homestead or something.  And there's mostly accurate lyrics here, but you're on your own because I'm tired of updating now.  :)

Next:  Pinback or something.

Like a train across the valley.

I just realized that my happy little urban scene [as seen above] comes complete with shoes thrown over the power lines.  Classy!

Tomorrow I have to:

• Assert myself over this $15 T-Mobile bill.  I took it out of the box TWICE.  This constitutes a $10 monthly service charge?
• Buy some of this.  Oh, and a card.
• Head out to Frederick sometime before rush hour.*
• If I forget clothes I will hate myself.  And a pillow.  And a blanket.  Because...I'm sleeping in the car?  ;_;

*it's a 1.5 hour drive that I'm undertaking alone and I will in all likelihood get bored, so if anyone wants a phonecall, say hey.

Whilst I wait for a swanky new computer so that I can actually do some work so that I can post it here, I'm still stuck in the predicament of having no idea what to write in here.  Being unemployed and sick, I've been watching a lot of the Travel Channel.  I've probably watched more Travel Channel programming in the past week than in my entire life.  Most Haunted was the gateway drug (faked or not, it's entertaining) (and I apparently cannot get enough of seeing people's freaky-turned-negative-from-night-vision-camera eyeballs).  But I think a lot of it's been that, honestly, I love traveling, the whole bit: hotels; wandering aroundexploring, it's exploring;even the actual process of traveling is fun.  I spent twelve hours in a car with Jeremy and wasn't bored once.  (I didn't get a chance to, the way he was driving.)

So I think, having just come off a week-long soujourn in a new and exciting place and having to come back to plain old suburbia again for God knows how long, I've just been trying to recreate that.  Perhaps before I return to the land of the gainfully employed, I'll pop up for another fix.

Kings of Convenience - The Build-Up

And then after that, it's just you and me, Samantha Brown.

Not my favorite Kings of Convenience song (that would be Misread), but I really do quite like the female vocals at the end.  And it's vaguely travel-themed!  So bonus points.  AND dude is vaguely cute, so even more bonus points.*

*Redeemable in participating locations only.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

Fortunately this requires nothing but pajamas.  And even then...

I, uh, have no idea what to do with this.  I think maybe one day when I actually have some animations handy to put up I'll post them here.  That is, until I actually cough up some money and time and get a real website.  :/

The hard part is that I've got my hands in way too many things.  Five LJ accounts (one of which is paid, and one of which is dead), Last.fm (okay, so that's different, sort of), and now whatever this is.

I had a chat with Jeremiah last night and reading over it now, it's really kind of funny, mostly because I say things like, "If there were, you know, actual dudes abounding, it would help."

Honestly.  Dudes.  Abounding.

I talk like a term paper with swear words.

Tilly and the Wall - Lost Girls

As my olive branch to the world of VOX, here's a...thing.  I found this song a little while ago and it was quite good.  It's written about the artwork of Henry Darger.  The percussion is TAP DANCING.  That's kind of awesome all on its own.