Brian's quite remarkable blog of wonder.

well, yesterday i finally saw Office Space, which was a funny movie but probably not one that i would want to watch a second time. today aaron and jake and danny and dan and megan and i watched The Talented Mr. Ripley, which i probably would have liked a whole lot more if it had not been 2 AM. i ended up leaving in the middle and walking downtown. bye brian.

i like Iowa City, because i can walk around downtown at 3 in the morning by myself and feel perfectly safe doing so. nothing was open, though, as it was extremely early on a monday morning.

i came back and finished watching the movie, and then we went home. the moral of the story: if it's really late at night and you feel like watching a movie, ALWAYS check first to see how long it is...

sometimes i get the feeling that danny's roommates, Chad and Brandon, despise us because we have nothing to do but to go to danny's place and watch movies at obscene hours of the night.

i believe tomorrow there will be camping at Jay's new house in Tiffin. hooray!

this is worth dialing back up to the internet and loading this web page again: today jake and aaron and jesse and i were in the Wal-Mart parking lot, and we were observing this huge truck that was parked laterally across three spaces, marveling at the sheer enormity of it, and then we walked around and saw that its license plate number was "407 BIG". i was in stitches.

my feet hurt. what a long day. i got directly out of my bed this morning and rode my bike all the way to the west side of town to the Cambus office for work. i could have driven my car, which now works dandily, and paid a few bucks for parking, but i chose to ride my bike which i think shows incredible strength of character. and then i rode my bike all the way home, where i could have watched a movie or done any of a number of slobbish things, but instead i chose to finish drawing today's page of All About Black Holes which was already late, as usual. and then i went BACK to work, doing a cleanup shift, which wasn't quite as hellish as cleanups usually are.

it's jake's birthday! aaron and i got him a bag of jelly beans and a dr pepper.

i like prokofiev's sixth symphony, the third movement of which i am currently listening to.

today a guy i went to high school with saw me riding my bike on the Pentacrest and said "Brian! hi! how's it going?" like we were old sea dogs or something, which we weren't; i had very rarely talked to him at all. the reason was thus: he was surrounded by a retinue of what looked like prospective U of I sorority girls, and he wanted to make them think he had lots of friends and political power, and ultimately get them, one by one, into bed. i'm so fucking cynical. i'm having a cynical day, which usually happens on days when i have to wake up by other-than-natural means.

i bought a Tom Petty CD. he is playing with his Heartbreakers in Cedar Rapids on monday. i'm not going to the concert, but they've been playing a lot of his songs on KRNA and 100.7 and i've really been getting into the stuff. good for me.

Trek Fest is this weekend! according to Star Trek lore, Capt. James T. Kirk was born in Riverside, Iowa, and so every summer there's a big hoo-ha there. the guys and i might go.

i got my car back, at long last! the air conditioner works, just in time for a cold front to move through. but i shan't complain.

we had some pretty exciting storms today. good stuff.

good lord, it was hot today. at work i felt like a miracle worker... i happened to get one of the few buses in the Cambus fleet whose A/C had been recharged. many deities were praised as people stepped onto the bus out of the 95-degree heat and humidity. there is so much construction downtown! i did not know it was possible for that much construction to exist.

i went on another good long bike ride today, but i broke my vegetarian streak by eating the last piece of Jesse's frozen pizza.

i'm glad that my work schedule allows me to sleep in most of the time and do things like take long walks at 3:00 AM.

tomorrow evening the Klezmer group that Chris, Aaron and I are forming is rehearsing for the first time! exciting.

wow, this whole wellness thing may just work out. since Friday i haven't been eating any meat and i've been cycling every day. plus, i've succumbed to the hypocrisy of diet pop. oh my. i never thought i would take sugar-free beverages seriously... i guess it happens to you when you turn 20.

today at work they made me do the thing that i really hoped i would never have to do: back a bus out of the barn. backing buses is something that i lie awake at night fearing. but although it took me a while, i succeeded with flying colors! who's rocking?

the only way this day could be more successful is if i actually finish tomorrow's AABH on time. we'll see. right now i'm going to ride my bike to Hy-Vee and pick up some Rice-A-Roni.

speaking of Kurt Vonnegut, apparently he's a really big fan of Phish. here's a picture of him in some musical performance with, among other people, Jon Fishman (Phish drummer), playing a vacuum cleaner. and here is a piece of art that Vonnegut did, when asked to design a mock album cover for his favorite recording artist. i would imagine that Kurt Vonnegut and Phish have similar fan bases, so this sort of makes sense.

i went on a long bike ride this morning, which was really fun. i really should make a habit of that.

it's really hot outside, and it's making me not want to do anything.
i just realized that i haven't eaten any meat for at least three days! i wonder how long i can be a vegetarian. one week? one month? anything is possible!

yesterday i did the coolest thing in the world: it turns out that my 7-hour Saturday driving shift is just long enough to listen to all nine of Beethoven's symphonies. so i recorded the complete Karajan set onto three 120-minute tapes, and wow. Beethoven marathon. that made an afternoon of Hawkeye Interdorm comparatively fun. perhaps i'll do something similar next week with Beatles albums or something. yes.

i am in ecstacy.

i was reminded today of something Kurt Vonnegut likes to say: "if this isn't nice, then what is?"

it's summer, and early summer at that! most of my friends are back in town. and Christer is living in Iowa City for the duration of the vacation, which is a great thing. my creative life is rich and full. i can still have a really good time without drinking alcohol. i'm getting my own place in August. i have a great job. i have rediscovered the joys of cycling. in exactly a month, i'm going to see TWO phish concerts and am going camping in Wisconsin with amazingly cool people. i am currently in absolutely no physical pain. i have a lot of Vanilla Coke in the fridge. the music of Prokofiev continues to inspire me profoundly. i seem to have kicked the habit of analyzing myself to the point of madness. i will get my car back very soon and the air conditioning will work. i am 20 years old, which is not really THAT old.

so yeah. ecstacy.

Aaron came home yesterday. excellent. he has a huge beard!

i've basically been watching a movie every single day. nothing wrong with that, i guess. we watched Empire Strikes Back. i love the pants game: "empty your pants of questions" ..... "put captain Solo in the cargo pants" .. etc etc etc.

i have a huge Winamp playlist: 1,937 files, a total of 128 hours, 15 minutes and 20 seconds. and it grows every day! so large. i put it on "shuffle" and it pleases me with hours of enjoyable music.

today i went with my dad and step mom to Panera, where i worked for four and a half awful months. remind me never to go there again. the second i stepped through that door and was hit by the smell of window cleaner and coffee grounds and heard that awful music from the satellite radio i was transported back to last August when i started working there every day from 7 AM - 4 PM without a break (which is as illegal as it sounds). it really made me appreciate the awesomeness of my current job.

i've been adjusting admirably to not having a car. it's been a week since i took it into the shop and i think they may have it ready tomorrow. i've been riding my bike a lot, and i may do so more often henceforth to conserve gas, etc.

it's already mid June! this summer seems already to be going by faster than it's supposed to. i guess it's because last summer i was living day to day, and this summer, because i have a job and a fixed weekly work schedule, i live week to week. which somehow makes it go faster.

i saw a funny movie today in the theatre: A Mighty Wind. the whole movie i was trying to figure out who the bass player was and why he sounded like Principal Skinner, and in the credits i learned that he WAS Principal Skinner, AKA Harry Shearer. now i really, really need to see This Is Spinal Tap. the movie also has that eyebrows and glasses guy from American Pie who is suddenly in every movie and TV show lately, Eugene Levy. while i understand that he cowrote the screenplay, his acting seemed really overdone. and it's too late for me to expand upon that, so i am now going to walk to Hy-Vee and meet danny.

the Three Dog Night version of "Your Song" is so much better than the original Elton John version. i don't normally side with the interpreters over the creator himself, but damn. i've always been a little bit indifferent to Elton John's style of piano playing (not to mention singing and lyric writing, but i won't touch that here), but it's not just that: his version is just so overproduced... strings, flute, harp, acoustic bass, yarg! too much! it has the tonal sensitivity of a bag of Skittles! i don't like it. Three Dog Night added a cool guitar riff and replaced the gushy piano with rock organ, and scraped off all of the frosting to create a low-calorie rock and roll treat. the moral: a love song can be austere and meaningful at the same time.

today i drove East Campus Shuttle. i ate at China Star.

Christer came by this evening and we hung out with jake and danny, with a little help from jake's minivan. interesting. we woke jesse up and made him come with us. that was good.

sometimes i get incredibly paranoid that nobody, including my friends, takes me at all seriously. i guess i shouldn't complain. i sometimes find myself completely left out, which i have gotten used to in real life but not among my own friends. i guess it's because the things that are important to me aren't usually the same things that are important to everyone else.

and i've been pretty pissed off at this damn sex-obsessed society lately. maybe i should just chill out. that has been a reliable solution to a lot of my problems lately.

i am going to try to begin arranging the Simpson Security klezmer song for our band tonight, but i might go to bed instead.

all right, it appears to work, so let's blog.

this has been an incredibly eventful summer so far (well, more so than summers usually are for me), and i have not had very much time to just stop and soak it all in. that is the purpose, then, of this blog. for some reason, i feel that every moment i live is infinitely important and must be archived as completely as possible. i'm going to try to write in this daily, and so i'll try to make every day write-about-able.

now then. to set the scene. i am Brian Lenth. i was born on 1 June 1983, which makes me 20 years and 9 days old at the time of this writing. i live in Iowa City, Iowa where i attend the University of Iowa (although i am becoming incredibly skeptical of "higher learning" - probably more about that later). i have a good, meaningful and well-paying job: i drive buses at Cambus, connecting people with places for no fare. i still live with parents on the outskirts of town, but i've signed a lease for an apartment downtown, which i am moving into on August 2nd of this year. that's just about enough information, i think. no need to go into detail, as i doubt anyone other than my future self is reading this.

today i took my car to the mechanic to get that clutch bearing fixed. or whatever. i don't know too much about cars, and i hope that some day i will. i just want to be able to open the hood and know what all that shit is, i guess. anyway, clutch bearing.

then i rode my bike to work. drove a pretty much perfect shift, i think!

then i rode my bike home. there are some really cool back roads and alleys in this city that i hadn't really explored before. i want to be a photographer.

jake has been blabbing about the Atkins Diet, and i'm realizing that i consume WAY too many carbohydrates. i drink so much pop it's not even hilarious.

anyway, this evening Andrea picked up me and Jake and Danny and we all went to Wal-Mart, which is what people like us do, i suppose. i bought a Nirvana album and a Huge pillow and some gummi bears (carbohydrates!) and we all went home, i guess. jeez.

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