Virtually Home

Sunday was Mother's Day, so after our traditional family gathering, I headed over to Cain's with my parents (because they have great taste in music) to see Wilco. The Smith Westerns opened. I had heard their name before, but didn't know who they were until halfway through their set. The sound wasn't mixed well, and the lead singer's vocals were half unintelligible, which was a whole lot better than this between-songs commentary, which was entirely unintelligible. Nothing in their set stood out particularly. It was two guitars, a bass and a drum kit, playing reasonably predictable pop rock. I couldn't vouch for the vocals, since I'm not really sure what they were about. The singer/lead guitarist and the bassist seem to be brothers, with the same slouchy posture and the same curtain of hair hanging in front of their faces. There was a photographer walking around in the crowd trying to get a clear shot of them -- I guess his press pass was limited to the fi...

On Friday, after a little bit of scrambling to print concert tickets on account of complications involving multiple malfunctioning printers, non-access to computer labs and missing ID cards, Zack and I picked Jacob up and, after a brief stop to add fluid to Zack's power steering system, we headed south on I-35 to Dallas. The weather was happy and sunny, and we basically had a sing-along all the way down. We ate some really terrible wings at a Church's Chicken attached to a gas station and headed to House of Blues. (Prepare yourself -- all of my photos from this show were taken on my poor iPhone, whose camera lens is scratched.) Finding the line proved to be kind of difficult, as there wasn't much of one, but we ended up inside behind three OU students (they were the extent of the line) who'd come down for the show and who informed us that, unless we spent $15 dollars at the bar or in the gift shop, we might not end up so close to the front as we would expect. A fift...

News is all over my Facebook feed and the television that Osama bin Laden is dead. I think probably this means less to the overall war effort than the news anchors are making it out to be, but I have the television on mute, and while I watch the footage of cheering crowds gathering in front of the White House, I'm thinking about how strange a creature time is. I remember debating whether or not we should enter the war with my classmates in a middle school English class. I was the only one among the students to think that maybe war was a bad idea. Facebook didn't exist yet, and neither did the iPhone I just texted my brother with. We just cracked open our first bottle of homebrew milk stout, and President Obama just addressed the nation -- who could have guessed he would have been elected? It took ten years, but they found the figurehead everyone was hoping to topple from the beginning. And all I can think about is how weird it is to have seen ten years pass.