all you ever talk about is dying and it's getting kind of old

so this weekend we went to new york, just for some fun to get away from the confines of philadelphia for a bit. it was a good weekend, despite a few things. we had origionally planned on going up to see our friends biffy clyro play at madison square theater with the queens of the stone age. however, we never recieved an e-mail back from them or their tour manager about the show. we decided to go up anyway just because of the current living situation and all, it would be something more fun to do than sit and sulk and worry about where i should sleep. anyway, we went up and visited the metropolitan museum of art and it was really cool. we saw some awesome photographs and paintings and sculpture and armor. (my favorite paintings were: 'a view of paris with furtive pedestrians' and 'man with a lollipop' the latter was painted by pablo picasso and the former by jean dubuffet). after the museum we walked around looking for a place to eat, stopping several times to see puppies and ask every fruit stand if they had grapples (a grape/apple fusion, tasting like a grape, feeling like an apple), but with no luck. then we parted ways with brooks' girlfriend maggie and headed over to madison square, where all the confusion began.

we subwayed all over the place and walked what seemed like miles to get there, even though we had no tickets or confirmation of guestlist. first we circled the entire building looking for biffy's tour bus... to no avail. then we circled again 2 more times to try and find the entrance (madison square theater and garden aren't very well mixed up and is very confusing, as they use the name theater and garden interchangibly throughout their signs.) finaly we found the spot, went in and got our bags checked and thoroughly pissed off the security for having so many bags. we got in and tried everything we could go get a hold of them, calling UK #'s and american interchange #'s and everything... but nothing was working. finally, some strange girl came over and stared at us a while and then, as if she was a charachter from the shining, handed over 2 40 dollar tickets to us for free. this was pretty awesome, but alas we had 3 people and only 2 tickets. finally we decided to just act like bigshots and see if we could swindle tickets out of the door people, or at least some information on the whereabouts of their bus, or them. we went up there and found out that they HAD guest listed us but with only 2 tickets... and so we were very lucky to have gotten those free tickets. we decided to go eat since the show hadn't started yet. on the way back we met an old friend of nicole's (one of the craziest coincidence yet, if you can believe it.) we caught up for a minute and then went into the show... only to be diverted. we had to part ways, people with guest list tickets went one way and other tickets went another. they sent us on a wild goose chase and it was 10 minutes before a bum helped us out and told us where the entrance was (outside, around and down a city block). by the time we had gotten in, biffy clyro was just finished and the only act left was queens of the stone age. we met up with brooks and maggie, watched 2 songs of queens of the stone and left at our cue. as soon as he starting singing about 'everyone knows you dance like you fuck' it was our time to leave.

after the show, still no luck finding biffy, so we decided to search the city for mcdonals veggie burgers (which i swear i'd had before, but none of these mcdonalds had any idea what the heck i was talking about.) we ended up at a coffee shop near NYU... a cool place with scrabble boards and fair trade coffee. we played scrabble and lost by 1 point. i was dissapointed... but they stole our word (axed) and that's what put them over the top and won with.... darn. we went home and watched videos on youtube for a while before going to sleep.

the next day was equally as hectic, we went to some hipster brunch place where i ate dry oats with soymilk and nuts... it was a strange and unfulfilling 10 dollar meal, but i guess that's new york for you. then we did another crazy subway trip and saw 2 different mariachi bands play for us. went to a thrift store only to find lots of hilarious shirts and jackets, but nothing worth more than a joke. then we rushed around for a few hours before we had to catch the bus, goign to h&m where i got a new badass michael jackson type jacket. we were going to do a youtube video about halloween, but ran out of time and will be doing that on tuesday.

tuesday is going to be another new york trip for jd and jake's birthday and perhaps a spot on cobra starships cooking show.... hopefully haha.

here are some reccomendations:

i reccomend that everyone goes to http://www.coldplay.com/ and looks through their 'timeline' of events in their career. it's quite inspiring and also amazing that they kept so many things from their past just to show us all.

also here's an amazingly hilarious video:


and here are the pictures from the weekend... the museum ones are very grainy because my camera doesn't take kindly to high film speeds.




















brendan