Thursday, June 14, 2007

Misfortune Cookies: The Opening Act

Put away the pitch forks. I've got a perfectly good reason why I haven't been 'round these parts.

Two weeks ago, I bought a new camera and went through a shim load of drama and agony to get it. In a nutshell, I wanted to use a $100 American Express giftcard to purchase it from Amazon, but I couldn't figure out how to use it. It seems when I was about to buy, the price always jumped up from my planned price of $297. I eventually figured it out and had amazingly locked in the $297 price right before it jumped to $349. I was a happy victorious chum that night.



Which brings us to the reason I haven't posted in a while... I was originally writing a dedicated entry about how I got the camera called "My Amazon Win", but it got way too long, way too wordy, and way too boring. So I lingered on it for the longest time before I decided to scrap it.

Plus, I was in New York.

Yes sirs, Ellvin Jeremias Kelvin is a doctor! Well, not technically yet because he still has a class to make up. But close enough! We journeyed afar to attend his graduation where Amazing Grace gave a speech because of her Presidential status. But more on that later. This New York vacation has many twists and turns, so I've decided to tell it in several parts; the entire saga being called Misfortune Cookies, and you'll soon understand why.

So let's begin with something that I brought up in a past blog: The Rufio Concert Challenge. If you remember, my favoritous band Rufio played their last ever US concert on June 1, 2007 (the same night as our flight to NY). The plan was to pack early, attend the concert and hope that there weren't any opening acts, and leave at 9:30pm to get back in time to travel to the airport, no problems. So what happened?

Would you believe three fuckin' opening acts??? We got there early and the first band played at 7:55pm. Rufio didn't get on stage till around 10:05pm. I kept staring at my watch and praying that these opening bands would shut the hell up (especially the last one named Over It--man was I so "over" them--the lead singer pranced around and shimmied like a freakin' fairy). Seriously, these guys were like Neverland's Linkin Park. After three songs, the crowd was getting restless and chanting "RUFIO RUFIO RUFIO..." and the lead singer doesn't take the hint, joins in and says "Yeah Rufio will be right out after we play a few more songs." And here's the really annoying part. They wasted so much time with these stupid jokes about hanging out with Rufio and then announced that they were getting out of our hair with one last song. They played it, but then jumped into another song! I swear, I hope they go nowhere, which I'm sure will happen.

At around 9:30pm, I had lost hope, but Timotei insisted that we stay for at least one song or else we'd regret it. So that's what we did.

Rufio finally came on after a long transition set up (they took forever taping down wires, testing the mics, and tuning the guitars). Everyone was cheering. The place was a madhouse. Then, this total fat drunk fucker wedged himself in front of me. This guy was nasty times 40. He had total sweaty backfat boobs that rubbed against my arm. Then he tapped me and asked if I could give him a boost to crowd surf during the first song. I told him that I was only there for one song (and being that I was going to record it with my shiny Canon SD 800IS), I could not do it. Plus, I would have probably thrown out my back lifting that fat idiot. He went on to call me "weak." Whatever. I jumped in front of him to record the show.

Little did I know, my SD card was 1.6 or so gigabytes filled out of a possible 2.0. I had been using the SD card as a thumb drive to transfer files and left an episode of Office/Scrubs on it. So half way through the song, this is what I see:

MEMORY CARD IS FULL

With a curse and a whimper, I lowered my camera and signaled to Timotei that we should start leaving. We reached the front door as the song ended. I got my last glimpse at the band and bolted to the car. It was 10:18pm. I drove the fastest in my life and got home in 10 minutes.

Later I would find out that my video of the concert sounded like ass. So all was just terrible.

To Be Continued.