SLAMMY'S

A few months back I took on a sort of on-call job with City Weekly's marketing staff. Whenever they need some extra help they send me an email and if I can do it, I get paid in "trade"--mostly certificates for local restaurants, etc. that the paper advertises for. Last night I went to help out with the SLAMMY's competition. It's sort of like a Battle of the Bands and these were the preliminaries. The first two groups were some hip-hop groups. Who knew Salt Lake had local hip-hop groups? Sounds naive, but even though every place has local bands, I never considered us having local hip-hop bands. The first one was pretty good, but the second seemed to be trying too hard to look bad-A. The fourth band was my favorite, sort of psychodelic-type rock, they were really awesome. Throughout this, I passed out anti-smoking T-shirts to the crowds of smokers all around me and counted ballots. My throat is still sore this morning.

I seem to have a problem always over-committing myself. I love doing events because you meet new people, see live music / movies / art, etc. and all of that makes me feel alive, but when I'm doing too many things it may be better to just stay at home for once. I want to get the most out of life that I can, but only if it's meaningful.

The night before last Tyler took me to sushi for the first time. We went to Ginza with our good friend Tim who is moving soon. Ginza was cool because it was small like most Japanese restaurants are. I think that's why I like sandwich shops so much, maybe just because they're small.

Around 2 in the morning that night I woke up to loud banging on our door. Ty's brother and his friend were staying at our house that night and so I thought maybe they'd gotten locked out (they went to the store when we went to bed). Tyler went to check though and they were both on our living room floor, so he opened the door to two huge policemen with flashlights and a dog. The dog had followed the scent of a suspect up to our very front porch. I guess there'd been a drive-by shooting somewhere and after the cops followed the suspects cars and saw him crash, he took off on foot. So they searched our house, but my heart was pounding like crazy. I kept thinking, what if he's hiding in our yard? Our basement? It really sort of freaked me out.

I'm so tired today. I can't wait to go watch the superbowl to see April's new baby and play with Lanik.