yeah… so remember that time when I bought a car, and then the transmission dropped, so I took it in to get it fixed and drove a the worst piece of crap loaner ever, and then I got my car back but it wasn’t fixed, so I was back to driving the loaner again, and it started smoking profusely every time you drove more than 100 yards, and then I ended up without my own car for over a month, and when they finally called to say my car was fixed (again), the loaner car dies one minute away from my work, so I have to get it towed and get ANOTHER loaner car to go pick up my real car and take the loaners back, all while dealing with some phantom bug problems in my new apartment which was causing all my clothes to be in garbage bags strewn about the apartment so I can’t actually move around the already tiny space to make dinner or to find a blazer in the morning before I went to work? Yeah… I remember those times. Like they were today.
Oh. They are. I almost forgot, I was too busy waiting for the tow truck to arrive.
STOP THE PRESSES!
Ralph, you were right. I got a job. And its a good one. And pays pretty well.
I’m now (or will be within a week) a web developer for Goldleaf Financial Solutions. This is a very, very good thing.
The last month has been very very interesting to say the least. A month ago, I was planning a wedding with no honeymoon after it, no place nailed down to live in when we get to nashville, and no job to be able to afford the place. Then the apartment opened up. The next day or so, we booked the honeymoon. Then the wedding happened, had a great honeymoon, got a LOT of really awesome and necessary gifts (thanks everyone!!), packed (ugh), moved (ouch) and unpacked (ugh again)… Kristin started orientation two days ago. Yesterday I had an interview for a job. Today, I GOT the job. There is not a lot left that needs to be worked out.
The last few months have been enormously stressful on me. And Kristin. And its been like one of those trust falls, where you stand on a ledge and fall backward and all your friends below have to catch you. It’s damn scary. And in real life, you’re not sure who’s there to catch you. But this all seems to have finally worked itself out nicely. I can finally breathe again.
Well, I guess that means Kristin and I are gonna go out for a nice dinner, buy a sofa, get cell phones and get our apartment internet’d. This is pretty cool.
Kristin and I have moved to Nashville – here we are. We leased an apartment sight-unseen, and I am (still) currently unemployed. And we have to buy a LOT of things. We got lots of nice big things as wedding presents, but we’re missing a lot of little things. For example, we don’t have a scissors anywhere in the apartment. We don’t have a flashlight, a hammer, bath towels, shower curtain rings, tupperware (“more necessary than you would think” – Kristin), enough kitchen shelves, a bed… etc. On the upside, we do have some really incredibly cool and necessary items such as a really nice set of knives (thanks mom and dad), an espresso machine (again, thanks mom and dad), a reallly nice coffee maker (along with some really nice coffee – thanks greenville girls), some very worthwhile 1950′s sci-fi movie posters (featuring none other than the poster to “Attack of the 50 ft Woman” – thanks Kate. You’re right. We probably ARE the only two people who can fully appreciate that gift), really nice cookware, and a wok.
Anyway, the place is pretty small. My studio is once again in a closet – I need a table before I can set it up though. Any box we have to store is fewer cubic feet I have in my studio. We have to buy some kind of other shelf thing for our kitchen because there is really barely any shelving space. But its in a really nice location. Its a block from a large grocery store and a pretty well-stocked hardware store. Its about one mile to Kristin’s building at school, and about 50 ft from a bus stop that goes straight to her building’s door. In between the school and our little place is a little used bookstore – probably Nashville’s best, a really really cool unpretentious high-end guitar store with actually pretty good prices and a good selection of vintage instruments as well – not that I can afford it anyway, but still… A panera (where I am sitting right now enjoying free internet, free pizza, and free iced tea – good deal), a trendy cute little taco place (think mini qdoba with a chicago hotdog stand attitude rather than t-bell), and.. well I guess that’s about it. A little ways down the road the other direction is a small but nice mall with a dillards and a macy’s. there is a target nearby, where we recently dropped $250 on little tchotsch. Anyway, that about wraps it up for now. I’m on my PDA and I don’t have pictures yet so you’ll have to wait until later for that. OH and i’m about 100% sure my webhost (slackhost.net) disappeared. Like they vanished. And with them, my website. So I’m currently in the market for good cheap hosting with PHP, MySQL support. If anyone has any suggestions, please send them to MatthewCGood – at – gmail.com. Oh yeah -I almost forgot. My mailing address is:
Matthew Good
2014 Linden Ave #9
Nashville, TN 37212
I’m pretty sure that’s right anyway. I’ll post a correction if its wrong. Love you all.
Hola, everyone. Look at what I am currently seeing.
Well…. WOW. Let me tell you what things have been like the last few days, then I’ll explain myself.
slksdfalkjsdjfklakljsdfa!!!!!!!!
That’s what its felt like. So many things are so very different from the way they were just 96 hours ago. For starters, 96 hours ago I was a single man. I was my own financial entity. If I were in a coma, the doctors would ask my parents if they wanted to pull the plug. Now I am married to Kristin Hawley, erm, Kristin GOOD. If she’s hurt, I’m in charge. We are a financial unit. It was just 72 hours ago that I was dancing and still taking care of various wedding-related details. 48 hours ago, I was shopping for some very last-minute items for my next adventure. Less than 90 minutes of sleep later, the next day begins in a nondescript hotel in Oak Brook, Illinois, US and ends in a resort 2 hours south of Cancun in Mexico. Today, here I am, on a beach on the Caribbean, after a GREAT day, looking out at the (currently) dark green ocean, sitting next to my new wife, writing to you. This is what I bought a PDA for.
We’re staying at a cute little resort called “Maya Tankah by Freedom Paradise.” It’s not a particularly exquisite affair, that’s why I said cute. But its way more our speed than the ultra-touristy more upscale places. This place is by NO MEANS a shack – don’t misunderstand me. The rooms are cute, the AC works well, we have a gorgeous ocean view (see below), and all the food and alcohol you can shove into your body. I am currently coming off a wonderful buzz induced from almost 32 ounces of a potent Blue Lagoon.
The pop music here is SO much better than US pop. I mean the beach bar here plays music all day long – and it must be just Mexi-pop, but its all pretty good. Nothing particularly terrible. I heard at least three songs today that I though were actually pretty good. More than I can say for US radio, anyway. Maybe its better when you can’t understand all the innane things they are saying.
Its getting dark. I kinda hafta use the bathroom. And dinner’s up. I’ll be blogging more when I get the chance. Peace!!
7:41 8-9-06
Soo… I asked Kristin Hawley to marry me last night.
And she said yes.
I don’t know if you know this, but… It’s kind of a big deal.
Okay, so full story – A bunch of my friends from Greenville were in Chicago for new years’ and stuff, and before I had decided that I was going to pop the question on that day. Well anyway I got the ring ordered and alll of that… and bided my time.
So we spent the day downtown with them, which was cold, exhausting, and fun. We walked everywhere, from millenium park to michigan ave to giordanos to navy peir, and eventually ended up at buckingham fountain for the fireworks. About a minute to midnight i sorta pulled her aside and told her to close her eyes while I got out the ring and got down on one knee. When she opened her eyes, I asked her to marry me. After she sorta realized what was going on she said yes and we kissed and then I told her to put the ring on, silly, so she did and we kissed again. About then we got our wits back just in time for the final countdown and fireworks. It was a pretty good night, if I do say so myself.
EDIT: Here’s a cute pic of us a few weeks after the fact:
this is old news by now. but i promised. so here goes. this is from the weekend of June 10th through June 13th, written the night of the 13th.
Just got back from Greenville recording Solafide. Its 10:13. I’m exhausted. Solafide stuf sounds really good though in general, so that is good. makes all the work worthwhile
Transcendent moment of the day: Driving back home, huge storm. Lightening. Rain. Wind. Rain. The outside was completely grey. One of the worst storms I’ve ever driven through. Thought at one point I might see a funnel cloud any minute. The storm begins to clear up. I see orange sky through a slight tear in the clouds.
Suddenly, the sun makes its landing on the horizon and sets teh world on fire. All around what used to be pure grey is pure bright polished bronze. “The Gloaming” finishes playing and now “There There” begins. It is still raining, and I am having trouble seeing, but not because of the grey downpour, but because of the pure horizontal column of orange light that turns the blacktop, the grass, the street signs, the other cars, the houses, and the sky to radiant light. I’m awestruck, then lightening flashes across the sky like vericose veins. I round the corner and the sky in front is blue, and orange behind. Thom Yorke is telling me there is always a siren singing me to shipwreck. I am presented with the most vivid, full rainbow I’ve ever seen in my life. In a blue sky. Surrounded by golden landscape. The rainbow is so vivid, in fact, that a second, concentric rainbow is necessary to frame the first. More lightening. “We are accidents waiting to happen.” And it is STILL raining.
And that’s pretty much my story…
Ok OKAY so NOW HERE THIS!!! I have a digital camera. It is small. it is 7 megapixels. It has a 2.5inch lcd. it is sexy. it has good manual features. I have a gigabyte SD card for it. I love it. I will be posting my life to the server in my basement on a more regular basis now that I have a camera. to see what I did tonight (including a video of me screwing up a guitar part in the studio), cruise on over to the Random Life Gallery at The Gallery Nouveaux. It is the hip new thing to do.
So we didn’t make it to Canada, sadly, but Holland was probably just as surreal. It all started when Kristin and I were in Ann Arbor (Ypsilanti, actually) visiting some of her U of M friends for a weekend. We we looking on the map, and what’s this big pink thing over there??? …Turns out it was CANADA, yes THE GREAT WHITE NORTH. We all of the sudden had the urge to go to CANADA, especially me who has never left the country, even to go to CANADA. So we continued the visit with the plan in mind to go to canada on monday. We did fun stuff like hang out in Ann Arbor eating middle eastern food and listening to some crazy band while eating a lunch we packed in two canoe’s we tied together on the Huron River. So come sunday night we decide to make sure we can actually get both IN and OUT of Canada, since it would be a disaster to be stranded there. Mind you, it is one thing to live in a spectacle for a day, its a whole other thing to become a part of it. Especially unwillingly. So come to find out that a drivers license will get us in to canada, and I have just gotten my new fancy “over 21″ license made, so I was allll good. (A funny side note about my driverse licenses. I had had longish hair before my drivers license was made, but on a whim decided to cut it short right before i went to get it. I then let it grow out again. It got really realyl long and there was a period of about a year and a quarter where I didn’t have a haircut… But then a week ago or so I got it cut reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally short again (maybe you can catch me on the webcam before i go back to school. I’ll be recording morons for three days this week.) and I am guessssing that it won’t stay short for very long. So all my driverse license pics don’t have a representative hair style ever. Ok story over.) Back to the US Customs website where they were all like you need proof of ID AND proof of citizenship. Proof of ID is drivers license and proof of citizenship is passport or birth certificate. DOh! We came to the consensus that they probably would not ask us for them, but we didn’t want to run the risk of getting stuck in the big State to the North. So we went to holland michigan instead because we were in the mood for something wierd and random and stupid. We saw windmills and dancers flinging their shoes at people and fed the goats and rode on some little spinny ride. The street organ was pretty cool though. So that was pretty much the trip, maybe I can get copies of the pictures and post them.
Read More »
mood: kinda tired and my eye hurts.
music: lots of bad stuff on tv and in the car. Oh, and the normals.
Ok, so where to begin? I’m trying to install php as a module in apache on my webserver. I downloaded the stuff and its just this collection of binaries… no installer, don’t tell you were to put it. Anyway.
Then I have been recording my friend gary. I’m supposed to be producing this album. He doesn’t really have “songs written” per se… So I’m ending up writing all the music to it pretty much. Which makes me sad, because some of the music is good and I might have wanted to use them in my own stuff at some point. One of the songs has cool contrapuntal sad organ in it, and the other one kinda modulates to parallel minor and back every few measures. Good stuff, I might steal backk the music anyway since I wrote it and all. Oh yeah, i was also supposed to have been paid for this. Se la vie.
Oh and in the comic/absurd department, the other day I went downtown to a tobacco shop and later to a bar to smoke cigars with some of my church friends and my old youth pastor. So anyway, let THAT sink in for a bit.
I just finished reading “My Name Is Asher Lev” by Chaim Potok. Good book about a conservative jewish boy trying to reconcile a prodigious artistic gift with his family, friends, and religion. Seeing as how lots of people including myself have dilemmas such as this at some point I was hoping for a happy ending. There is no happy ending. I’m thoroughly depressed. He is still a young man painting honestly when a specific painting of his causes his longtime friends to abandon him angrily, his parents to reject him and never be reconciled to him (though there were many attempts), and the leader of his hassidic jewish community forces him to leave. He ends up moving back to europe without reconcialliation from anyone. I’m thoroughly depressed.
Kate, dangit…
Good quote by picasso that encapsulates my aesthetic philosophy. “Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth.”
