#177 Mind Bullets

I'd like to take this moment to apologize for this photo. Just awful.

Anywho, this is one of my favorite shirts. Another threadless shirt of course, since they've really cornered the market on clever shirt slogans. You can find it here.

Sadly no funny anecdotes for you today. Try again later.

#175 Suck It, Morrissey.

I believe I last wore this to one of Darrin's BYOBBQFFs. If you are unfamiliar with the BYOBBQFF concept it is as follows: Darrin provides the grill and the grillmastery and you provide the food items of your choosing. So you Bring Your Own BarBeQue and make Friends Forever, or something like that. These usually also involve some Rock Band and hot tubbing.

BYOBBQs are perhaps my favorite common party gathering theme. Now we've had some pretty fantastic ones; Ugly Prom, Cinco de Seis, Rex Manning Day; but there's something nice about the casualness of the BYOBBQ. I mean, it's a small gathering with close friends centered around good food. What isn't comforting about that?

This is another tasty shirt from Threadless and you can find this specific shirt here.

The title of this post by the way is inspired by perhaps the whiniest song I've ever heard. Morrissey a man that built a career on being whiny and sad wrote the song "Meat is Murder". You can perhaps guess what the lyrics are about. I was going to post some of them, but they're awfully morbid and dramatic and would taint the warm fuzzies I've got from recalling the BYOBBQs of yesteryear (plus we musn't dwell. We can't. Not on Rex Manning Day!).

#149 "I would go out tonight, but I haven't got a stitch to wear"

The Smiths seem like an appropriate band to be listening to around Valentine's Day. Morrissey is probably the saddest of the sad singers out there, though he's in close competition with Elliot Smith and Conor Oberst. Morrissey had a bigger flair for the dramatic though (just listen to his song "Meat is Murder". That man takes his vegetarianism very seriously) in his singing.

I listened to The Smiths a lot when I was all teen angsty (now I'm just 20s angsty so I listen to songs that are sad without being angry I guess). Some of it is still pretty darn catchy but the life and death aspect to the love that Morrissey speaks of seems a little over the top now. Actually now that I'm going through some of my more favorite Smiths tracks, I kind of forgot how much I loved them. They're pretty great, just super duper dramatic.

Exhibit A:

They actually have quite a few surprisingly upbeat songs in their repertoire, at least sonically. Girlfriend in a Coma, This Charming Man, and Panic for example are all pretty bouncy songs, just with off lyrical content. They seem to have mastered the art of the happy sounding sad song.

#147 Vanessa Hudgens Sucks

Yes that is indeed a High School Musical shirt. Really this might be girlier than even the Twilight shirt that I own.

#132 The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything

This is one of my very favorite T-shirts. I mean, I'm pretty much over the whole pirate thing, it's just a cool looking shirt with a neat design. Yesterday Brandon, Tim, and I went on a research trip to Disneyland to take some photos for reference since our theme for the Davis trip this year is Disney/Disneyland. All very scientific, hard work I assure you.

Though it actually ended up being somewhat difficult since it's a little awkward taking a photo of someone that doesn't know you're taking a photo of them. One cast member (which I'm later going to abbreviate to CM) seemed particularly displeased to be the subject of Brandon's shot.

Anywho, while in line for Thunder Mountain we randomly spotted Darrin and Tanya. They were there using their free tickets that we got from the Disney Half-marathon so they were spending the whole day. Me being the hedonist that I am I couldn't turn down a day at Disneyland so I stayed at the park with them when Brandon and Tim went home around lunch time. Darrin and Tanya's friends Tim L. and Cierra (also L.) met up with us along with their two young sons. Now I had heard from various people about how adorable their first son Jack was. I come from a gigantic family so I'm used to being surrounded by cute little babies and toddlers. However, having met little Jack I've got to say, that is one cuuuute kid. I was a little worried he might be a bit put off by my presence since we'd never met before but about half an hour into meeting me he motioned for me to lift him up (well, more launch him into the air) and I happily obliged.

The kids were pooped in the afternoon so Tim and Cierra tagged out and Sarah and Sean tagged in. Pretty standard day though at one point Darrin mentioned that he had never gone on the Grizzly Rapids ride at California Adventure. So because the wait time was 5 minutes we agreed to go on it. We got all the way to the stop before the last drop when the ride broke down. To evac it they had to drain the section we were in, attach a ladder to the raft, and then we walked out through the mountain. Neat stuff. Anywho, they gave us a front of the line/fastpass-y thing to make up for the fact that the ride went down. We got one then while we were chatting with the CM about what rides we should use it on he gave us another one since he had extras. We ended up using them later in the evening. We went on the Matterhorn with one, then went on Peter Pan. The CM that was supposed to take the pass never actually collected it, then while we were chatting with the CM that was running the exit she handed us one to use on another ride. The park was pretty close to closing and we still had to get onto Indiana Jones (which we already had a normal fastpass for) so we decided to use one on the Alice in Wonderland ride just for the heck of it. That CM actually ended up handing the pass back to us again because the line wasn't really that long for it. Apparently you just can't give those things away at the end of the night. Too bad we didn't have more time.

#101 Return of the Shirt

I forgot how ridiculously hard it is for me to take a photo of myself and be happy with it. I must have taken and deleted around 10 photos today. I finally settled on this one:

But then I decided I hated that one too and made this face to express my feelings on the matter:

This is all the more reason for me to maybe try the whole vlog thing again. I'm much too self-conscious to be taking this many photos of my ugly mug. At least with the videos I can't think about it too much because of the timed aspect of the thing.

#99

Oh hey another shirt with a big heart on it. That was unintentional. Anywho, this is another shirt from Diesel Sweeties. Seriously, I wish that comic was half as good as its apparel. This shirt is special because it glows in the dark. (OooooOOOooooh). I'm wearing it today because I'm attending what is apparently a glow in the dark party aka, someone owns a blacklight party. In the dark a hidden message pops up on the heart that says "If you can read this, it's dark and you should kiss me". Thanks Tinker the True Love Tortoise! Find it here.

#98 I Heart Cliches

For a somewhat avid shirt collector such as myself, it seems fitting to snatch up the classics of the genre. It's like a comic book collector owning Amazing Fantasy #15 or a baseball card collector owning a Honus Wagner card. Shirts I would also classify as classics are the "Frankie Say Relax", the tuxedo t-shirt, "Kiss me I'm Irish". There are also your passing shirt trends such and Urban Outfitters classics such as "Everybody loves a _____ boy/girl" and "Jesus is my Homeboy" or passing pop culture memes like "Make 7 Up Yours".

Anywhoozle, I've really only been to New York once for a grand total of maybe 24 hours. I went as part of a trip to the east coast in the 8th grade. Saw the Lion King on Broadway, ate at the All Star Cafe in Times Square (I'm pretty sure those don't exist anymore), went to the top of the Empire State Building, it was a fun time. Oddly enough that's not when I got this shirt. Instead I got this shirt at the end of my roadtrip with Bstark in the JFK airport gift shop before I flew back to California.

faux-to booth.

This is the closest thing I have to a tuxedo t-shirt. It's sort of got like a punk schoolboy thing going on with the funky tie and random pins (which say things like 2 cool 4 school and ACE). My most vivid memory of wearing it was at the barn party at Davis the year that we went as rockstars. Actually, that then makes sense in context because I went that year as Angus Young who pretty much always dresses like a punky British schoolboy.

In honor of Halloween coming up, I think I'll end up doing a string of posts about shirts that are either somewhat costume-y or have monsters on them.

Rawr

This shirt was a gift from my friend Kat from camp (nicknamed Cat). She's awesome because she doesn't always remember to let little kids win little kid games (love you, Kat!). We used to do secret pals (aka secret summer camp santa) each week and then at the end of camp we'd get a bigger gift and reveal who our secret pal was. Kat had me and so knowing my love for T-shirts and cute monsters she got me this shirt. I believe it can be found at Hot Topic, but I can't be sure.

The time that I can remember wearing it most vividly is the last time I went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park which was a couple years ago I think. Elaine and I went because we hadn't gone in a while. It was pretty awesome. In case you care, my favorite animal at the Wild Animal Park is the Okapi. I think they're pretty cute.

Walk the Dinosaur

This is a shirt that I got on a cross-country road trip that I took with a good friend at the end of summer of 2007. To date that was probably the best summer of my life. I took my first over 21 trip to Las Vegas, I worked at a boating camp with my best friends, and I went on my first road trip to the east coast. My friend got into grad school in Connecticut and I decided to tag along as he moved out there. I believe we spent about 9 days on the road, eating good food that was terrible for us all along the way.

Things I learned on this trip:
-Flagstaff, AZ is temperate and bearable. Lake Havasu IS NOT.
-The difference between the kinds of close encounters in Roswell, NM
-Texas is boring
-Arkansas is gorgeous and green
-Pigeon Forge, TN is like a giant family fun center
-Memphis has the best ribs I've ever tasted
-There's no self serve gas in NJ so don't be too concerned when a sketchy-looking gas station attendant approaches your car as you attempt to fill up
-Philly cheesesteaks are totally better in Philly

The shirt is from Pigeon Forge. All along we way we basically stopped at as many dinosaur tourist traps as we could. There were dinosaurs along the freeway on the way to Texas, "animatronic" papier-mâché dinosaurs at an emu farm somewhere in the southwest, Dinosaurland in VA, and the Dinosaur Walk museum in Pigeon Forge. The museum housed a bunch of sculptures made by the same people that did the models for Jurassic Park so they were all very well done. Then on the outside they had a big T-Rex skeleton just like the visitors center in the movie. They didn't have any good shirts in adult sizes so this is actually a kids XL. It's probably the shortest shirt I own. I felt pretty obligated to get the T-Rex since it was also my camp nickname that summer.

As I said earlier, Pigeon Forge is like a big Family Fun Center/Boomers/Camelot. There were several mini golf courses, go-kart tracks, museums, and other entertainments. It's also home to Dollywood, the Dolly Parton's theme park. I could have easily spent a week there, but we only had a couple hours to explore. There was also a jurassic boat ride but we sadly didn't have the time to stop in. It's a place I'd gladly visit again.