April Music Blog

Two Door Cinema Club

I found these guys thanks to NPR’s world cafe. They’re Irish but that have more in common with LCD Soundsystem, Phoenix and !!! than any Irish band I’ve ever heard.  They’ve been in my 6-changer  non-stop for the last few weeks and the first recommendation to all of my friends.  Check out two free tracks over at NPR!

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The Strokes – Angles

If you have yet to checked out Julian Casablanca’s 2009 solo effort, Phrazes of Youth, I recommend you get on that before listening to angles.  Here’s the video for 11th dimension, from that album.:

Certified

So September 2010.  I am now certified as an Attitude Determination and Control Officer for the International Space Station.  Last week was my first week monitoring the station by myself.  Two months ago, I moved from the NASA suburb into Houston proper.  In the hottest part of the hell on earth Houston summer, I dealt with all the stress of moving, a broken AC, hired and fired a Realtor, repainted, spent thousands of dollars on all the things I never needed before when i had a roommate, numerous work evals leading up to my final simulation, and the minor alienation of my suburb friends.  Add that to shift work and I was on edge, stressed out, and generally lacking sufficient human interaction.  Thank god for my post final-sim trip to chicago/urbana/Home, I think that kept me afloat.

I feel like i have finally turned the corner.  I took on a roommate (from craigslist of all places) and reconnected with an old hometown friend and i’m starting to build a new social network.  I’ve even met a couple new girls, but that seems different now. (maybe its because i’m a little more aware of people’s flaws, still trying to figure that one out.)

Being certified has really boosted my confidence, and removed a lot of anxiety from my life.  (and when I work shifts, Traffic is removed from my life)  I used to shy away from telling people what i do; I tend to be super-modest about it because i was still in training and it didn’t seem real.  There’s also always the chance that people will freak out when i tell them. (last time i was at the airport a middle aged lady asked me to marry her, then said i should meet her cute daughter and then proceed to evaluate my life through astrology)

Now people ask me what i do and I say, “I fly the international space station”.  Couple that with the new beard and it seems like I’m entering life 2.0 . I can’t wait for Houston year three to start in November!

I want a Shawshank Redemption

So I just finished watching the Shawshank Redemption for the first time

yes I know that movie is awesome, yes it is ridiculous that I’ve never actually seen it before, yes I’m not as cool as you thought, yes the big reveal on the 4^th or 5^th reel actually caught me by surprise, yes I like how the name of the movie plays into Red’s character.

Anyway in the entire last scene as Morgan Freeman is making his journey south, I had this terrible, uncontrollable sense of dread.  He’s going to have a heart attack and die inches away from Tim Robins, or never even make it out of the country alive.  This had me almost off of the couch.  And when nothing terrible happened, and there was this happy ending (albeit after years of wasted life inside) – I could not deal with it.  It didn’t feel like a familiar ending.  It felt wrong, nobody ever gets a happy ending, we all get screwed. And I don’t know why I feel this way. Somewhere along the way I’ve become this sarcastic swirling mass of negativity.

“Do the interns have a gun?” “No they share one.”

As I continue to try to meet more of the young people at NASA I’ve started to encounter an entire group of people that bother me on a very basic level – multi-tour co-ops.  I met a girl who is 23, on her sixth co-op tour, still not done with undergrad, intending to do grad school, and planning a total of 9 tours before it’s all over.  She says things like “oh I don’t know the younger co-ops” and “I’m only 23, I’m too young to settle down”.  I wanted to just shake her and tell her to fucking grow up.  Younger co-ops?  All co-ops are young!  They’re in fucking college. 

SuperMackin’s top albums of 2008

There are a lot of these top 10, top 25 albums floating around the internet, the radio and magazines like SPIN (which I read cover to cover waiting for my delayed plane). And it is totally absurd that we’re asked to boil down hundreds of albums into a ranking of the top few, and accept any one list as gospel..

Completely ridiculous.

But do I ever love reading them! So here are my top albums of 2008, and this not a best of 2008, I haven’t listened to everything out there. But these are the albums that meant something to me in 2008. I listened to them a lot. These are the albums that reverberate inside my body. The songs that pop into my head randomly throughout the day.

The Killers – Day and Age. The killers redeemed themselves from the tripe filled Sam’s Town. That album was best know for two singles I only liked after mtv made me watch their music videos 20 times each. (those music videos are pretty good in retrospect). They posed a question none of us have been able to answer yet – Are we human? Or are we Dancer?

Houston is filled with promise?

Or Houston, TX in a paragraph, a rant, and a list.

So I could really come down hard on Houston. The Music on the Radio blows. There’s no mass transit. Their aquarium (possibly excluding the shark train) is an overpriced joke. The city is ugly and sunsets are orange because of smog. They think goddamned Nickelback is something you actually want to subject your ears to. But I can’t be that negative about the place where my job is, because I have to live here for awhile. So here’s an aim rant to fill you in on what goes on down here in god’s country (that’s Texas you heathens). Then a list of whats actually good.

Alyssa: how’s Houston?

What’s That? You Work at NASA?!?

Yes, yes I do.  And I’m usually pretty modest about it, so here’s your chance to hear all about it.

So what do I actually do at NASA? Well first let’s start with what I will be doing after training. I will be a mission control operator for the International Space Station’s Motion Control System