the graduate student union at columbia university is on strike this week. and today we have the wonderful sight of the rat outside the front gates--on one hand, the pearly golden gates to never-never land, and on the other, the rat, who clearly has the plague, waitin to bitecha.

it's not so special, i suppose, because there are 36 rats in new york city. and here i hoped there was just one.

he got arrested once. the rat. and you know what, he didn't even care.

ignore your blog.

last week i performed the herculean feat of seeing three large shows in the same week. while this does tax my legs, i find it recharges my batteries as well. joe and i used to see that much live music back in college--i especially remember that week around christmas in 1995 when we saw the Reverend Horton Heat. unfortunately, i don't remember the other bands--maybe i'll ask joe for help. . .

the first show was liz phair, who has somehow become a top-40 act? despite the clubby couples dancing into me and screaming when any of the new songs came on, i enjoyed it. since then someone told me phair has an anxiety about performing, which is a surprise since she's supposed to be a sexy rock chick. here is one piece of advise for sexy rock chicks: you look sexier with a microphone on a microphone stand--real men do not dig that madonna dancer microphone thing.

second was death cab for cutie, who i have never seen live before, and turned out to be sort of a loud band. their show was fantastic, but i was surprised that the crowd was mostly under 20. yes, i could have had the bar at irving plaza all to myself. the bartender asked if i had a wristband, and i said i was probably the oldest person there. he said, "i got you beat, i promise."

and third was the pernice brothers and lambchop. the pernice brothers were mostly new to me, although i used to like the old sub pop band The Scud Mountain Boys, which is sort of the same band. i was sorry that i hadn't found their song "working girls" earlier, because it's great.

and lambchop rocks out in that way only it can, perhaps being the band that does the best to outdo my expectations every time. i took my dad to see them back in 1997 in nashville, when front-guy kurt wagner looked more "grunge" and less "co-op horse feed". my dad had a normal reaction to lambchop, meaning he liked it but suspected he wasn't getting something. "is this campy?" he said. i told him no, but he was allowed to like the music just the same. last week as we were leaving, we discussed whether kurt wagner seemed "meticulous" or not--i mean, his stack of papers he takes on stage is pretty dog-earred, but then again, he turns exactly one page per song exactly at the end of the song, and never rearranges them. so, more than likely, meticulous.

so, after talking about music, i will now say this:

support Wilco, music on the internet is a good thing.

i am an engineer. in public, at parties, when meeting you, it's information that i guard. introduce me to someone and hear me squirm: "uh-huh, and what do you do?" "hm, nothing." "you don't do anything?" "yes, that's right."

why? well, i would rather be nothing than something. i suppose that's me being childish, but it's easy to be typecast in life, and most people have a good picture of an "engineer" in their heads already. (and my bowtie rarely matches the one they're thinking of.)

so, picture the engineer at work. he or she types out some matlab code to calculate something-or-other from some data. it takes a long time. then the engineer finishes. whew. but wait. then the engineer immediately discovers that matlab already has a built-in command to calculate whatever it was. hmmm. so what would you feel if you were the engineer?--1) joy at the marvel of technology, or 2) anger at the inherent snottiness of machines?

i am such a luddite that i hate it when computer programs make things too easy, and i wish you still had to draw everything out on graph paper and use rulers to extrapolate your data. this is the reason why i can never be a good engineer--because i distrust machines and i have a romantic attachment to the past.

as i see it, the only good gig in engineering: Bill Nye the Science Guy.

today i heard the iguanas on the radio. some things always get a response from you, no matter when and where you are, provided you don't experience them too much. the iguanas give me my first impression of new orleans back, without fail.

when i was a kid, my family went on "vacation" maybe three times. i think two of these times were to new orleans, maybe when i was 6 and 8. very young. later, i went to college with a guy who was from new orleans. he graduated a year earlier than me, because i co-oped for a year. my senior year, he called the week before spring break and said his mother died. i decided to go down to new orleans, both to be with him and to see it, since i hadn't been since i was a little kid.

he gave me directions to his place, and i drove down and arrived just at dusk. on the way in on I-55 and then I-10, the whole place turns into swamps, and the road signs start looking funny, and then you see the spillway and the utterly flat city in the distance. it just all seemed so weird to me. he lived like two blocks off 610, and it seemed like i got off the interstate, it got immediately dark, i turned two quick turns, and there was Joe, my friend, standing in the street waiting, just lit up in my headlights. he got in the car and directed me to rock n' bowl--i seriously don't even remember if i got out of the car first. the streets were so wide and flat, and the live oak trees made everything look so old--i was completely taken with it. and we got to rock n' bowl, i drank my first abita amber, and the iguanas were playing. it was very much a moment with a feeling to it. even after living there, that's still how i picture new orleans--after dark, with headlights, and the iguanas.