while(living){ try{ life.nextOpporunity(); } catch(e){ life.learnFrom(e); } }

Well here I am, starting a blog. As you can probably tell by the title of this entry, I'm kind of a geek. So... I apologize ahead of time, right away, for any overly geeky statements. If you're gonna read this, you're gonna have to get over it... cause this is me. I'm going to use the first few entries to just kind of attempt to describe the strange anomaly that is me, for better or worse, while still actually stating an opinion.

For those of you who don't speak geek... the title basically means:

While you're alive, try every opportunity that comes your way.
If you fail, learn from it and keep going.

Yeah, it says all that in that little line. Don't you wish you were fluent in geek now?

Listen, Feel

Music has been a pretty decent part of my life. It was my main outlet for my adolescent and post-adolescent life. I like to think at least some of the stuff I wrote was decent, but who knows. This is probably a good time to explain the name of my blog. I'm obsessed with the Dave Matthews Band. They have a song called "Jimi Thing," which I used with one of my nicknames (Jimmy D) to create a username which I use in pretty much every forum or whatever I sign up for. JimmyDThing. If you see that username, odds are it's me.

Over the past few years I've kind of been fading away from DMB... The newer music has either been disappointing or disappears before it can get really good and I was getting pretty tired of the solid fan favorites that I've heard a million times. The last new album, "Stand Up" really disappointed me... it seemed shallow compared to the songs that made me fall in love with their music.

I thought maybe I was getting old and growing out of them. Then "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King" came out and since I've been obsessed again. But I think I'll have to say more on that later in a review of the album.

Smell, Taste, See

My big "try" (what most people call a hobby) lately has been cooking. The guitar and music writing has sort of taken a back seat to it. It started just because my agreement with Elise was that I'd cook if she cleaned because I hate cleaning and I'm awful at it. Plus, I think I'd get sick of boxed Mac'n'Cheese every night. But I really got into it.

I try specific recipes, but rarely stick to them... I enjoy knowing the chemistry and physics behind why certain foods/ingredients act the way they do when combined a certain way or whatever. I try to use that knowledge to change things to put my own twist on them. I don't like using "regular" ingredients. I like to try to use something different, but I also enjoy not telling the people eating them what's in it until they admit they like it. It's great watching someone try to make "the face" at some ingredient when they really can't because they already decided they liked it.

It's quite fun to force people to try new things. After all... isn't that the whole idea behind the title of this post?