Brad Bolman

No, absolutely not. Tiny Desk Concert, here.

Today I was cleaning my bookshelf — tossing shit all over the place like I was Kansas earthquaking — looking for my headphones. Dear World, if you’re even somewhat involved with my life you probably already heard, but my beautiful Audio-Technica headset disappeared and I can no longer listen to James Blake in his mind-numbing bliss-ness. If someone found them, I would give them anything. Anything. The biggest problem is that I can’t help but notice that throughout my life I’ve lost tons of things. Mostly coats. Dear Mom, I’m sorry about all those extra coats: the Captain’s jacket that was left at a Kentucky hotel, the windbreakers I left multiple times in elementary school cafeterias, and much more.

While I was searching, I found a cd from Ariel Rubin. “Who’s Ariel Rubin?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you because you really needn’t stay in the dark: she’s a singer-songwriter-type based in Boston. She plays electronic ukelele which I think is a little gimmicky, but she pulls it off in a barely-gimmicky sort of way that makes it hard to hate much. After watching her do a live concert at the MegaStarshipBucks near Harvard — sufficiently convinced of the semi-gimmicky-ness of her uke-strumming — I decided I would support the band by buying a cd. There’s something about supporting the underdogs, it gets me every time. I walk over to her stand. “Which of your EPs is the best, do you think?” I ask her. Ariel indicates that the newer cd is produced much better, but we laugh at the difficulty in picking a “best” together. Such mutual rapport. I haven’t made friends this quickly since the time I was ordering coffee downstairs and, when the register stopped working, suggested with a coy smile that it was these “small victories against the machines” that kept us alive. I hand Ariel $15 dollars. My hand wavers momentarily, waiting to receive change. I do not.

I am not receiving any change.

“Well I guess I’ve made quite a contribution,” I reason to myself striding back to my corner table. My computer is still there. I have a computer-table-lock-thing but use it with little frequency and thus constantly to worry that I will return to my table to find a vanished computer. I lose everything else, why not? I like in movies and TV that when things disappear, they always leave a dust-imprint where they once were. It would be nice if that always happened, so every time you left somewhere there was a buttocks imprint proving you were once sitting there.

Then again the world would be a dusty asthmatic hell. So maybe not.

I look at the back of my new Ariel Rubin cd. There are three songs listed on the back. “You’ve got to be nutting me.” For those less mathly inclined, like myself, I did some quick calculations: that’s $5 per song. I don’t think I’d even pay Elton John $5 for Rocketman and that’s probably the best song of all time. I look back at Ariel Rubin from across the crowded MegaStarshipBucks: you may have won this time, Ariel, but I will vanquish you some day.

Her music is good, you should listen to it. But you should maybe avoid buying the $15 dollar EP.

I know that winter is coming, but I just keep listening to Beach Fossils, Real Estate, and The Drums and pretend that it’s perpetual summer. I usually do that while wearing a winter hat. This contradiction doesn’t bother me as much as you might think it should.

The number of Facebook friends who I add has dropped considerably these days, even given the relatively new shift in social location. In fact, my history of Facebook would probably show something of an exponential decrease curve, or a bell curve. Look, I don’t take economics classes here, I don’t do those CHART things. I’ve narrowed down possible reasons to two options. Either A) because I don’t have any friends or B) because I don’t use social networks with the same incidence that I did before. Unfortunately, given the frequency of snarky or music-themed statuses on my wall, it’s much more likely to be the first than the second.

On Friday, I was walking through “The Yard” in the bitter cold with a friend. We had both made mention of the bitterness of this cold and our desire that this cold be less bitter. Then I get a call on my cellphone.

I never get calls. Even when I know that the number is a mystery and probably a depressed-sounding Hispanic woman calling for Charlie or a telemarketer trying to sell me purple capsules to increase the size of my penis, I pick up the fucking phone because of how few calls I get. “Are you in the Yard?”

I am.

“I’ll come find you by the steps.”

And so I wait. The cold continues to bitter.

“Ok, you need to take off your shirt for a picture.”

I don’t really like doing that. You can’t let this Gulag frame out into the wild too much, especially not when there’s light around. Given the propensity for secret photos to make their way onto the internet, I’m slightly concerned. But then the idea of accidentally stumbling upon myself on a Ukrainian porn website makes me chuckle.

“And you have to hold this baby-doll.”

I’m starting to feel increasingly violated, but mostly just confused.

“And you have to suck your thumb.”

Violated.

“Ok, thanks so much, bye!”

And with that they disappeared. I started to put my shirt and coat back on, wondering the whole time what had really just happened here. I couldn’t help imagining this is what it feels like after a low-budget adult film shoot when you put your clothes on again and go back to your job serving burgers at a California Arbys. Then I remembered the little sticker they place on the back of books rented for class:

“I’m a rental, be gentle”

I have more in common with used copies of Dostoyevsky than I realized. Admittedly, it’s been a small goal of this blog to insert that line into something for quite a while.

Today Annenberg, which I will henceforth refer to pejoratively as “the cafeteria,” was serving “smashed potatoes”. Nobody likes smashed potatoes. We like mashed potatoes and we like regular potatoes. If anyone wanted hard, under-cooked potato chunks in their silky mash, they would ask for it. And if anyone is asking for it, you’re wrong. We don’t ask for eggs half-way cooked or under-done chicken. Even though, as I’ve heard from my meat-consuming comrades, the cafeteria does that one anyways.

Whoever decided to replace the Cranberry Pomegranate juice with Fruit Punch has created a vendetta with me that they are probably unaware of. Prepare yourself for battle.

Today was the Harvard Book Store 20% of customer day. That means that today I went like the Benjaminian-influenced bibliophile that I am and dutifully bought more books to enrich my knowledge base and my bookshelves, which are already so over-saturated that the first three volumes of In Search of Lost Time sit forlornly at the edge waiting to be read next semester. While I was inside, perusing the fiction shelves, I overheard a sentence that seemed out of place surrounded by so many great works of literature:

“The Odyssey is about… going around the Roman Empire right?”

Fortunately her friend corrected her. I didn’t want to have to do that.

“I didn’t realize the Baltimore Ravens were named after Edgar Allen Poe.”
“Neither did I.”
“Yeah.”

I had to leave.

People who wear sweatpants around everywhere bug me, even though I can’t really put my finger on why. I think everyone should be comfortable, but the rest of us are wearing real pants and you’re just a fabric cloud. It’s like clothing cheating. Maybe part of the resentment is that it feels a lot like they’re wearing pajamas outside. I admit to not really knowing. In contrast to this, I believe strongly that babies in pajamas, particularly onesies, are more adorable than usual babies. Go figure. Then again vomiting in public is much less acceptable coming from older people in sweatpants than it is from babies in sweatpants.

I heard Pumped Up Kicks again today. I thought that song was gone. Then I realized: it will never be gone. Pumped Up Kicks is an ontological certainty like birth and death. There is waking up, there is the sun, and then there is Pumped Up Kicks. When I die, they will be playing Pumped Up Kicks at the hospital. In the moment of my final breath, I will smile knowing that I have finally escaped Foster the People and their strange song about a school shooting. But then, as I approach Heaven, which I will realize much too late is real and will curse all of that sinning, blasting from the low-quality speakers at the gates will be Pumped Up Kicks and I will turn to St. Peter and say, “Fuck it. Send me to Hell.” And in Hell, I’ll scream “Noooooooo!” because I’ll probably just have to listen to bad remixes of Pumped Up Kicks and I’ll just suffer for the rest of eternity.

Sundae Sundays would be better if the ice cream weren’t a color that I’m relatively sure doesn’t exist in nature.

My name is Brad, I used to like Pumped Up Kicks and I still like babies in pajamas.

I should start off with a recent dream I had. No, not THAT one. And not the one where I finally find the beautiful Harvard girl. Illusive, as Yoda might say, she is. It went a little like this: I’m sitting in my fantasy English class (which already demonstrates a level of sadness permeating even my dream-life) when all of a sudden we are given a new assignment. Someone has to read Middlemarch. That someone is me. The book must be read in a single day. I remember waking up with something halfway between a literager (trademark!) and absolute dread.

I’m pretty sure part of the dream even involved me blogging about the dream. There’s no way it was that self-referential, but I have that creepy deja vu-esque sensation that it is.

Strange conversation I walked by:

“Right… and you have these nanobot red blood cells.”

I noticed a lot of people dressed up here on Halloween as police officers. But if you’re a girl, you don’t dress up as a real policer officer. Instead, you dress up like the “police officers” that pull you over in adult films and then “punish you.” I have to say, men and lesbian-ladies-who-love-porn, is this really anyone’s fantasy? Don’t people want to avoid an arrest and maybe just meet someone nice and intellectually stimulating? No? That’s fair. It certainly would be strange though if we inverted the porn-cop costume with the atire of your average police officer. Then, on Halloween, people would wear their “Fat-cop” costume or their “Well-Dressed and Official Publicity Session Lieutenant” outfit. The result would include what are essentially Arrested Development-style Hot-cops or tons of Lt. Dangle patrolling the mean streets of America, and on Halloween a bunch of people looking either

1. Menacing and ready to give you a speeding ticket or
2. Strangely well put together.

But girls don’t seem to dress up in business attire for Halloween. If I had a nickel for every time I heard, “I’m hot Hillary Clinton tonight,” I’d probably have to give a few nickels back for all the times I’ve heard, “I’m just sort of slutty-looking.” At the very least, police departments would save a lot of money on cotton and polyester. Hot pants are infinitely more economical to produce.

Music you should listen to: Morning Teleportation. Trust me, you haven’t heard of it, but it’s great.

Whenever I visit CVS, I go upstairs to look at office supplies. There’s something about staplers. They get me. This means every time I go, I’m tempted to buy one of those really top-notch Swingline staplers that you can swing around and staple shit with absolute efficiency and something akin to power. One strange thing about the Harvard Square CVS is that the pharmacy is located right at the top of the stairs. This invariably means that when I’m searching out a foxy new stapler, I see a bunch of people searching out some foxy new prescriptions. And there’s something that my level of society hasn’t quite worked out yet about seeing someone you know waiting in line for a prescription so that the experience can’t help but feel “awkward.” Medication is a lot like fornication or crapping in that we all know it’s happening but most people refuse to admit that the standing figure in front of them is capable or willing to do either of those things. Imagine a life without pooping. Now come back to reality. So when I see girls that I know at CVS waiting for what could honestly just be 24-hour photo development (it’s right where the Pharmacy is in some bizarre photography/medicative deal) but is probably birth control or ADD medication, there’s a strange moment where the person in front of me transforms beyond the idealized prototype of an individual that I think everyone to be into something quite other. When I see you standing there, I think, “Oh, this person is getting some action.” And I also append, “And probably more than me,” because my inexplicable and egotistic insistence that “I only date models” has really complicated romance at Harvard much further than it should be and to a nearly impossible level. This is not only due to a cross-application of the above discussion of the beautiful Harvard girl, but also because artificially limiting yourself like this ends up meaning you like women who quite like to pretend you don’t even exist. And here I thought I was the only one thinking nobody else exists. The Matrix.

Why did Kanye choose the West?

I get a lot of email spam. It makes things doubly hard because often I want to know about certain events that are happening. The problem is that when every third email entering my inbox is about “Patrick’s Pumpkin Hunt!!1!,” I have a hard time convincing myself of the importance of any other messages and that they don’t represent another “Farmer’s Lewis’s Amish bakery sale in the farthest away building on campus”. Because as many “Hear former President Clinton speak to an audience of six people in which you are the sole focus of everyone’s attention!” messages come, so many more are just shouting about midgetnards and the 86th health survey about whether or not my feet are comfortable on Harvard’s pathways. Someone’s job should really be to ensure that spam is filtered more effectively based on my interests. Google?

Things that make me laugh: Fat people on bicycles.

Also, fuck you, Palm Pre.

Goodnight, I’m Brad, even though I’m really just a world trying to open up to yours.

Today was an important day in the story of Brad Bolman. Facing a mounting crisis of clean-clothiness, which operates in a closed but mounting dialectical struggle between lazy ineptitude and horrendous stench, I broke down and did laundry for the first time at college.

I should note, before continuing, that I have quite a stupendous collection of t-shirts, dating back to an early-life obsession with collecting, so I haven’t actually been wearing dirty clothes for a month. Do people use the word stupendous ever?

A lot of people will tell you that college teaches you self-sufficiency. They’re right in a sense: you’ll learn that sometimes holding back your own hair and vomiting into urine-stained men’s toilets is the only close-to-positive choice you have. But in most ways, the Self-Sufficiency Thesis is the wrong explanation. What I really learned tonight is not some “Now I’m a big old adult who can wash his own clothes”-type garbage that my mom is always using as an excuse for me to do tasks around the house that I’ve never once cared about. (True story: She once told me that after I successfully watered her plants while she was gone, she could feel confident I could live on my own. PLANTS?) “I’m an adult, I can do my own laundry!” said a friend of mine. But that’s crazy: if your status as “adult” can be confirmed by this singular ability, that gives pedophiles a whole new avenue I’m not comfortable with them having. After all: she may be 13, but she knew how to do laundry. She can do laundry and the dishes, happy now, society? I didn’t think so. No, instead I’ve experienced the profound truth that out of desperation, humans will be willing to do almost anything, even when it runs against the dominant normal operating procedures. Isn’t this also really the lesson of Oldboy? A man gouges out his own eyes out of desperation to escape the reality of a terrifying truth. I haven’t done that yet, but since I’ve always been fond of the idea of a six-word novel, here’s a six-word story to explain my prior situation:

Wearing shoes. Lacking socks. Death decay.

When you have so much dirty clothing that one entire large load of laundry can be filled only with the gradient of dark blue-to-black — none of which include your shirts — you have to admit you have a problem. Or a petite issue. To call something a petite issue really removes nearly all of the significance. “Hello, Mr. President, we have a petite issue in Afghanistan.” Probably because it’s nearly impossible to take the French seriously. Honestly, they gave us Deconstruction and the Statue of Liberty. You can have them back, France. We gave you the effing Marshall Plan.

I always wanted an epithet. I guess “Smelly” has been at least momentarily taken off the docket for possibilities.

I can’t totally figure out which Harry Potter house I would be in, but these days I’m really leaning towards Hufflepuff. Just to say I did it before it was coo– ahaha I get myself every time!

Halloween is coming up. You know how I know? Because nearly every conversation I’ve had over the last week has involved at least one person lamenting that they’re having trouble finding a costume. Others, fortunately, seem to be having no problem: “I’m going to be ‘Drunk’ for Halloween.” Frankness, honesty. Let’s stop kidding ourselves though, Halloween isn’t about costumes: it’s about the same thing that every other holiday is at college. That thing? Boozing. It’s also about eating rotten-colored shit with sugars that have never heard of “organic,” scar[r]ing the shit out of our vulnerable roommates, and dressing like skanks (Men included). It’s fun either way, but the pressure to repetitively explain why you aren’t wearing odd clothes — which is also, ironically, the same explanation you have had but never used to explain why you didn’t join the drama club in Middle School: that you have frankly never found enjoyment in weirdly fitted shirts and face paint — can get a wee bit frustrating. It’s not that I judge other people for dressing up. Only a little. “SLUTTY MERMAID!” Ok, sometimes quite a lot. It’s just that some of us handle the holidays differently.

Speaking of which, here are some costume ideas for those having trouble (Nautically themed for no reason apparent to me). No explanations or justifications here, take the list as you will:

1. Perturbed Seahorse
2. Moby’s Dick
3. 1000 Leagues Above 1000 Leagues Under the Sea
4. Choral Reef(er)
5. Hyper-Marine
6. AcidVacation (Ironically, also the way you’d probably spell “Acidification” on an Acid Vacation)

Went to brain break tonight. Ate another stale, un-toasted bagel. Seriously, cafeteria, I want to level with you. We leave Brain Break. More specifically, I love Brain Break. Why? I honestly don’t have a good reason. But if you could just let me crisp up this bagel to a golden brown before I smear on that fatty cream cheese, I’d be yours.

Shamelessly lifted from my Facebook for those of you who are not actually my friends there… maybe you exist? I keep getting told you do:

A tourist turned his back to my building and coyly dropped a piece of trash. He thought he got away with it. Then he noticed my stare and knew his trick was up. He picked up his trash and went on his way. Environment? This one’s for you.

Last night, following a day where I accidentally slept through an appointment and woke up around 2pm, I decided I would turn over a new leaf on my life and my sleep schedule: waking up early, getting fuller nights of sleep. So I turned to the internet, where I learned that a healthy amount of fresh air at night can drastically improve the quality of your sleep. So I opened my window. Unfortunately, I forgot that the Harvard Grounds Crew would be assembling planks of birch wood directly outside my window from 6am to 10am. This means, for those slow readers out there, that I was awake for those hours, and when I finally got back to sleep, I would continue doing that through my first alarm and almost miss a class.

I should know better. Why? Because those cave trolls do this ALL THE TIME. There is not a week that goes by where the Harvard Grounds Crew isn’t assembling some peculiar structure of wood or metal outside my window. I’m quite convinced that most of these projects are utterly unnecessary, but continue getting green-lit purely to make my life a living hell. “Oh yeah, you want to build a toddlers play park? Sure, sure, you can have a grant, but you gotta do it outside of Thayer, between the Church and the handicapped ramp.” “No, no reason really.”

Tonight, I’ll be sleeping with my windows closed.

The movie 13 Assassins is super notch. Sometimes I arbitrarily decide to not do my work and instead indulge in cultural — culturedulgence. Give it a whirl. It makes conversations like these a little awkward though:

Friend: God, I hate being up this late.
Me: Why are you up this late?
Friend: Doing orgo work.
Me: (thinking: I’m watching a violent samurai film) Oh, yeah. Sucks.

My name’s Brad, I’m a little tired, confused by Republican Presidential candidates, and reading some books I probably don’t understand. Bye.