Holding All Other Variables Constant

I've spent the last week sleeping on an entirely too confusing schedule for my body to comprehend. I wake up at 6am every day, alarm or no, and after my few hours at school, I return to the sanctuary of my bed for another, oh, six or seven hours. With the completion of my statistics exam this morning, my first quarter of graduate school is officially over. I attended the post-exam reception, featuring a wine tasting with our Microeconomics professor, for about fifteen minutes, before taking off. The emotional high of finishing the exam an hour before 98% of the other 220 students in our class kept me moving in the direction of the parking garage so I could get another afternoon's worth of rest. Plus, the wine sucked.

After an incredibly liberating nap, I woke up just in time to stroll down to the Key Club (we'll ignore the return trip I made to the house because my roommate misplaced his wallet) to see the Riverboat Gamblers, who until a week ago I never would have thought about going to see live. Volcom has a reputation as a label for putting out utterly terrible records, so that stigma remained with the Gamblers when I started to hear their name in the press, even after I read that they put on the best performance of anyone at this year's SxSW festival. I'd just like to personally thank everyone that steered me back towards the band. The Gamblers' live show has the urgency of a hardcore show and the fun factor of a skate punk show. There are enough singalongs to keep the songs tenaciously stuck in your head for weeks, and the singer's distaste for remaining on stage reminded me of the first time I saw Death By Stereo (in front of a crowd of, oh, twleve people at a cafe in College Park, MD about six years ago). Many thanks go out to Mike Cubillos at Earshot Media for the free beers.

The final paragraph of this entry has been removed because I'm not ready to offend people here... yet. It concerned a record label I used to shame on the internet quite regularly.