woke up this morning...

...no really, i did. at 6:30am no less. why did i wake up so early? like last year (when i was somewhat baited with promises of IHOP pancakes), a small group of us made our way to the Ann Arbor Triathlon (which is of course in Pinckney...yeah, i don't understand it either) to watch my crazy roommate damon do his thing. once again, it was quite interesting and those of us observing felt quite out of shape (albeit much more sane than those competing), but overall the experience was a fun one, and damon appreciated all of us being there.

that's why i woke up this morning, but there was something else on the agenda, something that a small group of my friends had been expecting, anticipating, and theorizing about for weeks. it was going to be the end of an era in a way. queue up that song by A3...if you don't know what i'm talking about yet, you MAY have been living under a rock for the past few weeks.


the time had come to end the relationship with a certain family in new jersey. creator david chase was bringing The Sopranos to a close. things had come a long way since 1999, and most fans of the series, including our small group that got together every sunday evening (double, gwen, myself), were sad to know things were coming to an end.

it's one of those things where you anticipate it for quite some time, wondering what it's going to be like, what are you going to do, how is one going to react...and then before you know it, the moment has come and gone and you realize you don't really feel that much differently than you did before. or maybe you do, and it will just hit you later.

trite, you may say, it's just a tv show and who really wants to invest so much interest in the stories of a mob boss and their criminal life? if that's what the show really factors down to for you, then you really weren't paying much attention. that and there is a timeframe to consider...my old roommate jeremy (who i've known since 7th grade) once told me about the show way back around 2000, and i dismissed it as it just didn't sound interesting. movies were my thing, why i would i want to pay any attention to a mob-based tv series?

then my first field season came up here at UofM. i spent several consecutive weeks in muskegon michigan, only to come home for brief periods during the summer (not home to Ohio, but back to my one-bedroom apartment in Ann Arbor). i was bored out of my mind during those times. those of you who know me know that i'm not one for sitting around by myself that often, and it will eventually drive me crazy. at the time, i had little choice, i didn't know many people here in Ann Arbor, and most of my other friends were either out of town or too far away to visit. i should have been doing more research (especially in retrospect), but i can't function properly when i'm that bored or stir-crazy (which will eventually be my undoing, i'm certain of this).
anyway, i left my quaint spicetree apartment and visited the nearby blockbuster...i couldnt find anything i wanted to watch in the movies section (often a dilemma for me) and so i wandered by the tv section and saw some season 1 discs of The Sopranos. i remembered that jeremy said i should check the show out, and figured i had nothing better to do, so why not...i rented the first two discs of the first season, which was about 8 episodes. i should also note that jeremy and i shared virtually identical interests in movies, pop culture, etc etc over the many years leading up to grad school, so i don't know why i was so hesitant to listen to him in the first place.

i got back to my empty apartment and popped in disc 1.

now, it's no secret i don't like birds. ok i like some birds, but why some mob guy was so fascinated with ducks kind of escaped me. and therapy? i was not interested in watching an hour-long program of said mob guy sitting in a chair talking to an overly-quiet psychiatrist about panic attacks. but then came the stories with what he had to do over the course of his day...he left out the exact details when talking to the shrink, but we got to see them on screen. we met his nephew christopher (one of my favorite characters) and you're thrown into this anti-hero's world. slowly over the course of that first episode i became interested in what was going on with this guy's family. i watched episode 2, then 3, before i knew it, i was ready for the next disc. i was hooked.

i rented all the other discs i could, and when i couldn't get a particular disc of episodes, i ended up renting the godfather movies (they were of course heavily referenced, and i'd only seen bits and pieces over the course of my life so far). i ended up watching all the godfather movies over the course of 24 hours.

i should have been doing more research, but i was sucked in. i had sporadic field work trips to go on, and i even brought some of the discs along with me for one of them, and watched episodes during my downtime (you know, instead of sleeping).
i also became REALLY hungry for italian food whenever i watched the show...still happens to this day. unfortunately i could only make spaghetti, but that worked for me. sometimes (now this dates pretty far back in the city of ann arbor) i'd travel across town to fazolis to get some ziti just to eat it while watching the show. i wasn't greasing my hair back or pretending to be paulie walnuts, but the show had become a part of life...and kept me entertained during my first (and in several ways worst) year of grad school.

HBO of course has a crazy schedule, and so later seasons of the show were (seemingly) randomly on over the next several years. who i lived with, was friends with, and dated all changed over those many years, but tony and the family kept trudging along...even though they lost a few members along the way, new ones were added on, and some of the annoying ones always stuck around. and i kept getting this pavlov-esque craving for italian food.

fast foward many years to the present. we don't really see the ducks anymore, the feds and the family get along a bit better, meadow is still hot, AJ is still a moron, and most of the family doesn't quite have their grammar and literary references at 95% accuracy. but it's time to go. double and i had been equally anticipating and thinking about this finale for a while now, and it's honestly been a shocking last several episodes, but we knew chase wouldn't tidy things up in a neat box to send us off. he's been regularly quoted as saying he doesn't want to follow the rules of normal tv, and that this show is supposed to be somewhat like real life...and real life doesn't often tie up all the loose ends.

i won't say anything to spoil the end for anyone who eventually wants to see it, but i'll say that i was satisfied with how things "ended". a lot has changed since that month of june in the hot summer of 2001; people have come and gone, moved on, stuck around...a lot has changed. with this major story coming to a close, maybe another one will begin...OR maybe it's time to get more of that research done...


addendum:
if you are interested in what the New York Times had to say about the final episode, and need more background information, check out:
"One Last Family Gathering: You Eat, You Talk, It's Over"

<"//><

music:

"Don't Stop Believin'" - Journey (featured in The Sopranos finale)

"Before It's Too Late" - Goo Goo Dolls (Transformers motion picture soundtrack)

pic:

as if an entry could be made without bringing up Transformers. the first song released from the soundtrack is "Before It's Too Late (Sam & Mikaela's theme)" by the Goo Goo Dolls, and well worth checking out.

"a history of virulence"

so once again i am running behind on keeping up-to-date with events in the life of 'the fish guy'...i've come to grips that i can't always be back-logging (back-blogging? sorry) in order to report on each and every crazy event that's take place, so i'll just move forward in a somewhat randomized pattern as best i can. try to keep up. or not. or have a tabasco-flavored dill pickle, they're great.

every once in a while, for whatever reason, i get into one of those pseudo-nostalgic moods and like to look back on events past. this is somewhat easier for me to do than others since i tend to document past events photographically to an almost obsessive extent. therefore, i don't need to only travel to the past in my mind, but also have the visual aids to transport me and confirm (or contradict) various events with how i remember them (and with all those scientific names and useless movie trivia in there, that mind is already a crowded place).

the world of photographs has changed quite a bit, even in these past several years. most of the world has made the transition from film to digital media (although the versatility of slides cannot be denied, even my stalwart bio-photography prof from undergrad has moved on to the e-film era). photos are taken more frequently and with greater ease than ever before, and with several arenas available for display (facebook is one of the largest photo-hosting sites in the world).
my dad was always into photography and also into documenting important (or even not so important...or so we thought) events, so perhaps it's somewhat hereditary. anyone that knows me well knows that i just about always have my camera with me, or was always up for capturing a given moment (or wrinkle?) in time through the aperture of a lens. this does not look to change anytime soon, and although in the past couple years the majority of my photos have existed as electronic files on my computers, external hard drives, memory cards, CDs, and iPod (enough redundancies for preservation in there?), this was not always the case...

so as i said, i was feeling nostalgic for whatever reason, and my mind wandered to a box i've kept at The Tank, which has not been opened (for better or worse) for over two years. i went through the excavation process and came up with a cardboard box labeled 'Photo Wall - SRD'. i blew off the dust and opened up the box, inside it was a massive stack of photographs (yup, produced on old-school film from SLRs, point-and-shoots, and disposables), my own brief history of -photographic- time. i hopped into my DeLorean, cranked it up to 88mph and was on my way...


now, everyone has their photo albums, perhaps random stacks of photographs, whatever; i wanted to do something different. i didn't want an album that only got pulled out when a few close friends or guests came over and inquired, i wanted something on a larger level of production (which has generally always tended to be the case with me). i didn't put my 'recent history' photos into an album, i wanted them on display for anyone and everyone who entered my old apartment to see...so i created 'the photo wall'. this wasn't just a random collage, it was a multi-faceted mural which eventually spanned an entire room at my old place in Spicetree apartments (my first home in Ann Arbor for grad school). and this wasn't even tucked away in a closet in my bedroom, it was in a major section of the living room...everyone who visited saw it (or was subjected to it), and sometimes i even had to compete with it for my guests' attention. never got any bad remarks, but just about always got interesting questions, comments, and an almost tangible fascination (or concern?) with the phenomenon. it was my own timeline (not necessarily in order, but in a pattern that only i really understood) on display.

just about anything was included, family photos, high school photos (cross country, track, band, homecoming, prom, me and my friends being stupid), college photos, fish photos, the old family dog, kermit the frog, dinosaurs, items i cooked (really!), trips to foreign countries...it was all up there. most of the people who regularly visited, or i regularly talked to, interacted with, etc were on that wall. who knows how much larger it would have grown had i stayed there for longer...
...but alas, the day came when it was time to move on to bigger things, or at least bigger (and more aquatic) places. so when it came time to move on to The Tank, the photo wall had to be taken down and packed away. interestingly, this box of photos is one of the few things i have unpacked from the boxes in storage in our garage at The Tank, yet it wasn't opened until just the other night. The Tank is a different place from my old apartment, and the layout itself is not conducive to such a production. I figured why put the whole wall up in my room if only a few people would ever see it, and i KNOW i would get distracted by it up here anyway. not putting it up around fish tanks is a lesson i learned the hard way when i had to clean off salt stains and water marks from the actions of unruly fishes at my old place, so putting it up anywhere else at The Tank would also be hazardous. ...so the wall stayed in stacked (and somewhat ordered) format in a box in my room.

so after blowing of the dust, i took a look inside. the pictures were generally as i remembered them, but some of those photos had been almost forgotten, many faces i hadn't seen in ages, some i'll probably never see again. some i threatened to scan (ah, technology) and post because of their pseudo-incriminating nature (rachel & sarah better tread lightly...and a lot of the rest of you too! just kidding. kind of). but regardless, it was like reviewing 20 years of my life in a matter of an hour, almost a dizzying experience. i revisited everything from The Great Barrier Reef to the events/places/people that made me change my focus from med school to fish ecology (not necessarily an easy feat).


one thing, however, was for certain, and systemic in my photographic history...apparently i (and pretty much my entire family) have always put myself into social situations and settings. now, i know most people take pictures when they are with groups of people or at least with other people, and i'm no different in that general sense; but beyond that, where others may have some down time from such gatherings, i continued to pursue them and found myself constantly in them. i reviewed and revisited gatherings i'd arrange in our tiny dorm rooms at ONU, massive new year's parties at my parents' place (they were there, and cooked Indian food for all the guests as well), class photos that i would arrange...and of course, me with the fishes (who said all groups had to be composed of humans?)
this doesn't look to change anytime in the near future, and i hope it does not. it's definitely caused me problems in the past, that's for sure, but the benefits have far outweighed the detriments, and i wouldn't want it any other way. heck, it's that systemic social addiction that only lets me make these entries (or get any work done for that matter, but thats a different story) at the late hours of the night...when everyone else is asleep and the world is generally quiet. and not up for hanging out. one grandpa was a teacher/principal of a large school, the other a pastor, my dad is a pastor too...perhaps i can blame genetics/heredity once again, haha. either way, it has been with me even when i was very young (constantly being around youth group kids and others) and has persisted to this day, but it's a psychology i can live with. although i can't say it's helped me get a lot of work done (there, i said it)!


i looked through the last of the photos and put them back in the box. i had removed 3 photos out of hundreds. the three being somewhat unified in their relevance, a photo of the class that swayed (shocked?) me into the world of fish ecology, a decal of a particular ganoid-clad prehistoric fish, and a picture of a sign from a class trip to shedd aquarium (the sign reads: "Future Home of Grass Pickerel"...the scientific name of the grass pickerel is E.americanus in case you aren't a fish nerd). i realized i may have to spend a day (or 3) scanning many of them into my computer just so i have them on the many drives...just in case. i gotta be honest, if there is a fire and i can only save a few material possessions, Norton, that photo box, and (maybe) a flash drive with my data/thesis would be the items i come out with!

right now new photos are displayed on something of an electronic wall, and arguably to a larger audience than the old kodak-paper postings, but i kind of miss the original photo wall. i know the era of The Tank will someday come to an end; who knows, maybe at the next venue, those photos will be back up covering the greater portion of bare walls. <"//><

music:

"Amber" - 311

"Umbrella" - Rihanna

random pic:

part of our crew from "Taste of Ann Arbor" (6.3.2007, L-R: Double, Gwen, Summer, Andrea, Me) we periodically had to take shelter in the entry-ways of various shops along main street since it rained most of the day...of course i didn't have my umbrella, but luckily some others in the group did. still got somewhat soaked. twice.