The Athelete - Erland Oye - Unrest - 2003

The thing is, I had considered fighting Aaron before...but there's just no winning a fight with a tiny dude. You beat the crap out of him, and you look like a bully...he beats the crap out of you, and you look like a pansy. So my strategy was essientially to avoid contact with him.

This is why his hit and run while I was on a date was particularly annoying...but once he'd thrown the punch, I knew he was going to have to engage. The punch hadn't particularly hurt so much as jarred me, but it had stalled me long enough that every girl in school had surrounded "poor little Aaron" and gotten him as far from me as possible.

So a couple of interesting things happened in the aftermath. The punch hadn't really done much damage to me. Catching me right on the top of the cheek bone (Remember he jumped up to punch me and threw the punch downwards), I had little more than a little red dot on my cheek to show for the excitement. Aaron on the other hand had broken his first two fingers, his wrist and his arm to the elbow.

This had all happened on a Friday night.

Monday, for reasons that were honestly completely unrelated to the incident, I had foolishly decided to play hooky on the Monday afterwards. Not yet familiar with the intricacies of the high school rumor mill, I was shocked to discover that the word on the street was that he had shattered my eye socket and walked around the school all day on Monday, at long last the bad ass that he wished he could be. Needless to say, he was not happy to see me back and relatively unscathed on Tuesday.

We shared a class, 6th Period Spanish. The teacher, in what I am 100% certain was an effort to look up more plaid skirts of my female classmates, had arranged the desks in the class into two banks of three rows that faced each other and as luck would have it, he sat directly across the aisle from me. So I had to look at him all day. And in his misguided attempt to make himself seem tougher would spend the bulk of spanish class bashing himself in the skull with the cast on his arm...which he would follow up with a "manly" grunt and "fierce" eyes.

It must be really hard to be a short guy...fortunately I wouldn't know.

Kings of Convenience's Quiet is the New Loud is one of my all time favorite hangover albums. Having said that, I don't know that I ever need to have another album by the Norwegian folkies. There is only so much that sound can do. One of the members of Kings, Erland Oye attracted my interest when I heard his stuff was more electronica based...however it is still just as soft and delicate. The skill with melody is still there, but the acoustic guitars have simply been replaced by the bleeps and bloops of Scandanavian Electro-pop. It's nice enough, but a bit of a snooze fest.