jeffrey + upstairsloft

Doctors told me I have low thiamine, low vitamin D and high blood pressure.My doctors also told me to cut down on alcohol. So I did. 2 months later, my doctors told me no alcohol whatsoever…

So here are some things I want to do to occupy my time since I cannot drink—socially, leisurely, or simply for the taste of good whiskey and wine. Note: I love whiskey. I love wine.

Get a pet snake.
Sign up for a marathon. Don’t train. Just run it.
Fight a bear.
Start my own religion.
Stalk a ventriloquist.
Build a life-size Mario Bros 1, World 2, diorama.
Invent a disease and cure it.
Rob a robber.
File bankruptcy.
Fight all members in a fight club in one night.
Paint my living room with a Q-Tip.
Count sand.
Get a tattoo for each day I’m dry for the next few months.

Rewind 16 years. I was introduced to Weezer—you know, that nerdy rock band in that Happy Days music video? Rewind 13 years ago when Blue Album and Pinkerton ruled my music rotation—when Weezer songs dominated a majority of my garage band’s setlist.

I haven’t bumped Weezer in a long while but the moment I hear Rivers begin picking his guitar to the Blue Album’s opening track, “My Name is Jonas,” every teenage emotion—excitement, anxiety, melancholy, romance—will punch me square in the face. And I’ll stand there smiling like a loon—punch-drunk.

And tonight’s Blue Album performance at the Nob Hill Masonic Center is only the warmup to tomorrow night’s Pinkerton. I have goosebumps thinking about hearing Pinkerton live—the album I thought Rivers swore he would never play live—an album that is easily one of my top 5 albums.

Blue Album. Pinkerton. Really the only two seven Weezer albums that matter to me—really the only two albums that aren’t obvious candidates for some after-school special playlist… and those chords, those words and the memories… I’m stoked.

Notable songs:
Say It Ain’t So (Blue Album)
Only in Dreams (Blue Album)
Across the Sea (Pinkerton)
The Good Life (Pinkerton)

Year of the Throwb@ack #throwback #oldschool

Mobile food trucks and food carts killed it this year. I mean… all sorts of food at affordable prices. It’s nothing new though… There has always been food carts scattered across town and most of us have our food cart cult-following. For me, the best way to end a drunken bar crawl in the Mission is to stumble along Valencia looking for that bacon dog cart.

Then you have your fixed food carts and trucks… cobwebs flat tires and all. Well… almost. But I imagine posting up in one spot isn’t a good way to expose yourself across town. Enter Twitter. Twitter was a joke to me. I Tweet because it’s an industry best practice and it’s another channel to just type in words… Build uo a following… Tweet something random… sprinkle in a few good Tweets… bam. Ha. follow me (@jeffroxseven). Twitter’s biggest value is cyberstalking your favorite food cart. #commonsense, right?

So where’s that sisig taco truck? Where’s that’s adobo cart? That curry cart? Where’s that damn bacon dog cart? Follow them on Twitter to keep stay up-to-date. Yes… I encourage food cart/truck cyberstalking. What an age to live in. Combining the old school concept of food carts/trucks and Twitter.

Speaking of old school… I remember teasing myself about ten to fifteen years ago being a compact disc collector. I never really jumped on the vinyl bandwagon—and plus they sorta take a lot of space and space is something hard to come by in San Francisco. But compact discs… CDs… those plastic hi-quality audio discs… those are something I can swear by. And really, Kate and I only listen to CDs in the car—in its purer form, as an album, from track 1 until the end.

Nike Women Half-Marathon Runners / Me and the Mrs. in Seattle a week after

NLCS Game 4, the one where we killt it in the 9th / the fun N-train ride home

World Series Game 2, the one with the 9-0 shutout.

Reppin SF in Times Square / Majorminor + Lauren and Jun behind the lens.

An unexpected free, whiskey-induced, night at the Guggenheim
accompanied by my own soundtrack as I walked up the corkscrew.

Yup. It’s been 2 months and some change since I last blogged and while I would normally slap my hand for lagging hard on posting anything up other than a status update or a tweet—I can’t.

Not only has 2010 been an awesome year, but It’s been busy on all sides of the spectrum from living as fulfilled of a personal life while holding down the Majorminor and StubHub front.

I will describe the last two months like this: Vegas. Sunny San Francisco weekends. Tons (and tons) of work. Seattle. Lots (and lots!) of black and orange. At the Giants’ NLCS game. At the Giants World Series game. A weekend in Seattle with the Missus. Brand New Conference +  4 days in NY.

And unlike what the title of this entry suggests, here’s a cool little project I got to work on for StubHub—a supplementary video presentation for the president’s keynote address at the 10th Anniversary StubHub All Hands meeting/Celebration. It uses handrawn cutouts, hundreds and hundreds of photos and iMovie. Not bad for a kid who can’t draw and taught himself how to edit.

I used to tell people that my life was like an unsexy version of Mad Men. Even that was an overstatement beyond belief. Not only because Mad Men is ridiculous cool, but the only parallels between Mad Men and my life at my last job was the fact that I worked at a marketing and advertising agency. Many drinks were had, there were office romances/hookups (and I’m sure there were/are more beyond my knowledge), stylish good-looking people and those clients.

I started watching Mad Men just as I was leaving my last job. The furniture and the style, and the fact that I worked at an ad agency are what drew me into watching. Then I got hooked. This season (Season 4) is insanely addictive and well-written. It’s not so much about the style and furniture for me anymore (and the transition to Modernism doesn’t quite appeal to me so much). Now it’s all about the characters.

From a material standpoint, it especially appeals to me since I love mid-century furniture (long before Urban Outiftters started suiting their stores up with it) and I love the scene and time period in which Henri-Cartier Bresson was photographing.

Here’s some eye candy and a slideshow from when the actual Mad Men ruled Madison Avenue:
» When Mad Men Ruled (via Slate Magazine)

As summer winds down—or perhaps San Francisco has another leg in that short stint we called “Indian Summer,” I wanted to share a few snapshots taken throughout the summer. It was a great one.

My recap:
Rob moved to San Francisco in April, a setup for a blowout summer.
I took on a Visual Designer position at StubHub
Majorminor took home a few awards and won a handful of awesome clients
Western Caribbean cruise for our one-year anniversary
Visited Miami and met a longtime friend—for the first time.
Lots of family and friends events scattered throughout the weekend.
Celebrated lots of birthdays and anniversaries
Ate a lot.
Drank a lot.
Biked a lot.
Ate out a lot.
Saw friends more frequently than normal (whattap Vince!)

Words can’t describe how awesome of a mix my summer was—it was the perfect blend of a little bit of rowdiness and chill vibes.

Now we’re going out with a bang. This weekend we’re meeting up for our annual Monterey daytrip/BBQ—9 years strong. Next weekend… Vegas. Yep… we’re doing the Vegas thing. I despise Vegas and what better way to tell her by raising hell there. They market themselves as America’s playground—so it’s only fair. Ha.

» Summer 2010 on Flickr

» http://kate.upstairsloft.com/2010/08/yo

She gets mad at me for the sake of getting mad at me. I still love her though. That’s why she’s a boss.

» http://convoy.tumblr.com

My soul spoken through photos of knacks and things on somebody’s Tumblr. Beautiful things. Old thins. Renewed things. Cameras. Bikes. Antiques. Globes. Maps. The objects themselves are captured beautifully.