Today, I filled out the best form in the world - my graduation application for school. After going for my MBA part time for the last three years, I have one semester left. Come Christmas, I will no longer have to juggle my responsibilities between work and school. This makes me very very happy.

I have become such a bad student this year, along with everyone else graduating this year. I used to at least try to read everything that was assigned, now it's gotten to the point where I might glance at it and just wait to hear what I'll be tested on. It's kind of a vicious cycle - the further into your MBA you are, the higher up you become, the more responsibilities you're handed, the more meetings you're running back and forth from, the more difficult it becomes to leave at 5:30 twice a week for class. I missed about 40% of the classes for this summer's second term because I simply couldn't leave.

I'm glad I didn't know what I was getting myself into when I started this whole process, because I probably wouldn't have gone through with it. :)

So January will be a very nice month, not having to run to class, and knowing that every weekend will be homework free. Then it'll be time for another necessary evil - job interviews!

Hmmm, ten songs I'm totally into right now:

- Robert Owens : I'll Be Your Friend (an old house classic, heard it in Miami a couple weeks ago and it sounded so fresh)
- Depeche Mode : Never Let Me Down
- The New Radicals : You Get What You Give
- Kanye West : Gold Digger
- The Game : Dreams
- Gorillaz : Feel Good Inc.
- Joey Beltram : Energy Flash
- Armand Van Helden : Flowerz
- Orbital : Halcyon + On + On
- Chic : Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)

I hereby tag Phyllis Gabor and Loneliness is Pornography

Much is being said about the closing of CBGBs, I think it's time for the place to go. The longer it stays open, the more images of its heydey in the late seventies are tarnished.

Just a few blocks down from CBGBs on the Bowery, though, another NYC establishment is closing its doors too. Satellite Records will soon be no more as well, at least in brick and mortar form.

After I bit the bullet and dropped the cash for my Technics 1200-MK2s, I asked my favorite DJ where he got his shit from, because it certainly wasn't at the stores I was going to. Prophetically and with angels flying around his head, he said "Go to Satellite, ask for so and so, and you'll be on your way."

I spent years digging through the piles and piles of vinyl contained within, searching for the secret weapons I'd heard the Friday before. I quickly learned to branch out from the standard Hard and Tribal House sections, into Tech House, Progressive House, Deep Trance, Minimal Techno, and the billions of other sub-genres, searching for the perfect loop. It was incredibly intimidating at first to stare at the walls and walls of underground stuff from all over the world, but pretty soon I was just grabbing everything and plowing through it on the listening stations, pitching down the hard german techno from 160 to 125 bpms to see how it sounded.

You can't imagine how much horrible horrible dance music I heard, but I also heard plenty of moments of genius as well.

A few years ago, it became apparent that something was very wrong. The moments of genius were becoming more and more thinly spread amongst the rest of the crap, the new stuff listed online wasn't available in the store, and you were no longer fighting for a listening station. Every time that I've been there in the past two years I was generally one of four customers in the entire place, and unless I had specifically ordered something online to be picked up in the store, I probably walked out empty handed, feeling like I had wasted my time.

I suppose that just as with CBGB, it's Satellite's time to go. I kind of knew it was coming, but I'm also kind of sad to see it happen.