I write, occasionally

Kari spilled an entire "styrofoam leftover container" of Pasta Capri in my car. It's a very oily pasta with fettucine, portabella mushrooms, and artichoke hearts.

Well, I've been off work for about a week now, which has been awesome.

I went home to Illinois straight from work on Tuesday and met my dad and sister at Old Chicago for pizza, which was actually really good. Then hung out with Rich for the rest of the day.

On Christmas day, we woke up and opened presents. I got all kinds of good clothes, a toyota supra xmod (and stage 2 engines, metal bearrings, and body kits), some DVDs, and various other gifts. Later that day we went to Snowstar, a ski resort that some relatives of ours own. They close the resort for the family Christmas party and all the skiing, sledding, and snowboarding that we want to do. I ended up riding snowskates with my little cousin Erich most of the time. I hit a 50-50 …

So, lately, I've been getting a lot of people telling me that I "look like that guy on 'Viva la Bam.'" Which is sorta funny, because we do have similar styles, my hair is getting long, I skateboard, have all the cky DVDs, own a couple HIM CDs (which are actually from Finland, woot), and even sport a heartagram belt.

The thing that sucks is people only know Bam because of mtv. I mean, seriously... isn't Bam the guy sponsored by Element, Volcom, Fairmans, Clive, or Adio? or is he the guy that's been putting out awesome DVDs titled "cky" or "haggard?" or maybe he's the brother of Jess from the band, cky. He might even be that insane fan of HIM, has the same tattoos as ville valo, and puts a heartagram on everything. Why is he just now …

Within the last couple weeks I've seen all 3 of the Lord of the Rings movies for the first time. Today was opening day for the 3rd one at the theaters and I went with a bunch of guys from work.

Most of them have read the book, which I can't even imagine because... that would suck. I mean, seriously that is a stupid amount of reading... Having seen the movies, however, I think that it is one of the greatest stories ever written. Waiting until now to see all 3 was the best thing I could have done, especially since I knew NOTHING about them. I think that something about seeing them ALL for the first time in such a short period made them even better. I had no time to anticipate, guess, hope, or expect anything out of them.

Anyway... …

So, my cube is slowly turning into a tech deck skatepark. I've now got a quarter pipe, 2 grind rails, 7 regular tech decks, 2 mini tech decks, and a tech deck handboard.

Luckily most of my neighbors are into tech decks as well... other wise they would hate me. Nick has 3 normal decks and a mini deck, cedric has 4 decks, chad has 2, minnis has 1 and jason has 1.

Here's a picture of my desk right now.

Theta Semi Formal: Lame
Food: Worse
Music: wtf
Cool: Grant, Grant's friend, Kevin Keller, Justin, Seth, Cory, Jamie, Sean, Becca, Tara, D-wiz, Paul, Nate, Jamie's date, ...and maybe Kari (I guess)
Owls: Love Pacific Sunwear

This weekend I had originally planned to go see a Hip Hop show in Ames, but those plans kind of fell through so I decided to make a surprise visit to Mount Vernon for the weekend.

I got to play poker with Kevin and 2 of his co-workers (Adam and Sabra). They were really good. We played for over 4 hours. Kevin lost his $20, but lasted a really long time. I ended up down only $2.25. It was fun. Later, Kevin and I walked into C & D's lounge, a bar formally known as Joe's in Mount Vernon. We barely got 2 steps in the door and this old townie yells, "Hey I saw you on Mtv!" With little to no reaction time I just hit him in the arm and yelled, "Yeah that's cause I'm on it!" I don't know what happened, but it like stunned the dude. He just …

A lot of friends at work and I have been getting pretty into Tech Decks lately. Ollie-ing around the desk is a lot of fun. I even made some grind rails this week.

Anyway, today I was going for the highest ollie and landed one about a foot in the air. But then I wanted to go for a little higher... I popped it as hard as I could and followed it up about 1.5 feet. But the deck kept going up, all the way over the cube wall and into my partner's cube. The wall is about 4 feet higher than the desk that I ollied from. ... If I could have sprinted around the corner to land it... I bet I could have completed the trick. Regardless, it was the best ollie ever.

Cedric has a blister on his finger from working on his nollie... so he's out of …

Alright, so I was thinking today... How in the hell did miniature doberman's come about?

... and then i stopped thinking about that

A little later, I thought, "What if we could do the exact opposite and make small dogs really big!?" Like... Can you imagine a chihuahua the size of a great dane? wtf, that would be so scary. their eyes would be like softballs.

So, a long time ago I wrote this article to get a few things off my chest. My friend Zay really liked it and suggested that I should submit it to the school newspaper (The Cornellian). So I did, and it made a lot of people mad, especially a kid named Jonathan Levine. So he wrote an article in the Cornellian about my article... trying to bash me. It was funny cause he didn't really say much and really backed down when I approached him.
So... now that I'm out of school he decides to start talking about me again?

Mira824: dude
Mira824: youre in the cornellien
Mira824: did you hear?
Derek R Brooks: i am?
Mira824: jonathan levine says"there was no derek brooks insulting what it means to be an undergradute student at a four year …

This afternoon I installed new upper intercooler piping and a Greddy Type S Blow off valve on the car. It was actually a pretty easy install. I did it in about an hour and a half and it turned out really well. Here is the old version, and here is what it looks like now.

I also helped Nathan install some mirrors on his accord. It needed them pretty badly. The new ones are power and have turn signals in them, which is dope. It was interesting hooking the mirrors to his existing power controls, especially since the box that it came with was from another country and every word was spelled wrong... The turn signal lights were pretty easy once we got a wiring diagram from Grimes Automotive, but routing the wires into the car sucked sooo …

Last week sometime I started tracking how people are getting to derek.broox.com, which is pretty fun to watch. For some reason I get a lot of hits from people searching for "Chickety China the Chinese Chicken." And quite a few from ICP and Nextel searches.

The best ones, though, are the hits from people looking for Derrick Brooks of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It's funny because half of the American football fans that use the internet don't know how to spell his name. So they always search for "Derek Brooks" and "Buccaneers." This has been getting me hit hard because my name is, in fact, Derek Brooks. And I recently wrote an article about the Des Moines Buccaneers.

Even though we have these similarities, the main difference between …

I went to the MSI concert tonight with Cullen, Kevin, and Jenny (a girl from Cornell). It was awesome.

The show started off with a weird bluegrass/metal band from Brooklyn, NY called unkle ****er(but the violinist is hot). Then Tub Ring came on, a punk/metal band from Chicago, who was really really good... I wish I woulda bought one of their CDs. Shortly after, Mindless Self Indulgence came out....

Jimmy Urine is nuts and puts on a great show. Lyn Z is so hot. I wish she would live with me. Kitty is also above average and can definitely rock the drums. Steve Righ puked on stage for some reason.

So, Mindless Self Indulgence puts on an awesome show. We made it up to the front as always. Urine was standing on the railing right in …

So, today when we got to work we were in some sort of serious brown-out (we were getting a little power, but not quite enough).

The flourescent lights flickered, the PCs would boot until the harddrives started spinning, then it would start over again..

Some rooms/cubes got a little more power than others. Doug, a guy I work with took his PC into a conference room and plugged in, so me and a couple guys went in with our RC cars and Tech Decks and watched Office Space.

Now, it's 10:30 and the power is back on. suck.

So, if you didn't already know, Victoria's Secret has a series called "Very Sexy" which includes perfume and all that smell good stuff. Well, recently they released "Very Sexy For Him" .. cologne for the metrosexuals and for girls to buy their boyfriends or whatever. And even more recently they came out with "Very Sexy For Him 2." Only, this time when you buy the cologne you get the coolest umbrella EVER.

My girlfriend, Kari, likes the cologne a lot... and knew that I liked the umbrella. So she hooked me up, big time. Check it out: top, inside, closer.

Man I love rainy days.

Friday: Insane
We met Harper at Crobar, a new club in chicago charging like a $30 cover. The DJ there is a guy named 'Felix' who does work with Puffy and is definitely the best club DJ I've seen live.

Anyway, Chris (of the virgin tears) was hanging out with us also. He's friends with Felix, so we all walked in together on "the cool side of the rope" for free while some dude was taking pictures of us, ha. Inside, this place was so dope. It was 2 stories; the dance floor is on the bottom but there is also a balcony wrapping around the whole place and the DJ booth overlooked everything (this is where we hung out most of the night). It was so much fun.

More crazy stuff:
-They weren't letting people with tennis shoes in (luckily we …

On Friday, my friend Cedric had the day off, so we emptied his cube. We also moved boxes and a printer in and labeled everything with "Charles Brown" moving tags.

On Saturday, Kari and I went to a Des Moines Buccaneers Hockey game. They are in the same league as the Cedar Rapids Rough Riders... (First of all, I'm not one of the super cool fans for teams full of 18-20 year olds, but they are definitely fun). I have gone to quite a few Rough Riders games over the past 4 years, and had a lot of fun. The facility is really nice, the fans are nuts and always funny, the team is pretty decent and there are cool things in between periods. Since I moved to Des Moines, the state's capitol, I figured that the games would be just as cool, or …

I just got a good slap to the face as a reminder that November marks the 6 month anniversary of my graduation from Cornell. This isn't sad because I think I'm getting old, because I don't... It is sad because I got a friendly letter from the Iowa Student Loan Liquidity Corporation which is conveniently located 9 blocks from my apartment.

My debt to Cornell starts today... And the scariest part about this billing statement is that nowhere on it is the total amount that I owe or how many months/years this is supposed to take. I will probably pay forever...

Stupid, stupid Liberal Arts education. Why didn't I go to a state school??? Maybe I should make double or triple payments or something and put less money in the bank. Or I could …

This weekend I went to Detroit with Kevin, Ben Stockwell, Richie, and his friend Adam. ...Man, that city is ghetto, but also fun.

Thursday around 4 I drove to Mt Vernon to meet Kevin, then we drove to Richie's house to pick them up, then up to Detroit. After a lot of driving, we arrived at our hotel on 14 mile around 5 AM. We slept for 5 hours and then woke up to go sight seeing. While we were out we saw a lot of things referenced by ICP and other people under Psychopathic records. Here are some cool things we saw:
-The ghetto block that Violent J grew up on
-Old school ICP Graffiti
-Hot Hits (The record store that Alex Abbiss owns)
-Zug Island
-Burnt down houses
-Lots of other streets and places that get rapped about.

Later, …

I am writing this out of rage after placing my first order on half dot friggin com.... half.com sucks, and sucks hard. first of all they didn't give me a buy button next to the thing i wanted to buy.... so i got mad. and then, after i finally got through to the checkout and was ready to buy my ultra-cheap CD. I find out that they're ultra-stupid and don't accept bleeper bloppin paypal, wtf!?

I hate half.com