Birthday, etc.

I can't remember what I was going to write about, so I'll tell you about a couple of other things and hope it comes back to me.

So I turned 20 yesterday, and it was a great day. What made it so fabulous, you ask? Why, several things.
1. My dad and I cowrote this song about Micah 6:8 (What does the Lord require of you? Do justice, show kindness, walk humbly with God) and played it in church. The pickup for my acoustic guitar had a broken connector, so I ended up playing it on my Telecaster, which doesn't get much attention from me. (If it were a child, it would have been removed from my custody years ago.) We sounded awesome. I'll post an mp3 of it when I get the chance.
2. I cleaned my room. Though the process isn't a pile of giggles, the end result sure is neat. (Pun intended. I'm sorry.)
3. I had a party with my family. My family usually gets Dairy Queen cakes for birthdays, and I had one with dinosaurs on it! When we ordered it, the employee, upon hearing our choice of design, thought it was a cake for a small boy. My mother is probably still shaking her head at me wanting dinos on my cake, since that was the theme of my birthday party when I turned five. (I remember decorating t-shirts with dinosaur sponges dipped in paint. We probably played pin the tail on the brontosaurus, too. My mom is brilliant when it comes to throwing birthday parties for kids.)
4. My dad and I finished the NY Times Sunday crossword.
5. Among the gifts I received were 3 Barnes & Noble giftcards (the gift of textbooks! They will make the end of August much less financially painful) and the soundtrack to the movie 'Music and Lyrics'. This movie is so awesome, I must tell you about it, which I will do momentarily.

First, I must add this short blurb to indicate the end of the Awesome Things About Yesterday List, to clarify that I'm changing the subject.

So Music and Lyrics is a romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. Hugh Grant plays Alex Fletcher, who is a washed up 80s pop star, who was in a band called Pop!. (Basically he's the guy from Wham! that isn't George Michael.) He's picked to work on a song for a modern Britney/Christina-like pop star, but he was the half of a broken up songwriting pair that wrote the music, and can't write lyrics to save his life, most of the time. (I feel like Paul McCartney may have gone through phases like that.) He hires a lyricist who is very like Jack Black, but less funny, and ends up finding out that Barrymore, who's filling in for his plant-waterer, is really good a writing lyrics. Humor, awkwardness, romance and foolish mistakes ensue. The music in this movie is FANTASTIC. The Pop! song and video are spot-on with 80s style, and three of the other songs were written by Adam Schlesinger, the genius behind Fountains of Wayne (if you haven't yet heard 'Traffic and Weather', the album FoW released this spring, your summer has been lacking). It's awesome.

In less joyous news, the concert I was planning to attend tomorrow (Wilco was playing somewhere in Duluth) has been postponed. Most unfortunately, it has been rescheduled for September 4th. I'll have been in Ohio for a week and a half at that point. So for me, it's not so much postponed as canceled. I was feeling for a while this afternoon that this summer was becoming the Summer of Things Not Panning Out. But out of concern for my happiness and the fact that this post is already incredibly long, I shouldn't dwell on that long enough to make another list.

Happy Monday the 13th!

Oh, I was going to mention a dream I had this morning. My dad and I were robbed, along with several other patrons of a convenience store. It was kind of lame. But I was kind of glad I hadn't replaced my dead iPod yet. I woke up halfway through it, so the police might have ended up getting involved. I did notice that the two young criminals didn't really have their hearts in it. They seemed kind of bored, like they were doing something mundane.