Unreal

I’ve been meaning to write about certain things today, but right now I’m very sleepy, and I have to attend a Christmas party few hours later - it’s mandatory for me, so, what can I do?

The Christmas party I’m going to later is by the company where I work in, and everyone has to give gifts, each to a person chosen by drawing lots. We’ve written on a whiteboard our wishlists, and because of what the person I have chosen wants, I went to buy Guns N’ Roses’s much-delayed, 17-years-in-production, and banned-in-China Chinese Democracy. Gee, it must’ve been quite an agony for that person to wait 17 years to get that album. If he’s had it in his wish list for that long, I feel terribly sorry for him.

It’s incredible enough for the album to ever get released, making one of the funniest pop-culture slangs obsolete, so that I can no longer refer to anything postponed indefinitely as “the Chinese Democracy of [something]” (e.g. Duke Nukem Forever is the Chinese Democracy of videogames; Dr Dre’s Detox is the Chinese Democracy for Hiphop albums; getting a good president is the Chinese Democracy of…). Now I hold the CD in my hands while my head is reeling with disbelief; if you tell me two years ago that I’d ever get it, I’d laugh so hard security might send me out of the building. It’s just so unreal.

For the record, I’m not a Guns N’ Roses fan, but I like some of their songs, especially Sweet Child O’ Mine. Perhaps I’ll eventually give their new album a couple of listens, and decide if it has been worth the wait and the multiple changes of band members and the Axl Rose vs. Slash Snakepit drama.