datarocked!

Apart from the fine lines starting to show around my eyes when I smile (or smirk smugly), the prospect that jowls are only about 40 years away instead of 50 and the fact that I now refer to college kids as "kids" and literally mean it, there's only one other signifier of my actual age (28) that creeps up from time to time -- I can no longer metabolize liquor like I used to.

Probably like you, I was that kid in college who could go out on a Wednesday night, handle a pitcher of The Beast, subsequently pull an all-nighter and finish an "A"-grade midterm paper on the leit-motif of mirrors in Tolstoy's War and Peace by Thursday at noon, just in time to imbibe a healthful lunch of coffee and Mountain Dew during which we'd plan where and how we'd be drinking that night. And because of my science-defying healthy liver, this pattern pretty much went on for four years.

And things didn't slow up much for the first three years after college either when I lived in Moscow, Russia. I don't think I need to elaborate on that.

But now, as someone entering the end of their late-twenties, my body has decided to stop knowing how to properly process that unique combination of alcohol and caffeine into energetic hilarity and instead just processes it into a Sunday morning/afternoon intense hangover. Not tight.

The culprit last Saturday night was a little beverage known as Sparks -- a pre-canned Red Bull and vodka with twice the sugar. It tastes like liquid Smarties, well, if Smarties were chock full of booze. Anyway, the reason for this long, drawn-out explanation probably filled with a little too much information for my e-reputation is that my three cans of Sparks (they were only $1 a piece!) led me to take probably the worst photographs of my life at one of the best concerts I've been to in DC -- Datarock at the Rock & Roll Hotel. (Thanks to The Vinyl District for the tickets, by the way, although I hear Facebook was hooking people up, too. I am, however, eagerly awaiting my free swag, so again, thanks TVD!)

In honor of those three fateful cans of Sparks, I'm going to sum up the experience by choosing three words to describe the three key factors that made this show so enjoyable:

VENUE
Unpretentious
Design
Inexpensive

CROWD
Cool
Interesting
Diverse

DATAROCK
Loud
Norwegian
Sweaty

All in all, it was an awesome night. I hope you enjoy these blurs as much as I seemed to have enjoyed snapping them.

By the way, for more than a nine-word review, The Washington Post has a pretty good write-up here.