Say Anything

18 Weeks

2010-06-29T17:07:00.002-05:00

So this whole baby thing is really happening. There have been a few times in the past months that I thought maybe someone was wrong, or maybe it was all a dream that I would wake up from or a joke but this morning I felt the tell-tale bubbly movements in there and I know that it's real.

It was 6:15am and I had just hit snooze. The cat came in to see what the hold up was and decided to snuggle in for a few minutes if I wasn't going to be feeding him right away. He climbed in under the covers and curled himself up in a ball against my stomach and started purring.

For the past week I've been laying quietly at night and in the morning, putting the TV on mute and thinking little baby thoughts at it in hopes that I would feel movement and apparently all it needed was a cat because all that purring set off a flurry of movement. And then the cat freaked out and left, so maybe he felt it too.

Great Pets

2009-11-12T18:44:00.002-06:00

Some nights I come home and I look forward to a time when we have no cats.
Or at least cats that shed and shit with less wild abandon than the two we have now do.

Don't get me wrong. I love my cats. They are a fair representation of their owners: aloof assholes and insightful comforters in turns. And my home has always had cats, and sometimes a dog. I like pets but MAN these two are...suffering some sort of moving related trauma that is manifesting itself in the worst possible ways. Or they have simply matured into furry assholes, I'm not really sure.

Beatrice has claimed not only the bathroom but also the living room as her territory. This leaves Jabber stuck in our wee tiny bedroom and the corner of the kitchen where his water bowl sits. He doesn't even like that water bowl. When I get up in the mornings he is sitting beside it, glaring at it with complete contempt. If he could open the fridge and pour himself water from the filter into a proper tea cup he would be happier I think. He is a pris and a puss and easily bullied by Beatrice who has always been a bully, even when she was small enough to fit into my pocket.

It would take a really, really big marsupial to fit her in a pocket now, the fatass. We have taken to calling her Meatloaf behind her back because, from behind her back, she resembles one. But with evil eyes, that are mirrors into an evil soul. If it were up to Queen Bea every piece of paper or clothing that was left draped on a chair or on the floor would belong to her and her alone. The sweater I was wearing that I abandoned on the rocking chair? Hers now. The sports section The Husband is trying to read? Hers now. The desk chair no one has sat on in a half hour? All for Bea to sit on and not for you. She doesn't care what you thought you were doing, all your things are belong to Bea. End of story. It's no wonder that Jabber has created a fortress of solitude within our closet.

It's hard to believe that Bea is now 12 and who the hell knows how old Jabber is. He came to us with his (dumb) name and his age a mystery. We used to think he was really young but we're beginning to suspect he is actually an old man. We could probably take him to a vet but he's not sick, we don't have the money and the anxiety of the car trip and the waiting room would probably kill him no matter what his age.

Eventually, these two shall pass and I will be sad, probably for a long time, but I wont miss the smell of the liter box or being woke in the middle of the night because there's a cat trying to climb across my face and onto my pillow. Nope, wont miss that at all.

Some Things

2009-10-28T20:02:00.003-05:00

Riiiiiiiiiight. So about that whole I'm totally going to post more often thing I maybe hinted at a month ago. That didn't happen. But it still could.

But right now I got nothing.

That's not true. I got something. Some things. Little things though, nothing all that earth shattering or transformative.

I have, for instance, that I've been thinking lately that the best way to eat a bagel really is straight out of the oven. Barring getting one from the baker's oven, a frozen bagel defrosted in the toaster oven set to "bake" for about 7 minutes is pretty freakin awesome. Toasting really doesn't do a bagel justice. I had maybe forgotten what a bagel - crusty on the outside and deliciously warm and soft on the inside - can be. But I rediscovered it last week and now I am much more excited about the rest of the bagels we have in the freezer. They aren't New York bagels. They are actually really (really) good bagels from...uhh well its a store in one of the suburbs. I've never been there. But they have a booth at the farmer's market in Daley Plaza on Thursdays. They've got a really good deal. I think it's a bag of four bagels for $1.50. But I don't work in that neighborhood anymore so once we eat our way through the stash in the freezer I'm not sure what we're going to do.

That's the other thing I've got. A new job. It is a very good thing. That is all I will say about that here.

We push our clocks back an hour on Sunday and I'm wondering if, in this age of social networks, I should bother with my annual email. And if I do send the email does that absolve me from having to make it my status for the day on Sunday? Or should I do both? Why do I do this?

I'm a little strange I think sometimes.

I'm making a conscientious effort to invest myself in some sports this year. Honestly I really don't care all that much about any sport. If I could never watch another sporting event ever again I would be OK with that. But I have this husband you see. And also these friends...Many of whom find sports to be an integral part of their lives to some extent or another. So, you know, I do my best to know a little bit about a bunch of stuff - sound bytes from Mike & Mike or something I read somewhere, caught on the news. And I watch the important games - playoffs and bowls (OK, maybe just the Super one.) But they are not making it easy! The sports seasons used to be far more delineated than they are now. This week we have football, baseball, basketball and I'm sure there's a soccer game on somewhere that someone is watching and will be talking about this weekend. It's really making things difficult for me. For example, I knew that tonight would be all about the Hornets game. I was prepared for that. But then, when I mentioned that there's a new South Park on after the game I was told that after the basketball game there's also a freakin' World Series game on! This was never meant to happen. (And also I know it's the Yankees. They have like 26 titles, give me a break already.) You try to be a good wife and show a little interest, you give that inch and they want 120 yards. It's not right. Attention all of you various sports franchise things: Go back to the way it was when I could get at least a week of non-sports related prime time television watching in between seasons.
Is that too much to ask?

Integrity Sauce

2009-09-27T18:31:00.016-05:00

For someone who actually likes to cook, living with a professional cook can be frustrating at times. Sure I really appreciate the fact that when The Husband says he's got dinner/breakfast/midnight snack taken care of I know it's going to be damn good. But once in a while I gotta flex my chops in the kitchen. Because while I don't have many, I worked hard for the kitchen skills I do posses. And I can fucking cook, thank you very much.

So last week I made a dinner party. I needed an excuse to have people over to the new place. And, collectively, we needed an event to bring us all together and tip back a few cocktails before the Size 8 show. I decided to challenge myself culinarily (i maybe just made that word up) and promised everyone a homemade Italian feast. I planned on making a sauce with homemade meatballs, and The Husband and I spent a day making Italian sausages to thrown in. And because when I say I'm going to do something I have, on occasion, gone a bit overboard, I busted out the Play-Doh play station looking pasta attachment that came with our KitchenAid to make my own spaghetti.

Way back when I was what we would now classify as a "tween" I stumbled on the pasta press my mom had hidden in a closet full of other stuff that all, in turns, fascinated me. But when I found that I made pasta my project of the moment. It probably didn't last longer than a weekend because it was not easy work but I am at least familiar with the process. I made the dough a few days ahead of time to test the machine and froze it for the time being. On Saturday I gave it a little extra love and started throwing small balls of dough into the machine. Once it got going it was fun singing along to Magnetic Fields songs and rolling out linguine dough.

I made the meatballs from an old, family recipe. Rolling them out and smacking them into shape to the tunes on Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted. I have to say they turned out really well.

I threw the sausages we made previously into a pot to brown.

When they were uniformly crisp and beautiful I traded them out for the meatballs and turned those until they were patched with crunchy spots of crust. After both the meats had been cooked there was all sorts of delicious debris at the bottom of the pot. I threw the herbs in on top of all that to toast and then The Husband advised deglazing the pot with red wine. So I threw a good cup of an open bottle in there and scrapped up all the lovely bits and stirred it all up.

A word about the herbs. For a week The Husband and I had been debating the merits of my planned sauce. A friend of ours who does not eat peppers or onions was joining us and I was, therefore, planning a sauce without onions. To The Husband this idea was sacrilege. How was a sauce a sauce of any merit without onions in it? And what did I mean there weren't any onions in the meatball recipe? I was determined to prove him wrong. This could be good, hell it could be delicious, without any onions. And hell no there aren't any onions in my family meatballs!

The flavor base for the sauce would come from a whole head of roasted garlic and as much basil as our floundering little plant would yield, which turned out to be quite a bit. I harvested some leaves from the oregano plant and threw put that in with a bay leaf. That was pretty much it. It was a smokey sauce with just enough sweet to temper the crushed red pepper in the sausages.

I didn't take any pictures of the pasta because by that time I had an audience of dinner guests and it was cooking faster than I could get it all in the pot. It turned out to be a pretty skimpy batch. For the first time in my life I underestimated how much of something I would need to feed people! But the noodles themselves were light and fluffy. They were without much of a texture, acting more as a blank template for the sauce than as a substantial part of the meal.

In hindsight, and as mentioned by a few of the guests, it was probably not the best idea to fill everyone with pasta no matter how light it was and then troop us all off to catch a bus and see a show. But there was coffee and dessert (monkey bread is from the devil) and more coffee. When we arrived at the theater there was a bar in the lobby so we had another drink. We were in fine spirits when we sat down to watch the show. In such fine spirits, in fact, that after the show we all decided to go out and get another drink at a familiar bar in our new neighborhood. After the first beer the day's work in the kitchen started catching up with me but I hung in for another round before we left the party peoples and made our way back to the house.

I have to say I am so excited about how that all went: the new place, the back porch, the food the company, that I'm going to have to do it again soon. Or, um, as soon as I can. Which might not be until November now that I've seen what October is going to look like but eventually at some point I'll be busting out the pasta maker again and reinterpreting the meaning of integrity with some sort of tasty, delicious sauce. Maybe next time I'll do it without the garlic.

Ha. Not likely.

In The Past Week

2009-09-21T19:28:00.002-05:00

we learned:

5:00am is just too early, even for an early riser like me.

The Chicago Avenue bus is the devil's playground and should not be counted upon as a timely method of transportation to anywhere.

Tomato sauce can have integrity, even if it doesn't have onions in it.

That we are secretly excited about fall because there will finally be new things to watch on TV. Who knows if any of it will be good but at least it will be new.

It is possible that we watch too much TV.

I REALLY need this elliptical machine to get out of my house.

Locatelli Pecorino Romano cheese is the scent of my childhood.

And its sheep's milk, who knew?

There is such a thing as trying to read too many books at one time.

Morning Becomes Electronic

2009-09-16T05:53:00.002-05:00

I beat the sun up by about an hour and a half today. I am sitting here, drinking my first cup of coffee in the dim of table lamps instead of the overheads because The Husband will sleep for another two hours before his alarm clock goes off. It's really hard to get your coffee the right color when you make it in the dark.

Obviously I have interrupted something in the cats' busy schedule, Beatrice is looking at me like I am a some sort of invader. Jabber is aloof, as he has been since we moved in, but seems grateful to have me stand near him while he eats. I suspect I am running interference for him.
Beatrice is sudden very interested in me, the computer, my fingers on the keyboard...oh, no it's just that I am sitting in her chair.

The plus side to getting up this early is that I get to watch the Angel reruns turnover from series finale to series opener on TNT, like some backwards calendar page. I try to watch the news but increasingly I find very little newsworthiness to the stories they cover. (This just in: Korean woman hit by rock flung by zoo elephant!) I prefer reruns at this time of day, I can catch up on the news online later, when the world starts making more sense.

I usually spend my first few hours of the day sitting quietly, sipping coffee and eating breakfast. I don't talk much until The Husband gets up. And then sometimes I talk too much, forgetting that he hasn't been awake all that long. Occasionally the cats and I will converse or I'll make a glib comment directed at Matt Lauer but my brain is like a pile of wet timber this early in the day, it takes a lot of kindling and a few good match strikes to get it going. Trying to shake off lingering dream images and anxieties I brought home with me last night...which will just be piled on by new ones if I bring them back to work with me and eventually I will just collapse under the weight of them all. So I don't know if this morning writing thing is going to work out yet. We'll see. Let me practice thinking in sentances for a while.

Lord of the (Fruit) Flies

2009-09-14T19:29:00.002-05:00

So we moved, which you may or may not have heard. The apartment is nice enough, it has a big living room and a big kitchen. It also has a back porch and a front stoop which I haven't had since living in Queens. The windows look brand new and that will be handy come winter. I don't think we'll have to worry about putting plastic up insulation on these windows. But the bedrooms are like coffins, really big coffins but non-the-less I have had a difficult time sleeping here. Over four years of sleeping in a big, open space and now I sleep against a wall my ass practically hangs out of a window. Said window being only three feet away from our neighbors' window so yeah, I'm a little self conscious about that. Have you ever tried being self conscious in your sleep? It totally wrecks havoc on the REM cycle.

And I'm beginning to get the feeling that this apartment doesn't want us here. Nothing as dramatic as disembodied voices from the fireplace (we don't have one of those anyway) or invisible midnight marching bands but still, something is not quite right.

First of all, the day were moved in the movers were three hours late, not too big a deal if you are planning to start at noon and don't actually begin until 3pm but we were supposed to start at 5pm. They didn't get to our old place until eight. We weren't done getting stuff into this place until 11pm.

We got our stuff in without too much damage but we discovered that the bathroom sink drained really slowly. In the book of rules our landlord gave us (so not kidding, it looked like the booklet I got in the dorms at college) they said "let us know if there's something wrong, we'd rather take care of a problem while it's small then let it build up into something bigger." So, I emailed them. They sent someone over a couple of days later without ever replying to my email. But the sink was fixed so yay! Right?

Wrong. They just broke it in a different way so now the u-pipe leaked. I called to let them know and someone came back, and now we have a slow draining bathroom sink again...Which is better than a leaking sink but hundreds of thousands of homes across America have sinks that drain properly AND are leak free. Apparently this is not going to be one of those households.

Then we discovered the fruit flies.

I eat fruit, I am not ashamed to admit it. I like bananas and apples and all sorts of berries. I eat grapefruit and really like those crazy asian pear things. Most of my fruit I leave out in our fruit bowl. What? Bananas go brown in the fridge!

I don't know where fruit flies come from but one morning we woke up and discovered a swarm of them living around our sink and nestled into the stuff we store onto of the cabinets. I know they're harmless but they are GROSS and I have no desire to battle my way through them to make my morning coffee. Once we realized the cats weren't going to help we started chasing the flies around the kitchen trying to smoosh them in our hands. Deceptively hearty those little boogers. They only have a lifespan of, like, three days but they are impossible to crush! Like adamantium I tell you!

When that plan failed, my The Husband, started talking about importing spiders from the yard. Nuh-uh. No way. We've already got a daddy long legs living in one of the bedrooms and I've spied at least one other lounging webside in a corner near the kitchen ceiling. I do not need any more spiders than that living inside the house with me. As it is those two were hardly doing anything to quell the problem, what do I want with their lazy, outdoor cousins? For-get-it.

I did a little research on the ol' interwebs and discovered a page of possible home remedies. All non-lethal to other members of the household, all DIY and all sounded promising. I mean, why would the internets lie to me? So we chopped up a banana, put the pieces in a couple of deep take-out containers and sealed the tops with plastic wrap. Then I poked wee, tiny holes in the plastic wrap and we put them near the kitchen sink. OK so maybe the holes were too small because we watched those traps for hours and while the flies would land on top of the container and walk around on top of the plastic wrap they never actually went INTO the containers. Make the holes bigger he says, so I do. Then, of course the flies can get out. Fail. I poured myself a glass of wine and then poured the flies some and walked away from the kitchen.

The next morning we had a few flies, not nearly as many as we had hoped but any progress is good progress. For three days we put up with the smell of rotting banana and watched closely to make sure we were still luring them in. This morning we had two take out containers of stinky fruit and angry flies. They seem to be gone, for now, but I guess it will never be safe to leave fruit out in the summer here...? Are they hitching rides home with us from the market? Do I need to start thinking about fruit fly larvae when I eat a fruit salad? On second thought, don't answer that, I probably don't want to know.

Oh and then the fridge broke down on Saturday night. We didn't even realize it until The Husband went in for a beer and it came out warm and frothed over when he opened the bottle.

Well, maybe we put too much stuff in the freezer. Maybe we need to clear space around that compressor doohickey that makes the cold. Nope. Maybe we shifted the temperature dial when we were putting away groceries? Nope, in fact that thing doesn't move at all, perpetually set at level 4. Well, maaaaybe we accidentally left the door open, we'll close it and see what happens in an hour. Bupkiss. On Sunday morning I woke up from a dream of premature burial punctuated by a neighbor's phone call and the fridge stunk of the 1/2 gallon of milk that was going bad. Oh, and all of the fruit we moved in there to keep it safe from the (fucking) fruit flies. The irony, it was too much for me. I had a small, but meaningful, breakdown that sent The Husband scurrying towards KMart to buy a cooler, and ice, and milk. And if he had come home with a new wife I really would not have been surprised but he obviously loves me because he came home and made breakfast instead.

Do you see what I'm saying though? There's something off here and I don't know what it is. Maybe it's jinxed, or I am. Maybe I am blowing all of these little things out of proportion and I should just take a pill and relax. Or maybe, in 349 I am moving us the hell out of here.

I don't know. I guess we'll see how long it takes for the fruit flies to come back.

Turd Fairy

2009-02-14T16:58:00.003-06:00

After the first snows melt away in this magical city of Chicago The Turd Fairy comes out at night and sprinkles piles of doggie poo over all of the sidewalks and grass patches for all of the little girls and boys to find.

It's very exciting to go outside that morning and discover what wonders await. You never know where you're going to find a pile! It's like the Easter Bunny's retarded, shit flinging, simian cousin has been parading around outside of your house while you slept.

Truly a magical time.

Yay thaw.

167th Street

2009-02-03T21:03:00.003-06:00

Growing up in Queens, on 167th Street, we were surrounded by Jews. My family was one of the few Gentiles on the block. There were three other goy families on our street: my babysitter Josette's family, the family with the twin teenage boys and the Greeks down at the other end with their three kids, everyone else was mostly Jewish and mostly old.

Next door though was my very best friend, Effa, and her family. They were Conservative and her parents let me call them Ema and Abba. Effa was a very elegant little girl who had no problem allowing her mother to set her hair in curls or dress her in frilly dresses while I wouldn't even sit still long enough to get a brush through my short hair. I joined ballet with Effa and promptly dropped out of class when the embarrassment of my uncoordinated prancing outweighed the thrill of the tutus. Effa continued and I think she became a professional dancer after she and her mom moved to Israel. She was allergic to, like, everything and she was far too delicate to be playing with someone like me but we forged a friendship despite these differences. We were the same age, too old to play with her brother and the other boys on the street but never really accepted by the other little girl on the block our age. To her we were "weird." I was weird because I was half Greek but barely Catholic and Effa was weird because of her Jewishness and her allergies. Together we found ways to keep ourselves occupied though, they usually involved intricate kidnap plots perpetrated against our favorite dolls. We learned to roller skate together, like we were in a three-legged race. She wore one skate, I wore the other and we pushed ourselves holding on to each others hip. Sometimes we would just spin on their tire swing until at least one of us was reeling and throwing up.

On the other side our neighbors were The Weismans. They had two grown daughters and a grape arbor in their backyard. Marty took great pleasure in teasing me mercilessly. I always took him very seriously when he pretended to forget my name, or played "gotchya" with my nose. His wife made dolls and in the odd moments of being inside their house collecting for UNICEF, Rosh Hashanah parties or washing off grapes, I remember it being a very unsettling place with all of those doll eyes starring at me. But they were a sweet couple and as I grew older it was much more endearing to hear Marty yelling "Hey Dolly!" at me as I passed his house. I think they ended up moving in with one of their daughters. I don't remember anymore.

Next door to The Weismans were the old ladies' houses. Faye was pretty hip for a sixty year old and she always threw great parties that everyone was invited to. On the other side of her house were Sylvia and her mother. I can't remember her name anymore but I remember that the mother fell down and broke her hip around the same time that the Life-Call system became popular. We were generally good kids but for a really long time we would crack ourselves up whispering "I've fallen and I can't get up" every time we rode our bikes past their house. And we went by there a lot on our bikes. Sylvia had a great, sloping driveway that allowed us to burn rubber off of our tires, screeching to a stop before slamming against the garage door. Of course sometimes we would totally bite it and scrape ourselves up. So every time she saw us coming, Sylvia would come out onto her porch and try to shoo us off. It never worked.

Across the street, in the little blue house, were Arthur and his wife Betsy. They had a coy pond where our cat liked to go fishing in good weather. Sometimes we would come home and find a fish flopping around on the welcome mat. It would be my job to scoop it up into one of the aquarium bowls left over from my failed attempts at goldfish ownership and bring it back to Arthur's house. He hated our cat. He would always tell my mom she should "do something" about her. To that end mom tried to ground the cat a couple of times. Ever try and ground a cat? It doesn't work, they'll just pee on your sofa. I remember when Betsy started wandering around the neighborhood not knowing which one was her house. It was very confusing for the kids on the block. We wanted to laugh because it seemed like it should be funny, like it should be a joke. But it wasn't. Once she wandered off pretty well and Arthur had us all out looking for her and the cops ended up bringing her back from a few blocks away. I don't think she lived very long after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and Arthur didn't live very long after she passed. It's probably better that way, they loved each other a lot.

Also across the street were Lou and Hannah. Lou was the "hey you kids, get off my lawn" guy and Hannah looked like Mrs. Claus, which is sort of ironic for a Jewish lady. Lou was great, possibly my favorite of all the old folks on the block. He would keep any ball that landed on his yard and yell at any kid who dared climb onto his porch for any reason but he was always good to me. He's the one who convinced my dad to take the training wheels off my bike the day after I got it and even though he always looked gruff and angry he always had a smile for me. Their son was an artist, just like my parents, and he turned out to be gay. I remember it was a big to-do and Lou wanted to disown him or something drastic. But my parents, who were friendly with the son, went over and talked to him and Hannah and then everything was OK. I don't know what they said, they probably don't remember anymore either. Whatever it was it was a good thing they said it because I think their son ended up dying of AIDS but at least they had all reconciled before that happened.

And that's how it goes, you know? People get old, move in with their kids or just up and die. We went from Purim parties to Quincerias pretty quickly on 167th Street. Jessica and her family moved in where my babysitter once lived. Her mother had plucked out all of her eyebrows and eyelashes and penciled them on every day. They also had a parrot, who sounded just like Jessica's mom and it would confuse their chihuahua when it called to him.

Effa's family moved out and a Chinese family moved in. They had a daughter named San San who was a little younger than me but was still more fun that the other kids on the block because I got to be The Boss of our games. She died too, got hit by a car. I got to go to her funeral and eat breakfast in Chinatown, which was weird because it was fish. So was the funeral...weird that is, not made of fish. That was after her brother came over from China to live with them. Siu Hang. He didn't speak English when he got here and I taught him a bunch of stupid jokes and made him play house with me and San San. Eventually the Greek boy from down the block took pity on him and started including him in their games. But you had to be good at baseball to hang with that family so sometimes it was just easier to play with me. I don't think any of us did a lot of playing together after San San died though.

That was totally our Stand By Me moment on 167th Street, the end of innocence and the beginnings of adolescence for those of us kids left on the block. Junior High, new school, divorce, the 90s. It was a weird time and I haven't really thought about it in a while. In fact, I'm not sure how I remembered all of the names I mentioned here, it's been that long since I thought about them. My mom sold that house when I left for college so I haven't been back in over 10 years. But I had a dream about Marty Weisman the other night. He was standing in front of his house on a bright, summer day. He was smoking a cigar and smiling. He called me Dolly.

Untitled

2009-01-29T21:01:00.002-06:00

Up here in the ceaseless, arctic tundra that is Chicago my mind has been on slow-drip for months. I feel like that should mean only the finest thoughts are distilled. But, at the end of the day it's viscous sap that refuses to be decanted.

Do you have any idea how long it just took me to put those three sentences together?

Oh forget it. I'm going to bed.

Year of the Ox

2009-01-01T13:01:00.005-06:00

I suppose I should have some uniquely profound observations to start off the new year but I don't. I am, instead of pontificating, wallowing in a day long Bones marathon on TNT. Not really conducive to deep thoughts.

Neither is this headache. I don't really know where it came from. We were home fairly early and I didn't drink all that much. It might be a food hangover...do those happen? There was a lot of food at that party. There is always a lot of food at our parties. I think we are beginning to reach the tipping point where our parties are more food than booze. I'm OK with that. Does that make me old or fat? Or both? I can hear my elliptical machine laugh at that question. It knows the answer.

I was excited about the prospect of 2009 being nice and calm but it's not turning out that way. It is, in fact, shaping up to be a more hectic year than last. But I think it's going to turn out to be a good thing, this consistent busyness. I'm good with projects and deadlines and I haven't really had any since the theater closed its doors. I should probably thank my girlfriends for getting married and pregnant just so I have a bunch of stuff to do this year. But this is also the year I'm supposed to quit smoking, lose 10 pounds, move to a new, well, apartment at least and decide if I'm going to go back to school. So, you see, hectic.

I spent most of today in bed, watching TV. I guess it's time to get up and get going. How's that for profound?

Happy Holidays!!!!

2008-12-18T15:32:00.001-06:00

xoxo

Jen

Lost In The Supermarket

2008-12-15T10:12:00.000-06:00

We borrowed Our Friend Jo's car on Saturday to run some holiday related errands (OK, really it was to pick up a new TV but it will come in handy over Christmas.) We stopped at our local Dominick's supermarket to buy big bags of cat food and liter. On our way out I beelined for the $5 bottles of wine that are generally stacked just outside the liquor section but stopped short.

There, set up at a folding table, right next to the cheapest wines in the store, was Alpana Singh doing a book signing or something.

I froze. I wanted to shake hands with her, but I also wanted a cheapo bottle of wine and I knew I couldn't conscientiously do both. Because really how do you walk up to sexy sommelier Alpana Singh and say "Hi, wow I'm a big fan of your TV show and your blog" with a bottle of Turning Leaf in your hand? You just can't.

So I didn't do either. I flashed Ms. Singh a confused smile and rushed my cart off, away from the discount wines. and into a check out line.

I felt bad though. There she was with her hair all curly, looking really nice, (she's hot dude.) But no one was asking her to sign anything or talking to her. I really think they should have put her someplace less intimidating because I would have made my The Husband twiddle his thumbs for at least 15 minutes so I could talk to her about wine. Just not that close to the Yellow Tail bottles.

Slow Clap

2008-12-12T15:23:00.000-06:00

Oh, good job Bank of America.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aswiJZGC2Ca8&refer=us

Let me see if I understand what happened over the last year:

You bought a bunch of other banks with other debts.
Then you went on a property buying spree, forcing local merchants to shutter, so you could have prime real estate in retail neighborhoods.

And now you can't afford your payroll so you're laying off 30-35 THOUSAND workers?

Nice.

Taint

2008-12-11T11:39:00.000-06:00

I swear to God, if I have to hear about Blagojevich's taint being all over Obama anymore I'm going to throw up.

Math Anxiety

2008-12-04T17:51:00.000-06:00

2008 - 1975 = 33

awww yeah.

Monday, Monday

2008-12-01T18:30:00.002-06:00

When I woke up this morning it was pitch black. I wake up early, but there’s usually a little bit of light bleeding in. This morning it was still night. I thought I might have dreamt the alarm going off so I rolled back over. But it went off again and I knew it was past time to get up. But why was it so dark?

During the night we had the first significant snow fall of the season and there was about a half inch of the white stuff covering the skylights in the bedroom. Down stairs wasn’t much better and it was much colder. I had hung our new, insulated curtains on Saturday afternoon and in addition to blocking the drafts they also do some significant light blockage. Good when you’re watching TV, not so good when you’re trying to get yourself going in the morning. My grogginess persisted well into the 8am hour.

It probably didn’t help that my morning cup of joe was actually a cup reheated from yesterday. I am mostly unmotivated on mornings like this and it just seemed easier, and you know, conserve-y, since there was still a cup in the bottom of the pot. Shrug. I don’t mind reheated coffee (occasionally.) It reminds me of the “American Style” coffee they served in Greece. I’m not sure if that’s a complement.

Our microwave is pretty slow these days, too. It took three minutes to reheat the coffee and then five minutes to get my oatmeal hot. And yes, I eat oatmeal, most of the time. OK, more like “occasionally.” It would be more often but someone accidentally bought me real oatmeal instead of instant oatmeal. This means I have to actually cook my oatmeal and I get tired of dirtying up pots every morning so sometimes it goes into the microwave. I like to jazz it up with fruit and nuts but I usually end up putting brown sugar or maple syrup in there too. By the end it is barely a healthful bowl of oatmeal. I haven’t resorted to chocolate chips yet but they are tempting, doubly so today with the chill in the air and flurries falling. By the time the coffee and oatmeal were cooked enough to actually ingest I was falling farther behind in my morning routine. Monday is a good day for falling behind though, my The Husband has the day off and I won’t be interrupted by his need to eat, ingest coffee or use the bathroom. So I tend to lollygag on Mondays anyway but I really pushed it this morning.

On top of the snooze button incident and the dying-microwave cooking time for breakfast I have found myself drawn into these goddamn vampire books that I have railed against. Stupid, teenybopper, vampire books. I hate them. I loathe them. They are stupidly full of stupid things and just plain stupid. I can’t stop reading them though. But, I’ll be forced to stop once I’m done with this second book because I REFUSE to buy any of them (these two are on loan from an enabling friend of mine.) And my friend doesn’t own the last two because she REFUSES to buy them in hard cover. We’re trying to stay ahead of this ridiculous addiction. By the time the last two in the series are in paperback we’ll hopefully have forgotten about these first two and just wont care. (Or maybe we’ll find them in a used bookstore.)
So anyway, the snooze button, the microwave, the (stupid) vampire book and the snow. It was a slow morning and I ended up leaving about 15 minutes later than usual. No big deal. Although I did miss two buses as they breezed past in an inconvenient cluster so I ended up taking the train. Which I hate, because it’s crowded and there are a lot of stairs and they make me sweaty when I'm in my winterwear.

But I made it to work. And I sat at my desk, and I did my job. And I didn't fall asleep so I guess it all worked out. I mean, it's Monday. You can't expect too much from a Monday, can you?

So That Was A Little Weird

2008-11-22T11:58:00.001-06:00

When Barack Obama won the Democratic Party nomination earlier this year I made a promise to myself. Self, I said, if this guy gets elected to office you’re going to make some changes. He’s telling you to hope and change so listen up. And I did.

In an effort to heed the call to public service that Mr. President Elect has put upon us I signed up to be a mentor to a 6th grade girl on Wednesday evenings as part of an after-school program.

It doesn’t sound like a BIG change but hey, I haven’t voluntarily done anything since the theater company folded up its bag of tricks and that was like, five years ago. So there.

The program is affiliated with the Catholic Church, which is the first weird thing about it for me. I haven’t been affiliated with the Catholic Church for some time. The branch of the church that has its fingers in this pie is Opus Dei. Rationally I understand that Opus Dei is really all about finding ways in every day life to create a more personal relationship with God (at least that's what they tell me,) but all I can associate them with is the creepy albino dude from The DaVinci Code. So I was pretty surprised when the head of the program introduced the priest who runs the monthly Christian Fellowship seminar and hear confessions. He was young (ish, like not green out of seminary but not old and wrinkly either.) And he had a bit of sass mouth to him, which I always appreciate in my clergy. But, I think the biggest impression he left was how uncomfortable he was speaking in front of a room full of women. Which, you know, awww. But then that left me examining the women who are also part of the program.

For the most part the other mentors are all very familiar stereotypes. Mostly they seem to be former Catholic-school girls, like me. But, you know, the cool girls who never let you sit with them at lunch. Their hair is done, they wear slightly too much make up and are somehow still all wearing a uniform. Not the pleated skirt type, the social uniform. There were three women sitting in the back of the room all wearing different sweaters in the exact same shade of pink. They whispered to each other in that affected, nasal voice that always seems to indicate some form of privilege or entitlement issue and waved their fingers around when they spoke.

At least they were aware of their uniformity and sort of chuckled when someone tried to return a pen to one that had actually been borrowed from another. “It’s the OTHER girl in the pink sweater. But, you know, we know her so we’ll give it back for you.”

Standing around at the top of the stairs, waiting to meet our girls was a lot like standing around waiting to find out homeroom assignments. I was already nervous about meeting this girl. I really wanted her to like me, whoever she was. And, as the young girls came up the stairs to be paired up with their mentors that thought jumped to the forefront of my mind. There were a lot of girls and a lot of them looked really hip. Well, you know, still grade schoolers but "hip," wearing sharp jeans and puffy jackets. They had a lot of energy and were greeting their mentors with hugs and smiles. I knew I wasn't going to be getting the same treatment, just meeting my student tonight, but I didn't know what I was going to do if I was assigned one of these girls who was infinitely cooler than I ever was in grade school.

Turns out, that was not so much a problem. The girl to whom I was assigned seems very nice. She just turned twelve in September, she's in sixth grade and comes from a Polish-American home. Oh, and also, she's totally like I was at twelve, with the glasses and the awkward haircut. She needs help with math, reads two books at a time and, when reading, skips the words she doesn't know. If this isn't karma I really don't know what is.

She was all business and we dug into her math homework immediately. Luckily she's still only on identifying polygons so I was at least not stuck trying to relearn fractions like one of the other mentors. The time flew and at the end of the night she flew out the door with her father and not a single look back.

We don't meet again until after Thanksgiving but I'm hoping that when we return to the mentoring center I'm paired with the same girl for the rest of the school year. She seems nice, I'd like to get to know her, maybe help her out. Except with fractions. I'm just no good with fractions.

The World Is Run By Idiots

2008-10-21T18:27:00.000-05:00

You know what i hate? When you send a question to a website and they answer you with gibberish or by cutting and pasting the same crap that was unhelpful on their site in the first place.

For example "Dear Target, what is your return/exchange policy on wedding registry gifts which we obviously have no proof of purchase information for?"

"Dear So-And-So thank you for writing. Here is the exact same information you didn't find helpful on our website. And, in case this wasn't unhelpful enough, here's a link back to the page on our website where I cut and pasted this information from.
Thaaaaanks buh bye. Target."

And now I must leave you to pound my head against a wall.

...Something borrowed, and some Voodoo

2008-10-19T19:58:00.001-05:00

When you wake up on your wedding day in New Orleans and have no voice with which to say your vows there's really only one solution: Head down to the French Quarter and find yourself some white magic. Of course, the magic you find in the French Quarter these days is dispensed by white girls with tribal tattoos and probably not as effective as something I might have found in a cemetery on a moonless night 100 years ago (if you believe in that sort of thing.) But was a fun idea and at that point I had nothing to lose. So a Yankee delegation descended upon The Quarter looking for some voodoo.

We went for a big name, Marie LaVeau's, and the woman behind the counter offered me a gris-gris and some advice, "Just relax honey." It was nice advice, I wanted to take it. I didn't feel particularly nervous though. I was a little wound up about throwing a giant party that night but really, not the type of nervous that would manifest itself in some Freudian inability to speak my vows. So, after the voodoo shop we went over to Pat O'Briens to try a little "Irish" cure.

The idea was to get a hot toddy. This is not something a person usually orders in a French Quarter bar though so it seemed like we were out of luck. We sat down anyway and after the waitress listened to my friends discussing what sort of liquor I should be doing a shot of, she took an interest. "Oh chile, I've heard of cold feet before but you take the cake!" And with that she went off to brew me some hot tea. The whiskey and tea made me all warm and tingly for a little while and then my cousin and I decided to head back to the hotel, where I had set up camp for the week.

Everyone spent the day trying to convince me to not try to talk, or even whisper. But it was useless. There was too much going on, too many people milling about and too many things to communicate. Most of my friends resorted to text messaging my phone but that didn’t work with my mom and after a bath and some loud music I resigned myself to croaking my way through the day and the wedding in hopes that not caring about it any longer would make the whole thing go away.

And then I took half a Valium.

The rest of the afternoon was considerably unremarkable, except for a few random panic attacks, (probably just should have taken the whole Valium.) My hair was done, my makeup was done, everyone made themselves really pretty and we all piled into the longest limo I have ever been in. Like a freakin football field I tells ya!

We got to the venue and I think that’s when I really started freaking out. Let me tell you, I am really tired of people asking me if I was/am nervous about marriage. I am not, not at all. The Husband and I have been living together for about four years now. This whole issue of “marriage” isn’t at all the daunting part of actually getting married. What really freaked me out was all of the make up and the hairspray and the fancy dress and the people staring at me.

You may be thinking to yourself “But Jen, uh you’ve been in theater for like ever. What’s up with this stage fright?”

First of all, I haven’t really been on stage since high school. Second of all, being backstage means you get to call the shots and no one knows you exist. Being the bride in a wedding means a lot of having to relinquish control of the event to other, better trained people, or you’ll go mad. Mad I tell you!! It also involves a lot of concentrating on where you are walking in high heels and ensuring your make up doesn’t run all the way down your face when the groomsmen make you cry by tearing up on the alter. (Thanks a lot you tough guys.)

It helped a lot to know that everyone up on that alter was a dear friend, including the officiant. He had been aware of my voice problems all day and tried to artfully angle his lapel mic in my direction during the ceremony. I think I had exactly enough voice left for a harsh little “I Will.” And then it was back to the croak/whisper I had been perfecting all day.

By that time it didn’t matter though. Half of the audience knew I had no voice and the other half thought it was super cute that I was too nervous to speak. Whatever they thought, people laughed through a lot of that ceremony. Which is how we like it.

The rest of the night is a blur of candle light and peoples’ mouths moving. I really have no recollection of what anyone said to me, or what I might have said to anyone else. So, you know, if we had some sort of deep, meaningful conversation at any point after 6pm that night, forgive me, it’s totally gone. I remember maybe five songs that I danced to. I had exactly four bites of food and one bite of cake.

When I came back to work the week afterwards one of the girls in my office asked if the most fun I had were the times I was in the bathroom and I realized that after we left the hotel I didn’t go to the bathroom again that night until the after-party. Is that weird? The girl at the office seemed to think so. I just never stopped moving. Except for that one time I had to stop to take off my shoes. I believe that was after the “New York, New York” kick line my cousins and I improvised. We’ll all try to start on the left foot next time I think.

Overall it seems like we know how to throw a good party. It helps that it was in New Orleans, City Most Likely To Have A Good Party. But it also didn’t hurt that everyone we know is totally rad and were complete champs about getting to know each other, party with each other and all around unselfconsciously be complete lunatics around each other. I would really like to go back and get married again and send my stunt double in to do the dirty work so I could be a guest. The strangest part about a wedding is how completely in the middle of everything you are but, at the same time, completely removed from everything going on around you.

All I really had time to do was catch a couple of quick words here and there and then move on either to the dance floor or some other social group. It wasn’t until the day after the wedding, and the days following our return to Chicago that I started hearing about the side dramas and all of the random shenanigans that, were it not for the wedding, I would totally have been a part of. I can’t really say that I’m sorry I missed all of that stuff. I did, you know, have plenty to keep me busy. It’s just weird. That’s all I’m saying. Weddings are weird.

Also weird? Pirates. But that’s totally a story for another time.

Poorly Thought Out Ideas

2008-10-06T10:30:00.000-05:00

I totally shouldn’t be at work today.I can tell you right now that pretty much nothing is going to get done. In fact, if I leave tonight having remembered to rerecord my voicemail greeting I will consider it a productive day.

I also probably shouldn’t have bought tickets to this Ani DiFranco concert tonight. God knows I love Ani and her new album is pretty bitchin' but I bought the tickets without looking at the date and then I realized it was the night before we leave for New Orleans and figured “Oh well, by Monday night I’ll be all packed anyway.”

I didn’t stop to think about how neurotic I was going to get about stuff I may (or may not) have forgotten to pack. I didn’t think about being woken up at 3am this morning and then not being able to fall back asleep.

On the positive side, this concert means I don’t have to sit through a Saint’s game tonight so that’s good. And I will try to not let my brain explode all over the place while I over analyze the contents of my suitcases from afar or what a freaking hassle it’s going to be to have to get through the airport with 3 bags, a garment bag, The Fiancé and all of his crap. Do they still have skycaps?

I for sure had too much coffee this morning and I feel like I could eat a good sized piece of livestock right now despite having eaten my usual breakfast. And I somehow left the house forgetting to take out the garbage again, for like the 4th time in two days. Oh and also, I lost the list of last minute things I have to take care of today. It flew right out of my hand and into traffic. I could take that as an omen that I need to stop worrying about stuff I might forget or I could take it as an omen that I am totally doomed to forget something important.

Either way, can’t really do much about it right? I’m pretty confident I got most of it taken care of (except the take out the garbage thing.) And, even though I am super worried about turning my hair some unfortunate, Greg Brady color, I believe I will be forgoing the swim cap should I decide to take a plunge in the hotel pool this week. That’s what Clairol is for right?
RIGHT?

Yeah, so over-caffeinated, under-sleeped, in desperate need of some hard core mental distractions but also not really willing to do any actual “work” today. What a mess I am.

Woohoooo getting married!! YEHAW!

10 Years Later

2008-10-02T17:46:00.000-05:00

You know, I was going to compose an entry about how I've lived in Chicago for so long it's totally making me crazy and who the hell would have ever guessed, when I moved here 10 years ago, that I'd still be here now?

And then I was going to complain about the government cronyism and the mismanaged city infrastructure and how completely annoying I find how slowly everyone here moves (Seriously people, "rush hour," look it up.) I woke up this morning with a hangover and I've been sitting here with it all day but I'm still in a fan-freakin-tastic mood. You know, some days, you wake up smelling roses even when you accidentally step in dog shit on the way to the bus stop.

10 years is a ridiculously long time. It's pretty much my entire, independent, adult life and I've lived it all here in this Fly Over State. And yes, it has been a rocky road. And also yes, this place does make me completely cuckoobananas most of the time. But, if I hadn't stuck it out, if I hadn't passively decided to not decide to move away I wouldn't be where I am today, which is 9 days away from getting married, among other places.

That's pretty cool.

I wouldn't have the friends I have now, friends that are family. Friends I share the good times with and help bear up in the bad times.

Friends who over serve me wine whenever I ask nicely.

I never would have become a stage manager, I wouldn't know half as much as I do about theater or have seen as many shows. I wouldn't have sang as much karaoke or developed such intense feelings about pizza and bagels (you don't know what you've got til it's gone.) And in the end I don't know if I could possibly be happier anywhere else.

Listen, don't get me wrong. I miss the hell out of New York. It's my home and I love it and every day, no matter how happy I am here in Chicago, I think about New York but the idea of moving back there scares the shit out of me. Moving anywhere, packing up, starting over, building a new life...it scares me.

But, someone told me once that change is good. I didn't want to hear it then but it turns out he was right (loathe as I am to admit that.) And change wont kill me. And what doesn't kill me makes me stronger.

But, you know, let's just take this whole thing one change at a time please.

10 years. It's a long time. But, I'm still here.

A Letter to the %$#%^ CTA

2008-09-25T16:54:00.000-05:00

Dear Idiots With Your Heads Up Your Asses:

For the second time within a week the Blue Line service along the Bucktown/Wicker Park corridor was suspended this morning with little explanation and even less alternative transportation to downtown provided.

With hundreds of people waiting at the Damen/North/Milwaukee corners for a 56 Bus, at least 50 waiting at the Hoyne/Milwaukee bus stop and who knows how many more stranded commuters streaming west in hopes of catching a bus before it filled up along the route I spent 45 minutes watching buses blow past us. Each driver pantomimed a clear message “Sorry, this bus is full. I would stop if I had room to squeeze anymore people on, but I can’t.” This would have been valid except that as the busses passed us it was plainly obvious that it was only the front half of the bus that was full because no one was willing to move back. There was plenty of room on those busses if the drivers had stopped and either insisted that his passengers move back or opened the back doors for us to get on. Instead we were forced to watch and wait as it got later and everyone started calling their offices to let them know they would be late.

Finally, at 9:22am, a full hour after I had arrived at the Six Corners looking to get on the CTA to get to work two busses made their way east on Milwaukee with no one in them. The first one had a Garage listed on its electronic signage even though there were obviously people on it. It did not even stop. The second bus tried to blow past us as well but hit traffic at the light. I ran to catch up with it and when he opened his doors the driver told me and the two other people who were still trying to get downtown that he had been instructed to run express until he got into The Loop.

We bullied our way onto this bus because when there are hundreds of people affected by a blue line stoppage it is unacceptable to have busses running “express” through a busy neighborhood. Not only is it unacceptable it is a completely irresponsible decision made on the part of the CTA. Do you even recognize how many people there are in a 15 block radius in Wicker Park/Bucktown that depend on the CTA every morning and every night to get them to and from work? Can you understand how angry we were at some faceless managerial decision that would leave us waiting for God knows how much longer until some other bus came along? Do you think we hang out at bus stops for our health? No, we have jobs to get to just as much as the employees of the CTA do. In the face of rising fuel costs, environmental impact of single rider cars and an over crowded city more and more citizens are dependent on the CTA to get them where they need to go. What is the matter with you people?

I am thoroughly disgusted with the management of the CTA system and I’m baffled by the fact that despite the CTA’s continual threats to raise fares, cut services and the infighting that prevents anything from being achieved that may possibly benefit the ridership no one seems to be able to guarantee us a transit system that works. A transit system that does not, in the span of a week, leave riders stranded twice with no information on why service has been suspended.

You guys really need to get your act together. This is a horrible display of mismanagement and is totally indicative of why the CTA keeps running up against problems getting measures passed. If you think that you can continue down this path of lackadaisical service and still raise fares you are going to have a city-wide riot on your hands and you will deserve every headache and every indictment thrown at you.

Good luck with all that.
Jennifer Maravegias
Bucktown Resident

American WhointheWhatNow?

2008-09-15T20:07:00.000-05:00

So, the other night I came home from a seeing a show around midnight and turned on the T.V. At that time of night, on a Friday, it's hit or miss on television but I pay for cable and I expect a return in my late night viewing options.

I shuffled through my options on the bottom of the screen while something inconsequential played on low volume (it was probably Sportscenter. Blah blah blah.) Channel 18 is American Movie Classics on our cable and I feel like I should be able to depend on AMC for a good selection of movies. I should, shouldn't I?

Apparently I really can't because otherwise Pinata: Survival Island wouldn't have been what I found on Friday night.

Now listen, I'm as big a fan of Nicholas Brendon as the next Buffyophile (I didn't even make that word up) but Pinata: Survival Island is still quite possibly the stupidest movie I've ever seen. Troll 2 not withstanding. I contend Pinata is barely a movie and is certainly not a "classic," even if they tried to pass it off under their "New Classics" branding. Give me a break AMC!

I can't even say I stayed awake for the whole thing, although I did try. It was just too ridiculous to keep my eyes open for. It was pretty funny though. The evil pinata stalking the nubile, young frat boys and sorority girls through the uh, Caribbean Island's (?) swath of jungle. Ripping apart their dingies and cutting himself lose from his tether to...You know, I don't even know what this thing did. There would be a wide shot of this menacing, CGI beastie and then it would be quick cuts of kids screaming and blood spattering across the landscape. I have no idea how this thing attacked. It might have bitten and chewed people. It might have ripped them apart with it's ugly, red club-like hands. Or, it could have blown toxic boogers all over its victims. The filmmakers obvious just didn't have the money for those kind of effects.

Nicholas Brendon did have a tattoo on his bicep though. That and the cutoff sleeves on his tee-shirt were pretty much the only thing that differentiated this character from Xander Harris. He maybe didn't get thrown into as many walls in this movie. But, I suspect that was only for lack of walls.

Sadly, I fear that this is all I will ever know about Pinata: Survival Island. This is not a movie I am going to seek out, ever again. I wont even recommend it to my friends. I cannot in good conscious tell anyone "Oh, yeah! That movie was hilarious!" Because really, it wasn't. It just made me sad because it was on AMC. And if we're calling that an American Classic I fear for our future.

One Month to Go

2008-09-11T17:13:00.000-05:00

It’s really no secret that The Fiancé and I are hopeless procrastinators but that sort of thing doesn’t really get a chance to catch up with you until you find yourself one month away from your wedding with a list of things to get done.

I’ve already checked off all of the big, important stuff, but the details are killin’ us right now. And frankly I’m over it. Let’s just have this party and be done with it.

But weddings don’t work that way (apparently.) Everyone’s gotta know everything about everything. By everyone I totally mean my mom whom I suspect is beginning to stew in her own juices up in New York. I suspect that because, as usual, I am the one who put that pot on to boil. To be fair, I’m pretty sure she’s been on simmer since I left New York ten years ago. But that’s another post for another time. Deciding to get married in a place that is completely out of mom’s jurisdiction did not help this situation at all. A dutiful daughter totally would have gotten married in her home town and let her mom shower her with rose petals and hire a gang of wandering minstrels to follow her around on The Big Day.

This was not the route I chose to take.

I like New Orleans. It’s a great place to have a party. It’s really far away though so I can’t poke at vendors in person the way I used to poke at directors/actors/designers when I was stage managing shows so it’s a bit of a job keeping everyone on task.

Oh, who am I kidding? I’m the one having trouble staying on task. I’ll spend 20 minutes checking out limo prices and then get sidetracked by the need for wedding jewelry. My emails to my girlfriends have been erratic unfocused which, while I love me some stream of consciousness, is not usually my M.O. Every day I am making new lists to replace the lists of yesterday and while some people get stressed out and forget to eat I get stressed out and obsess over food. So, over the course of the day my thoughts may read something like this:

Oh crap I have to get those wedding favors picked out….What time did we say we wanted the ceremony to begin?....I wonder if they have a good mirror in the ready room at Rosy’s….I have to make a list of people coming to the rehearsal dinner so we can send them directions….damn, I could eat a pizza right now…..what about that necklace, that’s pretty…what was I saying about a pizza?...Damnit, work keeps getting in the way of all my wedding planning!...I’ll go out at lunch to find a sign in book….Nuts, I have to get those photos printed….Oh man I hope the food at the wedding is good….How are we going to get a bus to the reception hall mom?...Wont someone give me a slice of pizza?!

You get the picture.

My brain is as jumbled as my email inbox right now between wedding planning, election worrying and actually, you know, having to WORK occasionally during the day I have a hard time turning my brain off at night and when it does shut down, it’s gone. I mean I sleep like the dead when I sleep these days, which is cool because I usually sleep poorly. But, it’s freaking me out because I've been having some crazy dreams lately. Not that I can remember any of them two minutes after my alarm clock goes off but I do know I’m out of breath after a lot of them.

So yeah, weddings make people and mom’s crazy. Learn this lesson childrens. With 30 days to go I’m fairly certain my brain won’t explode before we get down to New Orleans but who knows what’s going to happen once we do get there.

Laissez les bonne temps rouler!

Hope Hangover

2008-08-29T17:04:00.000-05:00

To hear the democrats tell it, electing them to office in November will guarantee an idyllic wonderland where all of our country's wounds are healed and we can host some sort of global beach party without everyone trying to blow each other up. It's like some wonderful fairy tale in their rhetoric. Like a cool glass of lemonade after a forced march through the desert.

It's hard to plan big in the way Obama is asking us to after the past eight years. We've tried to plan big and it failed. We've tried to plan small and those plans failed too. I feel like everything has failed. Every system we had in place has been broken, every law we've had to protect us has been tossed aside like so much scrap paper. This has been a rough eight years. There's been a lot of fear and a lot of hate mongering. And it's really difficult to just turn around after a week of speeches and confetti and say "Sure! I believe again! Let's fly to Never Never Land Barak!"

But I'm trying.

I know there is no perfect system. And I know that for all of his promises and slogans, electing Barak Obama is not going to be an instant fix for all of our woes both national and international. I know this is not going to be the Camelot his speech writers are painting for us. But it's got to be better than what we've had, than where we've been.

And even if all of his big plans turn into little plans at least I can feel good about those plans. And even if it takes three years instead of three months to make the kind of headway into reform that this country so desperately needs, at least there will be headway. And instead of feeling like we're falling backwards maybe we can finally feel like we're taking steps forward. As a country we were never meant to go backwards.

I don't do a lot of political pontificating here or anywhere really. I am not, generally, that well informed and I will defer to those who keep themselves politically educated . But this year I don't care anymore. I am maybe not the most politically minded person and I will not engage you in a debate even if you ask me nicely but this year I'm standing strong for the democrats. I'm standing strong for the Obama/Biden ticket. And if you ask me why I might not be very eloquent in my reasoning but in my heart and in my gut it's less about change I CAN believe in, it's about change I NEED to believe in.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Dear Gustav

2008-08-26T17:15:00.000-05:00

Take Texas.
No one will miss it.

Hideous Edifice

2008-08-26T16:14:00.000-05:00

*Please note: I’ve been working on this piece for about 3 months now and intend to edit it to include pictures of the titular Hideous Edifice but my camera has been broken and I just got it out of the shop.

The neighborhood we live in used to be fairly unassuming and functional. It shares a border with that hipper, edgier, artsy neighborhood where I used to help run a theater company. And, even in its prime, that neighborhood was pretty unassuming too. A blend of working class, artist and immigrant collectives, Wicker Park and Bucktown were the proving ground for Chicago’s emerging artist scene in the 90s when I moved here. No one but the broke artists really wanted to bunk in with the predominantly Hispanic and Polish working class who dominated the area back then. Rents on retail and work/live loft spaces were cheap and the streets were littered with buskers, itinerant hippies, skate punks and artists peddling wares out of abandoned doorways and backs of trucks. Sure, it was a little dangerous to walk around in the wee small hours back then but when else were you going to get free pickings from the donation boxes left outside the Salvation Army? Or stumble on an after-party that you were too drunk to go to but also too drunk to say no to?

There were liquor stores, convenience stores, coffee shops, thrift stores and used bookstores where you could get a reasonable facsimile of a cup of coffee for a buck while you browsed. (OK, to be fair the bookstore is still there but the employees are way more precious these days.) There was also Furniture Row, which is still in the last throes of being dismantled in favor of chic boutiques and upscale shoe stores. You could pretty much furnish your entire apartment for less than $1000 as long as you didn’t plan on any of the furniture lasting much longer than 2 years which probably worked out OK for a lot of people who found themselves priced out of area apartments after the millennium turned.

You could find prostitutes for all discerning tastes at any hour and Horchata flowed like water. There were no lines to get into The Double Door (unless someone dropped a dime on The Stones playing a secret show) and North Community Bank was the only stash hole for your money.

Ten years later it’s a whole different landscape.

First of all let’s talk about North Avenue, which has been overrun by the Japanese boutique chain, Akira. To be fair, I have no idea if it’s Japanese. I know it’s stupid and expensive and takes up way too many store fronts. Plus, if I keep thinking its Japanese I can continue to use my Godzilla allegory of how it’s taking over the whole damn neighborhood. Really though, how many perfectly good stores have to go out of business to make you happy Akira? Do we really need an Akira, Akira Men, Akira Shoes, Akira Accessories, Akira Men’s Shoes, Akira Men’s Accessories? And let’s not forget about the curtain draped storefront you use as a staging ground. Take your $350 jeans and scram you retail monster!

I suppose I shouldn’t complain about Piece Pizza. If it hadn’t gotten so popular and become such a beloved Yuppie/Hipster hangout it would probably be shuttered right now. Plus, there’s just no way a pizza place that good with such astonishing micro-brewed beer was going to stay under the radar for long. We had a good run though, a good few years when it was still a secret gem in a dodgy neighborhood. We could get free pitchers when the owner spotted us and we knew most of the wait staff. Now it’s just another player in the Friday Night Traffic Jam that makes me not want to leave my house. Luckily, they deliver now so I don’t even have to bother with the over served assholes who crowd the bar.

I can, however, totally complain about what happened to Damen Avenue.Years ago I attended a workshop by an Urban Planning Group which discussed the intended path of Chicago’s gentrification efforts. I sort of laughed it off when they said that the end goal was to have more neighborhoods that look like Old Town. Who the hell wants more Old Town neighborhoods? No one who lives there can afford to shop their neighborhood stores. No one who shops the neighborhood stores lives there and neither group of people cares to stop and give the time of day to each other. Piffle I said. No way was this going to happen to Wicker Park/Bucktown. The Artists would never let that happen. Oh but they totally did.

I feel like it all started with The Real World Chicago but that was just the beginning of the end. A year or so later when my theater company got priced out of the space we were renting (stupid, rotten, shitty nogoodnick slumlord asshole…ahem, I digress.) There were already signs that the neighborhood was on the Gentrification Upswing. First of all; all of the hookers were gone. Second of all; you could count on one hand the number of months it took for storefronts to turn over. Something would open in April and be closed by August. Another store, with a similar look would open in September and not make it through the winter. Spaces were getting pricier but there weren’t enough shoppers coming in to keep these newer, trendier stores afloat. Fluevog somehow abides however. Don’t look at me, I think those shoes are ugly AND overpriced. But, back to Damen Avenue:

Someone, somewhere totally flipped a switch and sent Damen Avenue reeling back to 1987 while I was out of town one weekend I think. All of a sudden walking home from the train is like walking through Roosevelt Field Mall trying to steer grandma towards Spencer’s Gifts. Except I would maybe be OK if someone opened a Spencer’s Gifts in the neighborhood, is that wrong?

Marc Jacobs was first and can someone please tell me why he’s trying to sell me cashmere in the middle of the summer? It ain’t gonna happen Marc. Next was the BCBG next door. All of the fashions and window dressings are straight out my less than illustrious junior high days –neon, simple geometric shapes and lots of cut outs. WTF? Who buys this stuff? Ohhhh right that would totally be YOU Ms. Double-Wide-Stroller-with-a-Venti-Mocha-Latte, and your ear attached to your cell phone. You are far from your North Shore McMansion. Scram.

Now there is also a LeSportSac store (people still buy those?) and the latest addition is – and I am not even kidding – a Dairy Queen/Orange Julius.

Look, I am not one to disparage a nice dish of ice cream by any means but I remember when every other door on this street opened into an art gallery. I remember when you could go dancing at Danny’s on a Thursday. I remember when you could go eat at a restaurant in the neighborhood and not need a reservation on a Tuesday night. I remember being the only table in Silver Cloud and that shit just does not happen anymore.

And I bought an Orange Julius the other day for the first time in probably 20 years (shut up, I’m old. I know.) It didn’t really taste very good which made me sad.

I know I know….Blah blah blah it’s inevitable. Stop complaining about it. It’s just as much your fault as anyone else’s you crazy white girl. But it’s not. I didn’t move into this ‘hood with expectations of better shopping. I didn’t buy a condo a block from a Catholic Mission and then complain about the “undesirables” who gather on the church steps. I didn’t come into this neighborhood and decide to destroy landmark buildings in favor of granite counter tops and Jacuzzi bathtubs. I moved into this neighborhood because it had flavor. It was real. It was, occasionally, very dirty and a very dangerous but it wasn’t all painted in ecru and masked with crown moldings like it is now. Do you know how obnoxious it is to feel like you have to get dressed up to go to the corner store for milk? Do you know how even more obnoxious it is when the corner store is a fancy food market where the milk costs more than $2 for a ½ gallon?

My The Fiancé, who grew up in a bad neighborhood and was not in Chicago during the heyday of Wicker Park/Bucktown doesn’t understand what I’m complaining about. He prefers the safe walk home and the fancy grocery stores. I can’t say I mind being able to buy a nice bottle of wine on my way home but I object to the total obliteration of the neighborhood feel. I am all for gentrification at a reasonable rate but this proliferation of international chains and body waxing salons is ridiculous when you stop to consider how many locally owned businesses have gone out of business in the last three years.

It just makes me mad and depressed that the wonderful little neighborhood I have called home for over 5 years has taken on the look of every other retail neighborhood in every other city, in every other state all over the country. I used to like living here because it was totally cool in its total uncoolness. Just like I used to love hanging out at Piece, and Danny’s, Las Palmas and The Artful Dodger (RIP) before the overdressed masses discovered all of these places. Now, when I go out into the neighborhood I might as well be anywhere. And if I might as well be anywhere, what am I doing here?

Totally Me Dudes...

2008-08-25T17:31:00.000-05:00

Find out Which Movie Hero Are You at LiquidGeneration.com!

This Is Me Breathing Into A Paper Bag

2008-08-12T16:50:00.000-05:00

Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!Sixty Days!

Overheard In The Loop

2008-07-25T14:18:00.000-05:00

AKA: Why, no matter how long I live here, I'll never be a Cubs fan.

"Look, Wrigley is a great place to hang out and talk. If there happens to be a game going on, that's a bonus."

Also? Kerry Wood is on the Disable List for a freakin BLISTER!

W.T.F?
That's gotta be a really, really, REALLY big blister. Don't you think?

Suck it up you giant baby.

- End Jen's views on sports.

Friday Morning Convo

2008-07-18T11:04:00.000-05:00

K: I got your text this morning. Well, that's stupid that they're not running the train (out of O'Hare.) Does this make things extremely hard for you?

Me: No i'm totally cool. (Your) hotel is at Rosemont and that's where the trains are stopping. Track work. Nothing functions properly in Chicago, this city is such a wreck...I'm just going to head your way when I get off of work at 6:30pm and I'll call you when my train is getting close to the hotel.

K: Yay!! I'm doing some housework and watching a documentary on home births. Yikes. I'll tell you all about it later.

Me: Home births? What about dolphin births? Have you heard about those? Birthing with dolphins? I don't think i'd trust a dolphin to deliver my baby. No thumbs ya know.

K: But really supportive clicking sounds.

OMG! NPH!

2008-07-17T11:04:00.000-05:00

Why is Neil Patrick Harris the sexiest, singing gay ever?

Two words:

Dr. Horrible.

http://drhorrible.com/

Have you seen this yet? It's brilliantly funny. Funnier than most of the TV shows up for Emmys and I don't even mind all of the singing! Why? Because it is so hysterically funny and a little bit sad on so many levels I cannot count them all.

So, while you can totally watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog for (gloriously) free on the website, what you should reaaaaaallly do is pay the $3.99 to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. 'Cause, remember that writers strike way back in last TV season? Yeah, this is the sort of thing they were arguing about. The viability of online content.

Would that my home internets were working (curse you AT&T and all of your technical support minions!) I would gladly pay for all three episodes, and then pay for them again when/if Joss Whedon decides to release them on DVD (please please please please?)

So that's my story and I am sticking to it.

Carry on.

I Know, I Know

2008-07-14T13:09:00.000-05:00

"But Jen, where are all of your posts about planning your wedding?"

Well folks, to tell you the truth, I've been a bit busy actually PLANNING the wedding so I haven't really had time to write about it.

I promise I'm working on some entries and I'll post something more substantial sometime soon.

Now I gotta go back to tying ribbons onto invitations.

kthnxbai!

Summer Hours

2008-06-20T17:37:00.000-05:00

I do not have them.

Instead I'm watching the weather out of the corner of the window that I can see from here in my cube. It's going to rain again soon I think.

I'm reading The Jane Austin Book Club right now and I suspect it would be more interesting to me if I had ever read any Austin with any amount of seriousness. But, I've never been an Austin fan. I find her comedies of manners boring and hard to follow. At least the characters in this book about the book club reading Jane Austin books are more interesting but I can't fathom hanging out with people who would join an exclusively Austin Book Club.

It's been a fairly random week. To wit, I actually cooked dinner last night. And that NEVER happens. I didn't do too bad, considering I haven't actually cooked a dinner in like a year. How bad can you screw up pork chops I ask you?

June, though, is a busy month. Birthdays and visitors and good weather finally arriving (torrential rains and flooding rivers being the exception this year.) On top of the usual mishegas, we're closing in on 3 months to the wedding and preparations are being stepped up.

I went to Barneys and had my make up done. It scared both myself and my The Fiance. But I did get lots of awesome free stuff and, you know, someone poking at my face for about an hour. Plus, it was pretty priceless getting to wander around the expensive part of Chicago. Me and Amy hobnobbing with the goobersmoochers looking all ritzy and overly made up.

And we finally booked a DJ. But, we have to provide him with a full playlist so yeah...4 hours worth of songs coming up. Requests anyone? And no, there will be no hokey pokey.

In other news, there is no other news. I am working on a longer, more coherent piece about the gentrificational demise of my neighborhood and will post that as soon as I figure out how to take out all of the cursing and get my camera fixed so I can post photos of the ugly buildings they keep putting up.

Things I Thought To Think Today

2008-06-05T21:00:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure which is the greater evil on the part of Bank of America: That they've completely overtaken my neighborhood or that they hired Kiefer Sutherland to do voiceovers for their commercials. Because, in so much as I'd pretty much do almost anything he told me, having Kiefer tell me to bank with BoA almost makes it palatable.

I worry sometimes that I lapse into Aramaic or some other dead language at home. Somehow when I say "I'd just like a chicken breast and spinach for dinner tonight please, honey." It translates to "I'd like a pile of macaroni and cheese with bacon, cheddar and spinach in it. And a piece of chicken if you think to defrost one."
Pro: It tastes really good.
Con: It tastes really good. (Damnit)

Poorly produced anti-smoking PSAs really just make me want to smoke more.

No matter how hard I try to make my salad taste like pizza it will never, ever actually be a pizza. And that makes me sad at lunch. And also after lunch. And sometimes at around 10:30am when I start thinking about lunch.

Although, I have to say, a good splash of pink grapefruit juice and a pinch of cayenne pepper does make for a good salad dressing.

Frozen pizza will never ever ever be good for me but I just don't care.

As much as I could use a million dollars I just don't think either of our cats would put up with a flight to Los Angeles. Scratch that, I don't even think they could stand a trip downtown. Although the Allegro is preeeettty fancy. I bet Beatrice would like that hotel.

Chicago's over-crowded mass transit system would benefit from some horizontal bars for people to hold onto in train cars.

The world is run by monkeys and I am just a pawn in their retarded game of chess that they play on a Monopoly board. Get your hands off me you damn, dirty apes.

They are taking far too long to build out the Dairy Queen/Orange Julius store down the street. How do you build a "green" store anyway? Are they waiting for solar panels or perhaps wind-powered generators to install on the roof? I don't care. I want my Orange Julius!

We might be in way over our heads on this "sure we'll provide you with a complete play list for the wedding Mr. DJ" thing we agreed to. Sigh. Better that than doing The Macarana in a wedding dress I guess.

Oh, crap. I have to get my gown fitted.

The Mushy Food Diet

2008-05-13T20:17:00.000-05:00

So I had a couple of wisdom teeth out on Friday, top and bottom on the left side. My Maxillofacial Surgeon (fancy name for Dentist With Scary Instruments & Good Drugs) offered to take out the ones on the right side as well but I figured two gaping holes in my mouth were enough for one week, thank you very much.

I have a slightly irrational fear of dentists. That admission may come as a surprise to some of you, but probably not. I'm pretty tough but there's something about being immobilized while someone sticks their hands in my mouth sends me into fits of anxiety and hyperventilation. Also, it hurts. Possibly even worse than the pain are the noises that happen IN YOUR MOUTH. It totally freaks me out. Man.

Anyway. This whole extraction thing wasn't as bad as it could have been. For one thing I totally paid out of pocket for them to put me to sleep. And that's the pretty much the only reason it wasn't so bad. They put a lovely, vanilla flavored nitrous mask on me. We made a joke about my conveniently placed tattoo and that's all I remember until my friend Megan was standing next to me about an hour later.

It's not like it's painless though. They sent me home with two types of painkillers, some antibiotics and a double-sided sheet on post-op instructions. Allow me to paraphrase:

1. Take pain pills when the ones you took before start to wear off.
2. You wont be able to chew anything so just don't try to eat anything substantial for a while.

The one actual instruction that I really enjoyed though was:
3. Do not make any important decisions. You may change your mind tomorrow.

It's funny because it's true.

I spent most of the weekend doped up on pills and eating pudding cups. I watched/nodded off to at least 5 movies and I couldn't even tell you now what movies they were. I was completely out of action on Friday after the surgery and then on Saturday I felt OK. I went over to a friend's house and helped with the spring gardening and then went to a variety show some friends of mine were performing in. When I woke up on Sunday though, I discovered that they weren't kidding about peak pain and swelling happening 48 hours after surgery. I stayed in bed and dosed myself all day. Blerg. It sucked! No eating on Sunday for Jen. Except for, you know, a couple of pudding cups. I am now pretty officially sick of pudding cups. Not completely though. I'm probably going to eat one later.

It still hurts. Not as badly as it did Sunday, or even yesterday but it's definitely sore. I ate some chicken for dinner tonight though so that's a plus. I'm looking forward to the time when I can enjoy a nice, crisp green bean again. Ahhh vegetables. Who knew I'd miss them though? Today, I was at the farmer's market and the first asparagus of the season were out and they were so lovely looking. But, I know it's going to be at least until the weekend before I can even think about chowing down on some tenderly steamed veg. It will be a good day.

I'm glad those two teeth are gone. When they showed them to me after the extraction I had to admit, they were pretty rotten. I wanted to save them, perhaps as a lesson to any future children. "Look, see? You better brush your teeth. This is what they'll look like if you don't!" My The Fiance was totally grossed out by them and threw them away when the only energy I could muster as protest was "mlaarggfff." So, they're gone now. But trust me, they were diiiiisgusting.

So here's the wisdom I gleaned from this experience:

Floss.
When, at the age of 18 or so, your dentist suggests you have your wisdom teeth out, do it.

That is all. Puddin' time!

Late Breaking News

2008-05-04T19:19:00.000-05:00

Chicago - It was revealed last night that lesser known member of The Wu-Tang Clan, U-God (born Lamont Jody Hawkins) is actually the directorial talent behind one of the decade's most celebrated films, "The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring." While sources remain unverified at this time, U-God was the topic of extensive conversation at the Fakeo De Cinquo De Mayo Party. And was mentioned in relation to the film. So, that has mean something, right?

U-God has rarely been spotted outside of his secret Shao Lin Chateau in recent years. Although absent from the party he received an unprecedented amount of attention. In an attempt to revitalize the rap artist's career, talks proceeded to sign him onto an endorsement deal for Burgerritos (TM) (C) (Patent Pending).

Burgerritos are projected to be this summer's hot, new backyard barbecue menu item. A grilled cheese burger, topped with black bean dip, guacamole, salsa and rotel dip is then lovingly swaddled in a flour tortilla before being enjoyed.

Some of the key components to the Burgerrito are the American Cheese slice and the rotel dip. However, the ingredients of said dip were not made available for publication.

Party goers are said to have enjoyed an excess of Burgerritos and they were universally proclaimed as "the fucking shit, dude!"

Once a deal with U-God is settled, expect an early summer role out of the product. Which will be available anywhere someone finds a bag of flour tortillas in their fridge underneath the chopped meat they're about the throw on the grill.

6 Months!

2008-04-11T17:57:00.000-05:00

You guys I’m totally going to be a married lady in six months! Exactly six months from right…NOW my The Fiancé and I will be standing up in front of a room full of people making the whole thing official. It’s all so wonderful and nerve wracking at the same time.
There are so many pieces of the puzzle that is a wedding that are starting to come together and so many pieces that we have yet to even recognize right now. It’s overwhelming and now I know why all of our productions needed a stage manager! Keeping all of the odds and ends all together seems ridiculously impossible. My life is a series of lists right now. Everywhere I go, if I’m sitting still for more than two minutes I’m devising another list of things that need to get done, things that need to be bought, people with whom we need to follow up before these last six months slip away from us much like all of 2007 seems to have slipped away.

I may have lost track of the year but 2007 did teach me some things that I love, and some things that I loathe about this whole getting’ hitched par-tay we have coming up.

Pro: Oooh! Gifties!
Con: Feeling guilty about all of the people who didn’t get wedding gifts from me because I was broke at the time of their nuptials.

Pro: Pretty, pretty dress!
Con: Working out and dieting to look pretty in the pretty, pretty dress. I’ve never been so bored by salads before. There is seriously a week of nothing but burgers, fries, wings, beer and pizza six months ahead of me here.

Pro: PARTY!
Con: Planning. Even a “planner” like me gets tired of the constant vigilance it takes to ensure vendors and suppliers are all on point. Where’s MY stage manager??

Pro: Happily Ever After (!)
Con: The walk down the aisle to get there. I am only slightly terrified by the idea of all eyes on me. There, I said it. Mock me if you will, but there is a reason I went into management and not acting and the reason is rushing up on me right now. So, you know, if anyone catches Amy giving me a discreet push down the aisle it has nothing to do with doubts and everything to do with ALL OF THE EYES! THEIR EYES! STOP LOOKING AT ME! And my knees totally buckling out from underneath me.

Pro: New Orleans rocks.
Con: Now all we have to do is get everyone we know down to New Orleans. Actually this isn’t that much of a con cause, you know, it IS New Orleans. And, even if you aren’t into gambling, drinking, eating seafood or generally having a great time in a beautiful, historic city, it’s hella cheaper than trying to get everyone to New York or even Chicago. Plus, did I mention the gambling, drinking, eating seafood and generally having a great time? Yeah, you can do that there.

All in all, I suppose we are in a pretty good place six months out. And I think my biggest challenge will be to not worry myself unto death about all of these things over the next 183 days (183 days?? I like the sound of 6 months way better. I should maybe learn to avoid theknot.com or embrace it wholly because this half and half thing I’m doing right now is going to make me crazy I think.) Because it’s the over thinking that is a) part of my genetic make up and b) what will totally make me insane.

I think I’m ready for my drinky bachelorette party now. Can we do that? I need a drink. 183 days? WTF?? Seriously TheKnot, what are you trying to do to me here?

Got Time?

2008-04-10T18:21:00.000-05:00

The last 10 minutes of the work day are the longest ten minutes ever.

Unless you count the previous 10 minutes.

Or, really, any unit of time measurement when related to a rainy, cold, hungover day at the office.

blech.

ticktockticktockticktockticktockticktockticktockticktockticktockticktockticktockticktockticktocktick

What Are Words Worth?

2008-03-26T20:33:00.000-05:00

OK, listen up you guys there's something bugging me and I think it's time we opened up a discourse about it. There's a lot going on in the wide world these days; war, famine, genocide, political pandering. It's not like there's a shortage of drama out there. And yet, we seem bent on creating drama where there isn't any, seeing monsters in closets where there are only clothes.

I read a lot. And a lot of what I've been reading lately has really gotten my ire up. It's a pretty useless waste of energy considering I don't know any of the people who have been writing these histrionic things. Nor do they seem like the type of people who can be easily persuaded to see opposing points of view. They seem more like the type of people who project their own mental and emotional issues onto situations where they may, or may not have any basis in actuality.

First of all there's this:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2008-03-24-vogue-controversy_N.htm?csp=34

Poor LeBron. They just called him a giant ape! What the hell?

LeBron James is a badass basketball player. When he dunks a ball that thing stays dunked, dude. He is big and strong and yes, he is a black man. I know that's an oddity on the cover of Vogue but is it really helping matters by putting racial overtones on it? Personally I don't see anything wrong with this photo. I think I would have more of an issue if they put him in a trendy suit and had him sipping tea out of a flowered mug.

This photo of LeBron embodies the spirit he brings to the game. If I could play basketball like LeBron James I would probably roar more often too. But some people out there have raised a ruckus and turned it into the dreaded R Word. Racism. Really? Because I'm pretty sure that if you look at this photo and the first thing you think is "LeBron James is a giant, black ape menacing that pretty white lady" it says more about you than it does about Annie Leibovitz's photo. Gisele Bundchen sure as hell doesn't look menaced in this picture.

People, there is no reason for this hypersensitivity. Like I said, there are enough real world outrages out there for everyone. We don't need to invent offenses. In fact, the more of these things we pull out of left field, the less we pay attention to the real racism facing our society.

So, can we stop talking about this already?

Sigh.

The other thing that's really been bothering me lately is the state of feminism. It's no secret that I've always had issues with the word "feminist." I think that damn word got hijacked somewhere around the second wave because I don't really feel as though modern feminists have a sane grasp on it.

Feminism is about having strength in your own opinions, make decisions independently and knowing that you don't need to depend on relationships to define yourself as a person. Conveniently these are also the criteria for being a, you know, regular old adult human being. Which, in the beginning, was what feminism was all about. Equality. Starting unfounded witch hunts and labeling things as "misogynist" doesn't actually make it so. Nor does it help the cause at all.

Which is why this (via pajiba.com and galleyslaves) made me so mad. I'm just going to come right out and say it: This bitch is fucked up.

And I'm not being a misogynist. I just think she's insane. OK that's maybe a little harsh. She obviously has "issues" and has found a convenient screen on which to project the hell out of them.

Look, I like Joss Whedon. I'm not going to go so far as to proclaim him the next feminist messiah or anything but I'm pretty sure he's not the wife raping, misogynistic monster this lesbian feminist has made him out to be. It is also distressing that she seems to have a lot of people agreeing with her. However, she also seems to have a pretty strict comment blocking policy so we'll never actually know what her readers think. I do know the pajiba.com commenters are having a field day with it.

Reading this makes me wonder what they're teaching in college these days. But, then I remember the Women's Studies classes I took in college and how short lived that curriculum was for me. I almost got kicked out of my Women In Literature class for disagreeing with the professor. I have always disagreed on a fundamental level with a lot of the ideas espoused by the radical feminist sect.

I know that the womyn, wimmin and women of this world are constantly struggling on various levels all across the planet to be held in a greater regard as human beings. I know that there are atrocities committed against women that have been ongoing for generations. As far back as the human language goes, in some cases, if not farther. But, I also know that identifying everything as part of an oppressive, patriarchal conspiracy and venerating women just for the sake of being women isn't going to help anyone.

I recognize that there is validity to a lot of feminist theories. But this contrived piece of thought has little basis in Joss Whedon's actual body of work. This is all about the author and her personal experiences as she filters them through characters on a television show. Which is fine, it's her journal, she can write what she wants. But I still think she's way off base with this analysis.

I guess that's the blessing and the curse of the internet. Free to write, free to read.

...But I digress...

I'm really just tired of every interest group trying to put me on high alert for every shiny thing that catches their eye. You dilute the issues and the message you are trying to convey if everything falls under the banner of your cause. By making irrational statements you invalidate any rational statements you make.

In the case of the Vogue cover, disseminating the idea that it is racist perpetuates racism and is more racist than that photograph could ever be. You're telling us to see it in a racist light and that is irresponsible journalism at the least.

I'm not sure which is worse actually - perpetuating racism or devaluing rape by suggesting that all male-initiated sex is rape, as the author of that journal does.

Shame on them all though.

There, I feel better. Now I can go to bed.

Hardest. List. Evah.

2008-02-29T18:32:00.000-06:00

You guys, I totally finished my list of my Most Favoritest Songs of all time!
And I stopped myself at 25!

With respects to a number artists, musicians and The Flying Purple People Eater, here is the list of my all time, top 25 favorite songs of ALL TIME:

1. Johnny B Good – Chuck Berry
2. Superstition – Stevie Wonder
3. Hey Jude – The Beatles
4. Joy To The World – 3 Dog Night
5. Get It Together – Beastie Boys
6. Sloop John B – Beach Boys
7. Me & Julio Down By The School Yard – Paul Simon
8. Rock N’ Roll Radio – The Ramones
9. Filipino Box Spring Hog – Tom Waits
10. Untouchable Face – Ani DiFranco
11. Lithium - Nirvana
12. I Love Paris – Les Negresses Vertes
13. Talk To Me Summer – Screeching Weasel
14. Parachute – Something Happens
15. I Don’t Want To Grow Up – Holly Cole
16. Roller Skating Jam Called Saturday – De La Soul
17. Very First Lie – Material Issue
18. Stewart – Dead Milkmen
19. Handle Me With Care – Traveling Wilburys
20. I Don’t Care About You – Fear
21. Baba O’Reilly – The Who
22. Cult of Personality – Living Color
23. Smack Water Jack – Carol King
24. Criminal – Fiona Apple
25. La Croisade Des Enfants – Higelin Jacques

After completing this list I think the hardest part was actually resisting the urge to explain all of my choices. Every one of these songs has a story, or at least a really good reason why it's resonating in my head. I could tell you. But I wont. Unless you ask.

And, for those of you with an unquenchable thirst for archaic music knowledge check out http://dgmusicmachine.wordpress.com/ where a bunch of my work peeps totally geeked out over music together.

Happy Leap Year!

Of All Time

2008-02-17T17:08:00.000-06:00

A friend of mine asked me on Friday to put together my top 20 list of favorite songs and I've been thinking about it ever since. I'm already preoccupied with the issue of music. I'm having wedding DJ anxiety so, every song I hear is automatically weighted in relation to the wedding reception play list. But now there's this whole other level to it and that's...uh, two levels too many.

Music is hard to qualify. My favorite song is so dependent on my mood and the environment, the list is in constant drift between genres and artists. Once I am able to pare down the thousands to twenty do I need to distinguish their ranking? Does the number one song have to be The Number One Song? I'm a little scared to put that in writing. I mean, at one point in my life "Purple People Eater" would have held that position. I don't know if I can still say that, although it may still have to go on the list somewhere. I love that song. (Can I play that at the wedding?)

I guess I can start by artist. There are some that are on there by default: The Beatles...OK, there is one band that is on the list by default. Hell, The Beatles could be all of my Top 20, and I'm not even kidding about that. I am going to diversify though because, to be fair, I couldn't spend the rest of my life only listening to The Beatles so obviously there are other artists I love.

I love, I love, I love...Tom Waits. I love Ani. Nirvana. The Ramones. But I don't know if I can say with absolute devotion that there are other artists that I would place among the pantheon, above of all others. I really like Chuck Berry. And I really like Carol King. The Doors are sometimes good. And then there's that whole thing about The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys. And how if, you know, you really loooove The Beatles, neither of those other two bands are ever really going to cut it? Sure, they've got some good tracks but they'll never be The Beatles. I guess there could be a song by each of those two on the Top 20. I can't deny them as great bands.

I think De La Soul is fantastic. They always get me up out of my seat. Does that qualify them as one of my favorites? There could be a lot of really sad songs on this list. But should songs that I listen to when I'm sad, or to make myself sad be included in a list of Top 20? I don't think so. That doesn't seem right. God knows I don't need music to be depressed. And certainly depressing music doesn't do much to cheer me up. It's usually music to wallow by, if you know what I mean. Maybe I should stick to the music that appeals to the more rhythmic and upbeat part of my nature. It's good to feel good, ya know? Music should make you feel good. Relaxed, maybe a little loose. Get up on the tables and dance a little bit!

Let's not let me get carried away. Some of the music I like to dance to probably should be placed at least 20 yards away from this list. This list should get a restraining order against some of the music I like to dance to. But, I think it is safe to say that all of my favorite music is music that makes me feel good. And, look at that, it doesn't even knock Depeche Mode out of contention. Sweet.

OK, so The List is doable. I'm going to think about it for a little while longer. Once I get it figured out I'll post it. I know you all must be in a lather of anticipation over this, you multitudes of fans and readers, so I'll try to step on it.

Ooooh Shiny

2008-02-10T18:32:00.000-06:00

We just got our brand new, super shiny computer set up here at home.

It's purty.

And it has a printer.

I may be in love.

That is all for now. I'm gonna go back to making kissy faces at this thing.

265 Days

2008-01-20T20:05:00.000-06:00

I've already got my gown, so most of the pages in this wedding magazine I have are pretty irrelevant. But the wedding gown advertising is still...frightening.

OK first of all, some of these gowns are questionable. But, even the models in the most elegant of these dresses are completely un-bride-like in their facial expressions. And I'm using that term loosely. Is "anemic" an expression? What about "jaundiced?"

There are some really smug looks going on. As if they know they look better in their gown than you could ever possibly dream. The couple in this Ann Taylor Celebrations ad has this mystical disbelief thing going on. Looking into each others' eyes as if neither can believe they get to walk down this gravel driveway with someone so good looking.

It is, overall, a display of worries, anxieties, fears, boredom and sunken cheeked sultriness.

Most of the bridesmaids look like they're having a good time. Laughing it up, probably at the dresses they're modeling. Well, except for this Thread ad where all of the redheads look sad at being forced to wear every color in the pink spectrum. Although their hair is very shiny.

On the facing page, the Reem Acra model looks like a doped up child bride sold into a sultan's harem.

I don't understand why so many of these women are lying prostrate on the floor. Is it that they have become so overwhelmed by the velvet belt with giant ribbon flower wrapped around the bodice of their gown? Did they fall off the bed trying to get the garter belt on? Should I anticipate being on the floor at some point during the reception? I don't think we're planning on it being "that" kind of party.

There's also a lot of crouching going on in this magazine. As if the brides are, perhaps, trying to hide something, or from someone. That is not the image of a confident bride folks. This Kenneth Pool chick is in her gown, up on a roof, looking like she's going to make a break for it. I am not going to buy a gown from The Runaway Bride.

I'm not even going to discuss the caved chest, eating disorder look going on here. That's just a given in light of the media's unobtainable standards of beauty blah blah blah. But come on advertisers, would it kill sales to put a few smiles on these faces? I've got 265 days to plan what is supposed to be the "happiest day of my life." Perhaps that could be projected a little more clearly in the ads for all of the products, goods and services I need to purchase in order to make that day happen.

I'm just sayin'.

Definitely, Maybe

2008-01-20T19:50:00.000-06:00

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0832266/

Am I the only one who wants to see this movie because I have fantasies about bedding Ryan Reynolds, spawning a perfectly precocious child and living happily ever after until dying an untimely, melodramatic death (do people still die of consumption?)

I've said too much.

Me At 32

2007-12-31T13:55:00.000-06:00

So, here I am. New Year's Eve.
At work.

Which, yeah, pretty much epitomizes the year for me. Work.
While it's good to have a job with a paycheck, this particular job leaves much (MUCH) to be desired. And yes, I could go out and get myself a different job but that is really not as easy as it sounds people. What with all of the dressing up, and the uncomfortable shoes and the interviews and the making of first impressions.
Plus, and I feel really strongly about this, if I'm going to go through the trouble of getting a new job the year I'm getting married it's going to have to be something I really want to be doing, with people I don't feel like gutting every 20 minutes. So, that's a little limiting as far as career choices go right now. I suspect that if I were in a different city I could probably find something I like doing at a place I would enjoy doing it. But here? Chicago has limited industries. Mostly I am qualified to work in advertising and I, yes, hate advertising.

But, other than this stupid job in this stupid office filled with (mostly but not all) stupid people, 2007 has been a pretty good year. Nothing dramatically terrible has happened and I found the perfect wedding gown!

2008 will be...challenging. There's a lot to do. I think I'm up to it. I mean seriously? I've managed much bigger productions than this wedding is going to be. I should totally be able to handle it. Of course none of those past productions have involved my mom so that might be the ...um...wrench?...In the plan? That sounds mean but I don't mean it to be mean. I just mean that...well, you know. I mean, some of you know. The rest of you KNOW. So...yeah. Anyway...

If I can get a handle on the guest list I think everything will be AOK. Also a DJ. And a florist....and a bakery. Crap. Well, whatever. I have the perfect wedding gown!!

Yesterday I took some time to clear out old paperwork from some storage bins. I came across a stack of journals from high school and college. Yeah, those were about as painful as you would expect them to be. Which, I decided after the fact, was a good thing. I am not nearly as melodramatic as I was 10 or 15 years ago. Thank God because apparently I was a little insufferably melodramatic. I mean really, all of the declarations of undying love for boys I don't think I was even speaking to when I reached the last page of the journal. I certainly haven't spoken to some of them in ...um...10 years or so. Which goes to show you that...um...teenagers are...um....mellodramatic? Cause no one knew that yet.

Look at me! Full of New Year's Eve revelations!!!

I am a head with a hat and all I say is Ho, Ho, Ho.

No one is gonna get that joke except Kevin, and that's OK.

Right. So, progress has been made in the last 10 years. My hair is a normal color. I no longer have an unnecessary number of holes in my ears, nor do I continue to feel the need to hide under low slung baseball caps. I am marrying a man I am 95% certain that my 15 year old self would approve of (that other 5% of me really thought I would marry Morrissey.) I have mastered shopping for my own clothes. And I have gotten much better at shopping for my own shoes. I only buy shoes that actually fit me now. OK, that last pair of loafers was questionable but they really seemed like they fit in the store - must have been the lighting.

I could take this space to make up some meaningless and, probably, unobtainable new years' resolutions but I stopped making those around the same time I gave up giving up stuff for Lent. Plus, even if I did make resolutions I'm not necessarily going to share them with the blog reading public (all eight of you.) 2008 is putting a lot on my plate. If I can get through the year without needing to heavily sedated at any point I will feel completely victorious at this time next year.

So, 2007, in a nutshell. Work sucks. Love is grand. Food is good, I like food. Reading is sexy.

End Report.
End 2007.

See ya'll on the other side!

The Mind Killer

2007-12-10T17:25:00.000-06:00

I have been meaning to post about turning 32 and be all witty about aging and how I'm not all that much different than I was when I was 22 except that I am.

But, I just chipped a tooth (no mom, it wasn't on a crouton.) So now I am in the midst of anxiety attack crisis at the thought of having to expose my mouth to a dentist.

Which, actually, goes towards proving my point. See? Not much has changed since I was 22.

Excuse me, I'm gonna go breath into a paper bag for the next three days.

K. Bai.

First Of The Month

2007-11-01T15:28:00.000-05:00

So, I signed up for this NaBloPoMo thing.

I'm don't know what I am going to write about EVERY day for a whole month.

I am sure I will think of something.

Buwahahahahahahhaa.

ahem.

The Machine

2007-10-28T14:51:00.000-05:00

So, I went out and bought this elliptical machine last week. It's somewhat alien looking. Like a metallic antelope crouched behind the couch, waiting to spring at me at any moment. I suspect that the anticipation of it's impending attack is part of what makes it so necessary for me to climb on every morning. I'm gonna break this damn thing like a wild stallion before it can break me.

This exercise thing is really hard. Don't ever let anyone tell you that working out is "fun!" Cause I am seriously getting my ass kicked right now. I am not going to lie. I am in no condition to be working out every day with machines and weights and over sized balls. I am a fat, lazy couch-potato and my only hope is to get through these first couple of months without dying or pulling anything irreparably out of place. Maybe then I'll be in shape enough to work out. Right now though, I barely have enough strength left in my upper arm to lift this mug of water. I may die of dehydration, right now. And it will all be the fault of The Machine.

God, I really hate that thing. The day I bought it I went skipping out of the store. I was so excited and in love with the idea of being "fit." Yeah! I was gonna work out, eat healthy all of the time. I would feel vigorous! Full of energy and a zest for life.

Mostly, I'm just tired. And a little sore. And sometimes, when I look at The Machine, I cry a little. Knowing that the next morning, I'm just going to have to climb back on up there and work up a sweat. Again. But, in the long run I no longer feel guilty about my time on the couch, knowing that I have actually earned it now. So, that's nice. And, in about ten minutes, when I go downstairs and heat up that slice of leftover pizza I wont feel guilty about that either. I may feel a little guilty about the potato chips I have later tonight. Or, I may skip them. Of my own volition. Having absolutely nothing to do with that Machine that I have to squeeze past in order to even get downstairs. Nope. Nothing to do with that at all.

Stupid machine.

Home

2007-10-17T20:07:00.000-05:00

On a good day she can wait until she gets home to have her first cigarette. Savoring each, cancerous, drag from the comfort of the couch while her man fixes dinner and the cats clamor for attention. She is warm and safe and dry. The day is over, she can kick her shoes off under the coffee table and disengage herself from the world outside.

On a bad day, on a day when work has beaten her down and she can feel the contact lenses grating against her dry eyes, she lights up as she exits the building. Or, sometimes she waits to realize that the bus will not be soon to arrive. Odd work hours mean missing the rush of rush hour but it also means buses and trains may be few and far between. These are the days she shuffles through her ipod, waiting for the bus, until she finds Tom Waits and will listen to him croon about how hard it is to grow up.

The weather is, generally, irrelevant to her mood on work days. She usually only sees the outside on her way to work and her desk is nowhere near any of the plate glass windows that overlook the city (and a glimmer of the lake to the east.) Her days are grey. The walls are grey, the carpets are grey. As are the chairs and most of the conversations she overhears around her. She colors those grey with her mind because she would rather not care what people are talking about than get caught up in the mundane bullshit of office politics and small talk. Besides, the grey voices are rarely speaking to her anyway. They're rarely speaking to each other, mostly they are talking to hear their own voices.

It is these days, these grey cigarette days, when she is most grateful for her home. For the light and sounds, for the company of love and cats. Even when it involves nothing more than reading a book while baseball plays on TV it is, at least, illuminated. It is, at least, real. She is grateful even for too many pairs of shoes kicked off beneath the coffee table and too many dishes piled in the sink. She can savor dinner in a way that the leftovers for lunch will be impossible to enjoy - with a glass of wine and conversation containing more colors than...not a rainbow, because that's silly. But more colors than her grey days could ever hope to contain.

369 Days

2007-10-07T16:40:00.001-05:00

First things first.
Why is it October and 80 degrees in Chicago?

Second (and barely more importantly as I sit here sweating, in October.) 369 DAYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OK, I'll tell you something. I am heartly exhausted with the word fiancé. Blah. What a poncy word. And I've been using it (mostly. You shut up.) for almost a year. I just don't like it. I don't like saying it. I don't like referring to The Fiancé as The Fiancé. It sticks to my tongue. It doesn't want to be said. I still use boyfriend sometimes. But, I've begun to call him The Husband in my mind.

I think part of it is that saying "fiancé" opens the situation up to a myriad of questions that I just don't like talking to strangers about. Or, non-friends. Now you're going to ask me for all the details. The whole thing: the ring, how we met. Bleeh bleeh bleeh. Blah blah blah. Blow blow blow.

Enough.

I am occasionally overcome with a sweeping desire to dance around whatever room I'm in at the prospect of this wedding. And, as details finally begin coming together I sometimes clap my hands in glee. I can't wait. But, at those times, I have my clan to whom I can go squealing and jump up and down in circles for however long I need.

The rest of you peoples? Drive along. Stop gawking at the bride to be.

As for the other part of it, the Marriage part of it? I am neither sentimental enough, nor drunk enough to expound upon that topic at this time. Suffice to say that it is good to love and be loved in return.

Anyway, back to this wedding.

I am now in possession of one (1) wedding tip & etiquette book (thank you, young Mrs. LaGarde.) Thankfully it is not too outdated, or overbearing. And I'm sure that some of it will come in handy. But, I'm not lacking for advice. Or help. Which is so awesome. And I am so grateful.

So yeah. 369 (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) Days to go. 369 days to plan, fit, flower, taste and get it all in order.

Bring it on.

I Can't Believe I Watched The Whole Thing

2007-09-17T17:50:00.000-05:00

That's right. I did it. I watched the ENTIRE Emmy broadcast from E!'s Red Carpet coverage to Ryan Seacrest's last sign off.

I did it.

God, was it boring.

For me, the best moment of the evening was the Comedy Central Boys getting their hug on, even though Steve Carell didn't ACTUALLY win the award. That's what you get for not showing up, Gervais! Sucker.

A word of advice for the producers of awards shows. If, by chance, you are planning to have an "unexpected" guest come out of the audience perhaps you should have him NOT walk the red carpet before hand. Kanye I am looking at you. Nerd.

That was almost a funny bit. I think it would have been funnier if it hadn't looked so planned. And if Rainn Wilson had the opportunity to sing different song lyrics instead of repeating those that Kanye had already sung. But, I don't know, I don't watch that Don't Forget The Lyrics show so maybe that's the way it's supposed to work but still. Lame. Although, Kanye making fun of himself with "I never win" WAS hilarious.

Sally Field got censored for slipping a little GD into her anti-war speechifying which is plain ridiculousness. These Standards & Practices guys are maybe getting a little trigger happy. I guess we could continue to blame Janet Jackson's wardrobe "malfunction" but I think it's more virulent than that. Or maybe I'm sensitive.

I don't say much, but when I do have something to say I want the freedom to say it plainly, you know? This whole couching political beliefs in doublespeak so you don't offend anyone is a time waster and a tool for those who would rather waste time arguing semantics than actually taking care of business.

Righto, so anyway.

Yeah I watched it and I've got no other award shows to watch until The Oscars.
And maybe this year we should have a fancy dress up party for The Oscars. Not so much because I think they warrant fancy dress. Just because now I've got the hot, green number from Krista's wedding to wear somewhere and the gold sandals to go with it.

Live Blogging The Emmys for As Long As I Can Take It

2007-09-16T19:08:00.000-05:00

I hate awards shows.
Seriously. They are horrible and fascinating all at the same time. And here I sit, watching Ray Romano rif on his post-show home life. He's got a nice gold tie on but he needs a haircut.

He's presenting an award. I thought he was doing a bit.
Ohhhhh Two and a Half Men is nominated for...something. Best comedy show I suppose. Best supporting actor in a comedy series.

Commmme oooooon Neil Patrick Harris!

Booooooo Jeremy Piven. I am maybe supposed to be rooting for him. Coming from that Prestigious Chicago Theater family and all.
Meh.
He'll always be stupid Cupid to me.
But aww with the dedicating the award to his dead dad. Aw.

Vanessa Williams and America Ferrer look good. I was just watching the E! True Hollywood Story about Vanessa Williams today. God. What is WRONG with me? I watched 2 of those stupid THS episodes today. AND I know they call it THS.

I have a disease.

Creepy bald-headed dude from Lost just won Best Supporting Actor in a Drama. He's wearing a bright pink shirt. That's interesting. I really don't care. I don't watch that show. I tried, maybe twice and it was just too much for my brain to do after work and dinner.

God, I wish Macy's was as awesome as that commercial just made it seem.
I remember when Macy's was almost glamorous...Except the one near Queens Center Mall. That one has always been pretty shady. Nice parking lot though. The new one here in Chicago? Not everything I remember Macy's being at all. Oh well. I do most of my shopping at Old Navy anyway.

This is a lot of commercials. It was like that with the VMAs last week also. Too many commercials, not enough award presenting. Guess everyone's gotta pay the bills.

Do we think Sally Field was excited for Seacrest to bring up The Flying Nun?

Ooooh Tina Fey and Julia Louis-Dreyfuss. So pretty. So funny. I totally vote for Elizabeth Perkins for supporting actress in a comedy. I love Elizabeth Perkins. Ahh but Jamie Presley wins. OK, I guess but she's no Elizabeth Perkins. She's got some sort of old lady dress on. Or it's her shiny red breast bone that makes her look old? Aww she's cryin. Awww. So many touching moments so far.

Hey, it's the guy who looks like our friend Van. That Friday Night Lights guy. Him and Kartherine Heigle's lips are presenting best supporting actor in a mini-series. I haven't seen any of these but I hear Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was good. Wings and Wine Movie guy wins it! Thomas Hayden-Church. Whatever. Sandman. He's thanking Robert Duvall though so that's cool. But now he is crying too. I think they almost played him off. Or they just added dramatic violins when the tears started welling.

Ellen DeGeneres introduces a montage of one liners. Which seems to be an excuse to highlight the stand-up men who host talk shows now. Or maybe it's a tribute to Tom Snyder? Did he just die or something? Why was that part of the one liners montage?

Eva Longoria and the Entourage guys present for supporting actress in a drama. Ooh Rachel Griffiths. I like her. And Aida Turturro. Nice. Way to go New Paltz alumna! Katherine Heigle wins it though. I don't watch Grey's Anatomy either so I don't care again. I'm gonna go spell check all the names I've put in here so far while she makes her speech.

Jon Cryer is sooo stoked right now. Walking out there with Jennifer Love Hewitt on his arm. Oh Ducky. He's funny. I like him. Variety, Music or Comedy series. Woohooo Comedy Central! I am so conflicted! Who do I root for? Colbert or Stewart?? Or Letterman with his montage of favorite Bush moments? And it's Conan. But it's some producer guy making the speech and really, when you GIVE Conan an award don't you think it would be a good idea to let him make the speech?

Christina Aguilera and Tony Bennett duet time. It would be hilarious if Britney Spears rushed the stage from the wings right now. Christina looks good. Hell, so does Tony. How come the male dancers have their shirts unbuttoned? She's got that weird back of the throat voice though. It's OK I guess.

Alec Baldwin. Woot. Looks hot in a white jacket. Poor ole Alec. He's had a rough year. And Tony Bennett's show beat Colbert's. I wonder if that means he's going to have Tony Bennett on. Maybe he'll challenge Conan to a duel of some kind.

Everyone, even the criers, have been doing a pretty good job on timing their speeches.

Ooh! Ooh! Jack Bauer is presenting an award. So hot. Want to touch the Bauer. What a great voice. Robert Duvall wins for...something. Lead Actor in a mini-series. Broken Trail. He's totally gonna be the one who busts the stop-watch. I bet it's really hard to get Robert Duvall to stop talking once you get him started.

Here comes the exit music. That was a nice speech though. All about how Westerns are uniquely American. How they are stories that belong to us.

Ha ha ha. The Jersey Boys are going to pay musical tribute to The Sopranos. Ha ha. How ironic. Annnnd it's a commercial for Bertoli pasta after that out-tro. Nice. Way to feed a stereotype FOX.

Oh TMZ on TV. How did we ever get along without you? I can't even bring myself to pretend to be interested in that show. Because, if I pretend to be interested it wont take long for me to actually be interested. That's how I fell into the trap with the internets. I started out mocking the websites that I now check, like, six times a day.

Queen Latifah, in a smokin' hot red dress, honors the 30th anniversary of Roots. I was one. I didn't see it. I do remember the MASH finale and the Who Shot JR episode of Dallas though. That was some good TV right there. Oh, and here's the cast of Roots. That's pretty dope. Standing ovation. Very nice. Sally Field looks really proud. Ben Vereen looks funny. And I still can't look at LeVar Burton without singing the Reading Rainbow theme song in my mind. Lou Gossett Jr. got old. They're presenting the Emmy for outstanding mini-series to Broken Trail - that Robert Duvall western. That's better than them having to give it to Debra Messing for Starter Wife.

See, these guys know to let Duvall talk. Although, again, probably hard not to let him talk. All these guys really want a chance to say something. You can tell. The guy holding the award is practically doing the pee-pee dance. Oh well.

Doogie is making hetero jokes. I love it. Or, I hate it because he should be making gay jokes. Either way. Love me some NPH. But I'm not sure what just happened. They presented the nominees and then introduced the next presenter as the winner of the award without giving an award... Oh, this lady got her award last night. What a rip off for her.

Um. There are still two more hours of this show? Gah. No way am I going to be able to keep this going. I'm boring myself. I don't think I can even watch any more of it. But I so want to see what Kanye West is going to do.

Damn you award show! Daaaaaamn Youuuuuuuuu!

Coffee, Champagne and New Hyde Park

2007-08-21T20:42:00.000-05:00

While it's all well and good to have sunshine and cool breezes for post-wedding photos I have to say there's something "off" about an afternoon wedding.

First of all there's the getting up at an ungodly hour to get your hair done. Which, I suppose, only applies if you are a member of the wedding party. One with hair, that requires hairspray. And perhaps a curling iron. Or bobby pins. Definitely bobby pins.

In any event, 6 am is really just too early to even contemplate drinking. So, you start with coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. If your stomach isn't already doing jumping jacks you may attempt to eat breakfast but while outward appearances intimate a calm, cool, collectedness chances are good you're really just TOTALLY FREAKING OUT.

Although you would never admit it. In a voice above a whisper. That was directed mostly at your uneaten bagel.

But it's not a wedding without hairdresser. So, there you are with a stomach full of butterflies and coffee, sitting in the chair while she pulls and pokes and blows and sprays your hair into place.

It seemed, when you were being woken up with the sun, that the day stretched out long before you. But once your hair is in place there's really not much time because believe me, having someone else do your hair is the least of the preparations. The next thing you know, the limo is pulling up outside and you're struggling to shove all of the important tools of beauty into bags to bring with you. You can't forget anything. It's all important. But you forget your toothbrush anyway. It doesn't really matter because even those who remember their brushes will probably forget to brush anyway.

There's traffic. There's always traffic. You're on the L.I.E. It's a beautiful Saturday morning in the middle of August. Half the population of the boroughs is on the road, trying to get out of the city. But who caaaaares? You're in a limo. Hanging out with your best friends. It's better than the prom! You don't have to worry about putting out for your date and you know the food is going to be good.

And then BAM, there you are. Rolling up to the Inn at New Hyde Park. It's dope! Very swank. Sure, you were there for the rehearsal two days before but now it is in all of its finery. Flowers and half-columns. Everyone is dressed up, from the cater-waiters to the maitre-d's. And everyone is being really nice.

You go upstairs to the "bridal suite" where there is a crazy breakfast spread laid out. Bagels, muffins, fresh fruit, donuts (mmh, donuts.) Juices and coffee and champagne. And there's a nice lady who keeps pouring you mimosas.

"You want another?"

Sure! Why not.

There's only the walking in the heels, and the making of the speech. Why not have another? And, even before all of that there is the application of the make-up. It's a complex ritual involving many tools and processes. Careful attention to detail and a refined knowledge of the luscher color test are vital to this ritual. It's not only how the colors make you look, it's how they make you feel. Because you should feel beautiful. You should feel like the most beautiful woman in the world. Or, the second most beautiful if you aren't the actual bride.
Cause, you know, that would be wrong.

It's not exactly a short process either. Not when there are four of you. When hands are shaking from nerves and over-caffeination. That's why the mimosas sound like such a good idea. You need something to even you out. You didn't get much sleep last night (who could?) and now you're a wreck. Plus, you deserve some champagne drinks. This is an important day and so far, everyone has made through alive and nothing has been broken. A little bit of shiny eyeshadow and champagne go a long way.

People start arriving, the photographer keeps interrupting to take those endearing, yet annoying, candid shots of The Bride And Her Attendants Getting Ready. You struggle to ensure that the various states of undress are not captured on film.

"More mimosa?"

Sure!

Face painted, feet shoved into shoes and bodices straightened it's pretty much time to go. Time to get this girl married! Stand here, hold your flowers thusly, wait here, walk now. Now!

This is the other side of the mirror here folks. I'm usually the one telling people where to stand. Honestly, there's certain simplistic joy to taking orders. Especially when you are all dressed up and expected to parade yourself infront of a room full of people. I really liked that part. I'm going to have to remember that for later. The walk is not as sweat inducing as I had anticipated. It's possible all of the coffee and mimosas had dehydrated all of the sweat out of me.

And then you're done. All of that preparation, all of the fears and anticipation and now you're a part of the backdrop as the bride makes her own march down the aisle. And she's beautiful, the most beautiful. And she's laughing. Because that's what she does. And you try not cry. And you try not to giggle at the maid of honor crying. And you try to actively listen to what the judge is saying but you get distracted by your admiration for the groom who needs no prompting to recite his memorized vows. And you're keeping an eye on the flower girl who may make a fast-break for her sisters sitting in the first row at any time.

And then they are man and wife and it's time to ...take pictures.

Which is fine and uneventful, after the walk around the block to the backyard garden they built especially for this event (and the other weddings that are taking place before their permanent gardens are built out.) And there's MORE champagne. And hors d'oeuvres and you take off your fancy gold shoes because you keep sinking into the lawn and all of the little girls practice their dancing while the photographers pose the parents of the bride.

But it's still full on daylight when you are done and headed into the reception. It's not even cocktail hour when someone is asking you to order you dinner and there's no way you're going to get enough drinks in you to get on the dance floor. And you feel guilty, because you want to dance but it's too early to drink. And there's no way you're going out there without more drinks.
So you watch from your table, it's right on the dance floor, because you're a VIP. Or, because someone expected you to dance.

Either way, the food is good, the company at the table is great and being a spectator ensues that you wont miss the mother of the bride singing along to Love Shack, or the groom dancing in a circle with his nieces-in-law. And, it's all for the best because as a bridesmaid, you vowed to yourself that you wouldn't get yourself into the sweaty mess that you did at the last wedding you attended, last week. In Ohio.

But that's a whole other entry.

Other Peoples' Wedding Madness

2007-08-13T21:03:00.000-05:00

August.
The dog days of summer are upon us.
I've got 2 nights between weddings to make a brief update here.

There will, I promise you, more written about the weddings I've been to this year. I just need some time to catch my breath.

Maybe, like, I'll have my thoughts together by October?

Two days ago we attended the wedding of one of the original "Undateables," and my favorite Blues Brother. Quite possibly the only thing that could make Ohio interesting are the nuptial rituals of the DD.

And I'm not talking about a cup size kids.

Although, side note (and boys, you may want to avert you gaze here for a moment.) It is no joke shopping for a bra to go on under a special occasion dress when you are rockin' these kind of bodacious ta-tas. Gah, seriously. I am exhausted from the dressing room trips alone. And I haven't even gotten to the rehearsal dinner yet.

Two days from now I embark upon my first foray into actual inclusion in a wedding party. That's right. I have gotten this far in life (and never you mind how far that is, thank you very much) and this is the first time I am going to be a bridesmaid.

I couldn't possibly be more excited about standing up for darling Kristabeth. And, I am happy to report, she has chosen a lovely dress. For me. I really don't know what her wedding gown looks like.

Sure, I've stage managed more weddings than anyone should probably ever attend in their lives but I've never been expected to, you know, stand there with a bouquet and look pretty. I've always been in the back, bossing people around. Occasionally weeping quietly. A lot of the time laughing at things (Bryan.) There are going to be official pictures of me now. I can't let my makeup run this time!

I have purchased every tool known to women to ensure "prettiness" for this wedding. This, of course, means a lot of squeezing and molding of body parts. Lots of painting and tweezing and exfoliating. And, in my case, a lot of slathering on of fakeo-tan-in-a-tube.

That's right Krista, only for you will I subject myself to self-tanner, lest I blind wedding guests with the sad, Midwestern, whiteness of my exposed skin.

Curse this place and it's lack of proper beaches!

But it doesn't matter. Because it's not about me.

A wedding is a beast I completely understand. A bunch of folks get together to make two people look absolutely fantastic and create a beautiful event to honor them. Everyone else is just scenery. Granted, fabulous looking scenery, but scenery none the less. Everyone pitches in and makes it all come together for the bride and groom.

You may have to travel thousands of miles. You may have to endure the strip-mall mecca that is Boardman (Boredom) Ohio. You may have to spend money you'd rather put towards purchasing an HD TV. And you may have to spend a night sleeping on the floor of a hotel room. But, you do it out of love. You do it because when you commit to a wedding, either as a guest or as a member of the party, or even as a well meaning friend with a knack for moving people around, you're there out of love. And that should surpass any mild discomforts (spanx) or random acts of chaos (rehearsal.) It's a little bit of selflessness on your part. Making this thing that is a wedding happen for your friends, or your family. Or, in my case, my friends who are my family.

I know it sounds slightly insane but I wouldn't trade a moment of the sweating, stair climbing, being snipped at by cranky old ladies or last minute runs for decorating supplies that I've gone through as a part of the weddings I have helped organize for anything in the world. In the end you don't remember the food, or the DJ, or how much traffic you sat in to get there and back again. You remember the love. You remember the earnestness with which vows were exchanged. You remember the faltering of the best man's voice as he gave his speech and the hug that you got from the bride when she finally got around to greeting your table.

You will occasionally remember the after party. But, not if it was a good one.

One more wedding to go this year.
My next big project?
My own.

The Baconator

2007-07-22T17:06:00.000-05:00

Who'da thunk it? That cute little red-headed girl with the Pipi Longstocking braids is trying to kill us. My money has always been on the clown. And, in recent years, I've been hedging my bets with that creepy puppet king. But now I am pretty sure it's the pipsqueak who is going to do us in.

Have you seen this thing? It borders on gastronomic insanity. You eat one of these and you're practically saying "Here I am Lord. Come and take me."

Don't get me wrong. I love me some bacon. And, I love me some cheeseburgers. And I have, indeed, been known to chow down on a bacon cheeseburger or two in my day (OK, yesterday.) But still. There is a line and I do believe The Baconator crosses it. Crosses it, spits on it, rubs it's shoe in the dirt and then runs screaming away from the line waving it's arms. "Nyah, nyah you can't catch me!"

Does one person actually need to ingest that much meat, salt, fat and byproduct in one sitting?
Dostoevsky once said “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” But I say an equally valid judgement of civilization can be made by observing what we eat when no one is cooking for us. When left to our own devices, what are we ingesting? Are we seeking out meals? Or are we going for the quick cheap?

There is a lot to be said about the quick cheap. Namely that it is quick and cheap. And prolific. There is a fast food joint on virtually every corner and you can eat a full "meal" for around $5 any and every day at any one of them.

Which is a shame. Because it's very difficult to have the media, and your doctors and the government shouting into one ear about how you have to eat healthier. You have to cut out fats and eat more vegetables, get less sodium and drink more water. And, in the other ear you've got multi-million dollar corporations shouting about their new, triple stack double cheese, bacon, ham and mayonnaise sandwich combo death wish and a soda.

And we've done this to ourselves. The American love affair with fast food is as old as the interstate highway system. The more we buy, the more they try to sell us. But really we should reign it in a little here folks. Because this a slippery slope. You know that the next step is a slab of salt pork shoved into the middle of a frosted donut.

Oh, wait.

Rock And Roll! ... All Night?

2007-07-09T19:37:00.000-05:00

I bet you've been wondering where I've been.

I bet you've been wondering what I've been up to.

I'll tell you what I've been up to.

I've been living the life of a part time rock and roller.

Rock And Roll, you see, does not begin until after 9pm.

So, partying everyday is sort of out of the picture.

Unless by "party" you mean sleep late.

But still. Exciting times. Very exciting times.

I feel cool.
I'm "with the band." Heh heh.

They're a really good band. And, I'm not just saying that because I'm marrying the bass player. I mean seriously. They're good. It's been a meteoric rise from the Christmas 2006 show at the VFW Hall in Villa Park, IL to next month's show at Swig on Milwaukee.

You should check them out:

HEYDAY

Go on, click it.

Parental Discretion is advised. It's Rock And Roll. We should always show discretion when exposing our parents to it.

And, yeah yeah. I'm still getting married. And, there have been a number of weddings we've been to in the last year that I have not written about.
I'm mulling.
Leave me be.

Death To All Aphids!

2007-06-17T14:25:00.000-05:00

Bugs.
I hate bugs.

I really like my plants though. And my plants have bugs.
Little, green bugs. And some white ones. They look like lint until they start crawling across the leaf. The green ones are aphids. I don't know what the white ones are. I really don't like either of them.

We mixed up some soapy water to spray the pepper plants, as directed by a knowledgeable looking website. I think it made the bugs angry. I thought it would kill them. Or chase them off - an aphid diaspora. One application will just not be enough. But I don't want to over soap the plants. We're really close to having actual peppers. I can feel it. And, after our near fatal experience with the basil plant this winter (now having passed on to a better life in someone's garden in the suburbs.) I'm a little gun shy on the plant care front.

Also, sometimes Beatrice likes a nice side-salad with her meal. She'll nibble on pretty much anything that grows. I don't want to poison her with insecticides so I'm afraid to use anything stronger than soapy water.

I'm thinking about bringing in some lady bugs. Yeah, I know. Also bugs. But they are, at least, more attractive bugs. And I'm pretty sure Beatrice would snack on them if they got out of hand.
It doesn't seem as though my The Fiance is going to approve of this little ecosystem project of mine. I believe his exact words were:

"No. You are not allowed to have lady bugs."

So. Soapy water it is then.
Unless anyone else has any good ideas.

Memorial Day Weekend, 2007

2007-05-28T18:43:00.000-05:00

The only thing worth interrupting the TNT Law & Order marathon for is the discovery of the Jaws marathon on Encore. The Brody Brothers have just been reunited at the gates of Sea World setting off a chain of 3-D events. Culminating in the spectacular demise of Louis Gossett Jr. All four movies. All day long.

At eight o'clock The History Channel is airing a special about the mythology of Star Wars.

It is as if the Gods of Cable heard I was planning on spending the day in PJs, recovering from the weekend-long grilling bacchanal. Hooray for long, cool draughts of water and chocolate chip cookies.

Even the cats are lazing it up. The cats, however, are pretty much always lazing it up. It's what they seem to do best. Second only to waking us up at ungodly hours for no discernible reason. Beatrice is splayed out, lolling around in front of the television. The fan ruffling the white fur on her stomach. Jabber, I'm assuming, is under the bed. He's scared of the fans. All of them. Also the dishwasher and any noises coming in through the windows. Summer is a tough season for Ole Boy.

Summer. It's already summer. It feels like just yesterday that I was complaining that summer would never arrive and here it is. Theknot.com tells me we have 501 days until our wedding. If we get the date we want. If we find a place to have it. When we find a place to have it? Another trip down to New Orleans in July. A couple of more venues to investigate. And then hopefully, this October, I can get a committee together to come down with me and find a florist and talk decor.

But between then and now there are still 3 other peoples' weddings to attend. Gotta stay focused. Gotta keep my head in the game. Gotta pick out some hot outfits, book some travel arrangements and ship out some gifts. It's going to be busy. So bring it on, summer.

Bring it on.

Cute Shoe Revolution

2007-05-22T20:43:00.000-05:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm here to share with you a new plan for total personal happiness and fulfillment.

(Hold for applause.)

It's really simple!
There aren't a lot of complicated steps to follow. So there's no literature to buy.
And, while there is an initial investment cost, how much you contribute is entirely up to you! There is no minimum.
And there's definitely no maximum!

(Hold for laughter.)

I just need you to listen to me on this. I know what I am talking about! And I want YOU to know what I'm talking about too! Are you ready?

(Hold for response.)

Are you ready?

(Hold for response.)

Are you ready?

(Hold for response.)

Then, Ladies and Gentlemen, give me your un-de-vided attention because here it is. Here's the secret. I'm going to tell it to you right now. This is what you need to do.

Buy yourself a pair of shoes.

You heard me right. It really is THAT simple. All it takes, at the start, is one. new. pair. of. shoes.

What kind of shoes? Doesn't matter.
Whatever you prefer.
Me? I favor a cute shoe.

(Show them the totally cute Anne Klein peep-toes you got last weekend.)

(Note: Get pedi b4 conference!!)

But you may like something a little more sporty. Or formal even. Whatever you want. We can't decide for you. And we don't want to! YOU are the best guide to your own happiness. And we're not about making choices for you. We're here to give you a "step" in the right direction!

(Don't forget to take the step!)

In the next (check time) ____ minutes I am going to give you all the tools you need to feel "pumped" about going out there and starting your own Cute Shoe Revolution!

(Hold for applause.)

Why buy new shoes?
How can shoes make you happy?

Let me ask you this: How can shoes NOT make you happy?

The right pair of shoes not only helps you look better, they help you feel better. Feel better about your feet. Feel better about your outfit. Feel better about you. Feel better about THE WORLD!

(Hold for applause.)

Say you're in a store. Say you're there to buy some bath towels and you're walking down the aisles and you have to go through the shoe section to get to the bath towels. And as you're going past all of these shoes you see a pair. That one pair. It's perfect. It calls to you from the shelf. And you see these shoes and you love them! You hear them calling and you love them.

What do you do?

Do you say to yourself "Oh, those are lovely shoes. Too bad I'm only here to buy towels?"

NO!

You pick up those shoes! You try those shoes on. You walk around, find that little mirror on the bench and model those shoes for yourself. Do they look good? Do they feel good?

Then you BUY those shoes. You can still get the towels! You can get towels anytime. But you need to start buying yourself those shoes!

It doesn't matter if you have something to wear them with. You can build an outfit from the ground up if the shoes are cute. It doesn't even matter if you have a pair at home "just like them."

Let me clue you in on a little secret:

No two pairs of shoes are exactly alike.
And the small, sometimes indeterminate, differences are what make them all necessary!

Because you know you are going to want an alternate pair to wear while you're breaking the new ones in.

I'm not going to lie to you here. It's true. We all know it's true. New shoes can be painful. New shoes can hurt. But when that day comes when you take the band-aids off, when the blisters have healed over and you're no longer hobbling around you know it's worth it. You know!

Because your feet look great! They just look fabulous. And they make your legs look good and shapely. Your whole posture changes and all of your clothes look better. And when you go out there feeling like a million bucks you can MAKE a million bucks.

And, when you make a million bucks what are you going to do with all that money? What are you going to do with it all?

That's right. You're going to go out and buy more, cute shoes.

Now I'm just going to take a little break here. Take a sip of water while my associates pass our pamphlets out to you and get my transparencies mounted up on that screen.

Mmh, this is good. What is this? Evian?

Untitled

2007-05-12T18:14:00.000-05:00

It's not that I have known you for so long.
It's that I knew you so long ago.

The world and you and I were young
and more frivolous with our affections.

Different times and different pains
Different loves and reasons
came together, composing what was at once a friendship.

Kin by different bloodlines.
Running even deeper, at times, than veins can run in a body.

More solid than flesh and everlasting for the time.

When our world was one with walkable circumference
we were all it took to fill it.
Now the world is broader, bigger, wider than we ever bothered to imagine
when all of our time was filled with each other.

The distance between us makes the difference.
Not on maps so much as minds.
And hearts.
In soul and spirit.

It is the horizons that have changed.
Our angles in relation to the sun
and how we choose to revolve around it.

None of what we are or who we were has altered much.
Or been altered.
We are who we are who we were who we shall be.

The world, it seems, is big enough for both of us.
You there and me here.

Where ever there and here may be.

(aside)

2007-04-24T17:31:00.000-05:00

This past weekend I played more video games than I ever have in my whole, entire life. (So. Not. Kidding.)

Oh ye of little hand-eye coordination, get thee to a Wii. For The Wii is Wonderful. You can dance (Fiance refused that game), box (beat him), and shake ants off a banana (No. I don't know why.) And, apparently, it's all really good for you because you're standing up and moving around (instead of creating permanent butt-prints on the couch) and the boxing? Actually made my arm a little sore. (Um, did I mention I beat my The Fiance? At Boxing? Also at bowling and baseball and ...well, I'll just stop there. But also golf.)

This weekend I also got to play Guitar Hero II (Poorly.) And it was nothing less than nerve-wracking.

There are reasons all of my attempts at learning to play an instrument have ended badly (usually with cats hiding under beds.) I would tell you that it brought me to a whole new level of respect for what my The Fiance does but that would be a lie. In the end, it's still a game. And, although I full-on blushed in embarrassment when the "crowd" booed me : -( I still know that they are just a video game crowd (Thank you friends who remained supportive every time I mangled a song and will remember to never ever ever tell my The Fiance how bad I was at it...Right?) It's fun. (And only just slightly addictive.)

It made me realize how important it is to develop some of these skills in childhood. (Catching a ball, for example. Kicking a ball? Also good.) Not (as you may think) because I wish to beat the stuffing out of my The Fiance at more video games, but because...um....sports are good for you? No one ever told me that. (Maybe a little bit of a lie. But for sure no one emphasized it. Or, I couldn't hear them from behind my copy of Little Women.)

Never much of one for organized sports (Dreaded being the last one picked. Also, fear of getting hit in the face with a volley ball.) Or musical instruments (Cats hate flute.) I really didn't do much with myself while my cousins got their pictures taken for the paper playing soccer or baseball or sbaccerball...whatever.

Not me. I read. And read, and read. I even read some books about musicians (high school final paper on The Ramones and college essay on Nirvana!) There was that one book I read about the sports guy (That would be The Sportswriter by Richard Ford. Reading a book about a guy who writes about sports counts. Maybe.)

Anyway - point being....um...

RIP

2007-04-12T13:18:00.000-05:00

Rarely (ok, never) do I feel that a "celebrity" death warrents a post, or a picture, on this here bloggo. Kurt Vonnegut was a very influential force on my writing for a long time. And I will always credit him as such, and my father for taking "Breakfast of Champions" off the shelf and putting it into my hands. I am sad today to know that he has left us all here but happy thinking that he may finally know what his sister's real name was.

That's Entertainment

2007-04-08T15:32:00.000-05:00

When I was younger my Uncle John accused me of having indiscriminate taste when it came to entertainment. Which I think actually translated to "Please stop coming to my house and making us watch Ghostbusters and Return of the Jedi every weekend." To be fair, when I was 12, there was nothing that kept me more happily occupied than watching Ghostbusters or Return of the Jedi.

As I have gotten older that hasn't really changed much. You can ask my The Fiance. He hates my taste in movies because I generally insist on watching any crap that involves ghosts, demons, witches, fighters of ghosts or demons or witches, talking animals, animals that swarm and kill, poorly choreographed fight sequences or zombies. I also enjoy any movie wherein Bruce Willis or Will Smith save the world. In fact the perfect movie, for my money, would be some sort of buddy comedy/action adventure movie starring Die Hard and The Fresh Prince. World in peril? Who else are you gonna call?

This is not to say I don't also enjoy legitimately good movies. Movies that win awards. Movies that Ebert and/or Roeper thumb up. Movies whose scripts were not penned by Joss Whedon or the guys behind Freaks and Geeks. I watch those too. I like them. I am, generally, the driving force behind all of our movie rentals and try really hard to expose The Fiance to the important films. You know, the whole John Hughes oeuvre.

I kid. Well, not really. Although I am pretty sure this whole marriage thing would be called off if I tried to make The Fiance spend a weekend watching Brat Pack films. We rent a lot of old war films, newer action movies, sometimes a thinker or two. A History Of Violence was very popular with both of us. We spent some time, before we coughed up the dough for cable, renting various National Geographic and Discovery Channel documentaries. We were sorely disappointed by the show on the giant crocodile. And, tempting fate again last night, we were also disappointed by the special about Gigantopithecus. Lame.

Were you to walk into my house on any given Sunday afternoon you would probably find me scanning all of the On Demand movie channels looking for the most obnoxiously under-budgeted, poorly scripted horror movies. Most of which were created during the late 70s and early 80s. I will occasionally subject myself to whatever "Chick Flick" is screening on USA/TNT. But really, if it's not Reese Witherspoon it's a pile of pooh. Yeah, I'm talking to you Drew Barrymore.

I also REALLY love bad comedies. REALLY bad comedies. Chris Farley is in it? I am all over it! Anything that Adam Sandler made before he started trying to be a "legitimate actor?" Word. Broken Lizard Production? Giddyup!

So, yeah. OK. I am, perhaps, a bit lacking in the discrimination department when it comes to movies. There are a lot of people out there making movies. And, just because it was released straight to video or as a USA Network Original does not immediately make it a bad movie. Hallmark Channel? Yeah no, those are all pretty bad.

When it comes to television shows though. I am a little more picky. Buffy and Angel fascinations aside my criteria ... Well, I actually have a criteria regarding what television shows I will watch.

I will not watch a sitcom involving a funny, fat guy married to a relative hot, intelligent chick.
I will no longer watch Reality Television. (I had to draw that line the summer I spent watching every episode of Paradise Hotel like it was my job.)
I will not watch specials on 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Lost makes my brain hurt. I wont watch that.

There are a lot of shows I just don't watch. Most of the time it's because they interfere with shows that I HAVE to watch: 24, The Simpsons, Law & Order (SVU and The Original,) South Park.

Sometimes it's because The Fiance has very high standards for is stubborn about his television viewing. So, I miss some stuff. No big deal. You can find pretty much anything on television somewhere else to watch. DVD collections, the internet, someone else's TiVo because your The Fiance doesn't want to mess with the space time continuum like that.

Plus, it's only television. At one point in time, when a regular, good old fashion television set was groundbreaking technology people were producing groundbreaking shows. People were telling groundbreaking stories. Now? Now we're mostly scraping the bottom of the barrel. We're living in a time when most of our movies are remakes or film versions of old television shows. Even some of our television shows are just remakes of old television shows. And I don't mean that in the "inspired by I Love Lucy" sense. I mean: have you heard they are remaking The Bionic Woman? Also, there are way more commercials and product placements than there is actual entertainment on TV now. Snooze. How many E.D. medication commercials can a girl watch?

I refuse to allow television to be that important to me. Except for, you know, 24, The Simpsons, Law & Order (SVU and The Original,) and South Park. I know it pays the bills. I know, I know. I think half of my anxiety dreams are because I participate in putting some of this crap on the airwaves. But whatever. It's just not that important. That's why I'm OK with watching the garbage when I have to. I can tune it out, reduce it so it's just background noise. And sometimes, it's just fun to be easily amused. Like eating cookies for breakfast.

Mmh cookies.

Technical Problems - Please Stand By

2007-04-03T17:56:00.000-05:00

Ugh.

I seriously meant to publish about the latest wedding extravaganza (i am not even exaggerating when i use that word here people) we attended last week(ish).

However, software problems on the home machine have caused delays.

Translation: My computer is a P.O.S. that has no more room on it's memory for me to do anything else and I have no money for a new computer.
The one i'm currently working with was bought for $100 second hand on Craigslist.com. (Gosh, ya shoulda seen the porn on there when i brought it home!)

So, soon. I promise.
Keep yer pants on.

Here Comes The Bride. All Dressed In...

2007-03-11T17:15:00.000-05:00

So.

Wedding dresses.

They are really heavy. I'm not talking in the metaphysical sense here. I mean, those things are made of a lot of fabric. And tulle. Don't forget tulle. In fact, you cannot forget the tulle. But, I have limited experience with these things. I've only tried on dresses today. This was the inaugural shopping expedition.

Mom flew in from New York. I assembled my crackerjack team of shopping and style experts and we headed west. Past Cicero Avenue and into the land where Polish, Italian and Mexican families live Catholic harmony. Just like Springfield has it's Hammock District, Chicago has a Wedding District and that is where we were today.

It is not, as one might expect, a glamorous district. But there sure are a lot of bridal salons out there. And a lot of dresses. Dresses in all styles, colors and silhouettes. That is how you refer to them. Not shapes. Silhouettes. I think I learned that today. Did I mention the crackerjack team of experts? You wanna know why I'm smart? It's because I know when to admit that I need help. I tell you right now, without my three ladies, I would still have my head stuck in a dress with an arm poking through one of those fancy, hanger straps they have. I would be lost.

When we first walked into Eva's Bridal I froze up. There were a lot of sparkles, shiny fabrics and pointy bodices around. I got a little overwhelmed and I shuffled over to the desk, a display case of tiaras and other ridiculous accessories. They gave me an information card to fill out and by the time I looked up, the ladies had already agreed upon a gown off one of the racks.
I love these girls. They jump right in where I fear to tread.

We were told it would be a few minutes before my consultant was available and we ushered ourselves into the room of gowns. Floor to ceiling wedding dresses. I had no idea where to begin. I touched a few, wandered past a couple of different price ranges but my chest got really tight and I felt really lost for a minute. I can't even go to Blockbuster without taking six and a half hours to chose from all of the titles. What was going to happen here?

Ultimately, we're talking about a room full of white dresses. OK, some were ivory. Some were antique, some were even baby blue but upon first glance it is a sea of white. It was like being snow blinded. However, there was no hesitation on the parts of anyone else. Head first and into the racks they went with me trailing behind them.

Most of the dresses were hung inside clear garment bags. We were unzipping and digging through massive amounts of silk, satin and tulle. Don't forget the tulle. We saw some really ridiculous dresses. Lots of lace overkill ... er overlay and sparkly detailed bodices. When our consultant (and I say our because today was, for sure, a team effort.) We had three gowns to bring into the dressing room. I gave the pictures I had cut from the only bridal magazines I have purchased thus far and she went off to find more gowns for me to try on.

One of the best things about having spent so much time in theater is that I am pretty comfortable in a dressing room. Usually I'm the one lacing people into corsets but the tables were turned today. I think I did good. I had a specific dress in mind going in but I kept myself open to some other designs and I had three of my most honest advisers with me. Plus my mom. She was there to make sure my boobs weren't going to hang out too indecently. In describing her sense of fashion, as far as my wedding dress was concerned at least, she used the word "parochial." I'm not entirely sure what she meant by that but I have a good idea, considering she favored the more "well structured" and least plunging necklines of all the dresses I tried on today.

Not that there's anything wrong with a modestly cut wedding dress. However, while I am looking to minimize certain aspects of my physique, there are others that I feel should be tastefully showcased on my wedding day. Tastefully.

I think the biggest surprise of the day, besides the whole "wow, I look pretty f'ing good in a wedding dress" thing was that I figured there would be some sort of conflict over dress color. But there wasn't. In high school, walking the walk in the mornings with Eileen Kaufman, when we discussed future wedding dreams I always described myself in something completely nontraditional. And, while I have veered away from my initial feelings on a black wedding dress with bridesmaids in blood red, I am still not too keen on the pure white dress thing.

Now, I'm as virtuous and virginal as the next chick. I just don't think I look all that good in white. Plus, I'm a clumsy eater. And a clumsy walker. Pretty much, I'm a little clumsy all around and therefore I've never favored white. I've had in my head something in a nice ivory, perhaps champagne. I didn't think mom would go for it. Only daughter, only marriage and mom's not the most progressive lady... But she agreed. That was pretty cool. We can only hope that things progress as smoothly over the next nineteen months.

Only nineteen months? Oy. OK.

So the dress thing turned out well. We eliminated some styles altogether. Bye bye mermaid silhouette. See ya at someone else's wedding, Mae West slinker. Hello Grecian draped style.
I know, it's a real shocker that I can rock the Grecian garb. What can I say? Some of us are just born to look good in raw silk. Elegant, simple, classical if you will. Indeed. Lovely dress, shame it doesn't exist in my size.

It's a really arduous task, trying on wedding gowns. I am not kidding about the weight of these things. Thankfully my crackerjack team was there to help me in and out of the gowns. Pulling down underskirts, lacing the aforementioned corsets and making sure I didn't fall off that little platform they give you to stand on, so you can see what the dress looks like without stepping all over the bottom. Not to mention six brilliant eyes and three mouths not afraid to speak the truth. None of the three of these ladies are part of the wedding party. That team is all in New York. But these three, they are my every day go-to team. We have our verbal shorthand and I know I can trust each of them to give me unvarnished opinions. Very important.

I feel pretty good. We dropped mom off at the train to the airport with information on two specific dresses written down for further internet searching. We took some pictures. And no, you can't see them. We're going to try and find the first dress we all agreed on. The one they told me is discontinued.

There's also a second dress. We popped into the shop where one of the girls bought her own wedding gown. Unannounced, you can't expect too much from a shop the size of this store. But the lady was super nice and very helpful. The one dress I tried on there is a winner. It's beautiful, but it's got a lot of "business" going on. I don't know if I want a lot of "business." But we've got all of the information on that one as well.

And I am confident, after today, that I can find a dress I look great in. Truthfully, I wasn't too sure of that until I started trying them on.

I don't know if I did it right though. I didn't cry. Wasn't I supposed to cry? I always hear about brides and their mom's crying when they find THE dress. Standing there, in front of the three-way mirror in a billowy cloud of white, tears of joy streaming down their cheeks. Yaddayadda yadda. No? Good.

Stop Me Before I Troll Again

2007-03-06T17:16:00.000-06:00

there is some sick (SICK!) compulsion inside me that makes me do crazy things sometimes.

like putting my ex-boyfriend's name into google "just to see what happens."

you know what happens?

i find him.

and i go to his myspace page and stare.

and then i throw up a little in my mouth.

and then i do it all over again like a month later.
because...
i don't know.
maybe he makes mention of me? maybe someone finally posted a comment calling him out on his supreme douchebaginess (yeah, i made that word up. all on my own. fuck off.)
maybe some sort of non-fatal tragedy has befallen him and i can laugh about it!

curse you myspace.
curse you for providing access to the people, places and things we should never be able to access again.

curse you myspace and curse my trolling sickness.

ew. alanis morrissette's "you oughta know" totally just came on.
i'm going to go wash the gross off myself before it's permanent.

Love In The Time of Cold Remedies

2007-02-14T19:49:00.000-06:00

Ahhh Valentine's Day.
In honor of this most auspicious holiday marketing scheme here is a list of the other things that annoy me:

* Men blaming women for Valentine's Day.
You know, if some people thought to be more considerate and perhaps more caring towards other people on a regular basis (and without prompting) throughout the year maybe we all wouldn't be in this heart-shaped pickle, now would we?
Is it so hard to buy a bouquet of flowers every once in a while? Sheesh.
Ahh, not that I condone laying on the pressure for expensive baubbles and/or trinkets either. The entire thing is a gross misappropriation of perfectly good emotions if you ask me.
Just stop blaming me for the whole thing.

* Food voyeurs.
The next person who comes up to me and starts sniffing my food at lunch is going to get a face full of ...well, whatever it is I'm heating up at the time. I don't sniff at your food now do I? Scram.

* The CTA.
Specifically the Blue Line and the Damen Bus.
SpSpecifically having to wait a full 40 minutes for both/either of the above.
SpSpSpecifically having the above mentioned wait quadruple my commute time.
SpSpSpSpecifically when it's 10 FREAKIN DEGREES OUTSIDE.
Thanks CTA, I'm so glad the revenue from all of those fare hikes is being put to good use.
Douchebags.

*The Cold. The Cold. Oh The Cold. Please God Make It Stop Being So Cold.
It's very difficult to reach into my pockets when I'm fully dressed and leaving the house in the mornings. I can't answer my cell phone if it rings when I'm outside. I can't, physically, get to the inside of my pocket. It makes me crazy. My fingers are virtually useless inside my gloves. My scarf is so big, and wound so high on my face that my neck is immobilized. And I so wasn't kidding about waddling to the bus stop in the mornings. Today it was a pair of tights, a pair of wool leggings, one pair of cotton socks and a pair of wool socks underneath the big, pink snow boots and my jeans. So much. Too much. Enough.
Thank you.

*Commercials.
Dear The Violent Femmes,
So sorry to hear you have fallen upon hard times. I guess you should have invested some of that early-eighties cashola a little bit better. Maybe then you wouldn't have had to sell one of the most awesomest songs EVER to Wendy's. Dudes.

*Oprah.
Still.

That's it.
Right now.
I'm gonna go work on the one-act.

Man, I Wish We Had TiVo

2007-02-11T15:36:00.000-06:00

Now that The Panda Show is over I have regained full use of my Sundays.

Woohoo.

I love Sunday. It is a day spectacularly devoid of any responsibility or relation to the other days in my week. When executed without flaw I can manage to be in my pyjamas all day. I try not to make any promises or create any expectations for myself on Sundays. Sitting down to write here is sometimes a major accomplishment for me but Sunday is the only day of the week I have to myself. And, therefore, the only day I have the time to commit to it.

Which, I admit, is partially laziness on my part. Sure, I could take an hour or two after work every night. Or I could start writing in the mornings over coffee and breakfast. But really? No. Not really. In the AM my brain is pretty much in a vice-grip of stupidity until I'm actually in the elevator of my office building. After eight hours at work there's no less pleasant a thought than sitting down in front of another computer and having to use the same brain cells I've been exercising all day. I can maintain consciousness until about 11pm. After that, I guarantee nothing.

Yes, it's true. I live a simple life. A quiet life. Saturdays are generally for chores. Grocery shopping, forcing The Fiance to help me "clean up, just a little." Sometimes a movie, or lunch out. Not in this weather though. Occasionally, Saturdays are spent recooperating from Friday night, but most of The Big Events happen on Saturday nights.

Which brings us back to Sunday.

I sequester myself on the second floor. It's the bedroom, and our office, and the music studio, and a very comfortable lounge area easily fortified against the elements by strategic placement of our space heater. It's quiet up here. The forced-air heat doesn't have the same resonence as it does in the living room. There's not the constant volume monitoring on the TV or on the computer as there would be downstairs. It's oddly cosy for a space so open. Equally as important, my cell phone gets horrible reception on the second floor. Oh well.

I bring some snacks up from the kitchen and a beverage or two. After 6pm, or with whatever passes for dinner on days like this, I might have a glass of wine or two but usually it's tea or water or juice. I'll bring the paper up and spread it on the desk, piling the ad sections ontop of the ones I have no interest in - automobiles, business, classifieds and sports - and browse the rest of the paper. Beatrice will eventually come searching for attention and plant herself in my lap, or ontop of whatever I'm reading at the time. We'll watch a little TV together until she moves her fat, kitty ass onto the other chair finally freeing all of my limbs and attention. She'll sit quietly until Jabber comes up here to tell me that he's starving for food and from lack of attention. Beatrice will either run him off with a swipe of her paw or allow him to nest on the bed.

If I hadn't finished reading my book last night, I'd be making my way through that right now. Or muddling through the new novel I just brought home from the stash in my desk drawer at work. But there's a Law & Order marathon on (does it still qualify as a marathon if they show 5 hours of L&O every Sunday?) The cats and I are content enough to sit here and eat our snacks and pound out some thoughts on the ol' blog.

I've been thinking about a one act play. Today is the type of day I might work on that. Or I might spend three hours rambling here. Or perhaps I'll browse the list of wedding dress designers from the salon I am going to next month. The Hunt begins on March 11th. There are a lot of things I could, and probably should, be doing today. There are a lot of ways I could spend my Sundays. But the greatest feeling in the world is not having a single damn thing to do.

Big Mistake

2007-02-07T17:11:00.000-06:00

Wearing one less layer of everything today.

Bonuses:
Less waddle on the walk to the bus stop this morning.
Trading in tie-up hiking boots for giant, pink snowboots = way cuter and much less me losing feeling in my toes because all of my socks make the boots too tight.

What I Wore Today

2007-01-30T18:38:00.000-06:00

1 pair underpants
1 pair wool leggings
1 pair wool leg warmers
1 pair cotton socks
1 pair wool socks
1 pair ugly hiking boots that are more water/slip proof than any other shoes I own
1 pair corduroy pants
1 bra
1 thermal pullover shirt
1 cotton henley shirt
1 ugly wool "Mr Rogers" sweater over the whole mess

still cold.

2007 - The Year Of Living Frenchily

2007-01-16T20:02:00.000-06:00

*Deep sigh of relief*

Today, January 16th, is the first day in over a month I have been able to just come home, kick off my shoes and relax with a some episodes from the Law & Order franchise.

The above is a lie.
I was supposed to go to the grocery store and buy breakfast food and pick up a pair of long johns for Bird.

Weeeeeeeelll. I copped out and hit the 7/11 for over priced bacon and eggs.
And, since I told Bird's mom to send him new, fancy, long johns for his birthday (It's OK, his birthday is tomorrow and he doesn't read this blog anyway) I figured I should wait and see if that happens before I buy him a pair.

So here I am at home. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

The end of 2007 went kind of haywire on me.
First of all I signed up to stage manage a show.
It's strange and it's French.
It's playing here, in Chicago, right now. Come and see it!

Then, in November, Bird promoted himself from my "The Boyfriend" to my "The Fiance."
Go figure huh? (squeeeee!)
It's very exciting and a little bit scary.
Not because of the whole "til death" thing. That I feel OK about.
What's really freaking me out is the idea of being the center of attention at a huge event.
Really. There's a reason I'm a stage manager and not an actor folks.
I am fabulous with planning and organizing and making all sorts of magic come together.

For other people.

When it comes to my own life, and art, and entertaining I am way more neurotic and a bit of a weenie about committing to ideas and choices.

This is not a good way to be when you have a wedding to plan. I am trying really hard to remind myself what I have told all of my bridalicious friends at one time or another. This is just a big budget, one-night show. Lavish costumes, complicated props but (thankfully) very few light cues. If I can continue to think of it in this way I should be able to deal with whatever the next umm.... eighteen months....has to throw at me.

Only eighteen months???!?! Crap.

On the plus side, even if the reception falls to pieces, we're doing it down in New Orleans so people will have some sort of fun. Somewhere. Somehow, that I may or may not want to know about later.

And can someone tell me how I am meant to refer to the occurrence to this event?
"One the plus side...we're _________ down in New Orleans."

Fill in the blank:
doing it
throwing it
celebrating it
tossin' it up
pledging our love
making me an "honest" woman
proclaiming our intended fidelity
making it all OK with The Big Guy

Is there a preferred term? Is there something in an etiquette book somewhere?
(This, by the way, is probably the last time you will hear me inquire about any sort of wedding etiquette.)

Anyway, so yeah. There's that.

In continence of the frenchified theme for 2007, for my birthday my The Fiance's Mom sent me a copy of Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook.
So far The Fiance has put together a splendid baked chicken.

A few years ago my family started exchanging Christmas gifts grab-bag style. Which is fun and cuts down on the spendiness that was Christmas but maddening when the wacky White-Elephant rules apply.

(You know, first person picks a gift from the pile. Second person can snatch the gift right out of first person's hands. Or can politely take one from the pile.)

Let's just say this. I started the game with a copy of "Young Frankenstein" and wound up bringing home a copy of the Balthazar cookbook.

Which, you know, one can never have too many cookbooks. But 2007 is surely shaping up to be the year of Parisian Brasserie cuisine.

Note to self: Register for those cute little ramekins to cook souffle in.
And perhaps an escargot fork.
But just one though. I doubt we'll ever need more than that.

So, that's all I've got for right now. Tomorrow is The Fiance's birthday. We are going out to eat something fancy and not at all French.

Things You Learn On Your 31st Birthday

2006-12-04T14:23:00.000-06:00

1) The day goes by much quicker when you aren't forced out of bed by a blaring alarm clock at 6am.

2) Mimosas taste good ANY time.

3) Cats do not care if it's your birthday. They still want their litter box cleaned.

4) Funny e-cards come from www.lamecards.com (Thank you Kristina. And no, you weren't really an ugly baby. OK, maybe for a couple of weeks there.)

5) Waterworld? Still a bad movie.

Back to mimosa drinking.

Ta Ta for Now.
Happy Birthday to me!

And Happy Birthday to Cousin Kristina Tomorrow.
The strawberry shortcake is in the mail.

Pasting Down Reality

2006-10-05T20:55:00.000-05:00

In the early months of 1999 I began clipping things out of newspapers: headlines, pieces of articles and pictures. At the time I was working as a news monitor. It sounds like an interesting job - most of the jobs I've had sound interesting (that's why I take them after all.)- but really it was brain-numbingly dull. I watched a tape of local news programming and kept notes on what commercials were mentioned at what times.

Hrm. With some perspective I think actually I was a commercial monitor and a hell of a lot closer to my current job than I ever put together just this very second.

Anyhow. So I sat at a computer all day. On the television next to me the news played. Five hours of news. And all day long I would watch the television news and type out short descriptions of each commercial. As you may guess, I did not last very long at this job. It was depressing. News all day, every day. If you subject yourself to that sort of thing for long enough, you begin to lose hope. Everything becomes ugly and mean. This is when I started cutting up the newspapers.

I don't remember having any plan for these clippings when I first started collecting them. I kept them piled together in one of those two-pocket folders - you know the ones in rainbow packs that you used to buy as part of back-to-school supplies. There weren't many of them. Just a few, at the beginning. When I fled from that monitoring job I wound up working as the de facto office manager and receptionist at a non-profit organization. Part of THAT job was to go through the morning papers and cut out any articles mentioning the companies that belonged to our organization.

So there I was, paid to sit at a desk and cut up newspapers. It was strange timing on the universe's part because what had once been just a slight interest became a fixation. All of a sudden I had little bits of newspaper falling out of everywhere. I don't remember when, or where, I got the sketch book that they came to be pasted in but I do remember spending a lot of hours on the floor of my living room cutting and pasting. And there's a date on the bottom of the last page. The day I decided I was done. There was a rush towards the end. I got tired of the labor of it all, so I filled the last pages very quickly just to wash my hands of the whole thing.

I pull it off the bookshelf occasionally and you can't really blame me for wanting to get it as far away from myself as possible once it was done. There is really very little goodness in it at all. It begins with pages of short articles about foreign wars and atrocities. Afghanistan, Guatemala, Cambodia. A New York Times headline reads "Eight Tourists, Including a U.S. Couple, Hacked or Bludgeoned to Death in Uganda." I forget that happened. All of the time, I forget about how that was news for at least a week. It was, it is, horrifying.

One page only has 2 headlines, pasted perpendicular to each other, about racism in the London Police force.

Ha. Here's a good one:
"War leaves Clinton feeling dispirited and boxed in."

Who wrote that? Why did that make it into 16 point font?

2 whole pages of NATO and UN forces in The Balkans. Kosovo. Serbia. "NATO apologizes for bombing residential area." A full page, black and white photo of Kosovar refugees in a camp.

There's very little organization to this whole project. The next few pages are all Chicago violence. Gunfire, children killed, women stabbed, officer slain on duty. 12 hurt by acid on a carousel in Indiana. Someone known as "The Naked Bandit" in Allentown, Pa. James Byrd Jr. A Richard Roeper column about fraudulent news stories and liars in journalism. A section about the release of exonerated death row inmates and abuses within the Chicago legal system.

Total shocker, right?

I have captured Columbine, the wreck of the City of New Orleans. Pages and pages of stories about the war on drugs - because there was no terror for us to fight back then. Christians, Catholics, and ex-Mouseketeer Darlene Gillespie was arrested for some dopey, white-collar crime. Gay rights, and the lack thereof.

One of my favorites simply reads "30 years later, and we're still not living like the Jetsons."
(Seriously, where the hell is my fold-up, bubble-topped, flying car already???)

Chicago Sun-Times Friday, July 23, 1999: Front page, full page color memoriam shot of JFK Jr. He was handsome.

The debacle that was Woodstock 1999. (What a bunch of douchebags.) Dana Plato's death by drug overdose. Robert Downey Jr. Sentenced to three years in prison.

And then something completely Monty-Pythonesque: "New Flare-Up in U.S.-European Banana Fight." Or maybe those boys had more fun with Kansas cutting evolution from its science curriculum.

There's a map depicting how many juveniles were executed, or are on death row in each American state.

There are stories about diseases and viruses and cloning and celebrity deaths (RIP Mr. Belvedere). All sorts of stories. Some pages are crowded with overlapping headlines. Some have pages to themselves, or only have a couple of small stories scattered on the clean white sheet. It's an interesting collection. But I am glad I stopped when I did. The date reads August 25, 2001.

I am glad I stopped there because if I hadn't I might never have stopped at all. I might have shelves of sketch books filled with clippings. A catalog. I am glad I got whatever that was out of my system. I think about it now and again. This past week especially. Pedofiles in Congress, rapists attacking Amish girls, consequences of war and politics. I don't know if it is worse, or better or the same and just renewed or if it has sustained itself for all of this time, for all time forever. Maybe I stopped paying attention.

OK, not "maybe." I stopped paying attention soooomewhere around the priest sex scandal. Sure, I relapsed a little with the celebrity "news" and all but I've weaned myself off of that ... Mostly. I signed up for a month of The Tribune to help out some neighborhood kids with a fundraiser. I've been reading the paper on the way to work in the mornings. Now I save the news section for the ride home in the evening. It was too difficult to read about all of the horrible and confusing things going on that early in the morning. I like the funnies. Perhaps a story about different olive oils or a theater review. These are things I can think about at 9am. I save the hard stuff for the ride home. Gotta figure, hard to make a day worse right?

Maybe not.

This compulsion, the reasoning is buried somewhere. I feel like part of My Job is to hold onto these things; keep notes. There's a reason, I just don't know what it is yet. But artists, we artists - those of us who are not merely content to sit and watch. Those of us who feel the need to transform our surroundings and realities, those of us who dissect and lead examined lives - at whatever level and with whatever means - we have a job. I think. Someday, all of the things we have been collecting in our brains: the images and stories, words and songs and sounds and numbers. We're meant to put them to some use you know.

And I know I just put some people off of their lunch by using the dreaded "a" word. Get a grip. I'm,like, the least pretentious person you know. It's not like I capitalized it or anything. I'm just saying. There are those people who are content to get up, go to work, go home, go to bed. Repeat. Then there are those of us who need a little more than that. We bear some responsibility, to take this all and make something of it. Perhaps bring some understanding, or at least a perspective. There are so many people out there afraid, or unwilling, to own up to their opinions. Those of us who have developed methods to our madness need to take the madness and make something of it.
If you live in reality you wind up with a lot of crap stuffed in your brain. You have to do something with it.

Illuminate.

Reconcile

2006-09-11T19:58:00.000-05:00

Once Upon A Time...

There was a little girl who lived in New York City. All of her life she, and all of her family, lived in this beautiful city. To this little girl, at the time she was growing up, places like Milwaukee, San Francisco and New Orleans seemed to be completely disconnected from the place in which she lived.
As the girl grew older she began to explore all of the wonderful things this city of her birth offered her. Museums, concerts, parks and second hand clothing stores. She vowed in her heart and to her soul that she would never, ever, ever live anywhere besides this fabulous, loud and crazy city.
Then, one day, this little girl grew up. More specifically, she was expected to become a grown up. She had gone through all of her school days and now, armed with a diploma and a minimal sense of entitlement, she was expected to make her way in the world. She looked out onto the city of her home and where once she had seen beauty and wonder and adventure, she now saw high rents, low salaries and garbage piled on the sidewalks. While in her heart and soul a small voice still spoke out in favor of her earlier and earliest promises the other part of her (that would be the part that held the degree in Creative Writing) scoffed and called the dream impossible.
Turning then away from childish dreams and promises the girl packed her bags, grabbed her cats and her bear named Ted and hightailed it for a more promising scene financially agreeable scene in the great, mid-western city of Chicago.
The girl saw this sojourn as a resting point. A way-station of sorts, where she could learn to live and pay bills, perhaps write something off the wall fantastic and return, triumphant to her beloved city of New York.
She never intended to stay away for all that long. But, as it is wont to do, life got in the way. There were many trials and tribulations and dramas of enormous consequence to her life that prevented her from returning, let alone triumphantly.
And then, one day, a horrible, horrible thing happened. A big chunk of the city that she loved and watched from afar was set upon by Terrorists. All she could do was watch the horror unfold from the chair at her office desk as thoughts of everyone and everything she had left behind raced through her mind.
Where was her mother? Was she safe? Had she been hit in the head by falling debris? Had her father made it safely out of mid-town? What about her cousin who had an office near "Ground Zero?" Was she safe? When would the phones work again? Where were her friends and relatives???? How could she get in touch with them to know they were safe?
And what about the city? The city of so many dreams and hopes and promises? What about her city? Would it ever heal?
The girl sat at her desk and wept. Wept for all the people who were lost, all of the buildings that were gone and all of the needs of her city. If it had been possible, she would have been on the next plane/train/bus/slow boat back to New York. She felt as if the city might never forgive her for not being there at its greatest time of need.
For the next week she watched from the safety of her bed in her spacious, yet barrio adjacent, apartment in the mid-west as death tolls rose, speeches were made and plans for war were laid. She wept and wept and wept and wished that she had never left. Wished too that her mettle had been tested along with the rest of New York on that day. Feeling that she had inadvertently forfeit her right to be a New Yorker by being safely tucked away in The Second City on the day when all of New York rallied its resources and muddy good feelings to pull itself out of rubble. She looked at pictures taken by friends and strangers of the place that she still called home and felt that there could be no greater sense of loss than this gaping hole in her heart where those towers had stood as symbol of home and hearth and family.
Time heals all wounds. This is true. To an extent all wounds will heal and do. All wounds leave scars though. Some are visible. Like the way she cries on the plane after visits to New York. Some are more subtle, like the way she cringes with every mention of 9/11; no longer innocent numbers but an indelible mark on the lives of people all over the world. Or the way she handily avoided all news casts and internet news sites today, the fifth anniversary of that day.
But some scars are on her heart. Some of them do not fade with time but only sharpen in contrast. Some of them were reopened when she watched New Orleans wash away. Watched with her boyfriend as his city suffered grief and tragedy and injustice as well. Watched and realized that there is no difference - blown up or blown away. It's still your heart - her heart. His heart. And now they share a personal grief and guilt that they do not discuss and do not acknowledge. But it's there in the way they scoff at elected officials and their officious words. Promises of hope and healing for their cities are filtered through this grief and guilt. Knowing that in a solitary way they failed. Failed to be there when their family, and friends and homes needed them to be close and available - for a heartbeat, for a helping hand. As a daughter or son, cousin and friend. Failed to be there when their homes needed to be claimed as homes.
So now she must reconcile this guilt. She must remember that, although if any city in the world were capable of laying a guilt trip it is New York, there is no guilt. That, despite the length of her time in this city away from her city she is still a New Yorker and still a member of her family - family of blood and family of those that call New York "home." Because, no matter how long she is gone from New York she thinks about it every day. No matter how much changes in her city or with her family all of these people and buildings and walls and water run through her veins and make her heart beat. No matter what vacuous accent she picks up here in the mid-west she still falls into the familiar patois of New-Yorkese five minutes off the plane.
And no matter how hard her boyfriend argues against it, she will be back.
She will be back.

I don't wanna live in a big old Tomb On Grand Street

2006-09-09T19:55:00.000-05:00

Hrm.
I was all set to write about my current fascination with construction sites. Talk about how I want to grow up and be a construction worker.
I was going to tell you about the Caterpillar key I have that belonged to my grandfather. And how it could start any Caterpillar. Any one at all.
I was going to tell you that I keep it on the key chain with the keys to my parents' apartments.
I was going to say that I get a little thrill walking past those machines thinking that maybe the key I have still works and that I could just start her up and drive off down the road.
But, now I just cannot seem to be able to find the damn thing.
It really isn't funny.
I cannot think, for the life of me, where it might be.
It has been on my key chain since I was in High School. The keys may have changed but nothing else has.
So now I'm a little distracted from my plans of dropping out of the rat race to pick up a shovel.
I'm really disappointed in myself for losing that key. I have so few things in my possession as mementos of my grandparents. A rosary, a set of worry beads, a dog tag. Not a lot. There are plenty of pictures though, and memories. On my father's side I remember plenty of weekend afternoons playing with my cousin on the sticky, plastic covered couches. Or underneath the table while Yankee games played on TV. I remember having my nose stolen countless times and sitting at the window, watching the world go by. There was one time, when I was spending the night at their place in The Bronx, around Easter. I was staying up late, watching Jesus of Nazareth from the leather recliner in the dining room. All of the lights in the apartment were off and in the flickering from the television set I watched the silhouette of a mouse running along the baseboards. There was also the time I got myself locked in their bathroom. But that was just ridiculous and I refuse to go into it.
My mom's mother and I were pretty close. I used to spend long weekends at her house. And every summer, almost every Sunday, we would hit the road before dawn and head out to her house in Massapequa. From there, a quick stop for Gertz' buns (and half-and-half cookies for us kids) and straight on to Jones' Beach for a day on the sand. When I stayed at Grandma's house there were always trips to the beauty parlor, meals at Red Lobster and laps around the mall at Roosevelt Field with my great-grandparents. She always had beach towels spread out on the seats of her car. It was big, and silver with black, leather...Or vinyl, I don't even know. I do know that on hot days you could get third degree burns from sitting on the seats in that car. Hers was the house where my cousins and I played at mixing drinks at the dusty bar in the basement. It's where I watch The Natural and almost peed my pants watching The Amityville Horror for the first time.
My grandfather though, there aren't many memories of him. Mostly just impressions, he died when I was very young. I think I remember his hands, but not the missing finger so maybe I don't. There's a portrait of him that my mother painted. It's at my dad's house. We rescued it when she purged herself of all her art. I haven't had it shipped to Chicago yet. Part of me has no idea where we would hang it. The other part of me figures I'll be back in New York soon.
The pictures of me and my grandfather are all with my mother. She has all of the old photos. Including the one of me with the goat grandpa tried to buy from the petting zoo for me (or so the story goes.)

So one last thing of his that I have. Damnit, I wish I knew where that thing went.

I was really looking forward to sneaking out tonight and busting into the construction site down the street to see if it still worked.

So, As I Was Saying

2006-09-05T18:17:00.000-05:00

Remember how when I started writing this blog I was all "wedding wedding blee blah blooh?" Right? And then I ran out of weddings because I went to so damn many in 2005 and 2006?
Right, well after a brief reprive; um mostly because there have been some I just wasn't invited to. (Which, whatever. No gift for you then!)
ANNNNNYWAAAAAAAAY my crazy friends are all at it again.

5 weddings on the calendar for 2007! FIVE!
And, here's the capper. I totally get to be a bridesmaid - for the very, very first time ever in my life - in one of them.
And I swear I will look GORGEOUS in a Tiffany-Box-Blue dress Krista. I'll just, you know, dye my hair something...ish.

YAY!

That is all.

Do we think my idea to maintain positive outlook at all costs while seated at my work desk is working?
I can't tell. My brain went pretty numb back around 1pm.

Things That Cheer Me Up Whilst Stuck At Work on a Friday

2006-09-01T18:20:00.000-05:00

KITTENS!!!!

How Did I Get Here?

2006-08-31T17:42:00.000-05:00

Which, of course, is a question that leaves itself wide open to many and varied interpretations.

Most of which are best tackled on a day I do not already feel like going on a multi-state killing spree.

So I'll just ask this question: When did we start having to work 9 hour days?
I remember it used to be nine to five. There's even a movie and a song about it.
And now?
8-5
8:30-5:30
9-6
9:30-6:30
10-7

Can I get my hour back?

"Hear now a curious dream I dreamed last night"

2006-08-29T17:35:00.000-05:00

Firstly curious because I knew I had been at the location of my dream before. Only I could not (and still cannot) remember if it was a real place or if I visited in another dream.

Secondly curious because all of the rooms in the mansion I was visiting in this dream kept moving. As in: exit library, enter kitchen, walk back through the door you just came through and it's now a bedroom instead of the library.

Thirdly curious because all of the staircases kept shifting. Not in the fun Hogwarts sort of way. But more in the way that what was once a proper staircase as I ascended was now a rope ladder as I attempted to descend.

There were also a lot of people I attribute to high school in this dream with me. As if we were on a field trip perhaps. Except I was in charge because I had already been there. Thus, everyone expected me to know how to get from room to room and floor to floor. Only, I could never figure it out because everything kept shifting.

I do know that the grounds were exquisitely manicured and there were many beautiful flowers growing outside. There WAS something else, something in the lake. But that's the part I've already forgotten.

I meant to write this all down when I first woke up but started rushing around to get ready for work.

Which is what I suspect this dream was about.
Much anxiety.
I am considering running away with the circus.
Can't be any crazier than working here right now.
Plus, nothing beats calliope music!

Dear Mr. Fisk

2006-08-27T18:57:00.000-05:00

1. What is the middle name of the first person you ever slept with?
I am unaware of any middle name he may have had.

2. What kind of underwear are you wearing and what color?
Little green ones that say "angel" on them in sparkly letters.
What? Shut up.

3. What is the song you want played at your funeral?
"Dear Prudence" by The Beatles.

4. Would you tell your parents if you're gay?
If perhaps it came up.

5. What would your last meal be before getting executed?
Crap, that's tough. I don't know if I want to go out on a full stomach. Probably ziti with meatballs smothered in my grandmothers delicious sauce.

6. Beatles or Stones?
Beatles.

7. If you had to pick one person on earth who should die, who?
Fred Phelps. Deplorable excuse for a member of my species.

8. Beer, wine or hard liquor?
Wine.

9. What is the thing most important to you about your mate?
Rare moments of unrestrained silliness.

10. What are your plans for the future?
marry, write, publish, make a baby or two...move back to new york. no particular order.

12. Do you walk around the house naked?
nope. never have. never will.

13. How many drinks does it take to get you drunk?
Depends on the situation, and what I'm drinking. Generally about 4 or 5.

14. Where is your best friend?
in here with the rest of us.

15. What hair color do you like on someone you're dating?
dark.

16. Would you rather be blind or deaf?
blind.

17. Do you have any special talents?
juggling, organizing chaos from other peoples' scribblings,chocolate covered bacon.

20. Favorite hateful thing to do to someone?
2 words: wet willy

21. First movie you can remember seeing as a kid?
Splash.

22. What do you do as soon as you walk in the house?
announce myself to the cats

23. When's the last time you went on a date?
anniversary dinner 2 nights ago. Does anyone else remember when restaurants used to be quiet?

24. Do you like horror or comedy?
i think horror IS funny.

26. Person you most wish you hadn't made out with?
big. jim. degrassi.

28. If you weren't straight, what person of the same sex would you do it with?
Ha. Ha. Thought you could get me with that one AGAIN? Nope. Not playin that game no more.

29. Where do you want to live when you are old?
somewhere near the beach.

30. Who is the person you can count on most?
me.

31. If you could date any celebrity past or present, who would it be?
Walter Matthau.

32. Where was your first kiss with your mate?
Outside of a party for our friend Jen's birthday.

33. What did you dream last night?
i have no idea.

34. What is your favorite sport to watch?
curling. it always makes for good conversation.

35. When was the last time you got laid?
recent enough. thanks for asking.

36. What is your new obsession?
home decorating.

37. If you could take back one thing in your past, what would it be?
there is a list. i keep it in my heart. not on the internet.

38. Do you have a college degree?
BA Creative Writing for Theater, SUNY New Paltz class of 1998

39. What was the amount of your last electric bill?
$150 or so. stupid utilities monopolies.

40. Do you have life insurance?
yes

41. How many hours per week do you have to work?
40+

42. Have you ever attended a Toastmasters event?
no. i don't actually know what that is. i organized a roast for someone once...does that...? no, i didn't think so.

43. Favorite place to attend Happy Hour?
Snug Harbor, New Paltz New York. Best jukebox evah.

44. How many miles is your commute to work each day (one way)?
not far. close enough to walk it in an hour if i chose to do so.

45. What time do you get up every morning?
if the cats are being wretched jerks, anywhere between 5am and 6am. By choice, 6:45.

46. What is your definition of sleeping in late?
10am.

47. Have you found any gray hairs?
for years and years and years. blessed be clairol.

48. Do you check your cholesterol on a yearly basis?
yep.

49. How large was your first cellular phone??
not too big but paid for by mom, which made it HUGE!

50. Does your employer provide good health insurance?
not so much.

51. Did you use the internet to write a research paper back in high school or did you do it with encyclopedias and research books in the library?
there was no internet for me in high school. i remember sending emails in college but i don't remember doing any research that didn't actually involve books.

52. What is your earliest memory?
mmmmmh, something involving my scooby-doo wading pool.

53. Have you attended a HS reunion?
went to the 10 year. never going back again.

54. How many jobs have you held in your professional career?
ugh. six if you count helping to run "wing & groove theatre co." and more if you count the temp jobs i've held.

55. Have you ever been fired or laid off from a job?
hells yeah.

56. What is your favorite drink?
iced coffee, a tasty shiraz, or perhaps a nice syrah, fat tire beer, top shelf vodka and soda, mexican hot chocolate.

57. What is the most expensive bottle of wine that you have in your residence?
i gone done and drank them all.

58. How old were you when you stopped getting IDed for alcohol/tobacco etc...?
i still get IDed and i will thank them every time. "why how flattering, thank you so much."

59. Favorite casino?
blech

60. Are you happier now than you were in high school?
it would be impossible for me not to be

61. Did you ever have Hypercolor shirts?
no but i know people who did...er, might still actually.

62. Do you remember when Michael Jackson was black and attracted to older people?
yes because ew, who wants to date Liz Taylor?

63. What music was in your cd / cassette player when you were 16?
the cure, depeche mode, violent femmes, whatever they played on WDRE-FM.

64. Favorite fancy / upscale restaurant?
Coast sushi, right down the street.

65. How long has it been since you attended a kegger?
i believe i still attend one a year - so long as Ben Morphis is throwing 'em.

66. How many major wars have you lived through?
Well, I missed Viet Nam by about half a year. So...the cold war, the war on drugs, both gulf war actions...um, i could get really into this but i'm not going to because..yeah, no i'm just not.

67. Where were you when you found out about 9-11?
sitting at my desk in the research dept. annex at Harpo Studios trying to eat breakfast.

68. When's the last time you were at a 7-11?
About four hours ago.

69. Were you a planned baby?:
i have never asked.

70. Were you the first?:
and only.

71. Who was present at your birth?:
well, for sure my mom. that's all i know.

72. Were your parents married when you were born?:
yes. not anymore though.

73. What is your birthdate?
12/04/1975

74. Which parent do you get along with best?:
mmmmmmmh my dad i suppose.

75. What do you fight about?:
whaddya got?

76. Do you have step parents?:
no

77. Do you have more than one best friend?
yes.

78.What do you like to do when you are together?
drink, eat good food, make each other laugh

79. Do you share the same interests?:
some.

80. Which friend can you tell anything to?:
the best ones.

81. How high/low is your self esteem?:
historically it's in the toilet.

82. Do you get depressed about things easily?:
some things.

83. Are you an extrovert (outgoing) or an introvert (reserved)?
mostly introverted.

84. Are you happy?:
upon occasion.

85. Do you live life to the fullest?:
i try but it's expensive and takes a lot out of me.

86.Are you comfortable with the way you look?
at this precise moment? yeah, sure.

87. Describe your hair?
brownish-goldish-reddish with which to camouflage the grey.

88. How do you dress?
comfortably.

89. Were you a strange child?:
if i tried to deny it there would be very valid arguments to the contrary.

90. What did you used to love that you no longer do?:
not care about things.

91. Do you have the same friends?:
well, i've still got Tessa.

92. Was there anything in your past that was traumatizing?
plenty.

93. What is your ambition?:
write, publish and then happily make my living repeating the process as often as possible.

94. Are you scared of growing old?:
no. so far, so good.

95. Do you want to get married?:
yes

96. Do you prefer indoors or outdoors?:
all depends. got a porch?

97. Favorite Season:
autumn

98. Do you like walking in the rain?:
depends on the rain

99. Are you a vegetarian?
tried it once. failed when i started dreaming about McDonalds' cheese burgers.

100. What is your favorite food?:
many and varied and sundry and almost all of them.

101. What food makes you want to gag?
mushrooms.

102. What is your favorite dessert?
bread pudding.

103. What is your favorite restaurant?:
is it sad that it's Buca Di Bepo? It's just so easy...and the bottles of wine are so big.

104. Are you a fussy eater?
not really.

105. Are you single or taken?:
very taken.

106. If taken who is the lucky guy/girl?:
alberto. he makes me lucky too.

107. Do you think love is the best feeling in the world?:
ain't nuthin better.

108. Do you believe in love at first sight?:
no.

109. What was one of your greatest experiences?:
cross country trip on the Green Tortoise Bus.

110. What was one of the worst?:
Being left by my friends to find my way home alone from junior high on the second day of school.

111. Have you ever done drugs?:
yes.

112. Have you ever thought you were going to die?:
a couple of times.

Something Like A Smithereens Song

2006-08-27T15:13:00.000-05:00

By request, and a clever one at that Hackimer, here's the virtual tour of our lovely Bucktown apartment. I don't think I actually realized how gentrified the neighborhood was until I was taking pictures on the street today. I stopped for a 50 cent lemonade at a stand run by the neighbor kids. The lemonade looked good; slice of lemon and a couple of fresh mints leaves as garnish. I was equally impressed by the sugar on the rim of the cup until I realized that it was actually Splenda. It made me miss the lemonade stands of the early 80s I gotta tell you.

So, this is the street we live on:

Charleston Street. It's a pleasant street.
Except for the bar across the way. It looks like a nice enough place. We've been in for beers a few times. It is completely overrun by a certain class of people I have come to refer to as "Jazz Jerks." Liking jazz is OK. I have been known to enjoy some jazz. Jazz Jerks though, are the type of folks who turn into insufferable assholes when confronted with philistines who cannot be "down" with their extended xylophone solos.

Screw that. I live in a strictly "no xylophone zone."

This is our building. Standard issue, turn of the century brick. One of the few left in our neighborhood. Slowly but surely all of the other classic buildings are being razed in favor of tacky condos.

Across the street from us live the current bane of our existence. We thought the Jazz Jerks were bad but The Moped Posse across the street is enough to drive you to drink. Their little club rolls out the mopeds a few times a week. They rev the engines in the driveway for about 20 minutes at a time and then roar off. Usually they circle around a few times before taking off to where ever mopeds are acceptable means of confirming coolness.
Below is The Orange Offender. I swear, I am going to do something horrible to that machine one of these days.

I'll spare you the walk up four flights of stairs and just bring you right in the front door:

It's a modest kitchen but, it gets good light. And there's room for the table. I like the openness of the space. I would like to toss the noisy closet full of Goodman model central cooling air conditioner out the F'ing window at that moped. But I shouldn't complain because, no matter how disruptive the noise is to daily life it mostly gets the job done.

Hiding on the other side of the front door is the bathroom.
And hidden it shall remain.

You enter onward into the living room. It's got, um...sofas. And bookshelves. Also a table...Well, two actually. It's the living room.

Oh, and also - it all totally matches the cat perfectly:

We, natch, have an entertainment center set up in the living room. You know, with entertaining stuff? Yeah, we've got all that.

And, as you can tell in this picture, there's a bedroom over that way.
It's Beatrice's bedroom. But, she leases it out to guest at very reasonable rates.
We've come to face the reality that everything we own is covered in a fine sheen of cat hair. So, take your allergy meds before you come over.

But wait, there's more!
This way to the master bedroom, if you please.

That on the floor is our poor, abandoned mini-Weber grill. It's hard to grill out a window I tells ya.
Oh, and this here is General Robert E. Lee. Apparently it was some sort of package deal. Bird wouldn't move without him. So now he watches everything we do.

The entire second floor is one, big room. The only drawback is that the walls are slanty. You know, the kind of space you think sounds really cool when you're reading about the attic-bound heroine in the V.C. Andrews' book. But, in reality means limited vertical space. Not so bad for me. Terrible for the tall boyfriend.

Up here is also where all of the creative stuff happens. Bird has his music and I have my desk nook. I have a nice view of open sky above my computer. It's only distracting when The Air & Water Show is in town. The sky fills with all sorts of airplanes. Bird likes to sit and watch out the window. On a clear day, you can see all the way into downtown.

I guess the last thing left to show you is the closet upstairs. It's very roomy. Yep, lots of room for clothes and shoes and storage and...well, you get the picture.

That's about it folks. You want to see more, you have to come for a visit.
Oh, who am I kidding. Here: I'm a sucker for photos.

'Cause it's FrrriiiiiiDAY!"

2006-08-25T16:51:00.000-05:00

Yeah, that's right.
I survived the week.
Tonight my The Boyfriend and I dine fancily to celebrate three years of watching Law & Order together.
I promise posts over the weekend...probably Sunday.

Stay tuned for a virtual tour of our humble (yet duplex) apartment.
And the answers to burning questions! Not questions that burn...just questions that are.

Peace ya'll.
Go find something to do with yourselves.

Insert Evil Maniacal Laughter Here

2006-08-23T11:39:00.000-05:00

My evil plan is finally working!

Hey, Tom Cruise, I've got $2.63 in my pocket. Bet ya wanna sell pictures of that fake-baby now!

Humpday Blues

2006-08-16T17:30:00.000-05:00

Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.
Snarl.Snarl.Snarl.Snarl. ROAR.
Grumble.Grumble.Grumble.Grumble.Grumble.Grumble.Grumble.Grumble.
GNAP. GNAP. GNAP.
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa*gasp*aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate.
Sigh.
Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.
Weep. Weep. Weep.Weep.Weep.Weep.Weep.Weep.Weep.
Bachomp. Bachomp. Bachewy-chomp.
I fart in your general direction.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.Hate.
Hate.Hate.Hate.
GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME, YOU DAMN, DIRTY APES!!!!

end transmition.

Awwwwww

2006-08-11T13:06:00.000-05:00

That's all. Nothing else for now.

Who Am I Kidding?

2006-08-07T21:22:00.000-05:00

There's just no getting any writing done while Anthony Bourdain is on the television.

Speaking of Headaches...

2006-08-02T17:34:00.000-05:00

I got nothing. Except to insist that you watch this spectacularness all the way through.
God Bless Steve Guttenberg.

**NOTE: This used to contain a link to the YouTube videocast of the title credits sequence to the 1980 movie "Can't Stop The Music," a pseudo-bio-pic about The Village People.

Alas, apparently YouTube didn't actually have the rights to show the clip and have, as such, removed it. So the video link doesn't work.
But, if you are interested in learning more about this film please check THIS out.

I Have A Headache This Big...

2006-08-02T14:49:00.000-05:00

And it's got Heat Wave written all over it.
Damn, it's hot.
It's check-on-the-elderly hot.
I don't think I know any elderly...Hell, I don't even know my neighbors (except for the bar across the street...Hi!)

Would someone please turn off the sun? Do a rain dance, cause some sort of eclipse...anything.

I CANNOT STAND THE CONSTANT SWEATING ANYMORE!

Just another reason while my The Boyfriend and I will never be able to live in New Orleans year round.
Also why I am going home tonight and taking a bath in swirly-fun popsicles.

Blech.

I believe this is a fair representation of the evil, evil sun that continues to pound it's death rays down on us. Haaaaaate.

What Else Should I Be?

2006-07-05T19:28:00.000-05:00

When I was growing up I was taught that it was better to swallow everyone else's hurtful bullshit than to let them know just how much it affected me. I've lived most of my life like that. Hiding things from people because, I was told, if someone knew how upset I was they might not want to be my friend anymore. To that end I have taken the high road when: ditched on my first day of Junior High by the kids I thought were walking home with me; I was rumored to be a lesbian because I was quiet and awkward in High School; when I was made fun of for being fat; when cousins were invited by other relatives on luxurious vacation getaways and I was left at home; My best friend stole my boyfriend...both in college and high school; and, um that unfortunate, five year ~~incident~~ relationship that shall never be spoken of again.
Now, in my adult life, I get told "don't take things so personally." Which, you know, basically amounts to the same thing as far as I am concerned.
I have spent my life picking my way along the proverbial high road. It is slow going. Sometimes it is hard to determine which, of the many roads, is the "high" one. And it's a tiring process, maintaining a steadfast course along this road.

Well, I've gone and abandoned the path...at least for now.
Because really, there is only so much of other people's hangups I can take. I have my own special baggage, thank you very much. I don't really need other people piling theirs ontop. What do I look like? A goddamn bellhop?

There's an issue. Apparently a serious issue. So serious in fact that it was couched in nonsensical drama until today. Sneaky issue, trying to hide behind the banal.

I have been asked to "make things right." Which, I interpret as having been asked to apologize to offended parties. Well, one offended party. THIS offended party probably isn't going to get an apology any time soon. But, I have come to realize that such is life. My life. I am a rude, offensive, unethical creature. And you had best lock up all of your thoughts, good books and sons lest I come and snatch them away in the middle of the night. I'm like Lilith that way.

So I apologize.
I am sorry.
I am sorry you feel like I underreacted to your overreacting.
I am sorry you are so insecure in your writing talent that you feel like you need to clutch every word and phrase you put on paper.
I am sorry that you've never heard this particular euphemism before.As an english major I know it has been bandied about like a shuttlecock.
I am sorry you feel like a phrase that was moth-eaten before you ever put it down on paper is something clever enough that you need to claim it as your own.
I am sorry that you felt the need to create an issue of this that has come between good friends.
I am sorry that there obviously isn't enough going on in your life that your decidedly clever brain feels like it needs to harp on this.
I am sorry that it has gotten to this point.

Mmmmh, yeah. I think those are all of the things I am currently sorry for.
Wait, let me think on that for a moment....

Yep, we're done here.

"...Choking on the ashes of her enemies."

New Game! New Game!...And A Little Metacommentary

2006-06-26T14:53:00.000-05:00

So, some lady-friends and I have started a brand spankin new blog.
WOOHOOO
Capitalizing on all things celebrelated we now bring to you: http://whereisbabysuri.blogspot.com/

So, go there. Post comments. Make us feel witty. Our egos need the boost occasionally.

I would also like to take this opportunity to remind all of the bloggers I know to keep blogging.
It's good for you.
Like milk, but without the hormones.

And if you don't have a blog, you should totally start one. What? It's not like the internet is going to run out of rooom or something.

That's my public service announcement.

And now back to the daily bump and grind of doing whatever possible to avoid working here in my cube in the sky.

Ciao!

Oh - also, I am totally taking Italian lessons. So, you know, in about a year I should be pretty good and if anyone wants to ...say...take me to Italy I will TOTALLY be a great translator and promise not to pick your pocket or steal your purse.

Note To A Guilty Pleasure

2006-05-19T16:46:00.000-05:00

Dear Brittney,

Leave the douchebag already. The kid is cute. Find him a new daddy with a stroller.
M'Kay?

xoxooxoox

Stream of Blah BlahTotal Bullshit

2006-05-16T20:29:00.000-05:00

I have been inundating myself with information lately. Most of it is garbage.
By most I mean, like, 98% of it.

Hi. My name is Jen.
I'm addicted to celebrity gossip.

It's true. I just cannot help myself.

I know more than any self-respecting human should about this whole TomKat/Suri/Bride of Scientology business. I have studied pictures of Bradgelina looking for even a remote crack in that facade of happy, golden couple. I even drove out to the house Vaughinston bought in the burbs.

I'm kidding about that last one. I don't have a driver's license.

My immense wealth of absolutely useless knowledge is not limited to American celebrities. Oh no. Do you know Jordan? No, not THAT Jordan. The famous Jordan. The British one, with the ginormous boobs? THAT Jordan. No? You don't know her? Well, neither do I. But I do know she has a huge rack. She is also married to some ridiculous Ken doll of a guy and one of her kids is...um...Yeah I'm not sure but the Brits sure do love Harvey.

Can someone tell me why?
NO! Don't tell me.
I don't want to know.
I don't need to know.
Really. I am better off not knowing. Maybe there is a chance I can fit something useful into my brain if I don't learn that fact.

I had a friend in Junior High with a theory that every time you sneeze you make room in your brain to learn something new. It seems really stupid but man, I sort of wish I could do that. I would force a couple of sneezes before a party and then cram in a pile of interesting, useful knowledge. Politics would be handy these days. Like a second language, political discourse requires homework and careful study. Because if you lose track of that conversation it is totally like taking those verbal exams where you're sweating in a chair across from the teacher. And she's speaking in French, REALLY FAST, and all you can do is quietly conjugate irregular verbs under your breath and pray (Notre Pere qui es au cieux/Que ton nom soit sancitfie)

And the thing about political discussions is that they aren't really discussions. Most of the time it seems as though it's each person, taking turns, trying to convince the other (or others) that their opinion is right. Or The Right.

Not THE Right...just right...as in correct...but I was trying to put some reverential importance on it...with the capital...No? OK then, moving on.

Back to my problem.

It's not really my fault. I am not solely responsible for the paparazzi. Or for any of the ridiculous things celebrities are caught doing. (Kiefer, I am looking at you dude.) It is everywhere though. Everywhere. There are entire television channels dedicated to celebrity news. Why are celebrities news? Why do I care so much? And it's not so much that I care what they do or who they do it with or what they are wearing when they do it. The fact is I don't care. I don't care so much I have to go look at pictures of them to prove to them I don't care.

See, that doesn't even make sense. I am sick. It's an illness. I'm trying to rationalize my obsession with celebrity gossip. This is what it has come to. Gah.

Of course, if I were chipping out a meger living putting together a hot, celebrity blog or some dishy website I'd be very proud of myself right now. Alas, just a couple of steps behind the trend and the technology. I'm not jumping on that bandwagon now. The market, she is saturated. Unless I come up with something really cool, like this, I think it might be too late.

Not that I am giving up the whole Dream. I've still got The Dream. It's in here. I am just constantly needing to revise The Dream. Mackerel is now totally out of The Dream. Which is a shame.

No. Not really.

25 Reasons Not To Be Thin

2006-05-04T20:37:00.000-05:00

1. Fried dough, in all of its many guises.

2. Body Thetans.

3. Maintaining a constant level of moral outrage takes a lot of fuel.

4. They are closing the gym in the basement of my office building and expect me to walk EIGHT WHOLE BLOCKS to the closest Ballys.

5. Comfy new queen sized mattress.

6. Fear of death-by-car prevents bike riding or having moving parts strapped to my feet.

7. Scientific fascination with the chemical properties of the chocolate-peanut-butter compound.

8. Bacon.

9. Pizza.

10. Bacon on pizza.

11. Deep appreciation for the art of Peter Paul Rubens.

12. The only available lunch option that costs less than $5 is McDonalds.

13. No matter how hard I try, a piece of fruit just isn't dessert.

14. Sometimes I just can't get the Popeye's Chicken jingle out of my head.

15. My chef...er, boyfriend...favors a down home southern style of cooking. Who am I to argue?

16. I'm sold on the platform of "cheese makes everything better."

17. Weakness for pancakes.

18. 50 Cent wasn't around to care about childhood obesity when I was growing up.

19. Exercise at home proves difficult with only very heavy books to use as weights.

20. My clothes would look really silly on a skinny person.

21. Muffin tops are always the best part.

22. There's still 3/4 of a cheesecake in my freezer. Someone has to eat it.

23. Rolling the exercise ball at the cats is way more fun than doing sit-ups on it.

24. Fear of bird flu prevents me from eating light.

25. I'm afraid that if I don't do what he says the Burger King will show up in my bedroom.

We've Come A Long Way From Boxed Wine, Baby.

2006-04-30T13:33:00.000-05:00

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone but myself that after my year of weddings (which you could really stretch out into a five year span of time that pretty much everyone I know has become engaged, wed or with child.) I have found myself a bit awash in memories as of late.

The other night I had a dream that I was back in High School, except it looked like a summer camp I attended when I was in grade school. And the student population was comprised mostly of people I went to college with. The only real memory I have of this dream (aside from the pack of house cats that chased us as if through and episode of Scooby-Doo) is of my asking Seth "Does this mean we have to go to college again too?"
To which he answered with a sly grin and a ruffle of my hair - as he was so wont to do during college (what? really? no.) And say "Well, yes. But only for a little while Jen."
In my dream I was comforted by this. That Seth would be there too. That we would all be there again.

And before you start with your "Aw, Jen's missing her glory days." Let me assure you that there was very little actual glory involved in those days. Mostly, it seems in retrospect, illusions of glory. We all thought things were VERY important back then. "Back then," by which I mean you know, before adulthood. BA. Bah. Who am I trying to kid? I'm still not really an adult but compared to...say 10 years ago...I am a hell of a lot closer these days.

Remember how important every party was? How imperative it seemed that so-and-so thought you were cute? Or handsome? Or at least talked to you once, just once? Remember all of those nights, trying to figure out where to go with no place to go? The seawall, the park, the streets of lower Manhattan? Into the mountains, out into the fields, gulping down pixie stix sludge and running in circles for a couple of hours?

Over the last few years, I have seen many of the people I shared these adolescent pleasures with achive some really adult milestones. Do people "achive" milestones or do they just stumble upon them in the road? I don't know. Probably about 50/50 depending on the size of it, I suppose.
Attending weddings, watching babies be bathed, going out for drinks in a fancy, hotel bar: sharing these relatively brief events with people really makes me nostaligic. Not so much for an age, or a period of time. It makes me nostalgic for the presence of these people in my life. I wonder, what would it be like to be an adult with these people?
Now that we have our own incomes, no longer dependent on an allowance or a curfew or worried about getting kicked out of places we really shouldn't be, what would it be like to spend time with these people?

In my day to day life, with the adults I know...And, uh yeah I know it seems like I am giving us A LOT of credit using that word, guys. But you know, chronologically speaking, we certainly fit the criteria.

Anyway, as I was saying: In my day to day nothing terribly exciting happens. There are occasional dinners out, shows to see, movies to watch, sporting events to rally around. We, for sure, throw a vicious party every now and again. I am not under any expectation that anyone I originally took "The Purity Test" with is doing anything they consider terribly exciting. It's just the change of dynamic I am really interested in.

Now that we are no longer preoccupied by fake IDs, adolescent dramas and insecurities, how much has spending time with these people changed? How much have our dramas and insecurities changed? Me? Mine just don't seem so dramatic anymore. Thank god. Of course, I'm not married. Nor do I have any children. My big drama last month was the cat maybe being sick. And how were we going to take her to the vet and still afford to buy the queen sized bed we had been planning for.
See? Not even NEARLY as dramatic.

It figures now that I feel better equipped to deal with the sort of drama and insecurities there were in high school and college I just don't have them anymore. I have different ones. Ones I maybe never even dreamed of "back then." So I wonder how we would cope.

Remember how important it was that everyone liked your girlfriend? No, I mean YOUR girlfriend. Do you remember how bitchy and obnoxious it was possible for us to be when we didn't like her? Yeah, it's a little different now. We're a lot more subtle with that shit.

Most of the time.

Remember how important it was that every party we threw was The social event of the year? Or how upsetting it was not to be invited to The social event of the year? These days, if there's a grill and a beer it's a good party. No one passes out in the bushes anymore. No one is caught making out with someone else's boyfriend. No one even gets handcuffed to armchairs anymore. Are we still having a good time? Hells yeah! Does it take me two days to fully recover from a good party now? Hells yeah! Do I still know how to party like a rock star? You better believe it. Do I still dance like one? Not on these knees I don't.

A better question: Would I still enjoy spending four hours in a Jones Beach parking lot without tickets to the show, just enjoying the ambiance of the crowd? No, not so much. But we can actually afford tickets to the show now! Even if our parents don't like the group! It's an awesome power.

That's it I think. Adulthood, it IS an awesome power. Making our adulthoods everything we ever dreamed they would be, I don't know if that's possible. I guess that's what the new drama is. Our ideas of pleasure and happiness are more complex now. More sophisticated, if you will. After all of those years feeling and thinking we were adult and sophisticated, I wonder what it would be like to actually be adult and sophisticated with those people.

As long as, you know, it doesn't interfer with The Simpsons.

The Most Powerful Couch Jumper Of All Time

2006-03-17T12:56:00.000-06:00

So, apparently Tom Cruise, voted Craziest Man Alive 2005 by...um...me, has welded his star power for the forces of evil once again.

Not content with merely maligning women suffering from post-partum depression, haranguing morning show reporters or keeping a virtual child bride (FREE KATIE!) under lock and key, he has resorted to corporate blackmail to get his way.

Still pouting over the "Trapped In The Closet" episode of South Park that orginially aired back in November he told Comedy Central's parent corporation, Viacom, that he would boycott their press junkets for Mission Impossible 3 unless they prevented the episode from airing again.

If I were Matt and Trey this might make me write MORE episodes lampooning this moron.

Alas, I am neither Matt, nor Trey.

But I have an idea.

I think we should boycott MI3. All of us.

First of all, it can't be THAT good. MI2 was pushing it, if you ask me.

Second of all, the entire world seems to bow down at the feet of this little man. How did this happen? You do realize where this is leading right?

Someday, probably about a week before the offspring gets sprung The Church of Scientology (God, I cannot believe I just capitalized those words) is going to announce the breathtaking discovery that Tom Cruise is indeed the long awaited reincarnation of L. Ron Hubbard.

The baby will be born - we already know from the gossip rags they are expecting a son - and will have some pretentious name thrust upon his wee tiny babiness.

Flash forward 17 years when BabyXCruise, after years of home schooling and vacations on Scientology ranches working out his Thetans, finally meets up with his archnemesis... Kal-El Coppola Cage.

In a meeting more epic than when X-Factor and X-Men battled each other, it will be up to Kal-El Coppola Cage to defeat this meglomaniacal social demi-god. Bearing his mother's pert nose and his father's ego BabyXCruise MIGHT put up a tough fight.

I'm guessing he's going to have a glass jaw or a heel made of spun sugar.

Kal-El Coppola Cage - our future rests in your hands. You will be our last, and best, defense against the impending tyranny of Scientology and Couchjumper Cruise.

So, yeah - Boycott MI3 people. The fight begins here. And now... Or, well May 5th when the movie is released.

Save yourselves. Save our celebrities. Save our celebrity lampooners. Save our world.

Say NO to MI3.

She II - Morning

2006-02-22T20:48:00.000-06:00

She watched the remains of her coffee meander down the drain, staining the steel the color of sunset. Unemployment was beginning to weigh heavy on her soul. As she rinsed the mug and wiped it clean it occured to her that after this - breakfast, cup of coffee, crossword puzzle - there was nothing to do.
She had no money. So, despite the beauty of the late summer day, there was nowhere for her to go.
She had no job. No where to rush off to and no real desire to spend another day walking The Loop from one employment agency to another. Yesterday she had worn herself out bringing her resume around. Lake and Michigan, Jackson and LaSalle, Riverside Plaza. In every elevator she had reapplied powder to mask the sweat from the walk. In every waiting room she drank whatever free beverage they were offering and snacked on whatever candy was in the dish at the reception desk. If she had time, she made a visit to the bathroom and blotted face, underarms and neck with a damp towel before the interview.
It was hot again today. There was no air conditioner in the window. Instead she opened it wide and sat on the sill. It was only 10am. When you have no job and no money there's no reason to stay up late. You wind up waking up as if you were going to work anyway. Now the whole of this long, hot day stretched out before her.
Even if she could go somewhere, had money to take the bus to the beach, had $3 to spend two hours in the second run movie theater's air conditioning or cash enough to do a couple of loads of laundry it would mean leaving the phone. She wanted to be there in case something panned out from the day before. It was an off chance. She had already spent too many days tethered to the phone.
If she had any money she would get herself a cell phone like every other person in the world. If she could just find a job she would ditch the land line and shell out for a nice, simple cell phone plan.
She could spend the whole day sitting in the window, thinking about mightbes and maybes. She could write up on the walls the list of items she needed to get her life in order properly. There was no real point though. She should focus her energy on getting a job.
There was that one interview yesterday. The scary woman with the portraits of herself on various motorcycles on the walls. She had been overwhelmingly serious about finding a position for her. What was her name again?
She pulled her messanger bag up from the floor and into her lap and extracted one of the business cards from the many she had collected over the last month.

Lucille Waters - The Waters Employment Group

Maybe Lucille would come through for her. Somehow, when Lucille had looked into her eyes across the desk, she had believed her when she said "We're going to find a job for you."

She

2006-01-29T15:51:00.000-06:00

She walks through life with music in her head.
Emitting random squeaks and whistles on her inner up beats.
Her soundtrack is boundless, she makes her own music when left to her own devices.

And even songs she has never heard before are comprised of familiar rhythms and harmonies.

She tends towards easy distraction - both cause and affect - and will find herself afloat in the middle of a conversation without an oar.

She has never been good at summarizing. The big picture has never really been her scene. Minutiae makes her more comfortable.

Life is like a syllogism if you let it.

if good music is meant to be danced to. and this song makes her want to dance. it must be good.
even if only for dancing.

She will not dance to Cher.
Well, maybe just a little. But only in her chair. Or, with just one foot.

And she only sings along to Billy Joel with irony in her throat.

Everything else is pretty fair game.
She is like her mother in this respect. She knows she will grow up to embarrass her own children on road trips with the radio on.

But what is a life on the road without songs to sing along to? The open road is made for music.
Her penchant for speeding has a direct correlation to the practice of this theory.

Notes From Taos, A Post Script

2006-01-22T12:13:00.000-06:00

Christmas Week 2005. Taos, NM

Belated Birthday Poem For A Fearless Wanderer

I would take you to New Mexico,
where we would walk your dogs along the edge of Volcanitos!
Race breathless up El Pilar to view infinite Earth
from sacred earth.

Old Northern New Mexico

A wilderness of trailer homes, rusted trucks and busted fences.
Barbed into the ashram, ostriches strut on languid legs.
They seem out of place here among these lazy, sprawling dogs.
Good wine may not grow in this desert. But casinos do. And roadside shrines.
And graveyards.
Elaborate crusifixes scattered across the landscape.

One State Over

I tried to call you from the top of Pilar.
But my phone had No Service.
And, although I can see clear to Colorado from here,
I cannot phone to tell you.

Moderate To First Marker

Las Minas Trail.
The first snow we've seen.
Following deer tracks, and signs of other creatures
... further east into the hills.
There should be a mine on Las Minas Trail

Mica. Micaceous. Metamorphic. aluminum silicate Mineral.

I dawdle behind Bird's black leather jacket
collecting rocks and other, Shiny, objects in the pockets of my ratty blue jeans.

Magpies
Damn Birds!
Spend their mornings flitting from woodshed to river
while I run myself ragged.
Chase them from tree to tree with my camera.
Just one shot - blue white wings extended in flight -
before you disappear into the brush.
"They are shy," She tells me.
"They don't like their pictures taken," he agrees.
They nod wisely from the front seat of the car.
Happy with just a glimpse of magpies.

He is

A tall man in a Hobbiton world.
He is a punkrocker.

He is
In hippie hell.

He lumbers through this casita.
He amuses himself at the wood burning stove
in lieu of TV.

I consume books like black grapes
savoring sweet silence.
And then I miss TV too.