Sweetness is watching the debate in a room full of screaming drunken liberals. I had one watery 7&7 and left O’Gara’s feeling fuzzy and democratically drunk. Though the debates were tame in comparison to the nasty-bratty Bush/Gore cat fights, I still managed to enjoy them. This is the first instance I’ve actually been impressed with Kerry (I was voting for him, anyway, of course), and now I feel the teensiest bit of hope.
I decided tonight, however, that guys with crewcuts and blue dress shirts and khakis look like Republicans. We may need to institute a liberal dress code.
Going through my archives has been a little mind-fuck, considering I wrote a great deal about people I don’t speak much to anymore. I forgot how much I loved my friends in college, how I thought they were the most amazing people in the world and how I just knew we’d grow into hip old people and laugh about the time Dane was handcuffed naked to the living room table (true story).
I even forgot how much I genuinely liked Erik and how much stupid fun we had, and how we essentially grew up together. We began dating when we were 18 and 19, respectively, and we were both flailing and clueless about everything. We didn’t know how to properly order a drink at a bar. On a trip to Canada for Erik’s 19th birthday, we stuttered like morons when asked what we wanted and finally ordered all the drinks we could remember from these sex-drink shot glasses Abbey stored in the cupboard. We wore t-shirts to fancy restaurants and balked at beer and wine.
The last time I saw him, as I’ve written before, I was wearing dress pants and my hair was swept up and braided. I was clutching a glass of white wine. He asked to start a tab with the bartender and orded a foreign beer I’d never heard of. I wrote him an e-mail after that night, vexing his tab-requesting act, among other things. He wrote back and said, “What? What’s wrong with starting a tab?” And I didn’t know how to explain to him that, of course, nothing was wrong with starting a tab, it was a perfectly intelligent thing to do in a restaurant, very efficient, in fact. But it signaled something I wasn’t ready for, some finesse I hadn’t mastered myself. We were supposed to be bumbling neophytes forever, but instead, he was starting a tab and I was choosing between wine with a trained eye.
So, I feel strange with these archives. This is common, I’m sure, to read back five years and not recognize the person writing. But as awkward and clueless as I feel now, I’m much more distilled and graceful than I was at 18. Shouldn’t this be comforting? Shouldn’t I be happy I’m growing as a person or some other psychological crap? Instead, I’m wishing I didn’t know things about financing and benefits and Chardonnay. I wish I could go back to Canada and feel like a stranger in a bar who doesn’t know the difference between Seagram’s and Wild Turkey. I’m to the age where ignorance is no longer excused as youth, and I’m waffling.
It was absolutely freezing this morning, and I’m one of those people who can’t sleep in a room with a closed window (fear of strangulation by diminished air flow, but no fear of scary murderer crawling in, apparently), so waking up this morning was painful. I’ll enjoy this more when it actually feels like Fall, but the trees around these parts are still green, if not a bit yellow.
And today I learned that I’m judging people too quickly and harshly. Tall, lanky boy with the articulation problem who strolls in ten minutes late every day? First thought: some teenage PSEO knob, who writes about his black heart being torn to slivers in the dark bloody night of hell. Reality: bumbling, shy sweetheart who actually writes quite well, and fidgets with his fingernails. Lately, since I’ve decided to become a Historian as opposed to an actual Participator, I find myself pigeon-holing people into caricatures I can easily summarize and generalize. But! People are complicated! Right? Right.
Today I am wearing a black shirt that’s covered in cat hair and pants with a superglue stain on the knee. I slept on wet hair, so I’m looking lumpy and bristly. But I feel good, a little jittery, like I’m getting things done and working towards a goal, which, I suppose, is good for something related to my spirit.
There’s nothing like getting up at 7 AM to throw candy at cranky freshman Comp kids’ heads.
I’m slowly plugging in my old archives and giving them new titles. I know this is wholly uninteresting news, but it’s tedious work, not to mention a little embarassing. I think I might have been a moron in 2000 and possibly 2001. I think I might just have to claim moronhood for all of the ’00s, if I continue to go at this rate.
Tonight, I saw Margaret Cho and Ani DiFranco on their Vote Dammit tour. Margaret was hilarious and reminded me a little too much of my high school boyfriend. Ani, as usual, made me melt into a puddle of fandom tears. We were in the front row, next to the speakers, so the bass was invading my various organs and ear hairs with violent force, and I cried a little and smeared my mascara all over Chris’s hands, and I felt totally inspired, and then I came home and ate two chalupas and now I feel overheated and worried about getting up at 7 in the morning. I always lose what I’m going to say in transit.
I come back from an Ani show feeling displaced within my whole life. I get very very dramatic when I walk into the lobby after her performance and I think: Okay. Leaving this building is going to be a shock. I already feel like a stunned fish from the loud bass, but now I’m going to have to return to my little life full of migraines and pimples and stained pants, and I have to attempt to find beauty somewhere. Because, you see, during the show, my thoughts are always: what am I doing! I’m going to quit school and dye my hair the blue I’ve always wanted and wear long dresses and tattoos and fight fight fight for everything I believe in. And then. The car door opens, and I’m back to feeling a little achy in the shoulders and worrying about a class. So it goes.
At the show, I thought I saw a million people I knew, but they were all just close resemblances. So it also goes.
Oops. Everything got a little wonky on here over night. I’ll work on fixing that. This mostly has to do with Minh and I communicating primarily over IM, with most of those conversations sounding like:
Minh: WTF did you just do?
Me: Uh, that didn’t work?
Well. Hi. Here’s my new website, though it’s far from finished. (Only a few of the links work at the moment, so don’t strain your wrists clicking.) I know it’s bad form to launch a site with only the bare minimum completed, but I was way too eager to get it up (!) and sick of looking at my old design. So! Here’s me, in green. I know this particular design is circa 2001, but my old design was circa 1997 and the way I updated it was circa 100 B.C., so this is much nicer.
Credits!
Minh Vu put all of this together for me. I gave him a very vague idea of what I wanted (“um, something…boxy? with colors?”) and he worked his Vu magic and turned it into this. I’ve been sending him about eleven e-mails a day, many of which include the phrase, “Shit! I broke it!” and then five minutes later, “Oh, never mind. I didn’t. Now where do I change the colors again?” He’s given me degree-by-e-mail lessons in CSS and PHP, and I’m embarassed I haven’t taken the time to learn all of this earlier. Because! CSS is easier! Wordpress is much easier to update with as opposed to plugging everything into NETSCAPE COMPOSER 4.7. No shit. So, thank you, Minh. Your work is not done.
Also, Chris created the banner. I told him: “Um, I want something geometrical,” and then he kicked me out of his bedroom for an hour and made this. In case you were wondering, it’s constructed from a picture of me and the swirly stuff is my hair. My hair is not green, though in an unfortunate dying incident my freshman year of college, it was green for about, oh, six months. Anyway, way to go, Chris for making the banner I’ve always wanted.
Kip gets a mention, too, because I’ve been IMing him 834y83 times a day with, “I JUST LEARNED HOW TO CENTER THINGS IN CSS” and “FUCK! WHY ARE MY ARCHIVES BROKEN!” and, well, reading all-capital letters all day takes patience.
So, real content will return soon. All my old stuff is currently here, so if you really need to look at pictures of drunken college kids and can’t wait any longer, there’s your place. I’m going to manually insert all the archives into Wordpress, so, yeah. That’s going to take a couple hundred years. But there rest of the pages should be up within the next few weeks.
Also, I’ll keep comments on in this post so you can give me feedback, if you wish.
Word. (Press. Har. Har. Oh, stop.)
Abbey, Andrew and Matt before the show last Sunday.
Hi. My redesign is almost done, so soon I’ll feel less displaced within the internet.
Last night, I brought overcooked lasagna to a party and came home with a CD player and fifteen cassette tapes, the highlights of which include Paula Abdul and an Aerosmith single. And now I have to write things for classes, things that should have plots and don’t quite yet, and it’s way too humid and bright to write effectively, but there’s where the new Death Cab for Cutie CD comes in.
Last week at the Sunny Wicked show, I sat at a bar top before show time with my headphones on, reading and listening to Tiny Vessels, while the house music blared and vibrated my hands. Some scrawny blonde guy asked, “How can you concentrate?” and I gave him my standard answer for almost every question a stranger asks me, which is, “A band practices in my basement.” Later on, the same guy offered to buy me a drink and then revealed he was actually only 17 years old, and could I buy him a drink instead?
During the night, the bartender with the heart tattoo and I silently eye-flirted, and at the end of the show, he tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “Did you forget your Jack and Coke?”, referring to the untouched drink sitting on my table, the drink I may or may not have bought for an underage boy. But I thought he said, “Did you forget your jacket and coat?” and I looked around and said, “Oh no, it’s too warm for that.”
On Sundays, you can find me in the new Dunn Bros. across the street, typing on a Mac that isn’t mine and silently berating myself: “Jack and Coke, you jerk. Jack and Coke.
It’s another rock show day, which, by now, should be nothing, but it’s something because I have to make preparations. These preparations include: a mental pep-talk, something along the lines of, “Hi. There will be sweaty crowds and loud noises, and you will love it. Okay? You will like it. You’ll have two drinks, and you will be transformed into a crowd-and-noise loving socialite, and you will not start to get a little dizzy and your stomach will not flip and you will not have a sudden need to run into the street and find a corner to crouch in until the night is over. Got it? Okay.”
Less abrasive are the aesthetic preparations, which are usually fun since I don’t dress up often, but today they seem tedious. My face just doesn’t transform anymore. The black eyeliner I used to covet looks messy instead of Joan Jett, and my freckles are too dark from the summer. I’m recently not a fan of how I look in anything, a self-consciousness that includes: a short waist, tangly, limp hair and an undefined jaw line. Back when Chris and I first started dating, I secretly loved being the lead singer’s girlfriend, some faceless redheaded chick in the crowd who knew all the words. This was because Chris was still a rock star, and not the cute pussycat of a boy who craves chocolate when he’s sad and gets excited when he passes a level in Baldur’s Gate. When his band practiced in the basement of my Duluth house, I used to stand by the stairs, barely breathing, just to hear him singing and while seeing on him stage still flips the heart a little, it’s not the same because I’ve seen it a hundred times and stood in a hundred bars with my sloppy eyeliner.
So the rock show night has lost a little of its luster, but there’s still a little thrill in the routine. The load-up into the car, the inevitable panic when we get lost and the street-circling in an effort to find the back alley to the club. An early entrance into a dark bar is also a disorienting action; suddenly there’s sun and a gritty parking lot, and now there’s the smell of old beer and burned-out light gels. The place is empty, then, and the stage crew is in black, laughing and smoking by the light board. The band sets up and I crane my neck to find someone to go to the bar with me because though the place is open and crowdless, I start to feel the beginning of a throat tickle and I need a drink now, just something to remind me that life is fun and rock shows are cool. The first drink always goes down roughly because I insist on whiskey when I don’t really like it. But whiskey is part of the routine and the taste is familiar and has become a comfort in these places.
The house music starts and I sit at a table with the band, chewing on my straw and taking pictures. I feel like I have to keep up some sort of image, some image of suaveness and bubbliness, something I may or may not be feeling. People trail in and my “hellos” get louder and maybe I start to hug people and smile at strangers.
The band plays eventually and usually I sit riveted on the stage because, really, I love their music and I love these musicians and the things I know about them and the history I have with each of them. They are all pussycats, really, but on stage, hot under the lights, they’re something else, something thrillingly distant and foreign. The last song is usually my favorite and I suppress the need to shush the chatter in the bar.
Afterwards, I wait until the crowd clears and I hug the lead singer and though his hair is wet and his shirt smells like smoke, there’s the essence of what I know buried there, and I’m sleepy. We spend time in the back, sliding amps off stage and laughing, and then it’s always back into the alley. The dark outside is suddenly the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen just because it’s natural and translucent and smells so clean. I feel like a two-dimensional figure released from a painting, feeling real air and real brick wall for the first time. The car ride home is usually my favorite part. I’m coming down from drunk, but still buzzed enough to put my fingers on the window and squish stars.
At the end of the night, I forget that I thought I was over all this, that I wasn’t impressed anymore. I always think: just don’t wear the eyeliner and the tight shirt. But then Andrew yells, “Are you ready?” and I rush to my closet, saying: wait, wait. Two more seconds.
Hi. I’ll be switching servers over the next few days, and I think everything will go smoothly, but if this isn’t the case, don’t cry. Everything should be resolved within the week.
Last night was: another small town fair, full of too-sweet Amaretto Sours and fried mushrooms. Chris’s Dad leaned over to me in the bar and said, “That waitress, you know, her husband bought a motorcycle from from my friend who died of cancer. And then her husband had a heart attack three years later.” And then, of course, I couldn’t stop staring at her.
The band playing was a bluesy ’50s revival, and when we moved to watch from a dark bike path above the fest, my body visibly slouched a little. I think I’m physically allergic to color and crowds, unless I’m very very drunk and Amaretto Sours do not get an Irish girl very very drunk. This path would’ve been a giddy make-out haven in high school, the type of place you sneak off to during the party. I felt like a camera panning over the action, the type of shot you see in the beginning of the movie before it zooms in and focuses on Our Hero. I can’t remember the last time I’ve wanted to be Our Hero. And I can’t remember the last time I’ve experienced something without comparing it to a movie or a book.
On our way out, we stopped to watch two little girls in plaid pajama pants dancing on stage with the band. I whispered to Chris, “Well, it looks like they’ll be prepared for their future Sister Stripper Act,” and then felt bad. Their dances were choreographed, probably leftovers from their jazz classes. I wondered if this would be the type of thing they would remember and write about years later, the time they wore their pajamas to the fair and danced on stage with a blues band. Or maybe they do this everywhere they go; maybe they’re seasoned performers and this is just another night for them, no big deal.
I remember being on a boat in Rome when I was six. I was wearing a red velvet dress that matched my Cabbage Patch doll and a swing band was playing in the ballroom. After their first set, the bandleader came over to my parents and asked them if I would like to sit on stage with the band for the next song. He thought I looked like a little actress with my red hair and dress. I was too shy to actually sit on stage, so, instead, I stood in the front and danced, awkwardly at first and then wildly, throwing limbs and swinging my hair in circles. After the song, the bandleader, a thin, blonde man with a dark mustache, smiled at me and said the classic line, “Oh, you’ll break hearts, just wait.” But I didn’t know what that meant, exactly, I was a six-year-old literalist, so I didn’t dance the next song. Instead, I stood to the side, clutching my chest and eyeing my parents, waiting to hear a crashing sound and then see them collapse to the ground.
So, as I mentioned, my site is in the midst of being redesigned and I feel strange writing with this old design, even though the new one isn’t going to look much different (it’s more an internal work-up, than anything). So I thought I’d take out the gray table, to see if that would ease my troubled mind, but no, I still feel weird typing with this design, as if it’s a corpse I’m scribbling on. Or something.
And this design wasn’t even supposed to be a design; it was just something I slapped up here two years ago for “in the meantime,” and here we are, but that’s how these things work, you say, “Oh, I’ll move to Minnesota for a few years to finish school, and then I’ll go somewhere else,” and now it’s five years later, and you haven’t finished school and you’re still in Minnesota, and you pronounce “bag” in a way you never thought possible, and last night, you dreamt about making lefse and you thought, “Ah, I should try that in the morning.”
I suppose what I’m saying is that there will be weirdness here until my guru Minh completes the master plan, which will hopefully be soon, but you never know with Minh because every time he visits the house in Minneapolis, he leaves something different in my bedroom, like a beach towel or swim trunks and or a really really comfortable hoodie sweatshirt that he will not be getting back anytime soon. So I don’t know if you can trust people who forget things, especially beach towels.
This website is my baby. I don’t think I’ve ever officially called an inanimate object “my baby,” before, but if anything’s going to get the title, this would be it. I’ve been writing on it, at least once a week, since I was 16 years old. Sixteen! That’s almost ten years ago. In that amount of time, I’ve graduated high school, moved across the country, had three major relationships, two of which crashed and burned after three years, became a vegetarian, went to four years of college, failed out of college, went back to college, developed a love for Margaret Atwood and and Ani DiFranco and Radiohead and had a total of four boyfriends, thirteen roommates and two cats.
This site is the only project that’s been just mine; I’ve never had a close real-life friend who had a deep abiding love for the internet and the medium of internet story-telling*, and I’ve never had anyone ask me to explain what I’m doing with this or how I’m doing it. It’s just been my thing, something I do when I’m alone or when I’m feeling inspired or when I’m pissed or drunk, or both.. So I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go on an extended hiatus or give it up all together; it’s something that’s shaped my identity and maybe the only thing that’s changed with me.
I’ve been spending most of my free time at the new coffee shop across the street, and I’m just not sure what I want to write anymore. I’m writing a lot for classes, but I feel like my focus here is changing, like I’ve been trying too hard and I never say what I mean. I feel like that in person, too. I feel like I’ve forgotten how to be sincere and, really, I hope I remember soon because it’s exhausting always trying to force a good impression. I’m a kind, empathetic and deeply strange and self-absorbed person, but I insist on something else in public, some sociable, self-contained, still person who wears white sweaters while eating red food, and is bent on proving she understands, instead of sitting back and actually getting it.
My redesign will looking something like this, except without the horrible splotchy banner and with different colors.
*with the exception of Dane, who now lives in Oregon, so he’s become a virtual friend.
Bits:
You know what’s been keeping me busy? Homework. In my 20+ years of schooling, no matter how much homework I’ve been assigned, it’s never actually kept me busy. Though I managed to get good grades for the first 19 of those years, homework wasn’t something I put especially high on the priority list. I always chose going out at midnight for root beer floats or crying about my boyfriends over writing papers. But, now, homework is my master, mostly because it’s fun homework like writing stories and cutting out words in magazines to glue on cardboard. Which is actually not so fun because I hate crafty projects, but I much prefer scissors-and-glue things to writing thirty page research papers on Faustus.
I’m trying to stray as far away as I can from my normal penchant for sentimentality and “ooo, look at the kitty” type of writing, so the story I just completed was about organ harvesting. It’s creepy. I was sitting in the new Dunn Bros. that opened up across the street, listening to the moron lady behind me surfing the free internet with the speakers turned as loudly as possibly, and totally freaking myself out. This might mean I’m brilliant.
My website redesign is 50 percent done, thanks to Minh Vu, who lives and works in Virginia, MN and cries himself to sleep in boredom each night. Seriously, and let me tell you second-hand, folks, there is nothing to do in Virginia, Minnesota. I have a secret hatred for that town because every time I tell someone where I’m from, I have to specify, “Virginia, you know, the state,” so they don’t think I’m from the iron range.
I just ate a type of spaghetti I’ve named “HOLY SHIT HEART ATTACK,” because of its sour cream/butter/pepperjack cheese/pure lard sauce, and my middle bottom tooth is sore from a violent flossing episode yesterday, and really, I think I need to have more frequent awkward sushi dinners with my ex-boyfriend because I finished all my writing homework two weeks early, all thanks to things I wrote down on a paper napkin while I was ordering my third martini.
Sunny Wicked is playing at the Dinkytowner next Sunday at 7 PM. You should go and tap me on the shoulder and/or punch me lightly in the arm and say, “Hey, sweet thing.” I’ve been far too awkward lately, so a little sleaze could do me good.
P.S.: If you see an image somewhere on my site of a woman having sex with an octopus and the words, “Don’t hotlink, jerkface,” then quietly avert your eyes. I’m still working out the kinks on my anti-hotlinking tactics.
“September’s coming soon; I’m pining for the moon.”
I couldn’t decide whether to make September’s inaugural picture the cats or a grossly exposed picture of my bedroom, so both it is.
September opened with an awkward sushi birthday dinner for an old college friend. The awkwardness came not from the friend, who was tan and in belted khaki pants, looking like the young, newly married professional he is. The awkwardness, instead, came from my third key lime martini and the proximity of an ex-boyfriend one foot in front of me. I kept accidentally kicking him in the shins with my boots and he didn’t look me in the eyes once over the course of three hours. I left the restaurant, with a salty lime taste that wouldn’t go away and a displaced sense of time.