catching up

they say you can't go home again, and i suppose it's true, because this is what many of my high school compatriates have done with themselves over the last five years:

• n. is in san quentin for pushing drugs, as well as his alarming habit of building bombs and detonating them in the middle of fields.


• j. is in jail for being an accessory to armed robbery; she had a baby during her first month on the inside. it was taken away from her.


• l. is a devout zionist, living in israel. she apparently starts sentences with "those damn palestinians..."


• a. is married, mormon, and living in utah


• a.m. has impregnated so many girls in the area, that people who barely know him have taken to beating him up on the street in protest.


• b., the richest kid at my first high school, is working at a strip bar in san francisco, having avoided picking up any other useful job skills along the way.


• n.f., one of the bitchiest girls in school, has come out of the closet and has apparently become much much nicer since doing so.

there's more, but those were truly the highlights. it's funny, considering my hometown is such an affluent suburb, it sometimes seems that those of us who grew up there have had a hard time getting out without religion or law enforcement.

on shivery having no sense of direction:

we thought we'd be sneaky last night and take a shortcut through the park. the gathering was on the west end of the street we were on; simple, right?
sure.
it was dark, and it was cold, and if any of you have ever walked central park at night, you know that certain parts of it are not well lit. so we kept our eyes and ears open, holding on to one another's hands, gravitating automatically towards the light on the road the instant it makes itself visible. we trail the joggers and the cyclists, we watch a stray dog shimmy through the underbrush. the road seems to go on forever, when finally the other side becomes visible.
"wow, how far up do you think we'll come out?"

"85th at least."

"really? you think that far up? naaaaah. no way."
when we emerged from the rambles we got a hold of our bearings. 88th st. on the same side of town where we'd begun.
as soon as we realized that, we laughed, grimaced, and chalked it up to our fulfillment of the romantic moonlight ramble weekly quotient before surrendering to the reality that we were going to have to call a cab if we wanted to show up before midnight.

we interrupt the sound of tumbleweeds...

whoever said that happiness was stifling to one's creativity was absolutely fucking right.
as you may have noticed around here.

illin'

in a testament to my true geekdom, i just managed to convince the brass here to buy me a subscription to the learning database at www.lynda.com. this means: eighteen hours of pure illustrator crash course joy.
awww, motherfuckin' yeah.
in other news, i really need a play through tuner, as well as a new pickup for my guitar. my old one appears to have been eaten by the pixies. which is not THAT big a problem, as it was a piece of shit anyway.
tra la!

grandstanding.

i am not an overtly political person. but once in a while, i get a little bee in my bonnet, and today his name is ralph nader. please excuse me a moment for some venting: isn't it enough that he split the democratic vote in 2000, thereby clearing the path for a narrow and cheating victory by the hail-to-the-chimp; what strange innate force is causing him to try and do it again?
granted, i know. okay. he is striking a blow against the oppressive two party system under which we currently labor. i accept that, i respect that, and i wish him much success in his endeavor. someday. but really, NOW IS NOT THE TIME. not when we're facing another four years under the megalomaniacal thumb of a man of questionable integrity and even more questionable leadership skills.


fuck's sake. without wanting to sound fatalistic or pessimistic, now is not the time to try and change the world. now is the time to focus solely on getting a dangerous man out of the most powerful job in the world. now is the time to unite and rid the world of a great danger.

of course, i can't make that happen alone. neither can you. so, whether you support nader or not, whether you support bush or not, go register to vote. seriously. make it a fair fight, and make your world a safer place to be. go. in the words of our kate, just fucking vote.

true story.

we were on a boat down mexico way, navigating choppy waters to Isla Mujeres for a day of shopping and sightseeing. the waves were high, and the boat was pitching furiously. most of the passengers were gripping the siderails for dear life, concerned that they were going to be unceremoniously tossed out into the cool sea. we were standing in the stern, lightly holding a pole with one hand, riding the waves, unconcerned. "you two had better hold on! the water's awful rough!"

punctuate this.

generally speaking, i'm not known for my weird grammatical idiosyncrasies. but, there are a few things with which i have a problem; i should probably get them checked out. of these, the most prevalent and insidious of them is my obsessive need to properly punctuate taglines. for the most part, i've managed to curb it here in my little corner of blogland; you'll notice many a post title living quite harmoniously without the aid of a well placed comma or semicolon. but, it does manifest itself. in the title of the blog, for example. virtually every phrase i have used has been finished by that most innocuous of punctuation marks, the period. i simply cannot seem to live without it.


this all comes to mind right now because i am working on a new layout for the company website. we have a tagline which the brass wish to highlight, so i am working it into the design. and blow me down if it just refuses to look right without a period at the end.


is this compulsion? is it insanity? or am i just a victim of a grammatically pristine upbringing which continues to rear its ugly head in the strangest of ways?


anyway. it bothered me. so i thought i'd share the love. and not a word about my inability to properly punctuate my entries themselves.

v-day

well. it's probably unsurprising for me to discuss how very much valentine's day rocked my face. you probably don't really want to hear about the roses and the candles, or the pretty pink shoes. you probably don't want to know about the lobster risotto and boulliabaisse that D. made for me. you certainly don't want to hear about what it was that made me so very, very dangerous. i'd also imagine it's fairly safe to say that you don't need to know what was said in the quietest hours before dawn.
but i'm pretty sure you can gather how i feel. about the Boy and about the day. and the whole shebang.

everything and nothing.

she came on like a light

elevate me.

the elevator at work has died. they are in the throes of fixing it, which apparently involves lots of drilling and a few acetylene torches--a nice background din for the masses. and it wouldn't bother me, except for the fact that i have to do my 'microphone configuration training,' which will ultimately allow me to provide the voiceover narration for our online virtual tours. apparently, my microphone is sensitive enough that it is picking up the grinding noises in the background, and thus refusing to recognize my voice; apparently, it thinks i'm speaking some sort of grindy moon language. interesting.
so anyway. that's frustrating. like many other things. it being friday the 13th and all, i suppose that makes sense.

glasstacular.

i have spent the last two weeks with small pieces of glass embedded in the underside of my left index finger, right at the joint.
i am pleased to report that what i believe to be the final piece of glass has finally ejected itself from my dermal layer.
hurrah!

the wrong side of the bed.

i secretly harbor a theory that the human mind is wired to crave routine. though we're all reticent to admit it, there is something about the familiarity of repetitive behavior that soothes us, allows us to cope more easily with a wild wild world. it seeps into everything we do: we use the same routes to travel to work each day; we sleep on the same side of the bed; we always put the same arm into our coatsleeves first. it's generally not noticeable, because it feels so familiar; we don't need to give it a second thought.
until the routine changes.
sleeping on the different side of the bed. putting your coat on using your non-dominant arm. subway disruption. the slightest change, and the world feels somehow wrong for just a couple of minutes.
it's the wrongness that keeps us from breaking routine. it's disorienting. it's disconcerting. and the whole point of routine is to prevent that sensation of the world not fitting properly from happening. it gives us peace of mind, even when the routine is not necessarily constructive. this is why we stay in damaging situations even when we know they're not good for us; no matter how bad something is, the prospect of encountering the unknown, the unfamiliar is always somehow a little bit worse. this is why i stayed in my last job for two years; i probably could have escaped earlier than i did, but i was so scared about the prospect of starting again that it stayed my hand a little. but eventually, something had to give, and the comfortable routine had to be broken. and while i do miss the security of a familiar perch, a mindless job that a monkey could do in its sleep, i know in the long run that this new state of affairs is going to be much better for me, no matter how overwhelming and scary it seems now.
it does not, however, mean i'm going to be volunteering to sleep on the right hand side of the bed anytime soon, that's for damn sure.

let the games begin

day one. here we go.
*deep breath*

freak like me

my first self-appointed task at my new job (besides the inevitable gauntlet spent on the phone with IT, attempting to get myself all set up and put together) is to start designing new layouts for our site--i.e., come up with some more options for people who have opted to "personalize their page." now, if i were sensible, i'd have just started with solid colors, making it a little easier for myself. but, being a good little ninja scout blogger, and having paid attention when particularly creative web monkeys work their mojo, i've decided to plunge straight into the wild world of image exploitation.
and, naturally, i'm wondering how much i'm going to have to rein it in to suit the milquetoast tastes of the general populous. having found a fabulous free photo site, i've been mocking up some nutty little scenes, with psychedelic baseballs and technicolor dominoes; they look great (if i do say so myself, but then i'm creating them specifically to suit my aesthetic tastes), but i can almost hear the groans from the brass here, asking me for something more middle of the road. i mean, one of the major demographic groups we're going for is old; they're probably not so excited by an electric pink view of the manhattan skyline.
of course, i'm going to continue making my strange and exciting backgrounds until i am explicitly told to go for the bland. because it pleases me to do so, and as i've said: if they just wind me up and let me go, i really think i can do some good things with this site.

a brief rundown

on my vacation i had a terrible cold, but that didn't stop me from:

walking the length and breadth of the garden district; getting drunk in the french quarter; wandering around louis armstrong park; eating biscuits with country gravy and grits at the trolley stop diner; listening to great zydeco and blues bands; missing the jazz at preservation hall because we lingered too long over beignets and hot chocolate at cafe du monde; visiting the voodoo museum; getting impromptu surgery on my finger (it involved a needle, a lighter and an antiseptic wipe, and was less gruesome than it sounds); buying fabulous pink shoes; being fed strawberries and shortbread in bed; having my first taste of gumbo, etouffee, jambalaya and oyster po' boys; taking lots and lots of pictures; going on the ghost tour of the french quarter; being asked by no less than three people if we were on our honeymoon; finally seeing the mighty mississippi; nearly ripping the sole off my favorite boots; wearing skirts and walking around without a scarf.


loving every damn second of it.

the end of an era

my final assignment, my lasting legacy in this place is a pair of rhyming couplets i wrote about a bear dressed like elvis. a promotional giveaway for one of our big functions in thailand, each year the stuffed bear has a different theme. we've had samba bear, fred astaire bear, bunny bear and now elvis bear. every year, we look forward to the production of this bear with increasing degrees of trepidation, because, frankly, nobody wants to write the damn poem that will go along with and introduce the little critter.

but, as i don't really care if the door hits me on the ass as i leave, i took a stab at it. or, rather, was coerced into it with a sick amount of flattery. as the resident songwriter, clearly i was the perfect choice to tackle this. so here's what i cam up with:

gone

outta 38th street for the last time.

fuck this noise, yo.

wheeeee!

so....close...

this afternoon is painfully reminiscent of the last day of high school, when the last 45 minutes are the longest of your life.

random.

there are not words to express how very much i would like a t-shirt that says "the people's republic of astoria" on it.

fer sher.

won't you take me away from this place.

i'm going to new orleans this friday, a last hurrah before i ensconce myself in the drudgery of a new occupation. and not a second too soon, really. i am ready to be somewhere else, ready to be away from the relentless gray and the cold and the rain and the doctor's appointments and the morning commute and the trucks rumbling by my window at night and the exorbitantly expensive cigarettes and the open container laws and the cold and worry and here.

i'm ready for the voodoo museum and the vampire tour and the dixieland bands and the cajun influence and the ionic columns and the mighty mississippi and ernie k'does' mother-in-law lounge and preservation hall and the cable car tour and beignets and chicory coffee and warmth and cities of the dead and not coming out of the room for love or money until the sun goes down on saturday night.

that's what i'm ready for.

on (the subject of) my knees

i'm wearing my knee brace today, for the first time in nearly a year. you see, between the extreme cold and the header that i took into the concrete steps at port authority last week, the knees have grown a tad stiff, recalling ghosts of old injuries. and injuries aplenty have i racked up in my time, having at one point been a fairly athletic person. none of them have been serious, but there have been enough of them that i suppose i'm fated to feel them until the thaw comes. a brief rundown:

him and the boy scouts.

i saw a man on the subway today with a briefcase full of rope. i watched his hands as he tied these elaborate knots, some of which involved only one rope, some of which took as many as three. i've never been much good at tying knots (which might explain why i'm always tripping over my boots), so i was transfixed, spellbound.
of course, as is proper etiquette on the subway, i had to pretend not to be. even in new york city, blatant staring is not considered particularly good manners. which is too bad, because i bet i could have learned a lot if i'd actually taken the time to watch. or ask.

o magnum mysterium, arr. morten lauritsen

there is a part of the song where it suddenly drops from beautiful harmonic dissonance into a minor key reverie, a very spooky sort of change. the first time i heard it, and i heard that part, it was as though someone had found a way to give everything that scared me a voice, a shape. that passage was all the shadows that crept in the night, every uncertainty i'd ever had, everything that had ever made me cry. it was the whisper heard across the plains when you're certain that all hope is lost.

it is the darkest moment imaginable.

but only for a moment. after that part, it opens up into the most beautiful, poignant, lush arrangement of harmonies imaginable. if the minor passage is everything that goes bump in the night, the section that follows it is everything that keeps those things at bay. it is the moment the fever breaks. it is the sunrise after the longest night of your life.

it is hope.

i know this entry is painfully earnest, that what i have to say about this song must sound absurd. so feel free to scoff if you are so inclined. but i guarantee, if you ever hear this song for yourself, you will understand why i hold it not just in high regard, but sacred. there are days when this song is the only thing that can persuade me that things are going to be okay.

and everybody needs something like that, don't you think?