moving, just keep moving...

there are currently fifteen bags of trash sitting out front of my old apartment. that's more than 350 gallons.

that's right. i said my OLD apartment.

the floors are swept, the old furniture carted out, leo's car stuffed with all the items we're taking to the charity shop, my eighty million boxes carted over to the new apartment and even slightly unpacked.

special thanks go to my sister, who swept in from maine and is (in my opinion), singlehandedly responsible for me actually getting my apartment sorted out in any semblance of time; dom for putting up with me, making the apartment look so nice, dealing with all the annoying little things that come with a move and just generally being a everything a girl could hope for; biscuit and patchesboy for taking some furniture off my hands and giving me a very welcome respite with much giggling in the afternoon; leo for lending us his car; my roommate for helping me get the apartment cleaned up when she really hadn't spent enough time in the apartment to have ever actually contributed to the mess; and to the gate, for giving us somewhere to drink.

big love and kisses to everyone who offered to help and just called to check in and say hi on moving day--it was touch and go there for a while, but as i realized late this afternoon as i listened to my next door neighbor (you remember--the jazz guitarist?) practicing, everything's falling into place nicely.

musings of a desk jockey.

much like the biscuit of late, i've been languishing in a big puddle of jackshit-to-do during office hours. the IT guy is sick, we have no big projects or deadlines coming up, i spend my days reading blogs and poring over television without pity (becuase i don't watch tv, i just read about it). despite the high entertainment value of these pursuits, it's made work a slightly depressing place to be. for once, i'm not particularly worried about getting fired--i'm about to take over our designer's job as well as my own, which will keep me righteously busy. but the last few days (particularly because there have been so many cloud fronts breezing through and making the office dark--i am, after all, solar-powered) have been a bit draining. particularly because i'm starting to get that buzz of excitement that comes with a move--i want to go set my hooks into my new home, instead of sitting here chained to my desk, wasting time as efficiently as i know how.

and yet still i get offered free korean food on the company credit card. gracious!

that so-called life

i remember my senior year of high school, mtv took it upon themselves to start rerunning the entire series of my so called life weekdays after school. for this, i am mighty grateful--though i was the exact same age as the characters when the show originally ran, i missed most of the series when it was broadcast. the reruns allowed me to finally figure out what it was that everyone was going on about.

as part of the great revival, the powers that be promised a demi-reunion moment--by having angela and jordan host a special hour of music videos. being seventeen, i was awfully excited about this; particularly because it was in the last few days when there was still any M in MTV. i was excited, i was going to record, i was counting down. and then the moment arrived.

i stopped the recording pretty early on, as soon as i discovered that claire danes and jared leto have the collective onscreen charisma and chemistry of a carrot stick. claire wouldn't look at the camera, and jared only fixed it with this crazy mackerel stare that was more unsettling than anything else.

and i remember thinking, "if these two captured us flawlessly when we were fifteen...are they doing it again now?"

it didn't bear thinking about; i may not have much charisma, but please put me out of my misery should my reserves ever fall so low as theirs did that day. i want no part of it.

though i really wouldn't turn down a blond pixie cut as awesome as the one she was sporting that day.

color me beautiful.

we've entered into negotiations as to what color we're going to be painting the new apartment of infinite joy. this means that i have spent some time on several interior paint websites, trying to find the perfect shades. it also means that i've been forced to pay attention to the absurd names that these shades are given. "mozart blue." "polar ice." "key lime citrus." "new wave umber." which of course begs the question: who comes up with this stuff?

other than j. crew's catalog copywriters, nobody really knows for sure. one thing is certain, however: biscuit and i both want that job. we think we'd be quite good at it, too. we've been practicing all afternoon.

to show you how good, i'm going to give you a list of colors we've come up with , interspersed with REAL LIVE HONEST TO GOD COLORS, found in catalogs and paint chip aisles everywhere. think you'll be able to tell the difference?

strap in campers--read on for the answers.

snapdragon. cameo. rind. blade. fresco. venetian glass. stunning. millet. carbon. oleander. angelfish. volcano. cobble. cherokee. indian dance.

ours:
snapdragon, cameo, venetian glass, millet, oleander, angelfish, cobble, cherokee, rind

theirs:
blade (green), fresco (blue), stunning (blue), volcano (bright red), carbon (gray), indian dance (orange)

rock the mic

i get a secret thrill out of going to sing karaoke with a group of people who, while at varying degrees of audiophilia, know their way around the virgin megastore (so to speak) but still have never heard of any of the songs that i choose to sing.

not that i'm into that whole indie rock "nothing is any good if anyone's heard of it" trip, but yeah. sometimes it's nice to be the kid with the esoteric taste. i mean, until people start making jokes about how i'm the KID.

speaking of countdowns...

a couple weeks ago, when the first frenzy of moving really set in (by which i mean "shiv started to get her knickers in a twist about it"), we asked the people currently living in our apartment when they thought we might be able to move in, so that we could schedule our movers. their response? "welll...we can be out by the 25th...if you give us $300. other than that we'll be out late night on the 30th."

excuse me?

now, i know that's well within their legal rights, not leaving till the end of the month, but really--where's the courtesy? it would have been one thing if they'd simply said they couldn't get out before the very end of the month. and another thing entirely if there weren't an apartment in gramercy park sitting empty, wasting the rent dollars they've ALREADY PAID. but...really. making it clear that if we pay them off they might decide to maybe work with us a little here? we're not unreasonable people. but that rubbed me very strongly the wrong way. just the blatant, painful mercenariness of it. the cheek!

as most people who know me will attest, while i have the propensity to be as catty as the next girl, it's rare that someone gets my hackles up on sight. as in, to the point where i will come up with almost any excuse to limit contact to the barest minimum. the girl who is living in our apartment has achieved this dubious honor. a fact which i think amuses dom a little; i don't think he's seen me curl my lip at someone who's not my family yet.

i will say, however, that my displeasure with her has achieved one positive end--i've been so busy grumbling that the other details, such as packing things up and rerouting my mail and all the other nuts and bolts of moving, haven't really stressed me out. much. having the world's most helpful boyfriend is helping on that front, too.

just to cap the anecdote, however, i will point out that they're moving out today. the 25th. without our $300, trying to sell us their appliances to the last.

one more thing: seriously. i know they're within their legal rights. so if you feel the need to comment on how i'm being utterly unreasonable...don't.

smile and nod, smile and nod.

despite the fact that i've dropped out of the marketing rat race, i continue to take a bit of interest in the way certain companies package themselves. on the radar this morning is yahoo, who appears to have forsaken its previous tactic of whoring itself to the business community in favor of a more personal touch. its most recent spate of irritating banner ads is a series (i've found three so far) featuring yahoo 'employees' (and by 'employees' i mean 'carefully chosen faces representing the different ethnic groups frequently stereotyped into association with the tech industry) and what they're doing for you: parvalli is on virus watch. hao keeps you spam-free; so does melanie. just for you.

i find it interesting that yahoo has suddenly opted to humanize its product; i suspect it's in response to the upcoming public float of competitor google--a crunchier, friendlier service that is rapidly gaining in popularity and thisclose to eclipsing yahoo entirely. in order to keep its competitive edge, yahoo appears to be doing what any self-respecting corporation does in times of possible audience loss: trying to poach users from the competitor to keep its numbers up. they've chosen to do this by attempting to offer some of the same laid back vibe that google, with its novelty logos and occasional gag pages, provides.

or, to be more clear, yahoo is trying to negate its legacy of corporate theism and replace it with a more down-to-earth accessibility. though i still suspect that if you walked into its corporate headquarters, put your feet up and addressed the president like an old friend, you'd get escorted out by security. some friendship.

what i'm most curious to see is whether this works for them or not. we tried this exact same strategy at my old company; upon the introduction of a new division (a division so mired in corporate double-speak that it took the better part of a year for our staff to figure out what it was supposed to do, and along the way completely alienated most of our private clients), our sales plummetted. though we'd started providing what many corporate clients felt was a necessary service, we'd suddenly painted ourselves into a corner with words like 'unaccessible' and 'impersonal.' in an effort to either explain ourselves or woo back our private clients (i still haven't figured out which), we produced a series of pamphlets and other marketing materials identifying staffers by name and location and function. reminding people that there were humans still running the show, despite all appearances.

it was an interesting choice, a complete reversal of their previous strategy. i have no idea if it worked, however, as i left the company shortly after we completed the suite of materials; the department (the entire office, actually) was dissolved shortly thereafter. thereby cementing my amusement with the whole idea--let's show just how personal we can get by firing a whole bunch of people.

fourth floor: ladies' lingerie, assorted mythological creatures, delusion.

there's this wonderful ad for the new school that used to run on the new york subway, depicting a group of people standing in an elevator, all staring upwards at the floor counter. in the corner of the ad, there was a simulated torn piece of paper, describing a class in socially conditioned behavior (such as watching the floor counter in an elevator) and what causes it (discomfort with one's fellow man and peer pressure, perhaps?). i've always found it brilliant. an avid floor watcher myself, i recognized the parallel in my life, and nothing makes me giggle like my own foibles (except, perhaps, the alias recaps over on TWOP).

and, of course, it makes me wonder--for so many of us, that action is natural, instinctive. but what if we stopped watching? what if we all stared at our feet or at the door? would the elevator pop off the grid of reality and take us to the secret floors? would it start to fly or sink to immesurable depths, like willy wonka's great glass elevator?

okay, perhaps only in my wildest alcohol-soaked flights of fancy, but it is worth a think. what would we find if we could will an elevator to step off the grid through the sheer power of our inattentiveness? what do you suppose we'd find?

also, show tonight with this guy at the open center, 83 spring st. be there or...well, just be there. i go on at 8.

re: the little shop of image destroyers and the spydaddies who love them.

a side note on reading television without pity while at work: don't do it. because stifled guffaws are actually painful.

that is all.

if you're like me,

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start there, and do your part to save the world from the greatest threat to marriage, family, god, country and everything else you might ever hold dear.

counting down

guess whose turn it is to move now?

if you have empty boxes, excess packing tape, hugs or advice to offer, please feel free to drop me a line. though i would recommend doing so soon, before i utterly lose my mind.

which means somewhere roughly within the next 42 hours.

a telephonic invasion

last week, dom finally acquiesced to the inevitability of cellular technology: after many a year of steadfast refusal, he finally obtained a mobile phone. which is exciting, despite the fact that he hasn't quite gotten himself attuned to it to the point that he can hear it ringing while out on the noisy streets of new york (rendering it a bit spotty on the actually useful for communication front at times). it also opens up an entirely new form of communication for us--text messaging.

it took me a full week to get around to actually exploring this possibility--i figured i'd give him a week to grow accustomed to the small plastic alien in his pocket before forcing him to read it as well as listen to it. but, at last the time came, and i sent him a short message yesterday after we trekked from 57th street back down to 23rd in the blazing heat, just in case he hadn't heard me the eighty times i'd said it in the course of the walk.

i didn't expect him to answer, as he's new to this whole messaging business and wasn't anywhere near his user's manual (the luddite's best friend). but answer he did, with the most wonderful response that auto-complete can provide to a girl's profession of her love: Uprolo Void.

and by Uprolo Void he means eep-opp-ork-ah-ah 'i love you, too.'

forum fever

you may or may not recall my oft-repeated lament that the universe tends towards a state of maximum irony. for me, this means that i (until recently a vehemently non-marriage-oriented girl) spend a lot of time looking at wedding and baby-oriented websites for work. you are familiar with this refrain. spending so much time in this alien world, however, is just as educational as it is mystifying. for example, i'm learning that there's something about becoming a bride that turns many women into seething bitches with a disturbing fondness for the word 'tacky' and very distinct opinions about whether the cake should be angel food or sponge. these are the things you learn when you cruise the forums.

it's like watching 90210, only with (i suspect) worse hair--there's a hierarchy, horrifying repartee (if you can call it that) and more claws out than you'll find in a brooklyn nail salon. i can't tear my eyes away, though i must from time to time--were i to bait these bridezillas as i am so sorely tempted, they might tear my eyes OUT.

also, i'm learning to love the name 'burdine.'

the path

the path of fury is fascinating, particularly when it lacks a clearly defined center. it tears up from the depths of me, ripping like a tsunami as it moves to inhabit and infect my limbs. i don't know why it got me this morning, why each punch of the bell demanding entry to this empty office made my digits quake with rage. it was almost like euphoria, inducing similar lightheadedness, and it remains beyond me to pinpoint the root of the affliction.

the storm flickers quickly in and out of focus, running away for short swathes of time while still leaving a few clouds in its wake. such as the vehement desire to set the rest of the world on mute, or just openly scream everything i'm dying to say (shut up, stop staring, hurry up, go away, take a shower, stop it, fuck you, don't touch me, don't look at me) but won't out of a sense of propriety. and futility.

i never cease to be amazed that it is only in those moments when i want some peace and quiet that the bell and the phone never, ever stop ringing. that the boorish carriers of fedex and ups barrel in screaming and treating me like i owe them something, grilling me with questions that i can't answer. a good employee, a good human being, i force myself into some approximation of pleasantness, loath to fully unleash my humours on the innocent, however irritating. and thus i lie through smiling teeth, wishing people a nice day when i really just want to rip out their throats.

but i don't. after all, there are laws. and blood is a poor substitute for lipstick, let's face it. the color never stays true and it gets mad sticky. which nobody likes.

so, you know. smile, nod, grit, wait. seethe breathe.

knocked over

i've never claimed to possess anything that even vaguely resembles grace. but recently, i've been impressing even myself. seriously. if knocking over glasses full of liquid were an olympic sport, i'd be the front runner on a medal-winning team.

soul food

time with the divine miss n is good for my soul; so are sundays and sunshine, even when they include inexcusably rude service at one of my favorite haunts. ("excuse me, but...my friend here's done with her sandwich, and i'm still waiting for mine...and these people who got here after me have already finished as well...could you..." "siiiiiiiiiigh what did you have?" "a tuna sa--" "FINE.") cheesy tv in small doses isn't bad, either. nor is running into old friends in the most random of places. or fish stew. or a good story.

less clear with regards to its impact on my emotional well being is the fact that i can't stop listening to britney spears' 'toxic.' scoff if you will, but that song is painfully fucking hot.

off color.

by way of explanation i offer this: if my mind were a color right now, it would be magnolia--that nondescript shade of almost-white that is the default color used in apartments when nobody has the energy to mastermind a more vibrant scheme. that's how i feel. i feel nondescript. not unhappy, exactly, but carefully neutral. and i have no earthly right to feel like this: i have a non-soul-killing job; a fabulous boy with whom i'm wildly in love, with whom i'm moving to a fabulous park slope brownstone apartment; great friends, cool shoes and a music career that is currently going absolutely nowhere. i should be swinging from the rafters with euphoria.

but i'm feeling a little stalled out. those of you who know me personally may have noticed; maybe not. i don't really know. another side effect of feeling off--decreased awareness of the world around me.

i guess i'm just asking you to be patient while i try to reinject some joie back in my vivre and get myself sorted out.

soundtrack of pure joy.

WHOEVER THE FUCK IS IN CHARGE OF SOUNDTRACKS AT DREAMWORKS NEEDS TO CONTACT ME RIGHTNOW SO I CAN KISS THEM.

observe the roster of artists on the soundtrack to shrek 2:

tom waits.
frou frou (covering BONNIE TYLER)
dashboard confessional
pete yorn
counting crows
JENNIFER SAUNDERS (a.k.a. edina monsoon)
nick cave and the bad seeds
the eels.

jesus marimba, people. you think they're trying to kill me with kindness here?

all good things...

i have an announcement to make.

after several years of hard service and much enjoyment, the end of an era has come.

i must at last give up the ghost and replace my headphones. they've been with me for nearly six years, and in that time they have lost the foam padding on the earpieces, the plastic has disintegrated to the point where my ears are consistently stabbed, they look funny, they've been to three continents, and they've put in their time. i've been reticent to replace them, partially because new headphones cost a limb, partially because i love them and we've been through a lot. and really, who wants to surmount those particular obstacles when the headphones still work perfectly well? certainly not me.

but yesterday, oh yesterday, day of infamy, yesterday the sound started cutting out of the right earpiece. if i wiggled the wire just right, it came back; i initially thought i could just tape it in and make it work, postpone the inevitable a little while longer...

and then i realized that they're ugly and uncomfortable, and really not worth performing surgery on. and that i deserve some new headphones, goddammit. and...and...and yeah.

rest in peace little headphones. you're already dangerously close to resting in pieces.

addendum to a previous entry

c'mon, people. i like to think you give me a little more credit than thinking that i'm okay with having a kind word be my ONLY compensation. i'm just as mercenary as the next girl.

i'm an idealist, not a simpleton.

that is all.

stand by

so, remember all the song submissions i asked you for?

i'm working on it. promise. the invincible mix is en route--please stand by.

bringing home baby

in other news...

picking it up today, yo.

exit, stage left.

my parents, though they will never admit it, have never quite gotten over the fact that i've never lost the weight i put on after i got over my eating disorder. normally, they hide their disdain well, but sometimes it comes out, clumsily, and usually after a few drinks. example: "you know, you really should go to the gym. i mean, not that...i mean, you look...fine...but you should start..maintaining now."

right then.

i suppose it makes sense--in the circles they travel, many of the women are what are affectionately called tai tais--society wives whose job it is to look good, as they have no official (i.e. paying) employment. as such, if these women are not svelte and toned and perfectly painted or coiffured, it reflects poorly on them. the same, i suppose, extends to their children. my stepmother attempts to lead by example, by not ordering dinner after nibbling on an appetizer in the bar downstairs, or by ordering the linguini with clam sauce and only consuming the delicate mollusks themselves.

there was a time that i admired that tendency of hers; this can probably be explained by the fact that during that time, i was surviving on half a tuna sandwich and thirty cigarettes a day. i was twig thin and they loved it. they were so proud of their tiny, smart daughter and did you notice how thin she is? doesn't she look great? never mind the fact that i was also completely off my rocker with hunger-induced insanity.

and let me tell you, it seems strange to see in their eyes a small measure of disappointment that i've put that weight back on. but then, when you consider that in their circles, bulimia is far more acceptable than a few extra pounds, it makes sense.

other than that, and our family forays into binge drinking, it was a fun visit.

the beagle has landed

the parents have arrived.

more details to follow.

lord give me strength.