taking stock

in 2004, i:

-quit smoking.
-shacked up with dom.
-got my uk passport.
-assembled and played out with my band.
-got engaged.
-got a tattoo.
-wrote only one song (disgraceful).
-left the city five times (new orleans, maine, norwich, bronxville and california respectively).
-got a new job.
-voted (fat lot of good it did, too, but i did my part).

in 2005, i will:
-write more songs.
-get married.
-record SOMETHING with the band.
-paint my kitchen.
-rekindle my fond acquaintance with bourbon.
-call my sister more often.
-drink more water.
-start getting the eight hundred rolls of film kicking around here developed.
-work on standing up for myself more.
-get my watch fixed.

in 2005, i will not:
-let my family's idiosyncrasies reduce me to tears on a regular basis.
-be crap and stop kickboxing.
-live in fear of getting fired.
-shirk vacuuming duties.
-fret nearly as much as i currently do.

happy new year, kidlings. congratulations on making it through!

and now that i've managed to compose myself a tad...

last week, i went home for the first time in three years. and it was different, this homecoming. to pick up a theme recently put out there by our little owl, this is a tale of two shivvies with which we're dealing here. an exercise in stark relief.

the last time i was home was december of 2001. it was my first christmas out of school, my first holiday since surviving the grueling hell that was the summer of 2001, the shell shock of my first real job, and (of course) the utter mindfuck that was september 11 (three days after i started my job, no less--"welcome to the working class! here's the end of the world!"). i was in love with someone who couldn't care less (pattern, anyone) and had recently cut loose the faithful and wonderful boyfriend of the preceding two years. i had recently discovered the restorative and healing powers of alcohol. i'd managed to conquer the eating disorder by that time, but i was still a complete and utter train wreck.

the vacation, if i recall correctly, was like familiar landscape filtered through the sickly light of a winter dawn--beautiful, and pleasant, and familiar, but ultimately too cold to thoroughly enjoy. we were all shell-shocked that year. friends, family, everyone. we were ourselves, but only ghosts thereof. we were interacting with each other through saran wrap, and i couldn't wait to get back here to new york.

i was myself, only stranger.

going home this year was so different; i felt less like a shadow slipping home and more like a technicolor fever dream returning to roost. things were no longer sepia toned and sepulchral; the sun was bright, and everything exciting and yet familiar. i suppose that's what happens when you finally start to feel like you've got your life together; home becomes less of a default retreat and fortress and more like something alive and integral--this is the place that i CAME from. this is part of what makes me ME. liking the "ME" that i've become is the basis of this transformation in perception this time round; a subtle but imperative difference.

this was dom's first trip to the bay area, and i have never delighted in it so much as i did with him these last few days. the weather gods were with us the first two days, allowing us high temperatures and brilliant skies as we rode cable cars and ate sourdough in san francisco, looked reverently at the ludicrously ancient redwoods and had a nostalgia trip on the beach where i'd passed so much of my misspent youth. we met up with some of my friends from high school, some of the brightest, most creative and wonderful people i've ever known, and whom i always forget how much i miss. i didn't manage to bring him to the coffee shop that had been my home away from home, nor did i get to show him all the landmarks in my life, but i gave a decent sampling. he knows where i come from now, more or less.

going home made me realize a handful of conflicting things, the first being that it's difficult to go home properly when your mother has given away your bed and turned your bedroom into a closet, but it can be done. the second is that a good dive bar requires more than big moustaches and a questionable jukebox--there's a certain panache required to make it work in a city where the population of harley owners is lower than the population of vintage vw beetle owners. the third is that however much we grow up, no matter what we go through and how we change, in certain respects we are always going to be the same--my friends will always find it difficult to make plans simply, and i'll always be reduced to the age of fifteen in the face of my mother. fortunately, modern mobile technology and improved self-esteem can ease the trouble wrought by this very fact.

i give up.

okay. that's it. i was going to write a heartwarming little anecdote about my adventures in the golden state to keep the winter chill out. but, when i went to log into MT, i discovered that someone had bestowed upon me the gift of 1300 comment spams over the last couple days.

which put a bit of a damper on my festivities.

i cannot keep up with the comment spam anymore, i am not going to try, i am very pissed off and i hope that you comment spammers are happy about the fact that you are ruining the internet for everyone.

merry fucking post-christmas. i hope you understand that you're all going to have to just bloody wait for an actual update.

p.s. dani, thank 'ee for the crimble email! you are a superstar!

and to all a good night

well, i'm heading out of town for a few days, to give biscuit's mama the opportunity to babysit my apartment and to give myself and dom a taste of california sunshine, so i'm going to be away from my desk.

i hope you all have a fantastic christmas, and i can't wait to hear every detail!

love,
shivlet

ah, winter. almost forgotten about you.

before i get started, let me just say that weather this bloody cold can bite me sideways for two reasons:

1. sore knees.
2. the hunger that never ends. seriously. when it gets this cold, i am hungry ALL THE TIME. it's bad news.

in other news...

friday's show was jolly good fun, despite the technical difficulties brought to us courtesy of an extremely sozzled sound guy and a really ornery bartender. really, the whole experience felt very rock and roll for that very reason--that, and the small coterie of new york's bravest (firemen) who, almost as sozzled as the sound guy, parked themselves in front of the stage and peppered each between-song moment with appreciative comments; if they are to believed, i am their new favorite person. at least that's what I heard; apparently there were some rather choice obscene comments floating around as well, which i mercifully missed.

*ahem*

it was all quite harmless and fun, really. they left me alone once i got offstage, and so it was all fine. but yes! good fun.

sunday, i think, was the most restful day in the history of the world. i slept late, read for a few hours, took a nap, read for a few more house, watched some buffy and then went to sleep. well, kind of. my punishment for such a delightfully slothful day was a horrifying bout of insomnia which ended somewhere between three and four hours before i had to get up. fortunately, i had the new bantamweight champion of the world sharing my bed to act as my alarm clock, bringing me back to the waking world with the steady CLANG of his fist connecting with the radiator. ah the dreams of boys and boxers.

p.s. we are working on getting some MP3s--we were supposed to get some at the show last night, but our recording was another casualty of the sound guy. alas!

lucky friday

so, tonight my band has a show at the orange bear, 9pm. if you're in the nyc area, you should come down and enjoy the hot rock and roll action.

theshivery.com for more info.

things that are good:

finding five dollars in your back pocket. the word 'archaeopteryx.' having the presence of mind to take a day off on each end of your christmas vacation. christmas lights. band-aids. touched-up roots. voluminous mascara. warm socks. fresh green peas. biscuit's bourbon cranberry sauce. aspen trees. the beach at north salmon creek. customer service that actually serves the customer. raw silk. fresh flowers. the smell of lilac. buffy the vampire slayer. basements. amazon women on the moon. football badgers. flatwound strings. tie clips. adobe illustrator. the fonts porcelain, engravier initials and mc auto. perfect intonation. fat squirrels. the brooklyn bridge. the golden gate bridge. playing live. velvet curtains. velvet anything. coming to the end of journeys that you thought you'd never, ever finish. a perfect cup of coffee. colin firth's glower. stargazer lilies. sideburns.

your thoughts on the matter?

midweek miscellany

my earrings are mutinying. i'm wondering if it's a case of 'i'm cold as hell and i'm not going to take it anymore' or what; it remains unclear. what IS clear is that in the last eight hours, i've had two different earrings jump out of my ears of their own accord. the first jumped ship en route home from the juliana hatfield show; i discovered its absence after peeling off my shoes and outer vestments, and with a mighty display of pout convinced the ever-fantastic dom to track down a flashlight and help me look for it (we live two blocks away from the venue where the show was--the request is less ridiculous then it sounds). fortunately, we found it; it was my favorite pair of earrings and i was verily saddened by the thought of its loss.

the second occurred this morning, just as i emerged from the subway--disentangling itself from my ear and hurling itself to its death on the 5th avenue asphalt. it broke, sadly. but i can repair it with a little krazy glue and a lot of patience. my greater concern is whether this is about to become a trend. it's too damn cold for me to grapple with the loss of favored adornments!

in other news...

1. drinks with the boss went well; food also got involved, which is always a bonus. especially if that food is snow crab salad and an assortment of oysters.

2. there has to be that one girl at every concert--you know the one--rail thin, midriff-baring, pointing her hipbones accusingly at the world, behaving like a superstar; unless she's the one on stage, you want to kill her. she was TOTALLY there last night. and we totally should have handed her juliana's guitar because she probably would have put on a more interesting show. (sorry, but true. we left halfway through the set it was so dire).

3. it seems that even with pest control, practice makes perfect: after my experience with mousezilla (you remember, the mouse that wouldn't die?), i was DEE TER MINNED to get rid of our new furry friend asap (oh, didn't i tell you? we discovered a mouse this weekend). and after one false start, we got him! quite a change from the several months i spent hunting the elusive mousezilla before he expired crawling out of my stove. i feel mildly guilty, as he was just a little mouse and not really doing anyone any harm...but i do have issues with having my home invaded by non-rent-paying dwellers who have made no arrangements in advance (we require reservations). particularly when there's an actual houseguest due in a week or so who may or may not have a serious aversion to mice. so anyway. hurrah for traditional snap-traps and peanut butter.

biscuit, don't tell your mom.

festivize.

i left home in 1997 to embark upon the great adventure of college and life. since then, i've been home for christmas only intermittently; as such, the whole spectacle of the festively attired tannenbaum has more or less bypassed me the last few years. it's a shame, really, because the trees we had growing up were always so lovely--somehow, we women of the house would manage to wrestle a six-foot fir into the living room and gussy it up splendidly, with colored lights and whimsical ornaments; as my sister was so fond of saying, it looked as though it were sprouting toys!

we didn't have a tree the last time i came home for christmas. since the sisters fled the nest, mom didn't really think it necessary to go through the hassle of lugging in a tree, setting it up, all that good stuff (to say nothing of vacuuming the needles out of the carpet!), since christmas is for the children, after all (or so they erroneously say). i was going to be home for only a couple days, so we figured we'd forego the tree entirely. and it wasn't so bad. but there was something missing, it's undeniable.

i spent christmas in new york the year after that; i didn't have a tree, but ross did, and it was beautiful and tall, just like him. so i came close to having a tree. i helped him put it up and smelt like pine needles for hours afterwards; but i didn't get to bring it home. and it was sad leaving it at night.

last year i spent christmas in the uk. the tree was already in place and decorated by the time i got there; my relationship with it consisted of me trying to give it a wide berth and avoid knocking it over. so no particularly warm fuzzy feelings there.

but this year, oh this year, despite the fact that dom and i will be spending christmas in california, we have decided that we have been sans festivity long enough: we decided to bring back the tree. and so now, for the first time in our collective adult lives, we have a christmas tree to call our very own. it's a midget tree, but it's ours. and it smells wonderful. and when it was finished, fully clad in white lights and silver and red glass balls, i felt a little bit misty and nostalgic, because i'd forgotten how much of my love of the holiday was wrapped up in the little coniferous creature now sitting merrily in the corner.

convenient, as today is ostensibly the first day of christmas.

UUPS.

never leave me in charge of your office. seriously. just don't do it. i decided that this decree must be made official party rhetoric this afternoon when i attempted to prepare an envelope for UPS overnight delivery.

i had no fucking clue what to do with it.

ultimately, my boss had to come over and show me how to assemble the whole thing; fortunately, he found my complete lack of basic office skills amusing instead of enraging--"you can create anything i ask you to with that computer of yours, but you can't address a UPS envelope. that's funny!"

tomorrow, he meets the boyfriend. we go out for drinks. dom and i try not to chew off our fingers with nervousness.

in other news, IT'S HERE! IT'S HERE! THE PASSPORT IS HERE!

i feel some jigging coming on.

chaaaarge!

while generally a responsible and productive member of society, i do have a spectacular failing in one particular arena: i appear to have an aversion to charging my various electronic thingys before they actually run out of juice and die at inopportune moments. thus, the ipod, cell phone and pda all run out of energy simultaneously, leaving me incommunicado for the shy cousin who was calling me at the exact moment my phone died.

alas!

curse you, electricity!

adornment.

they warned me it would become like an addiction, and i laughed it off.

but they were right, as the infamous they so frequently are. it has become like an addiction. it hasn't become a full-fledged addiction, because i lack the money to indulge, but it is an approaching shadow.

body art. the desire had lain dormant for years, eleven to be exact. that was the time i got the second hole punched in my ears, and by that time i'd had enough. or so i thought. fast forward to last august, wherein i received the infamous tattoo. since then, my dreams have brought fevered scenes of second tattoos (just in time for the wedding) and new piercings (high cartilege in the ear, the bellybutton)...i flush when i think of these, my heart rate rises and i get swept up in the excitement, wide awake and thrilled.

kind of like how it feels to be on a coke binge, only with less worry that my heart's about to explode.

but the thrill, the thrill remains the same. i'm not certain why this is; it's the same kind of thrill i experienced when i was younger and did something bad, like smoking or cutting class. it was an assertion that my life was MINE. i suppose that in a way, i feel like i'm asserting the same thing by entertaining notions of further self-adornment; showing the world that it's my body and i will do as i please with it. the difference being, of course, that this time around nobody's going to tell me i can't. i am an adult, and my life is most certainly and thoroughly mine. so i feel fortunate that i still get that same, illicit thrill.

and, more to the point, since i quit smoking my family hasn't really got a leg to stand on with me about self-mutilation--i've already cut out the worst thing i could possibly do to my body (in their estimation).

plus there's the extra bonus of my wild hypochondria to steer me clear of particularly stupid behavior...though i suspect that with regards to tattoos that self preservation instinct might need some work.

MAIM DESTROY

if the intern doesn't stop discussing his stock portfolio to some mystery person on the phone VERY SOON i am going to stab him in the face with a fork.

V

IS FOR VICTORY!

upon checking my credit card statement this morning, i discovered a mysterious charge for $119.50. 'What on earth could that be," i thought. "my new boots weren't that much." so i checked the details page, that would reveal to me the source of this mysterious charge.

and the culprit? the british embassy in washington DC.

WHICH MEANS:

unless the credit card company and the embassy are colluding to give me the ultimate mindfuck, MY DRATTED PASSPORT HAS BEEN APPROVED.

i'm sure i don't need to describe for you how this makes me feel.

thinking:

i don't spend nearly enough time prancing around in nothing but my underwear and a pair of boots. it's far more fun than you'd think, at least if your apartment is properly heated.

i can't believe that christmas is almost here. despite the fact that i started my christmas shopping in AUGUST, i am still woefully further from done than i'd originally hoped, as well as hindered by the knowledge that the onion chopper i'd planned to give my mother's boyfriend won't make it through security at the airport, so i'd better find another gift or abandon all hope of flying carry on only. or else forking over still more of my hard earned cash to the post office. given that they've already gotten more than fifty dollars in shipping fees off me for my stupid packet of oft-returned passport application papers, i'm not entirely sure i want to do that. just on principle.

here's what i DO know: i am not going to have to ship anything to china, for which i am very, very grateful. i have actually selected the world's most perfect gift for my sister and i wish i would be with her on christmas day to see her open it. i'm generally a crap gift giver, so to have found something that i KNOW is going to rock her world makes me awfully happy. fingers crossed that it arrives in time, eh? i have picked out some gifts for dom that i am fairly certain are going to rock his socks.

i do love christmas, though my general feeling of wonderment has abated somewhat since my childhood. i get a little cynical about it sometimes, as i'm not really part of a close-knit family. i don't look forward to the holiday with the same kind of gleeful fervor that others do. i look forward to the baking, and the lights, and the fact that we're going to festivize our apartment this weekend...but i've not been home for the holidays in years, and i haven't really missed it. and if the holidays aren't for family, what are they for?

but then, i suppose that depends entirely on your definition of family.

oh, tannenbaum.

the borough of brooklyn has finally done it: its PR has outstripped its delivered product. we found this out the hard way last night, when a handful of us kicked against the driving wind to check out the great brooklyn christmas tree on atlantic avenue whose red-letter lighting we'd only barely missed. we were promised carolers, and cookies, and bright lights and baton twirlers (well, no. but i was really hoping we'd get some anyway). what we got was a stooped ten-foot tall specimen lurking sadly in a church courtyard and some overturned chairs in a dumpster. fortunately, we were feeling warm and well-fortified, having just made our way from a nearby cafe where we enjoyed the best hot chocolate ever (i am not kidding) and tried really hard not to be overtly rude in the face of the abominable poetry slam going on concurrently.

sample lyric: "my heart. my art. i choke. artichoke."

right. it reminded me not-so-fondly of my college years, wherein there was a constant stream of these events, full of equally abominable verse delivered in that terrifying, cracked-cadence, dynamic shifting poetry voice that never fails to make me want to dash my head against the nearest telephone pole. "i am NAKED BUT i am still BORING."

despite the disappointment of the poetry and the tree, however, we managed to call upon our super secret urban ninja skills salvage the evening with that time-tested elixir, booze. so off to the brooklyn inn with we, for wine, pool, and many laughter-filled discussions of magnetic parenting ("miz b? your kids are stuck to the fence again)", young dashiell (ladykiller, ubergeek, or homosexual. one of these fates is certain to be his) and other assorted scraps of amusement.

as i'm sure you'll be unsurprised to hear, a good time was had by all.