questionable days start with...

finding out your punching bag has an as-yet unlocated leak which has caused your basement to flood.

rah rah rah!

everybody's working for...

this weekend was immeasurably good for my soul. this is a good thing, as i find myself yet again back here in the den of dead souls, counting away the hours of my life until i am again loose on the streets of the city to create mischief and other general good mojo. today, at least, i have the weekend to reflect upon. this includes:

-newly dyed, murderous scarlet red hair (many thanks to the biscuit for applying the goo and allowing me to turn his bathroom into something that resembles nothing so much as a murder scene).
-a fab show by our favorite drummer, performing his songs with a fiddler and a guitarist. totally different, but as always, marvelously fun.
-dancing. oh, the dancing. it's such an easy thing to pencil out of my schedule that i frequently forget how much i love it, and how good it makes me feel. after ben's show we made our way to a hookah bar on first ave, which has a secret (and by 'secret,' i mean 'unknown to me before saturday night') dj dance space in the basement. we went for a drink and stayed for several hours; i was on the dance floor for most of that, because these hips are made for shaking. naturally, the evening was slightly marred by the ubiquitous dance floor troll--that random guy who consistently tries to get up in the grille (so to speak) of every girl on the floor (there is one at every dance venue. fortunately, this one didn't try to sniff my ass), and seemed particularly fond of hovering around me and the lovely liz. fortunately for us, we came accompanied by a phalanx of handsome boys to act as our beards and run interference for us. sunday morning, i was as sore as i remember being in a long, long time, but it felt absolutely wonderful.
-brunching. you cannot really go wrong with brunch with friends, particularly at a place that looks like it was decorated by griffin and sabine, doesn't even OFFER melon and makes the most heavenly lemon poppyseed bread. put it two blocks from my house, and i'm in paradise.
-ipod. dom, being the astute and amazing boyfriend that he is, beat me to the punch of upgrading my ipod, presenting me with a new 30GB machine for my birthday (how fortunate that the DSL at work had gotten shut off earlier in the week--i had been planning to buy one for myself). it's been languishing, empty, for the last couple of weeks, because all my music exists solely on the old pod; the hard drive on my little laptop before it died was so small that i could not maintain a music library therein. so, it took me a couple of weeks to figure out how to transfer all the music off the pod and on to dom's machine in order to affect the transfer. two weeks of queries and three hours of grappling with the software later, ShivPod 2.0 is ready for action, and ready for business. word.
-alias. if you know much about me (and my kickboxing, and my interest in spies, and my love of costumery, and my love of geekery), i shouldn't even need to explain this to you at all. suffice it to say, i have found myself in possession of the third season (Which i missed entirely while it was being broadcast) on DVD, and yesterday i found the opportunity to break it out and indulge. an afternoon of an asskicking girl superspy? i fail to see how tv gets better than that.

so that was my weekend. when can i do it all again?

stereophonic sound spectacular!

so...i may not have written anything new in a while, but we have some new arrangements of old favorites posted for your pleasure, at long last.

that's right. the shivs have landed. all the old songs are new again!

vox populi.

this is the third time i've attempted to write this entry. let's see if i can make it stick.

i've been spending a lot of time thinking about my voice, both in the literal (i.e. singing) sense and in the more literary sense. about how valuable i find them both, and how weak they've both become.

i rather suspect that the weakening of my singing chops is not particularly noticeable to anyone but me; it might come as a surprise to some that it's a calculated offense, or at least a side effect of it--i've been trying hard to tarnish the shiny patina it acquired during ten years of classical training; while technically correct, it's not very rock and roll. so i've been trying to rough it up. pull an ashlee simpson style makeover, if you will, only while retaining the ability to carry a tune and avoiding peculiar irish jigs while on stage.

unsurprisingly, as i work on this transition i've been finding myself caught in the middle of the styles. i want to give up my operatic flourishes, i've never liked the sound of them. unfortunately, singing more rock-stylee tends to both limit my range and make my voice hurt. i'm still on the road to doing it properly. so i'm stuck in the chasm between, mastering neither and feeling compromised while i'm at it. suffice it to say, i'm off my game. my game is in cuernavaca. and while i am confident that i'll figure it out, and it will be worth the wait...in the meantime i grow frustrated by the limitations i'm finding as i shake off the technique i took for granted. and it's hard, having to redefine myself within the confines of the thing i've always been best at, and finding out that, at least for now, i'm not really up to snuff.

so there's that.

there's also my mysterious voice ailments with regards to writing. you may have noticed my absence around here. i certainly have, almost as acutely as i've noticed my total inability to write new songs over the last year and a half. when i get het up about this, i am always reassured by biscuit that it will just take time, that i just need to find my new voice, the voice that has other things to talk about besides being brokenhearted.

this new voice is being irritatingly silent. or perhaps just slow. i suppose if i were it, i wouldn't be rushing to this sleety wonderland, either.

i wonder sometimes if it's just a lack of focus on my part, a sudden inability to distill situations and thoughts. or perhaps i just don't have anything to say anymore, an infinitely scarier prospect. but it's seeping out of the music and into other parts of my life. i feel like i'm quieter than i used to be; i have so little to say in this forum (though that can be attributed in part to the fact that work is taking up a significant quantity of my mental real estate, and we all know the golden rule about blogging and work); i haven't been writing songs; i feel like i've barely been speaking. and not that there's anything wrong with being in listen mode, but i'm used to being louder than this. and braver, which is another story, but another example of how i feel i've been on mute for a while, and i'm not sure why.

things have to change. things are going to change. i can't wait for the wind to blow this winter away. because the return of the sun heralds the start of a sorely needed adventure.

less than ten weeks to go.

rote

the sky is wider when you go north; bluer, too, though i'm not sure if that's a function of atmospheric change so much as it is a question of contrast between earth and sky during mud season. and mud season it was at the rote farm up in maine, where the yawning mud flat that was once the driveway made you understand why it is that most mainers prefer 4WD vehicles. the mud. and the snow. and the wild roads. and the...but i digress.

in honor of my birthday, dom and i decided to make a whirlwind trip upcountry to visit my sister. it's not something i would necessarily recommend to everyone--two days' travel for one day's vacation--but if you have a destination like the rote farm, i can't encourage you heartily enough. go. go now. seven hours is nothing compared to a day on the farm.

the rote farm is beautiful, and sprawling, and a wonderful place to play even when it's surrounded by vast pits of mud. the field adjacent to it is ringed by trees, shielding it from the road; it's heaven for my sister's corgi and her playmate malcolm the labrador, who happily bound through the snow and skid around with abandon. the field is more heavenly for humans in summer, when hammock beckons and the fresh heat demands quality laziness (just do not under any circumstances forget your mosquito repellent), when the lobsters are cheap and the tomatoes are blooming and you can see more stars than you had any idea still existed.

this is not to say that the entire place is more habitable for humans in the summer--far from it. winter means fires in the wood stove, tapping maple trees to make syrup (photographic evidence to come at some point), dogs and cats (including the feline equivalent of me), strong coffee, the world's best four berry pie and the magic of dilly beans, bluegrass jamborees in the living room and much more.

i'll be the first to admit that i'm a complete city slicker (much to dom's chagrin); but sometimes...i definitely see the appeal of going rural. and think that i might even enjoy it once i got past the fact that there is nobody around there who would deliver sushi to me at 10:30pm on a tuesday.

remember two things

1. tomorrow is my birthday.

2. if that news fails to move you in any capacity, i recommend that you instead check out www.stbaldricks.org--it's a charity whose gist is that people get pledges and shave their heads for children's cancer research. my sister is participating this year, so do her (and st. baldrick's) a favor and go make a pledge or a donation. consider it an early birthday present to me and a lot of sick kids.

hussy white, darling. hussy white.

merciful heavens, i just ordered my wedding dress.

next stop: shoes.

the piscean part of my nature rejoices.

explication

okay. so. making good on the promise. i lament that y'all (my lovely viewing audience of two) have probably picked the songs with the least interesting stories behind them to ask about, but nonetheless i shall give their backstory to the best of my ability.

#3: "you didn't warn me that we'd finished whatever this was before it could begin" comes from a song called 'detour,' and it is about a bartender that i very, very briefly dated. he worked at one of my favorite bars in NYC. i went there every monday for ages; he gave me free drinks, we flirted, eventually we went out on a date. it was fun, if a little odd (going out for a drink with a bartender? probably not the most brilliant idea i've ever had). but, it was a good enough time that we set a time to go out again. kind of. though we'd set an initial time, date and place, we didn't end up adhering to it, because he called three times to postpone it. this, naturally, sent my spider sense a-tickin', but because i'm delusional and like to believe the best of people, i showed up on the ultimate appointed date to the cube at astor place. in the rain, just to fully live out the cliche.

he, however, did not. and thus, by taking the pussy's way out of an affair that wasn't even an affair, he joined the pantheon of stars known as "the shivery light brigade of shame."

#8: "kind as vipers, soft as vises." this comes from 'reclamation,' which is as close as i'm likely to come to writing a girl power anthem. really, the only truly significant thing about that line is that i loved the aural double entendre that 'vises' made with 'vices.' i enjoyed that greatly. i wrote the song because i was fed up, as girls so frequently are, with work, boys, feeling helpless and crap. it was kind of a turning point, and remains to this day the only song i've written that was a rock song even when it was just me and the guitar. at least, i think so. now, with a band, it's a super rock and roll juggernaut. and really fun to sing REALLY FAST.

so anyway. those are the stories. probably not as exciting as you'd hoped, but i promise you--they translate much better to song form.

navel gazing

i don't often share what my songs are about, at least not explicitly (though as ray pointed out the other day, you'd have to be an idiot not to know if one is about you; if you know the circumstances, they're fairly specific). i'm not really sure why this is; when i'm feeling lofty, i like to say it's because i don't want to impose my impressions upon the listening audience; each song can be interpreted in its own way and even made applicable to the listener's life. not all songs, and not always. but some and sometimes, and i don't want to taint that.

truthfully, though, it's far more often because i'm too embarrassed to go into actual detail about whatever sordid affair inspired that particular song. sometimes for myself, and sometimes for them. other times i just don't want people to think quite so badly on the people i am lambasteing. mostly, though, i'm just too embarrassed.

however, though, i'm feeling a touch benevolent (or, more to the point, chatty), and so i'm feeling revelatory. if you want to know what a song is about, let me know. i'll shed some light on two songs--chosen from the following list of teasers:

1. i cannot break that promise, because the promise isn't mine
2. your outline started cooling as you slept there by my side
3. you didn't warn me that we'd finished whatever this was before it could begin
4. but i will miss my sunday mornings, i will miss my thursday nights
5. all are forgotten when i'm in the dark with you
6. the skyline's like a heart attack, with several minutes missing now
7. find it hard to focus with my senses tuned like this
8. kind as vipers, soft as vices
9. i'm not sure how you can stand there, bleeding my name
10. now that i've dreamed you i'm certain you'll come true

what say you? what do you want to know?

and, of course, if you want to hear them live, come see the shivs on march 17 (my birthday) in all their technicolor glory!

proof that i am a HUGE GEEK.

i regard being hooked up with an ENTIRE DISC full of fonts as being on par with being given the keys to a ferrari. if you listen really carefully, you can probably hear me squeaking with glee at the fact that i now have in my possession WendyLP, Porcelain AND Galliard Italic.

geek geek geek geek geek.

wishful smelling.

i never fully appreciated it growing up, the fact that northern california winters were comprised of nothing more than four solid weeks of rain. i didn't understand what people were talking about when they spoke of the soul-crushing nature of this endless season; even when i was a kid and lived in canada (land of infinite snow), winter meant sledding, snowball fights and snow days. despite the bone-crushing cold, winter was fun.

then, i moved to new york.

it probably didn't help that i was already fairly depressed when i got here, thrown tail over teakettle into an utterly alien environment and lacking the requisite skills to accomplish such basic survival tasks as making friends. but that part aside, moving to new york caused me to redraw the boundaries of my relationship with winter: whereas once we were the sort of acquaintances that nodded pleasantly in the hall, i was suddenly the bobby briggs to winter's leo johnson--full of attitude but not really able to fight the bully or cope in any meaningful way. and slowly, oh so slowly, getting my ass kicked in a variety of exciting ways.

and so it has gone, in the seven winters since i first lit in this state. winter has been a trial, a season that lasts half the year and manages to suck my soul down into some horrid dark place every time. this year has been particularly bad. the combination of winter and various other things in my life has sent me spiraling into a depression the likes of which i've not really had since i was about seventeen. not the 'oh, i'm going to kill myself' kind of depression; more a 'i don't actually want to do anything at all. ever again' kind of depression. the kind of depression that leads to multiple saturday mornings spent curled on the couch in the fetal position and worried boyfriends asking where your spirit's gone. and a total inability to answer questions like that. an inability to answer the phone or go out. or read books. or write songs. or watch a long movie. or write. or work.

hence, the disgraceful state of my blog. the inside of my head, on those rare occasions it's managed to kickstart itself into generating any sort of abstract thought, has not really been fit for public consumption.

the last week or so has been better; my temper's been a little longer, and i've had the werewithal to do things like cook and see my friends and answer the phone. i'm still tired all the time, and the morning commute continues to make me wish that i lived anywhere but here, and to be perfectly honest the list of things that currently sound worth doing is still pretty short. but getting up in the morning has been a little bit easier the last few days. and i'm almost able to see the point of making myself presentable in the morning. and the first breath of spring is in the air, if you look really carefully for that little whiff of green.

and every now and again, for just a fleeting moment, i feel like it's all going to be okay again. it isn't yet, but it will be. eventually.