THE WICHITA LINEMAN

Losin it

2012-01-19T22:47:00.000-08:00

I think I've lost access to some of my "inner tools." For instance, what's become of my intuition, that inner voice that cuts through all the fat and rises bell-like above the din to provide clear guidance? Lately, I hear so many voices that they drown out whatever pathetic squeak is left of my intuition. I am unable to move forward with any impulses or ideas, because I've come to mistrust my own motives.
Previously, I have found that reflecting on my dreams was a useful tool in illuminating the basic hopes and fears I'd hide from myself in waking life. After awhile, I felt interpreting a dream was easy, and the symbolism nakedly obvious. But now my dreams have taken a strange and indecipherable turn. On a Sunday night I dreamt in grave detail of a man I'd never seen and on the following Wednesday, to my astonishment, he walked into the clinic where I work. I quietly, discreetly flipped out. Another night, I dreamt only one name over and over: Pena Branca. After doing the best I could with some truly horrific Alta Vista Babel Fish translations of Portuguese websites, I deduced that he was a Brazilian indian chief at the time of early Portuguese settlement, and possibly also a spiritual figure. The name could mean white sorrow, white rock, or white feather but means absolutely nothing to me. I don't understand why my subconscious now points me towards foreign wikipedia submissions and previously unknown UC Davis employees, but I'm finding this new mode less personally useful than the old days of bland-but-meaningful symbolism. Where's a good old gut feeling when I need it?

Little Things

2012-01-15T21:52:00.000-08:00

How many books have I read in hopes of learning, once and for all, how to find the zen in my everyday routine? Too many. How many times have I written or said aloud that it's "the little things in life I most enjoy."? Lies! Although, it would be worth my while to appreciate the everyday more, as "everyday" stretches dully before me like a road trip through Kansas. These days I might say, "I'm doing things that my coworkers like to do so that we can talk about it later, at work," or "I tried a new recipe and this one doesn't have yogurt," or "I started drinking a non caffeinated beverage that convincingly mimics the caffeinated beverage it is designed to replace." These conversation starters (enders?) are accurate reflections of the dullness that has spread through my life like a malignancy. My life has been boring for so long, I would think I might be used to it by now. Even when I look back on times that I considered to be exciting, like my freshman year at college, a good percentage of the so-called excitement came from pre-planned "antics" at the dining hall and getting to run errands without my mom. Things aren't actually bad. The trick is to recognize that boring can be good, and recognize it before I take a wrecking ball to all of my hard-won comforts in a misguided effort to pepper my life with "excitement." I know my own patterns well enough to know that after enough time has gone by, I'll look back on this time with bittersweet longing-- this time when I lamented my boredom. I'll think it was a time of simple pleasures--and isn't it the little things in life I most enjoy?

Dinner Tonight: Gateway to Eckhart Tolle Town

2011-12-08T19:14:00.000-08:00

There have been times when negativity twisted me until I was doubled over in paroxysms of self hatred. Tonight is not one of those times, for tonight I made a quesadilla with the best bacon money can buy, white cheddar, and thinly sliced apples. I cooked the quesadilla in the glistening grease left by The Best Bacon Money Can Buy, then coated the whole thing in sweet jalapeno sauce with a loving, almost motherly hand. In cooking this meal, I have taken the first steps on a shamanic journey to higher consciousness, and finally have an inkling of the "divinity within" I've heard so much about.

The divinity within is sitting like a rock in my stomach.

Taking Initiative

2011-11-19T15:14:00.000-08:00

Maybe soon I will do something with my life. I was just waiting until I got really, really pretty. Now my pimples are starting to get wrinkles; I can see that this day is not going to come.

Interdepartmental Romance

2011-10-21T22:23:00.000-07:00

I get migraines. The brain of a migraineur is extremely sensitive to any differences in routine, and even small changes can trigger an attack. For instance, getting up an hour later than usual might trigger a migraine for some. Yesterday at work, an attractive patient asked me out. He wrote "lunch?" on one of his business cards and pushed it over the lip of my desk. I politely declined, and then blushed profusely for half an hour after he left. Usually, the kind of men who try to pick up on me are unwashed, plainly drunk, and trying to get a free ride on Amtrak. I was pretty tickled to garner interest from someone who was both physically attractive and obviously employed-- I am not accustomed. Too tickled I guess, for I got a migraine later that day. This incident points to a grim future. Can I look forward to becoming physically ill when good looking professionals look at me for longer than 30 seconds?

I'm not actually looking to change my current romance situation, but sometimes during the work day I daydream about an interdepartmental romance, like my coworker has. She put in her work order to have a nest of bees removed from the building and 3 years later there's a rock on her finger from the man who showed up to poison them. Daydreaming this way helps pass a time that is mostly spent talking about clearance forms, printing out clearance forms, searching for clearance forms, talking about clearance forms, and boiling the clearance forms into a lumpy, nutritionally void porridge which we then eat.

Key Largo

2011-10-09T01:03:00.000-07:00

My Grandma Nina died in the summer of 2005. We all gathered at AJ Nicoletti Funeral Parlor on a white hot August day in the Sacramento Valley, and were milling around hopelessly whilst awaiting an official cue from the funeral director. Though muddled by grief, I was dimly aware of soft music playing. It was mainly indistinct, inoffensively bland piano, but somehow an instrumental version of that Bertie Higgins song "Key Largo" got into the rotation. I caught the attention of my cousin, thinking this was a funny oversight, and we had some laughter over the cheeziness of the lyrics (which I of course knew). What a stupid song-- a song I'd heard years before, sitting in my grandparents' kitchen while they read the paper, drank weak coffee, and listened to AM 1320, KCTC, Your Music and Memories Station. Then I started to cry.

This song came up on the side bar when I was browsing youtube for similarly stupid songs. Now I'm remembering my Grandma and playing back the funeral and the days surrounding it in my head like a movie. I get a certain sense of relief knowing that I can attach my grief forever to this song, and not The Pina Colada Song, which could have just as easily played in the funeral parlor without much notice.

Ficitional Name Available

2011-09-29T15:02:00.000-07:00

As I child I didn't understand how it worked. Not only did I think it would be relatively simple to go from my stucco box in Sacramento to a glamorous world of evening gowns, butlers, and limousines, but I believed I was destined for it. Adulthood would somehow ignore my origins completely and transform me into a venomous, wealthy temptress with unrivaled beauty and a collection of jewels. In fourth grade, I thought up a name that would better suit my entrance into the Danielle Steele-ish world of dark sophistication in which I would surely move one day. It was Veronica Ludlow. Sadly, adulthood finds me downwardly mobile and looking exactly the same as I did as a child, but with a hook nose. Plus, the more I think about it, Veronica Ludlow is not so much a name for rich beauty as a weird girl at school. She's really nice but you never want to go over to her house because it smells like fish and all the furniture is covered in dog hair and all she wants to talk about are gnomes.

This name is now up for grabs. It might best be used by a children's author who needs a name for the protagonist in a story she's writing about a girl who helps a horse in distress.

Apartment Hunting Follies for the Unemployable and the Ludicrously Hairy

2011-08-22T22:59:00.000-07:00

I'm considering going to Grad School, or at least lying about being a Grad Student so that landlords with the quiet apartments with washing machines will rent to me. I never thought of The Graduate Student as a pillar of respectability the way the Davis landlord does. When my thoughts turn to grad school, as it has been lately, it is out of a pit of desperation that these thoughts arise. I assume that actual grad students were similarly just one breakdown shy of sticking their heads in the oven but applied to a grad school instead-- unstable types-- not someone you want inhabiting your precious, cheap clapboard tinderbox Davis duplex. And yet, the hushed, reverential tone so obvious even in Craigslist ads with the "ideal for grad students and researchers" specification conjurs an image of a monkish figure, working in religious silence by the flickering light of an oil lamp. His face is beautiful and saintly, the ecstasy and the agony of his studies giving him strength of purpose and a strange glow from within like Charleton Heston in a biblical epic.

The rental offerings available to a couple comprised of one undergraduate and one unemployed whatever-I-am are predictably nonexistent. I keep thinking of that fable about the grasshopper who frittered away the summer with enjoyable frolicking while the ants spent every free moment storing food away for the winter. Then the ants get the satisfaction of saying " I told you so" as the grasshopper shivers in the cold of the winter, not a crumb to be found. Whatever. I hate that fable.

Tonight, in response to a craigslist ad for a pretty ideal sounding apartment, I unwittingly called a distant relation who I forgot rented properties in Davis. When she realized to whom she was speaking, she expressed some reluctance to show me the apartment for several reasons, the biggest one being my "heavily bearded" boyfriend might clog up the plumbing. As a concession, she suggested that he might wash his hair in some kind of laundry basin out back. I can't help but think that this conversation could have been avoided, if only I had a masters degree.

2007 Memories: Trysha

2011-08-12T17:59:00.000-07:00

Three or four years ago I drew a hideous comic for my friend about an old, ugly prostitute named Trysha. It was very poorly drawn. Today I found some "notes" I'd made for future Trysha adventures and for the sake of the children I'm not going to draw them. Here they are:

Trysha meets a degenerate when she's coming out of Planned Parenthood, where the clinician turned her away as a lost cause. He pretends to be her daughter's ex boyfriend so he can get into her house and use the shower. He steals the VCR when Trysha falls asleep doing an improvised pole dance which she dubs "Night of the Iguana."

What follows is the an actual Trysha comic, which I share in the spirit of keeping the internet as the best forum to showcase bad choices.

Hypothetical Garage Sale

2011-08-11T02:01:00.000-07:00

My parents have been talking a lot recently about cleaning out various storage areas, ie the garage, my entire bedroom, etc. I can't help but notice an at times hopeful, at times accusatory glance cast my way when they broach this topic. Granted, I admit to storing a fair amount of childhood detritus in their home, but all of my things are heirlooms and very, very tasteful. Why must I come home and start this process for them by throwing out my (still quite precious) belongings? Some of the things they seem to be having a hard time removing are ridiculous. Why wasn't the old toilet taken away after the installation of the new one? It's got its own special spot in the garage like it's a piece of arcane camping equipment. While I guess I've seen worse things at thrift stores, the idea of donating these burdensome, tasteless or useless items seems almost cruel. A garage sale is out of the question (think of us sitting there on the lawn in fold out chairs, the erstwhile family toilet mere feet away with "as is" sticker looking every bit like a pimple on the flush handle). Can you imagine the flyers?

GARAGE SALE! THIS SATURDAY! YOU DON'T WANT TO MISS...

-CANARY YELLOW RIBBED GARBAGE CAN! (standard size)
-BAG O' RAGS, PRE-OILED!
-PLASTIC NIGHTSTAND WITH WOOD GRAIN FINISH! (wood grain paper peeling off in spots, drawers rotten or broken)
-CERAMIC HUMINGBIRDS CANDLE CADDY- curious expressions suggest interest in votive!
-AROMATIC 30YO TOILET!
-HOME DECOR: POSTERS IN COLORED PLASTIC FRAMES! we never cared for them much- from drugstores
-METAL PALM TREES OUTDOOR WALL HANGING!
-PADS OF PAPER FEATURING AREA REALTORS!
-GRAY SYNTHETIC FOOTSTOOL WITH BRASS FEET! stained/sticky
-"EASY TIP" UNSTEADY PLANT STAND!
-ANTIQUE VINTAGE HAIR FRYER!

AND SO MUCH MORE!

Kiss of the Spider Woman: Toys (and Men) From My Childhood

2011-08-02T19:32:00.000-07:00

I'm 80% sure I just fractured my pelvis due to some bicycle clumsiness. My first thought was "will this turn arthritic when I'm old?" my second thought was "have I damaged my internal organs?" and my third thought was, "what of those toys of yesteryear?" Since I foolishly chose not to COBRA my Kaiser coverage when I had the chance, I'm going to ignore those first two thoughts until the pain becomes excruciating. Meanwhile, waltz with me down memory lane to a time when the internet was just for looking up the tacky crap you had as a kid. Share in the spoils of my search!

Popples! Were they insects? I pretended to be into them to gain favor with my cousin, Dominick, who seemed to like them. I had Popples party favors for my 4th birthday, probably due to my competitive and jealous nature that was already rearing its ugly head at that tenderest of ages. "Now I have the most Poppleses!"

Dominick and I both had Nosy Bears because our family members got wise to my insane jealousy after the Popples affair. He had the one with the basketball court in its nose and I had the one with the hypnotic swirl. Dominick is a CPA living in the bay area and I'm unemployed and blogging in my underwear with some dislocated body parts with a box fan blowing . When will the endless comparing end and when will the healing begin? It starts with me, I know it starts with me. Ok, next toy!

Lucky Lemon Lion and Peppermint Kitty from the Yum Yum series. Got these for my fifth birthday, that summer when the house was infested with fleas. The lion was overpoweringly lemon scented. It was hard to play with these two friends together, as the artificial peppermint and lemon scents did not mix well. I should mention that my next-door neighbor, Bobby, got the Peppermint Kitty as well--seems I had ensnared another man in my jealous games-- a wicked spider woman am I!

The premise of this toy is ridiculous and many hysterical explanations can be found elsewhere on the internet. I had the Purr Tender that was disguised as a bunny and the smaller Purr Tenders that Burger King came out with as well. My mother got rid of the big Purr Tender along with some other treasures while I was minding my own business at school one abysmal day in 1992. I've spent every day since then slowly morphing into the perfect revenge: an unemployed, immature 26 year old woman-child with visible armpit hair. Moving on...

Sweetie Kitties--scented purple cats with Barbie hair! Hey, it's not any worse than My Little Ponies, unless the cloying aroma of fake lilac does, in fact, make it worse. There is surprisingly little info about these on the web-- might have to take this one into Deep territory. I had a whole collection of these...and so did Bobby. We had the exact same cats but I would say something like, "yourzis tail is not as brushably soft as minezis." Bobby grew up to be a real problem-- trouble in school, fist fights-- you name it. Was it always in his nature or was it the kiss of the spider woman? I will never know.

Little Miss Makeup. Did I have every toy on the market from 1988 to 1994? I'd like to think that toys were just way cheaper then and turn a blind eye to the possibility that I was spoiled.

Fashion Star Fillies. I didn't think much of this flamboyant blue horse at the time, probably because I got it as a gift and not because I begged for it after seeing it on tv or at another kid's house. I feel a sudden weird impulse to fill my apartment with them now, though. Or maybe wear one as a necklace to a party. Look at me look at me look at me!

Please note: the above listed are just the toys that I don't have anymore. There are roughly 50 remaining toys and stuffed animals waiting in the closet of my childhood bedroom from that garishly colored, artificially scented time. Is it any wonder that I developed psychological issues then that continue to pick up speed?

I leave you, intrepid readers, with a parting shot of Bobby and I at the Funderland amusement park in Sacramento. That little car was no doubt a hotbed of manipulations.

Special thanks to the similarly deranged people behind katrina's toy blog and Ghost of the Doll for jogging my memory.

Thirtysomething? Perpetual Adolescence?

2011-07-25T23:25:00.000-07:00

Is anyone else out there returning home early from the latest noise show, not because it sucked (well, I guess it's better than dub step) but because you need to continue watching Thirtysomething on Netflix Instant Watch? Either I'm doing that thing where I find a way to isolate myself so that I can complain about how lonely I am, or I'm on to something here!

If you haven't watched it, now is the perfect time to get totally absorbed. The styling is so now--now in that 1988 way-- more chambray button ups, well-made oxfords, and pastel southwestern thick knits than you can shake an American Apparel catalog at. I've even been lusting after a set of dishes that hope brought out in episode 11. I came for the style, but I stayed for the emotionally fraught communication. Man can these people emote! Never has television heard so much frustrated sighing, or seen so many tight-lipped looks of disapproval.

One criticism I have of the show is that it seems to imply an inherent flaw in single women-- they are emotionally unsteady or otherwise damaged in some way-- and that's why they are unable to find decent men. It also implies that if only they were to find decent men, life would suddenly be fixed and secure. The protestations that "it isn't really so easy," coming from Hope, the show's key married woman, are weak, considering that she is rewarded with constant physical affection, a house of her own, and a beautiful collection of earrings. Though maybe this is more of a selling point than a criticism, because who doesn't half love that feeling of having your blood boil over a perceived injustice?

If I still haven't sold you on Thirtysomething, then behold Melissa's math equations coat that I covet fiercely, and tell me you don't want to get in on this.

I'll be watching until I run out of seasons, or until I get a job (whichever comes sooner.) Consider joining so that this doesn't become some weird "no one understands my shows" mopefest.

Up next: Northern Exposure. Stay tuned.

Suggestions For Your Jug Band

2011-06-11T22:06:00.000-07:00

To those of you who make your earnings by busking: are you worried that the early American roots/jug band music you've perfected is becoming too hack? Maybe you just haven't taken it to the absolute limits of frustration yet. Take your signature song about a hobo boiling his own shoe and going blind drinking rot gut whiskey, and consider adding an eefing and hambonin' routine! I'm sure you'll find it to be the perfect addition to your set. Bonus: it will make you look really, really poor, and as you know, looking poor is ideal when you are asking for money. Good luck!

Breaking the Loop

2011-05-01T18:09:00.000-07:00

I have experienced a shift in perspective on living in San Francisco. It came with the gradual trickle-in of a few friends, the anticipated arrival of spring, and a potent cocktail of melatonin and 5-htp giving my receptors a warm fuzzy. The fierce loathing and paranoid anxiety died down and what was left behind was bland exhaustion. Newfound "positive" attitude notwithstanding, an opportunity to jump ship came; watch my cannonball!

Initially, I felt some reticence in leaving San Francisco after not quite a year; I thought that maybe I would lose something by a sudden discontinuation of my daily routine (even though my routine filled me with despair and gave me weekly migraines). I was afraid that I hadn't yet learned the lesson, hadn't yet discovered the "reason" for my being in San Francisco, and felt if I left before some oracle divulged it to me then I would be doomed to repeat the cycle of working as a secretary and living in sub par apartments with too many guys on an endless loop. I've been in the new place, a studio I share with just James in Davis, for a little over a week, and can already see that all my reasons for staying in San Francisco as long as I did were motivated by either pride or fear. Oh, and I learned my lesson after all! Of course, it was stupidly simple and I wish I didn't have to have such a crap time in order to get it.
I came up with it myself. It is:

QUIT DOING THINGS YOU DON'T LIKE.

I will miss my SF transplant friends, La Mediteranee, Outerlands, The Painted Bird, Golden Gate Park and The Presidio, but with this move I got myself back-- a worthwhile trade. Maybe some day I will go back once I'm sure there's no danger of me trying to move in with a bunch of 22 year old dudes, work front desk jobs, or otherwise look to punish myself in any way.

Me with Goethe in GG Park in my mom jeans, our last weekend in SF

Grotesques

2011-01-29T22:19:00.000-08:00

Many times in my life I have wondered, "what am I doing here?" and "what am I for?" Fighting the initial, negative instinct that I am completely without purpose and I don't belong where I am, I return again and again to the idea that I must be in this particular place at this particular time to help someone-- that my presence is instrumental in aiding someone in a way that I don't yet understand. It is a vanity and a delusion that persists without any kind of evidence. I've learned many times (and forgotten just as many times) that people don't want you to come up with solutions to their problems when they complain about them; they just want you to listen to them. Take it from me-- your overweight friend does not want you to exercise with her, your coworker does not want you to point out that her crippling insomnia is the result of the 2 gallons of diet coke she consumes daily, your OCD friend doesn't want you to calmly explain how things couldn't possibly be as contaminated as they seem. All that concern of mine just warps into something resembling snobbery or self righteousness. I get frustrated that I can do nothing to reset the course of peoples lives, that all I can do is sit there and listen, feeling more impotent all the time.
It's common for me to actually abandon the relationship or the job, as I can't stand the constant reminders of my own impotence and lack of influence, can't listen any longer. It just seems so cruel that we can only help ourselves. It's the hardest thing to do. I wish that I could help other people and that other people could help me. No luck. So what am I doing here? What am I for?

It occurred to me while watching a bald woman spit seeds into a plastic sandwich bag that I was born for no other purpose than to bear witness to the grotesques that I encounter on the muni, in line at the pharmacy at Kaiser, and lurching down the aisles at Safeway. One day, while riding the bus that takes me to work-- the 24 Divisadero-- an elderly Latino man got on the bus. He was wearing a neat little linen suit and a fedora, and carrying an ornate wooden cane. His eyebrows were drawn on cartoonishly thick with what could have only been a black crayon. He was bald under the fedora, but he drew in a hairline with the same smudgy black crayon. His entire face was covered in a thick layer of petroleum jelly. He looked like a wax doll. Looking at the tired and bored expressions on the faces of the other passengers, I realized no one else noticed him. He was there just for my noticing and I was there just to notice him.

I must belong here in this disgusting city and all my wandering is over.

Demons

2011-01-05T18:50:00.000-08:00

For an embarrassingly long time in my life, I would not go to sleep unless the mirror in my bedroom was covered with a sheet. It's hard to remember how many years this went on--probably well into high school-- as the ritual was as essential as brushing my teeth, and I gave little thought to it other than it had to be done. Failure to perform the mirror covering left me at the mercy of Bloody Mary who, in my version of the legend, needed no provocation to pass through the mirror and seize me. Over time, the evil witch in the mirror has been relegated only to bathroom mirrors, where her potency hasn't really diminished (at 25 I still won't go into a bathroom without first turning on the light, and even then I won't look in the mirror). I was reflecting on this insanity recently, wondering why this remains scary when all other childhood bogeymen have faded away long ago. I realized that, like a lot of people, the things that scare me the most appear when I'm deep inside of myself. Naturally, an evil presence that is activated when I'm looking into a mirror, looking at myself, would be especially real to me.

Last night, in the delirium of migraine, I told my boyfriend that I wished we could go into a spaceship when it was time to go to sleep, where our brains would both be plugged into the same program. That way, we could be together as we slept, instead of him drifting off and me staying awake, alone with my worries that overpower me when no one is around to challenge them.

Reflecting on the Bloody Mary fear and the anxiety of insomnia has left me with a realization that I find troubling: I hate being alone, because I hate the sounds of my own thoughts, and am more afraid of knowing myself than of anything else in this world. I am afraid to pursue my interests, because doing that would leave me alone with myself in the creative act-- I am afraid to spend that kind of time with myself. The longer I spend doing a job I hate, living an a place I don't like, etc, the further away I get from myself, and the harder it makes it to return.

New year's resolution: Cut it out.

The Bouche

2010-11-01T18:06:00.001-07:00

Why MacFrugal's was changed to Big Lots I'll never understand. A better name might be Ugliest Available Everything. I didn't know I had a certain taste in alarm clocks, laundry hampers and slop rags until I went into this store and found all of their offerings to be unsuitable/hideous. I wanted to take a picture of the object that best symbolized what I felt to be the prevailing aesthetic at Big Lots-- an oversized, clear plastic, lumpy, guitar-shaped container filled with neon orange cheddar cheese flavored popcorn with a highly stylized airbrush rendering of Elvis on the front-- but I wanted to leave more.

This was not my first brush with Big Lots, nor will it be my last, as my memory will lapse and I'll go there to look for an affordable coffee grinder again someday. In 7th Grade, Kim Danko's mom took us to MacFrugal's and we bought a plastic comb with orange wax heaped onto the base. The idea was that you drag it through your hair and it leaves an "edgy" looking orange streak that I'm sure would have looked really great offset by about 12 butterfly clips, a zig-zag part, and body glitter (the chunky kind). What in fact happened was the wax ripped our hair out and so what we had then was a plastic comb with clumps of hair embedded in a wax chunk. We called it The Bouche and tormented each other with it on weekends. I'd like to think that this relic of our tween years is buried deep in a Caboodle filled with Wet n' Wild nail polishes, ready to ruin some upholstery or melt in the backseat of a minivan when the mood takes us.

The California Lifestyle

2010-10-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

...every religious man places himself at the Center of the World and by the same token at the very source of absolute reality, as close as possible to the opening that ensures him communication with the gods. But since to settle somewhere, to inhabit a space, is equivalent to repeating the cosmogony and hence to imitating the work of the gods, it follows that, for religious man, every existential decision to situate himself in space in fact constitutes a religious decision.
-Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Prophane

I used to refer often to what I called the California Lifestyle. Loosely defined, it means doing whatever I want to do, while also having peace of mind, enough to eat, and proximity to nature. To me, it is akin to the feeling of first falling in love-- a state of constant ecstasy. I always felt that this could not be achieved anywhere but in California. Of course, any person with the most cursory knowledge of psychology will tell you that it can't be achieved anywhere or at all. Still, I maintain that it is even more impossible outside of California, where your chances of 75 degree sunny days, season notwithstanding, become very slim.

Version one of the California Lifestyle was something I fabricated in high school, and thanks to a blossoming obsession with Richard Brautigan, it was extremely San Francisco-centric. I had probably been to San Francisco a total of three times, so it lent itself beautifully to fictionalization and idealization. In this version, I was making a living as a writer, cataloging many charmingly absurd occurrences and thoughts like so many Brautigan narrators, and living on California Street in San Francisco. I had it in my head that if I lived on California Street I would have reached the apex of what it means to be a Californian in terms of the sacred California Lifestyle, and a greater understanding of humanity and all the cosmos would be revealed to me from the hallowed halls of some oddly affordable, sunlit bay-windowed Queen Anne.

I spend 5 days a week on California Street, working in that Victorian. As the 24 bus labors up the hills, I see that the gods of California have eluded me again, having fled with the California Lifestyle to a cabin in Bolinas... or something.

Totally the Same Only Writ Large

2010-10-01T23:36:00.000-07:00

During a bout of rare lucidity attained through what I'm guessing was stroopwaffle consumption, I pondered the course of events from May to September. I left my life as an underpaid dental office employee dwelling in a house full of dudes, only to arrive...at another dental office, another house full of dudes. Granted, now I am not so underpaid, as some of the dentists I work for are high profile in some surprising ways (see video below) and, naturally, I live with different dudes. Still, it seems that my daring attempt at changing the course of my life was, in fact, a complete circle and, in essence, a failure.

Some positive improvements:
-great AM oldies radio station... all the hits in mono!
-less financially destitute
-my boyfriend likes it here
-I think this time around we're going to actually get a desk instead of just talking about how we wished we had one

I hope to learn soon whatever lesson was intended in repeating my previous dissatisfying mediocrity so that my life won't become an unfunny Groundhog Day knockoff with my unflattering harem pants acting as a poor substitute for Bill Murray's charisma.

The Dreamgirls and Conversely, Me

2010-08-16T17:40:00.000-07:00

I saw a pair of dreamgirls the the other day. Both of them were thin, probably about 27, with slightly dirty, messy strawberry blonde hair pulled up into top knots, with large, shiny geometric bright hammered brass and wood earrings. They each had one or two small hair clips with abalone inlay embedded in their hairdos, and they each had on dark blue denim skinny pants that looked impeccable and expensive. The one that was slightly prettier with extremely clear skin had on a gauzy top with different pink shades in a painterly design, with a similarly gauzy bright yellow scarf coiled around her neck like attractive plumage. The other girl was slightly less pretty but made up for it with tasteful ornamentation-- two-toned oxfords instead of plain brown, one extra bead in the earrings, a few extra patterned textiles sewn into the hems of her garments. Her cozy looking boxy sweater was the exact same shade of yellow as the first girl's scarf. They sat at Philz chatting for awhile before mounting two bikes that were twins in their nondescriptness and rode slowly down Folsom, best friends.

Everywhere in San Francisco there are dreamgirls, with coils of ropey hair up in top knots or cascading down alpaca-sweatered shoulders, with long legs emerging from perfectly worn leather shoes, striding gazelle-like down these chewing-gum and spit cobbled streets towards lives of almost yogic aesthetic harmony, or, at least, towards bay window apartments filled with healthy succulents and sun-faded tapestries and Ouspensky books. Do they even suspect that they are the dreamgirls?

Of course I'm wildly insecure and I'm going through one of my dumpy, androgynous (but not in a provocative way) phases in my 13 year long adolescence, replete with a growing-out short haircut that now resembles a toupee designed to mimic the look of your dad in 1986 and pants that are in all ways circumspect, so the constant presence of attractive people leads me to make dangerous and foolish self-comparisons. Comparing, as I have learned from years and years of doing it, is synonymous with coming up short, and try as I may to learn that my self esteem and acceptance has to come from within it is proving to be a very hard lesson to learn.

It is a lesson I should have learned when I watched that modernized ugly duckling cartoon when I was faking sick at age 7. Nickelodeon took the character outside the traditional world of Hans Christian Andersen, where the animated duckling winds up on an adventure with a fast-talking wolf or fox in some kind of traveling medicine show/biker gang atmosphere. I don't remember if he even changes into a swan in the end. the point of the movie, from what I could gather at that tender age, was not an eventual payoff of finally attaining physical beauty after years of painful ugliness, but the journey towards self value. At an early point in the film (when our hero is yet to be convinced of his self worth) at the fox's suggestion the duckling sings in a plaintive tone, "I like myself, I like myself. I want you to know, I like myself." So I feel like this stage of self development for me is very much akin to the cartoon duck's at that point-- I'm kind of half-heartedly muttering self affirmations while still secretly waiting for that beautiful swan payoff that never comes! But hell, if that duck can learn to like himself (at least I think that's what happens) then there's no reason I can't!

Look out SF, I'm going to start leaving the house soon!

The Call of Nature and The Call to Serve

2010-08-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

Back in 2005 I needed badly to use a restroom on a day trip to San Francisco. Naive as I was, I thought nothing of using one of those cylindrical, self-cleaning public pay toilets downtown. Upon inserting my quarter, such unspeakable horrors of humanity greeted my stunned senses that I ran out, unrelieved, and refused to even speak of what I saw for years afterwards. Let's just say the self-cleaning mechanism malfunctioned and either one person or many people and one blind, violently ill bear retaliated by leaving steaming mounds of liquefied fecal matter in all kinds of places in addition to the overflowing toilet, and that's the least troubling thing I noticed.

More recently, a lengthy battle with moderate constipation (and an unhealthy desire to talk about it constantly to whoever will listen) made finding comfortable public places to poop an issue of utmost importance (and a refreshingly frank icebreaker!)

With these distressing incidences now behind me, I want to unveil my latest (only known recorded) effort at helping my fellow man: a google map of places in San Francisco with comfortable public restrooms, conducive to "letting it rip." Consider this an open call for all you folks who are familiar with the area to contribute your favorite places to the map. Maybe if people had better knowledge of the adequate restrooms available, they'd be less inclined to defecate on every square inch of sidewalk in my neighborhood. Wishful thinking?

How I Wound Up in San Francisco

2010-08-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

I am guilty of integrating the lyrics to popular oldies into an already illogical philosophy of life where anything "romantic" takes precedence over everything else, including my own best interest. A pivotal song has been Glady's Knight and the Pipps' "Midnight Train to Georgia," specifically the line, "I'd rather live in his world than be without him in mine," which I recognized immediately as an applicable truth, and has formed the deranged nucleus of every decision I've made for the last 6 months or more.

Little Cable Cars Or Whatever

2010-07-30T20:51:00.000-07:00

Have you ever run away from your old life in pursuit of something more satisfying, only to find that your new life is comprised totally of sleeping in uncomfortable places, trying to dodge disgusting blobs of god knows what on every conceivable surface, and trying to arrange free rides back to where you used to live... or free rides in general?

I am trying to learn to like San Francisco, because I live there now. It has been difficult, as it feels like I've arrived here less by choice and more because it was the only thing available. Also, everyone is either a really hot young woman or a sinister troll covered in boils, and I can't tell which is more personally threatening to my sense of security. Perhaps eventually I'll see the avoidance of human fecal matter every three feet on the sidewalk as a fun strategy game, and remember the romantic regard in which I held San Francisco for years before I knew how gross it is.

I plan to make future posts citing examples of ways I've learned to like it here. So far, I really like Philz Coffee, as it was instrumental in ending that month long bout of constipation that many of you know of via facebook. Stay tuned for more poor taste and big city adventures!

Glamour, Romance and Food Stamps

2010-07-15T15:29:00.000-07:00

I understand people are lonely. I understand the desire to reach out to other people and pull them into your life. What I don't understand is trying to pick up on girls in line for government aid.

I spent 5 hours in line at the Sacramento County Office not long ago, waiting to receive food stamp benefits. During this time I received, in addition to $200 dollars monthly, unwarranted male attention. I was looking kind of raggedy and asexual and feeling kind of ashamed and financially downtrodden, and was expecting everyone else to feel the same. Evidently, having no money, job, or prospects whatsoever does not diminish confidence or deter the spirit of sexual adventure for some. After being aggressively ogled by a young man who resembled in every way a real-life Bobby Hill, I finally walked outside to discourage him from taking a suddenly empty seat within gripping distance of my bare thigh. I was gone no longer than 30 seconds when Bobby Hill appears, obviously having followed me. "I don't blame you for leaving," he said. "What?" I stammered. Could it be that he knew how creepy he has been and is coming out to apologize? "I said I don't blame you for leaving to stretch your legs," he said, practically right on top of me. Then, without any perfunctory getting-to-know-you smalltalk, he offers to give me a ride home. I declined politely but vehemently, imagining him making 3am slow drives past my address, or worse! While I pretended to be fascinated by anything that took my gaze miles away from the spot he was standing, he tried to charm me by referencing times he "blew stuff up" in the army, probably in hopes that I would get some sense of the roiling testosterone and rugged masculinity seething just below the surface, the surface being, of course, shaved completely bald and very, very doughy. Fortunately, my name was called over the loudspeaker before we could get to know each other any better. Following shortly afterword, a man maybe 20 years my senior with speech patterns reminiscent of drug use asked me if I wanted to go grab a beer when the process was over. I wondered, briefly, where he got his beer money, realized I was probably going to end up buying it, and declined the offer.

So ladies, take a lesson from ol' Mama Rach. Don't feel ashamed if you are down on your luck and in between jobs. If you are lacking in confidence, just march on down to your local human services department. Even if you aren't eligible for aid, if you look even 3% better than an obese person, gender indeterminate, wearing a stained t-shirt of Tweety Bird looking pissed in a backwards cap you could get hit on a ton!

Scrap Everything Pt. 3

2010-06-27T16:46:00.001-07:00

In addendum to a previous post: The vacation is over.
I have foggy memories of leisurely walks in Palo Alto, musing over Ritter Sport varietals-- did it really happen, or was it just a dream? We've spent what feels like a long time garnering experience for a lifestyle guide entitled Exhausting Your Resources and Wearing Out Your Welcome. Some noteable chapters include, Chapter 1: Is Your Mom Cool With Us Staying Here?

We've bounced from Palo Alto to Santa Cruz to San Francisco to Davis and now, back to Sacramento, thanks in part to the kindness of friends and family, and to our own inability to make any plans come to fruition. These times have not been without fun, but were tinged all the same with stress over not knowing where to land. Once we finally decided, OK, we're going to Portland, a comic misunderstanding with our ride left us without a ride at all. I hesitate to write what our next tentative course might be, as we seem to be at high risk for jinxing. There have been only two constants in our lives, and they are the World Cup and the film and television career of Kyle MacLachlan. These minor consistencies are comforting in this uncertain time.

Ritter Sport: New Flavor Suggestions

2010-06-09T20:32:00.000-07:00

Ritter Sport is one of my favorite chocolates, conveniently located in the impulse buy section at fine grocery stores. They have the expected fillings, as well as some more exotic choices, such as Yogurt or Cornflakes. As I snacked merrily away on the Ritter Sport Milk Chocolate with Butter Biscuit this afternoon, I thought of some other flavors, sure to be popular:

FRENCH'S FRENCH FRIED ONIONS- familiar crunchy pizazz is not limited to casseroles anymore!

BEEF N CHEDDAR/SLOPPY JOES- the savory, stick to your ribs chocolates for men that eat like a meal

JALAPENOS- the chocolate with sabor from south of the border.

MACADAMIA CRUSTED HALIBUT- Your evening plans for a fine dining experience at Chili's with the gals fell through, but you can still savor this "catch of the day" chocolate

BENADRYL- Who says warding off allergy symptoms can't be decadent and indulgent? May cause drowsiness, definitely causes a flavor sensation.

ACTUAL BEES- "live from the hive"and enrobed in milk chocolate, for a sweet "sting" that stays with you. Pairs well with the Benadryl Ritter Sport.

Scrap Everything Pt 2: Done!

2010-06-08T13:58:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, we didn't really scrap everything so much as stuff it into our parents' houses as the prologue to a novel entitled Your Worst Nightmare, Mom and Dad! Chapter one details the packing of several pounds of beans, musical equipment, and a suitcase containing some ill-fitting 90s jeans (not the best decision) and big silly shirts into the trunk of our friend Yan's Prius heading towards an unoccupied condo in Palo Alto. Since then it's been endless hikes,trips to the beach (Half Moon Bay, Bolinas), poolside lounging, playing music, and of course, bean-based cuisine. Gone is that familiar anxiety-based stomachache-- it has been replaced entirely by beans. Had I known that quitting my job would be so luxurious, I would have quit long ago.

Up next: planning our next move for when the vacation's over/we run out of money.

Finding Ourselves in The Great American West (Broke and Homeless!)

2010-05-17T16:28:00.000-07:00

"The old wage-slave mentality of renting ourselves to our jobs for eight hours a day to cover the essentials of life is giving way to the awareness that work is an integral part of our lives. Therefore the quality of our lives and the quality of our work-time are one in the same." -Michael Phillips

I instantly regarded the above quote, read late one night from one of the many new agey self help books that surround me like fortress of tranquilizing weird, as a message of approval from the spirit in the sky for my new life plan. I use the word plan without much regard for its meaning, for as I write this, the "plan" may or may not involve using the deposit money to procure a Vanagon with a working stove and drive it to destination TBD, and may or may not change with our next few gulps of beer. Three things are for certain: We have quit our jobs, our last day in the house is May 31st, and James has purchased a pound of beans and a pound of coffee to get us through the uncertain lean times ahead.

recommended reading: Chop Wood, Carry Water: A Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everday Life,

Where "Freedom" Means "Self Imprisonment" and "Total Enclosure"

2010-05-12T02:08:00.000-07:00

My favorite misheard lyrics are from Madonna's Get Into The Groove. "Only when I'm dancing can I feel this free/ At night I lock the door where no one else can see," becomes, to me, "All I ever wanted was to feel this free/At night, I lock the door and throw away the key."

from 12/20/06

2010-04-18T20:20:00.000-07:00

I want someone to carefully preserve their memory of me, to press it carefully between pages and then hold it, thin and fragile between their fingers and ache for me.

Scrap Everything

2010-04-09T15:34:00.001-07:00

I just finished a journal. A quick reread betrayed the true identity of what I egotistically think of as my ongoing memoir to be a crude roster of unfinished (unstarted?!) projects and half-baked schemes to get out of my job/town, some of which aren't even mine, all of which wither in infancy. It is also a chronicle of the life and times of My Boyfriend-- sometimes like a detailed report on the habits of a rare and fascinating bird, and sometimes a book of devotional hymns. Those many journals, those glorified shopping lists and unreadable half remembered dreams, might never be protected by some literary society devoted to exclusive study and preservation of my "works," and this kills me a little. I am terrified of the ordinariness of my life. I find myself eating a lot of couscous and watching Curb Your Enthusiasm on the internet and longing for something more-- it is hard for me to live these down times in between great acts of instability and profound tenderness, where I'm just riding my bike to the grocery store and doing laundry. I don't know how I got to this point where I feel like any time I'm not experiencing the emotional equivalent of getting shot out of a cannon is merely biding my time, but being immersed in a society of constant thrill-seeking doesn't really help. I think it's time to scrap everything and cool it out in some oceanside retreat, fill those journals with crummy drawings of dolphins with "om" coming out of a speech bubbles and snacks that I like and just forget it.

Excitement

2010-03-13T22:09:00.000-08:00

Having left my yoga-coma only to realize that what I'm wearing is suggestive of mental illness, I'm following directions on How To Make A Dinner printed on the back of a jar of curry (had to get detailed reminders from 2 people on how to make rice) while alone in the house blasting the local R&B and Old Skool station. Later, I'll walk to a party and hope that accumulated sips of other people's drinks will create a slight buzz. I will desperately search the room for some chatchky or houseplant to make disparaging remarks about in hopes that a better conversation will follow or that a younger girl will make a scene and alleviate the need for conversation. This is about as much excitement as I can stand, or afford on my paycheck.

This blurb was going to be a Facebook "status update" and the last sentence was going to be "See ya then!" but it was too long. I have pasted it here, against better judgment, to give you, gentle reader, a glimpse into an oft-repeated scene in the gradual encroachment of The Late 20s onto an unprepared host.

Unused Titles for Motivational Speaking Tapes-- FREE GIVEAWAY

2010-02-19T22:49:00.001-08:00

Tonight I spent some time making a tape for an extended car ride I plan on taking instead of going out (trend emerging?) I taped over what I'm guessing was a motivational tape with financial improvements being the main focus called Stalking Your Goals by Zig Ziglar. I was inspired to write some titles in the same style. They are categorized by motivational effectiveness where GOOD means aggressive and BAD means anything else.

GOOD
Attacking Your Goals
Viciously Mauling Your Goals
Sneaking Up On and Ambushing Your Goals
Gaining A Stranglehold on Your Goals
Kidnapping Your Goals and Holding Them For Ransom
Tapping Your Goals' Phone
Breathing Down The Necks of Your Goals
Making Harsh Accusations Towards Your Goals
Holding Your Goal's Face Just Inches From a Pile of Dog Shit While Calling It A Fag

BAD
Gently Nibbling On The End of Your Goals
Coyly Flirting With Your Goals
Savoring Your Goals
Do It Tomorrow: Thinking About Making A List of Your Goals
Enrobe Your Goals in Luscious Milk Chocolate
Wear Your Goals On Your Sleeve
Winking From Across the Bar at Your Goals
Remembering Dreams You Had About Your Goals
Leaving Your Goals Notes Around The House
Sexual Astrology of Your Goals
Aiming Low: Goal Diminishment
Your Husband's Goals and How You Can Help Him Achieve Them

summer of?

2010-02-17T22:26:00.000-08:00

Age ten early summer vh1 on the tube in the den sea monkeys half-glowing in their specialized aquarium underneath the green shade of the office lamp (the kind bookkeepers and card players used in movies from and about the 1940s) varying itchy shades of tan upholstery scratching bare legs on the couch eating ice cream sandwiches (the neopolitan kind, chocolate part eaten first to get it out of the way, strawberry best for last) drawing in a mead notebook with a sticker of a bear wearing braces on the front. What was I even doing then and why did I have to perform that ritual there nightly? It seemed so beautiful and rapturous, like once I found something in that combination of objects, sounds and circumstances and if I did it over and over I could unlock it again and slip inside. I was acutely aware of childhood's impending end but also aware of lingering childhood. I occupied a liminal space throttling the gulf between and it was nostalgia and hope for the future mixed.

I've tried to write about being ten that summer at so many different stages of my life, with fluctuating degrees of understanding, never fully achieving the desired results-- to feel that way again.

August 13, 2009

Valentine Options

2010-02-14T18:11:00.000-08:00

Option 1: Go out dancing; it's the weekly funk night all your friends love!

Option 2: Stay home and draft end times manifesto in huge sprawling print until all wits are lost, most of the pages just say "MY VAIN GLORY" on them and are soaked at the corners with saliva, then gripping them in hot fists and flying down the street until falling down at the feet of a middle aged woman walking a pug hybrid. I view her unflappable serenity as proof that she will soon be diefied, so I sputter "Please! The answers!" as fluid oozes from all my facial orifices.

I've put on my dancing shoes but my plans are still very much up in the air.

2/18/10 edit:
totally did both.

Pure Emotion Translated Through Technology/ Check Out This Animation

2010-02-05T12:22:00.000-08:00

Long before my unwavering devotion was ever legitimized by actual dating, I created this tumblr as a frenetic ADHD internet love poem to my boyfriend. My love for him is best characterized as adolescentobsessional, allowing me to sustain that early creepiness many months into a real relationship, propelling me past the laundry, dishes and dollars follies into which so many romantic feelings become mired . He is a partner/friend and also a celestial visitation that materialized in my realm after wishing him into existence some days after I was born and every day since then. I've been reluctant to make this post because it lays bare some serious vulnerability-- celestial visitations are typically fleeting-- and I feared setting myself up to someday write an unreadable entry on profound loss. I'm throwing caution to the flatulent wind and celebrating love-feelings on this pre-formatted web template! My first (and last) sentence was originally going to be, "Check out this sweet cartoon my boyfriend is working on!" but something else came out instead. Woops! Enjoy...

Ways to Enjoy the Present: Crab Feeds

2010-01-25T20:17:00.000-08:00

I think the glare of the cell-phone camera adds a nice sheen to the deli meats, don't you? If you are at all enticed by the "antipasto platter" to your left then you should consider dropping $30 dollars at your local neighborhood crab feed, where all this and more (and more, and more...) can be yours. Crab feeds are lucrative fundraisers for churches and social clubs and seem to be very popular around here, especially to Italian Americans and the 50 and up crowd. I sometimes like to go to them with my family, who have been hitting the crab feed circuits since the early part of the 1980s. The first rule of crab feeds, it seems, is to never diverge from this order:

1. Amble into gym, locate picnic table at which your family is seated, and sit there. Tie on provided plastic bib with crab illustration. Make smalltalk with people who aren't your immediate family but are at your table by some grave mistake. Try to identify "problem" diners by asking leading questions like "You big into crab?"
2. The antipasto platter and several carafes of red table wine arrive (see photo, above). The problem diners make hideous displays of greed and all the mortadella goes missing before the antipasto platter even brushes the table. Plan strategies against them for later.
3. Iceburg lettuce salad with a cherry tomato. Pass.
4. Soup. Minestrone or Clam Chowder. Right around this time the true crab feed hobbyists will procure their supplies from some carefully concealed kit-- individual butter melters, personalized crab crackers, and other things you didn't realize were so essential until you saw them and felt envious.
5. Rigatoni
6. After the rigatoni, a sort of Christmas Eve anticipation can be felt throughout the gym as diners notice the crab feed volunteers suddenly pick up the pace. The crab is HERE in the building!
7. Bucket after bucket of crab arrives like you've just won the lottery in a dream. Wrestle away legs and claws from the problem diners and eat until you no longer like the taste of crab (usually about 3 buckets in). Here is another glamourous cell phone photo of the carnage. What you're seeing is the small plate left behind after a volunteer had cleared my big plate. Greedier denizens will now start putting uneaten crab into baggies that are hidden in their purses for some fake homebound relative.
8. Mutter "why did I do that?" under your labored breath as an eternal raffle announces its gift baskets and spa days into infinity.
9. Chocolate icecream with wooden spoons like you'd get at the ballpark, tastes like wood and a faint childhood memory of chocolate.
10. Without much warning a dj appears and a disco ball is lowered. Hits from my grandparents' youth are on. Elderly couples emerge from the labyrinthine tables with smiling faces, no doubt thinking "it's great to be active still!" looking every bit like actors in a commercial for bone loss drugs.
11. Disco and r&b hits, alternately drunken dancing or leaving.
12. terrible terrible gas

Lurks in the Harddrive

2010-01-18T21:35:00.000-08:00

In the process of backing up most of my computer (I anticipate and would almost be relieved by a crash), I found this word document.

So I'm sitting here in a silver lame and electrical tape Barbarella costume exuding 60s mascara hairspray in front of a computer screen with library books (most of them untouched) all around me, trying to come up with a paper on Pan-Africanism and pulp fiction. It's halloween. I'm nostalgic for things I never thought I'd be nostalgic for: a big sleazy house with a big sleazy party, to come home at 3am reeking of booze, B.O. and cigarrettes, and have a stomach queazy with romantic uncertainty. I'm bored. And I don't give a fuck about Pan-Africanism or pulp fiction.

Wait. Someone in the next room just yelled, “Grab my nipple, bitch. Grab my nipple.”
Things are looking up.

.
Halloween, 2006.
Adolescence Eternal

Friends Reduced to (Or Exalted As) Dream Symbology in 2k10

2010-01-07T20:25:00.000-08:00

I had a dream recently wherein I want to say "an old boyfriend" but that wouldn't exactly be right... let's say instead a fascinator from my old co-ed days had gotten married and I found myself at an informal reception held in the happy couple's honor in a sprawling southern style mansion with creeping vines and a wide verranda. The house was the at the end of a country road that I often travel on in dreams that are going to include alien feelings and a party that I'm trying to leave. This union came as quite a shock to me, for when I knew him this fellow was more the rambling type that Joni Mitchell would have written a song about, embittered, after a brief but memorable affair (and here I am, too, with pen in hand) than the sort to go tying the knot. As he chatted amiably with guests and barbecued, I combed the house for a Sega Genesis where I spent the remainder of the dream playing a made-up, side-scrolling dream game comprised of blurry little ghosts with blurry objectives.

The video game portion of the dream was probably a gift from my boyfriend's subconscious to mine as we slept. The earlier portion was probably brought on by a meeting with a high school friend who told me he was living in an honest to goodness house in a neighborhood inhabited mainly of parents. He then introduced me to his fiancee. We were at the grocery store. I was probably wearing a big wooly nightmare and clutching something like a $12 homeopathic ointment for fungal itching, I don't really remember and it isn't important. "Are we really that age?" I kept thinking for the rest of the day and any other time friends of mine seem to be accepting adult responsibility for the direction of their lives with confidence and grace. Could it be that I'm holding myself back by subscribing to a limiting myth of myself as possessing an attractiveness as a member of society and a general set of abilities akin to those possessed by a urine-soaked lunatic? And yet, subscribing to this myth is deliberate in the sense that being viewed as capable and successful in the eyes of a society with which I often have trouble identifying holds little appeal. I'd like to believe that it is possible to achieve success by a definition more intrinsically human (more humanistic?) than what is currently offered by society... some sense of satisfaction brought on by finally becoming what you always were...or something? I was going to launch into the movie Slacker and why I had a hard time watching it (because I identified with it) but on second thought I think that review would be a redundant addition to this topic.

See you in my dreams,
R.

Badly Timed Holiday Theme Post

2009-12-28T17:30:00.000-08:00

Let's hark back to 3 days ago, when the blue bird was being replaced with the new bird and your diet was comprised solely of butter and sugar. Gentle readers, please tolerate a holiday themed post now; I was too thoroughly sodden with hot toddies and bombarded by family togetherness (mine, other peoples') to make one when it was still pertinent. By now you've reacquainted your body with vegetables, washed the new socks, lost your ipod nano and come up with some creative reuses for gift bags such as giving them back to your mom or throwing them in the garbage. But have you stuffed an orange with cloves yet or combed the youtube vaults for Christmas commercials from your childhood? Do it now before your Christmas tree becomes a fire hazard and you have to toss it into the gutter like an old wino! Here I'll help:

This Fruity Pebbles Christmas commercial is completely burned into my brain, taking up a lot of valuable hard drive space I could use to remember my grandparents, learn another language or understand simple spacial relationships.

In this Folger's commercial, the handsome eldest son sneaks into his parents house after a prolonged absence, delighting everyone by brewing coffee crystals. His alleged break-in is never addressed.
allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344">

I don't really remember this commercial from childhood. I found it while looking for the Fruity Pebbles one and was captivated/grossed out.

Merry Christmas belated!

Addendum to Season of Giving: Christmas Ants

2009-12-13T00:20:00.000-08:00

There was an office cocktail party tonight for which my mother urged me to "dress sexy," meaning in an outfit she provided.
The boys trooped off to San Francisco for a night of punk rock or something and won't be back until tomorrow.
The house is infested with ants.

That's why now I'm laying supine in a velvet skirt suit with shoulderpads, wondering whether or not I should booby trap the entrances with some kind of tried and true saucepan and fishing line combo or just continue to watch youtubes of Sade. I snacked merrily away all night on bacon wrapped almond stuffed dates and kahlua mudslides because I thought overeating in public was "festive." Now I am a little sick. Additionally, ants are crawling all over me. There are no ant free zones, but I wanted to share this brief holiday story about how my boss' girlfriend slipped me an envelope with penguins on it as we were leaving the party, which I chose to open in the car. Encased in that envelope I expected to find nothing more than a card with penguins on it but found also $200. So touched was I by this unexpected generosity that I burst immediately into tears. I then decided that sharing Hallmark-ish yuletide sentiments through broken sobs to an audience of just my mom as the rain beat on the Accura was appropriate. My bad-- sorry for the outburst, Mom! Now I can stop thinking about how I'm going to afford to buy gifts and start thinking about switching to a birth control pill with a lower hormone dosage.

Season of Giving

2009-12-03T16:29:00.000-08:00

I assumed that once I got a job I would be able to afford grandiose gestures of generosity. This hasn't been the case, but I still managed to pick up a few "choice" items.

1. a 2010 calendar book that says "Teamwork" and the name of a local periodontist in gold against a background of grey and black hikers.
BONUS: -could be mistaken for a fancy organic chocolate bar
-smells like mothballs

2. secondhand socks, brown
BONUS: -barely smell at all

While the aforementioned presents will be reserved for my dearest loved ones, or, failing that, a white elephant gift exchange, ANYONE who gives me their address will receive a Christmas card picturing a cat sleeping in front of a garishly decorated fireplace. Go ahead, leave it in a comment or email it to yourfriend.rach@gmail.com

$$$$

2009-11-29T15:02:00.000-08:00

As coffee steamed in our Garfield mugs, the bf and I mused, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could go to Santa Cruz, get to the ocean for awhile?" Already I could see us zipping through the forest with something inoffensively jangly on the radio, wind whipping tendrils of hair around our smiling faces, and the faintest whiff of saltwater beginning to scent the air. The trunk is filled with Mexican blankets, film cameras, and good intentions. Whose car is that, I wonder, transporting us through this dream? Neither of us have one, nor could we afford to get one even if we pooled our resources, not with the prices of insurance and gas... Amtrak prices, too, are exorbitant. Flying is out of the question. Do all the people who ask me to come visit them have rich parents or real jobs? Does travel to them require no more thought than remembering to put the tickets in their pockets? So many dream canvases are ruined this way, punctured and ripped through by a sharp and intimidating dollar sign. I wish I had some money-- not a ton-- just enough to leave town if I felt like it, and buy some nice Christmas presents for the people whose generosity I've probably exploited while "living on my own."

Someday when I'm rich and famous for blogging, gluing googly eyes onto inanimate objects, and fretting inside my duplex, there will be some kind of grand repayment to all those people that make my life easier, probably in the form of an awards banquet/ comedic roast hosted by Alf where there are ostentatious giveaways under the seats ala Oprah. Until then, I'm hoping for an It's A Wonderful Life inspired rediscovery of all the things and people in my life that are precious after a frightening journey led by an unearthly visitor conjured by my own childish complaints.

A Slow Meltdown

2009-11-19T13:00:00.000-08:00

Here is a list of the most recent songs played on Sacramento's Mix 96 radio station. Coincidentally, it is also a list of the Songs I Never Need To Hear Again. Several (all) songs by Journey, Eagles, and Billy Joel who have not yet appeared on the former list deserve special recognition for topping the latter.

Saturday Night Cloister/Total Brain Rot

2009-11-14T20:27:00.000-08:00

I made these on the 1994 macintosh emulator. I wonder how many other people are thirsty for human contact but are at home on a saturday night tinkering with outmoded software because they envision many terrors lurking in the autumnal shadows, the most horrific of which include:
1. an unholy combination of rotweillers, knives, junior-high age males and quicksand
2. conversational lulls
3. buying things

If you are one of these people you should call me right away so that we can talk about how awful this is, making no motion to get together. In fact, I probably won't even pick up.

Hanging Out With My Mom: Our Mutual Profession and How Weird It Is

2009-11-11T00:16:00.000-08:00

There are very few perks, I'm learning, in the dental profession aside from TOOTHBRUSHES! TOOTHBRUSHES FOR FREE!* But occasionally, there are dental events that the dentist will pay for you to attend with pinot noir, lasagne, and a motivational speaker with a comedic style in a banquet room at the Hilton. These events are good opportunities for dentists and sellers of dental equipment and materials to shmooze and make business arrangements. These events are like mini-versions of Dental Conventions, which rage on for many days in exotic locales like Hawaii and Las Vegas and were, from what I hear, a sort of publicly sanctioned gigantic key party back in the 70s. Of dental conventions, my mother astutely summarizes, "You could get into some trouble at one of those. I think even I could still get into some trouble at one." Dental professionals can log a certain number of hours or "points" after attending such an event that count in some esoteric realm of which I'm only remotely aware and have no desire to explore. Tonight I attended such an event with my mother, Debbie "Knows No Strangers" Scott, an RDA with over 30 years in the 'biz. As we parted the sea of business casual with glasses of pinot gripped sloppily in our fists, she immediately began identifying people she'd worked with before and introduced me to several Dental Professionals of Her Past. I stifled the urge to say "Ain't that the tooth," in response to all statements directed my way, figuring they would nullify all my Possible Career Advancements. "There's that doctor I had a fling with years ago," she murmured. Strangely, I received neither an introduction nor an identifying point in the man's direction. The dinner was decent but it was hurled at us and was snatched away just as quickly. I hadn't time to wonder if what I had eaten was in fact lasagna before the motivational speaker emerged in all his chubby white loud guy telling jokes glory. I was pleasantly laughing along and soaking up the motivational "dental family message," not thinking much of it until he said, "Dental front offices are populated by freaks. Where do they get these people? They had to have a relative that got them the job-- McDonald's rejected them." Was he a psychic? How did he know so much about me? My office contingent was pointing and laughing at me while I indulged in cartoonish, hammy shoulder shrugging. Again, a prime opportunity for that dental pun came and went.

Later, I'll identify this event as catalyzing a deep look at the direction my life is taking. Much cartoonish, hammy shoulder shrugging will follow.

*limited to amounts of unnoticeable-by-boss quantity

On Standby

2009-10-19T12:44:00.000-07:00

Hello avid readers! ::audible cricket chirps, microphone hiss:: I'm coming to you live from the internet at work when no one is looking! Sorry for the dearth of stimulating posts lately (or any posts, for that matter). I've moved, and seeing as that the jobs of internet and electric account set-up have been left up to me, I spend a lot of time reading B.Kliban comics and half-heartedly crocheting in the dark instead of getting it together. Topics to be covered when I return:
- Being Blacklisted Socially in Already Socially Atrophied Sacramento!
- Human Petrie Dish: Some of My Rashes This Month!
- Adventures in Domesticity: Looking For Deals, Finding Ample Time to Obsess Over Irrational Fears!
-How local Adult Contemporary Radio Station Mix96 is Building an Evil Empire Against My Sanity with Overplayed Billy Joel and Elton John Songs as Their Arsenal! (working title for that entry might be "You May Be Right: I May Be Crazy..."
-Seasonal Easy Listening songs and their poorly rendered youtube videos!

Stay tuned!

Once Upon A Time The World Was Sweeter Than We Knew

2009-09-22T19:23:00.000-07:00

Mercury is in retrograde and the customary communication breakdowns abound. Despite the fact that my life demands major decision-making at the moment, I refuse to make any until Mercury alters its course. Nothing like a good psuedoscientific excuse for the procrastination problem I developed in youth and sustain in adulthood. It's times like these when I really identify with Easy Listening songs sung from the standpoint of a 50 something year old man, wistfully remarking on the rapidity with which his life passed him by with a tone of hard-won wisdom and bittersweet remembrance. I felt especially attuned to these songs when I was about 14, when they should have had no relevance because I'd experienced... nothing. I clasped my hands under my chin, braces cutting into the tender lip-flesh, and thought about "yesterday, when I was young," which I suppose meant pre-6th grade, those True Kid days before my nose grew in and my boobs didn't and the social fallout and self-consciousness that followed. Those songs are approaching real relevance, as I spend enormous chunks of time either at a job where I answer a telephone in a singsong voice, or vocalize various stresses without making many moves to eliminate them. The future-- even less real than the present. I'll tackle it when Mercury moves forward...

Oh, also, that picture in the upper left came up a few pages into a google image search for Mercury in Retrograde.

My Cup Runneth Over (With Wet Garbage, Confused Hopelessness)

2009-09-18T17:29:00.000-07:00

We came back from Oregon feeling financially and spiritually poor and physically ill. Summer feel-goods (the swimming, the board games, the dinners and plans) ushered in circa mid-June dissipated and although the weather remains hot, this Indian Summer has taken on a certain chill as sobering realities have settled like a fog around us. Why is everything so expensive? Why am so ill-equipped to handle life's least challenging adult responsibilities? Why is there so muchcat pee and wet garbage in the house? A recent horoscope implored me (and everyone else born June 21st through July 20th) to ask for help when I need it and quit trying to do everything by myself. Funny, I can't remember a time when I'd either achieved true independence financially or otherwise done anything successfully by myself, ever. I'm not sure what to do, and so I'm going to meditate on it for awhile, and by that I mean hole up someplace listening to a compilation I've made called The Saddest and Most Pathetic Hits of The Carpenters and wait for solutions to come. I AM WAITING.

edit:
Solutions Generated So Far
1. Save Money! Stop buying voluminous pants/bulbous jumpsuits, used books with titles like Heal Your Hormonal Imbalance With Wheatgrass and Occult Practices, organic foods, and hand-fired clay nose douches... and start stealing them?
2. Eliminate Fruit Flies: read up on "home remedies" on the internet, keywords "trick fruit flies" and "voodoo fruit fly end times" and employ them.
3. Reality Check! You'll never afford to not live with 12 people with your job! Use next paycheck to buy tent, join popular nationally- renowned Tent City.
4. Repeat mantras! Try
I AM ON THE FAST TRACK TO POSITIVITY DRIVEN SUCCESS.

Cluttered Computer Desktop Mirrors Troubled Hallways of The Mind

2009-08-29T20:59:00.001-07:00

I like to "organize" my computer desktop because it makes me feel productive and it involves no body movement. I can't fully express the feelings of confusion/desperation left by the sordid nuggets uncovered during tonight's long-overdue desktop cleaning, so I'll just post them here for you to squint at or ignore. First off, there are these pictures to your left, which defy description or explanation. Is this somebody's dad? IS THIS YOUR DAD? We must now assume that there is a video of your dad on the internet where he is the proud owner of a high-stepping Palamino or Polar Bear (it is blurry, isn't it?) and then has to make a quick getaway in an alternate pair of pants. How well does anyone really know his or her parents? Then there was this list, titled "Business Ventures," which serves as a lesson for me, namely, that I should always collaborate with others or at the very least ask for a lot of advice whenever I get bit by the entrepreneurial bug.

1. Make Flesh Toned Scarves
cons: from afar, makes neck look like it has a growth
pros: ?

2. Van That I Wash Dogs In
cons: I can't drive and I don't like dogs that much so every day I'll crash into a fire hydrant or garbage can while wet dogs bark at me
pros: ?

H1N1: The True Smmr Bmmr, everything else ok

2009-08-25T14:23:00.000-07:00

Greetings Earthlings,
I have returned, not entirely unscathed, from a weird vacation in the Pacific Northwest, a vacation with, as far as I knew, one objective: attend the SMMR BMMR music festival in Portland, providing hometown support to friends appearing in various bands (MOM, Ganglians, Mayyors) by drinking cheap swill and sort of bopping around near them as they played. I write you this blog post from my sickbed. Let me explain:

After slipping into the late-night travel delirium vortex found between an SUV, liscensce plate "BOOMPY" and a motel room floor in Grant's Pass, Oregon, where Sharis restaurants are pronounced alternately SHARE-iss or Chairs, and a fictional musician named Carlos Fiancee plays rumba versions of your favorite songs at dinnertime, we shook free from our sleeping bags and drove to Olympia, WA, where our friends were slated to perform. Olympia is just like the Santa Cruz-Sacramento hybrid familiarized in dreams, only more haunted and less familiar. The show begins not long after arriving and immediately the origin of the puzzling garbagey stench plaguing the car for the last 800 miles is revealed when MOM, mid-performance, unleashes the unsavory contents of her suitcase: dead frogs and spoiled milk. Mystery solved and let's get her in a different car on the way back! We track rotten milk and dead frogs in and out of the house all night. Meanwhile, as I'm pleasantly sipping on a stout, trying to avoid both getting pummelled by some 7 foot tall avid Mayyors fans and slipping on a frog, our teenage acolyte Dylan is downing vodka in some totally unsupervised zone, and our fearless driver Liz is struck down by the flu. Dylan pukes, drinks more-- I'm making that Marge Simpson noise and frowning but am otherwise inert and waiting for the houseparty's lonely and attention-starved stragglers to quit talking about what great sandwiches they make so that my bf and I can roll our sleeping bag rig onto the spoiled milk and mud stomped carpet and just LUXURIATE in this unique aromatherapy opportunity. I put most of my clothes from that night in a scented garbage bag that I stole. ROCK! We all wake up in the morning and go to an adorable breakfast restaurant staffed by cute girls with dirtier permutations of my own foolish haircut, all except Dylan who doesn't wake up at all and has to be dragged into the SUV. Idle talk of buying him a big gallon of water at one of over 74 gas stations stopped at amounts to nothing, and he stays in the car as we ascend the stairs into SMMR BMMR land to begin smoking and drinking copiously out on the charming back patio of the venue. We were sloshing around and conversing and dancing and were not sober. About 15 hours of this rolls pleasantly by when Holy Smokes we forgot about Dylan. We find him with his feet hanging out of the car moaning. The BF and I, in our feeble fashion, decide to rescue him first by trolleying out little glasses of water from inside for him, then with tater-tot casserole in a paper cup and finally by finding a real adult to go take care of him. The OhSees played on the back patio, which was rickety and elevated several feet and covered in hundreds of bloodthirsty white people with haircuts. "We're going to die!" Julian turned and said to me, and "Yeaaahhh!" was my reply. Enough has been written about the transformative powers of sweet-ass rock n' roll and I will leave it to the professionals, but those transformative powers were present. Then it was over, all of us disappointingly intact. Through strategic artistry and a convincing decisiveness Liz rustled all of us into cars dumping us off at Eat Skull's house, a largely undecorated home of unspecified Oregonian time period where everyone smokes indoors and no one goes to bed/stops yelling till 5AM. I dreamt that night that everyone laying on the living room floor there was connected to a giant masterlung through tracheal tubes. As we slept, the lung was failing. I woke up with the flu-- aches so severe that I burst into tears at a dim breakfast restaurant called My Father's Place. The Ganglians and The People who Live In the Eat Skull house all went to go swimming in the river even though it wasn't even 90 out, probably having a sun-drenched and by all cases romantic time, basking in the glow of the magnetism that is Rob of Eat Skull, and we non-band members stayed behind, wandering onto Hawthorne Street which was reminiscent of Haight Street but less bummy-- a vanilla time was had by most. The Romance Partner and I continued to wander the through the luxuriant verdure of the neighborhood, mainly to avoid the house because a) it was gross, b) we felt as if we were imposing c) walking is free. As we passed through the frontyard foliage we heaved a collective sigh and shared a shoulder shrug over the supposed magnetism of this city. As a 24 year old white girl in a rayon 90s hawaiian shirt obsessed with my own childhood memories and the creative possibilities inherent in their reification, no other city has ever needed me less. It also rates high on the too good to be true spectrum, with the lush overgrowth tending toward permaculture Garden of Eden smorgasbord status (herbs! fruits! free and in the street!) and outrageous affordability for seemingly all things leaving me asking, "What's the catch, Portland?" When we left it was really time, most of us having caught some incarnation of the flu, all of us having woken up at some point with the smell of Pall Mall's hanging thick in the air, the sound of unmitigated puking ringing out like perverse churchbells to herald another day of much the same.

So that's how I got the swine flu. It's not going away.

Puberty Revisited, Pt. 1

2009-08-04T18:27:00.000-07:00

I really love the songs "I've Got My Mind Set On You" by George Harrison and John Lennon's "Jealous Guy." I first heard these songs in the movie Look Who's Talking Too, which reminds me, today is the 12th anniversary of puberty's onset! Let's revisit my singular, all-consuming obsessions of tweenhood in several easy to digest installments. Let me explain about the talking baby movie.

An obsession with John Travolta meshed with a watching-movies-repeatedly-in-order-to-memorize-them obsession and coincided perfectly and inexplicably with my first hormonal rush. Why I chose John Travolta as my initiate into carnal preteen lust I still don't fully understand, but the issue was compounded by my discovery of a copy of Look Who's Talking Too in a friend's family room, unreturned to Blockbuster many years prior, which I pilfered. This VHS quickly became the cornerstone of a ritual which I performed nightly, at around midnight and with my parents' bedroom door closed. The opening scene involved some muppety-looking sperm fertilizing a similarly muppety egg to the tune of "Sea of Love"-- pretty innocuous stuff, but not when I was 12. I was convinced that I was watching an Adult Film. I would then proceed to watch certain Travolta-laden scenes in the movie over and over again, rewinding seemingly hundreds of times until the dialogue became unreal and musical, and I felt dirtier and dirtier. So, in effect, Look Who's Talking Too, a comedy about 1)talking babies voiced by Bruce Willis and Roseanne 2) a crumbling marriage and 3) oldies functioned as a sort of pre-pornography for me and I still feel weird about it. Have I shared too much? Furthermore, have my habits even really changed? Your answers in the comments field will be much appreciated and immediately deleted.

Concise, Mildly Derisive Analysis of Great Work of Literature, Pt. 1

2009-07-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence:
What a mama's boy.

Directionless Youth? Not A Problem! Bizeewerks 4 Kidz

2009-07-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

Parents, if you're like me, you're constantly wondering (in my case many many years in advance) what to do with the kids when school is out. You have a few choices, all of which come up short. There's the classic summer camp in the woods- kayaking, vaguely native american crafts, hiking-- that sort of thing. It also comes with collect calls to complain of homesickness, bug bites that could wind up in medical journals (who wants that kind of infamy?) and learning repetitive call-and-response songs with parts involving funny accents and maybe even spitting that will no doubt be sung, often and at deafening volumes upon returning home. Your other choice is signing your progeny up for a summer program at say the YMCA, wherein they'll be treated to regimented weekdays of nonstop summerfun activities--usually to indoor soccer fields and water parks on special discount days only accessible through the presentation of numerous Pepsi cans, etc. You'll be required to keep track of a dizzying array of release forms, permission slips, neon wristbands, bus passes, id cards, water shoes, epi-pens, matching "Summerfun at the Y" teal oversize t-shirts with your child's name sharpied onto the namespace provided, and Austin brand orange crackers with "peanut butter" in the middle. Who wants the headache? You also have the option of providing no structure for the children, allowing them to idle in front of the video game consul of their choice, a box of Tofutti Cuties melting beside them into the carpet with occasional sugar-fueled breaks to jump all over the new Lovett's sectional while your back is turned. You have not yet made the 3rd easy payment of $79.95 on that couch-- you must find a better solution! Lucky for you, I've got it.

I've invented a Summer Activity Center for Kids designed to provide daily structure and also prepare them for the kind of jobs they'll most likely get if they decide to pursue Literature degrees in college. It's called Bizeewerks 4 Kidz. The logo will be in bubble letters in alternating primary colors and some of the letters will have tufts of hair and eyes looking in different directions. Fun! Here's an example daily schedule:

7:00 AM Punch in, log into obsolete PC, Starbucks shooters, make label of own name
8:00 AM print out various forms, make 12 copies, write in office journal that 12 copies were made, get supervisor to initial
9:00 AM to 12:00 fill as much of the forms as possible
12:00 Lunch- Chipotle!
1:00 PM - 3:00PM resume filling out packets
3:00PM in a spreadsheet, log packet progress,
4:00 make 3 copies of Packet Progress Spreadsheet, place one in a folder with the unfinished packet, place another on the desk of your supervisor, shred the 3rd copy hastily.
5:00 Write a series of post-it notes with cryptic one-line reminders, stick them onto PC monitor, shred Packet, Progress Spreadsheet, folder, name label and post-it notes, log out.

The whole process will repeat itself daily, with subtle variations on Thursdays when an additional label is made. Your children will be very tired. Very tired. Now accepting registration for Summer 2010!

Impersonal Apology to Everyone I Scolded Previously About Their Caffeine Habits After Having Developed One

2009-07-11T13:21:00.001-07:00

I was talking to my friend Cassie today after a prolonged absence (distance to blame). When we shared a coast (oh those halcyon beachside days!) I'd chastise her for living a life built upon the habit of drinking what seemed to be several pots of coffee a day. I had to mention in that confessional of a Facebook chat window that I'd started drinking coffee recently. "I understand the appeal finally," I said, "it's like i'll be moseying along, and then suddenly it all CLICKS into place and I am A BRAIN and I become IDEAS... and then i have to poop." I feel brilliance, and also my bowels are hotwired to a paper cup in a cardboard sleeve. Sorry you-- all of you-- for all the guff--I didn't understand before.

"the dreaming energy of the california mind"

2009-07-03T13:21:00.001-07:00

"Like all exceptional realities, the image of California has been distorted in the mirror of the commonplace...The failure of understanding that has resulted is based on the difficulty of avoiding the hyperbolic in describing a reality that at first seems weirdly out of scale, off balance and full of fanciful distortion. For there is a golden haze over the land-- the dust of gold is in the air-- and the atmosphere is magical and mirrors many tricks, deceptions, and wondrous visions."
from California: The Great Exception by Carey McWilliams

the pictures are from Carla's flickr

Frank Sinatra: Indulge Me Not

2009-06-14T22:57:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wish I could just swagger onto a stage to the sounds of an orchestra swelling, the twinkle of my pinky ring competing only with the twinkle in my mischievous blue eyes, a swirling tumbler of bourbon held aloft in one hand and a cigarette pinched deftly by the thumb and forefinger of the other. I start feeling this way in mid June. Like werewolves and their full moons, the scent of gardenias and jasmine suddenly induce a terrifying transformation; I must have a scotch and soda, I must have a tiny orange kerchief poking out of the pocket of a white silk shirt, I must take up residence in a bungalow with a kidney-shaped pool in Palm Springs, I must forge contrived mob connections, I must alternately speak/croon, I MUST BE FRANK SINATRA.

Last week yet another best friend of mine fled my ~~clinging desperation~~ loving arms and moved across the country, causing me to wonder, self-centeredly, what I do that is so damned repellent before remembering both that not everyone's (no one's) major life decisions have anything to do with me and that lists of my more repellent qualities can be found with ease in the archives of this blog . I wanted to provide some kind of ceremonious goodbye, some means of expressing the gravity of this move and the meaningfulness of our long friendship, but as we hurtled towards the Sacramento airport that night, I could think only of "New York, New York." Under the delusion of a misguided sense of situational appropriateness, I allowed the beast to emerge. The imaginary suit closed around me. I felt the silk lining. I belted out, "Start spreading the news, I'm leavin today..." with an unpopular encore of "Come Fly With Me." Farewell: ruined!

Hide your grandpa's record collection, your Seven and Sevens and your soft summer nights, I'M ON THE LOOSE!

Is Anybody Out There and Are You Paying Attention To Me?

2009-05-30T15:22:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a book of collected letters from D.H. Lawrence to publisher and friend Thomas Seltzer. When I purchased the book, I was under the impression (probably from not reading carefully) that it contained the responses to said letters. No. Subjects include the weather, books he is working on in general with no specific insights into the mysterious content, and most prominently, Dammit Seltzer You Never Send My Manuscripts Out When I Ask You To or Respond To My Letters. I must, then, assume the that responses received were the postmarked equivalent to the conversational "Oh, really? That's nice," assuming, again, that there were responses at all. I feel like my blog is like this. An audience is intended, from whom I get no response; yet the content is not really compelling enough to elicit a response and so expecting one is an act of supreme egotism on my part. Basically, I can retitle this project Does This Ever Happen To You, because I'm looking for some kind of validation, either that I am not a total weirdo and that you, the reader, can relate to my mildly amusing misadventures and interests, or that yes I am a total weirdo and my misadventures and interests imbue me with a uniqueness that charms you, the reader, endlessly. Unlike D.H., I have no fame or provocative appeal to bolster readership-- you have to be fascinated by the tawdry triumphs and failures that decorate small lives-- my small life--and even I'm losing interest.

I'm always tempted to write about my dental office job in the style of Charles Bukowski's Post Office, with no luck. The job is too cushy to cast myself as the world-weary man with menial employment, confronting an endless barrage of characters who were ridden hard and put away wet, just looking for my next piece of ass and a place to get out of the rain. Pieces of ass? I'm struggling to find a way to make a boring, regular job and a boring regular life seem grandiose and fascinating, because I'm a product of our times and can't conceive of a life lived without famousness. I try to villainize my coworkers so as to have something to talk about. Their names make them sound like they should be members of Prince and the New Power Generation, though I'm sure it would never occur to them to daydream about such a membership. I got a weird haircut recently which threatens to become more interesting than I am. There is nothing of aesthetic substance (is that an oxymoron?) at my office and so I turn to my own head. I wanted to look like a Patrick Nagel painting. I guess if I want to be surrounded by Nagels in the workplace I need look no further than a job at a hair salon. What else? The house is so hot that upon waking one recent morning I was so thoroughly wet from sweat I convinced myself that I had peed. HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED TO YOU? Here is a video I've been watching recently on youtube:
DO YOU LIKE IT?

The response is: That's nice, Rach. You don't say.

Mom to the Rescue

2009-05-11T00:44:00.000-07:00

The other day I was perched precariously on an exercise ball, wondering "What would happen if I just let myself fall?" It was an impulse best left unfollowed, as I careened headfirst into my bike, causing great rivers of blood to soak the nethermost quadrant of my perm. Carla had Jon take care of the situation, which involved spraying Bactine not so much on me but at me. Fearing a concussion/lacking evening plans, I called Mom to suggest we wile away the horas at The Emergency Room. Who do we run into immediately but The Woman Who Insulted Me at Trader Joes Last Month. I had been plotting all the cutting remarks I would make during our next interface, but was unfortunately all agog with pain. My mom artfully dodged having a conversation with The Enemy, anticipating what would have surely included my guileless admission to falling off a giant ball on which I had been absent-mindedly bouncing, by repeating the phrase "head trauma." "Head trauma" had the effect of a long-forgotten and powerful incantation handed down to my mother by ancient practitioners of magic. The woman seemed to be propelled backward by a fetid mist coming off of a freshly opened crypt, and someone else would have to hear about her chinless husband's monthly blood pressure ordeal. Meanwhile, my stupid reason for visiting the E.R. remained shrouded in mystery, thank God. Bullet dodged and head throbbing, I sat down an a grimy chair and thought about that swine flu craze that's sweeping the nation for the first time in earnest. Maybe half an hour went by as my mom and I shifted uneasily in our seats, exchanging glances in acknowledgment of a noxious odor reminiscent of foot fungus. An especially pungent whiff caused us to bolt from our seats, quickly gathering our now contaminated belongings and fleeing to the car.

"I'm probably fine," I said.
"It's like those people never washed their butts. Everybody in there stank," was her reply.

The Best Compliment?

2009-05-09T10:21:00.000-07:00

"I want to rip you off."

Favorite Painting Companionship Ideal Involving, Of Course, Big Hair

2009-04-30T19:32:00.000-07:00

I had a hangover yesterday and so went to the library as an alternative to laying on my air mattress moaning. I returned Fingerprints of the Gods and got dizzy looking at books from the oversize stock department. Notables included illustrations of birds, initiation rituals of various cultures photographed and spoken of condescendingly, and a David Hockney retrospective. I don't know anything about art. The things we had on my walls growing up were usually in a Comfort Inn continental breakfast room color palette, behind brass frames, and from Thrifty's. I know I like David Hockney because he does paintings of pools so evocative of summer that I can almost smell the chlorine and hear the electricity buzzing, and because of Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy. I first encountered the picture in thumbnail form in Harper's Bazaar, a magazine I've kept a subscription to since age 14, when we had to sell magazines for a fundraiser and I sold Harper's Bazaar to myself.

Could I possibly want anything more than the life depicted in Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy? To dip my bare toes into the extra deep pile shag, a cat balancing on my crotch, awash in light, thinking nothing other than, "She designs the textiles and I design the tea dresses"--enviable hair textures in an enviable apartment in an exciting decade-- this is living! I love their creative collaborations and their love for each other! I love this painting! I'm freaking out! Will someone be the Celia Birtwell to my Ossie Clark someday, or vice versa? Will we wear luxuriant green clothes and spend any time that isn't spent standing bathed in perfect light and love coming up with brilliant premise after brilliant premise, turning them into magnificent reality after magnificent reality? Until then, I am Percy, a weird, stiff-looking white cat with my back facing the audience, inserting myself into the lives of the fun creative couples I know, allowing my happiness at being included to mingle sometimes with jealousy.

I already regret that cat metaphor, don't you?
Can I just have a bunch of Celia Birtwell/Ossie Clark dresses in which to languish and be my loner self? See figure A, below:

Times I Was Sweaty Last Week

2009-04-26T21:59:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, April 21
At the end of yoga, we were called to make a circle around Jessica, one of the instructors, and touch her so as to send positive vibes or some such loving energy her way; it was her birthday. If you couldn't touch Jessica, you'd touch somebody else. Eager, as always, to participate in something that would make me lose credibility with my peers and further entrench me in a community comprised of primarily white women with too much free time, I enthusiastically placed my sweaty little paw smack dab on an even sweatier woman's shoulder and thought "I wish you a year filled with personal growth!" as hard as I could so that I would fairly radiate it. The person who touched me barely pinched part of my soaking wet tank top. I don't know how she expected to transmit birthday messages to Jessica that way. She did succeed in transmitting the following message to me: You are gross and I hate having to touch you.

Thursday, April 23
I remembered James Rabbit, a favorite band of mine from Santa Cruz comprised totally of prolifically talented friends, was playing at a bowling alley in the seamier side of already seamy West Sac. I burst in during one of my favorite numbers, Coast To Coast Heart to Heart, grabbed Tyler (Mr. James Rabbit himself) by the back of the neck and pulled him in close as we both sang into the mic, "Oh you know that I will go anywhere you are!" By the end of the show, I was covered in sweat from so many hugs-- Tyler, Mike, Dylan, Max-- and invigorated with reunion energy. It was the perfect counterbalance to that yoga incident.

I'm living the single life, but I'm not lacking in love, or sweat.

Reasons To Be Cheerful April 2k9 and Brazillian Singers With Big Curly Hair Roundup

2009-04-19T08:41:00.000-07:00

1. The 5 S's: suntans, sweat, swimming, saltwaters, and sangria all on their way soon with temperatures like this:

2. Yesterday I came home and found these on my bed. If there was any question before over whether or not I love my housemates, consider that question answered in the affirmative.

3. Don't let sporadic posting fool ya, Vanessa Olsen lives and she spent the day with me yesterday catching up in glorious California fashion.

4. Zac Efron movie in theaters now! Many shots of his wonderful armpit hair, which deserves a post unto itself.

5. I spend a lot of time wishing I was a Brazilian singer with big curly hair. With help from my hairdresser/spiritual guru, I'm always halfway there.

"Come Love With Me and Be My Life," and Other Popularity Increasers

2009-04-14T21:19:00.000-07:00

There is a book at my favorite thrift store called Come Love With Me and Be My Life. It is a book of saccharine poetry written in the 70s probably under heavy influence of an I'm OK, You're OK feel-good style guide to dealing with heartbreak. I am indifferent to the contents of this book, but love the title; Come Love With Me and Be My Life sounds like something I would say to someone at a party as an icebreaker. I said "Why don't you love me?" to someone at a recent party instead of "How are you," with some success. Bad conversation starters have been a specialty of mine since high school, when my patented "How do you feel about lobster?" and "Do you have any addictions to over the counter medicines?" not only got a few lunchtime chuckles, but started many friendships (on the wrong foot) as well. I'm impatient for a meaty conversation, and saying something inappropriately personal or just plain weird is the quickest way to bypass the smalltalk and allow you to gauge the levels of receptivity this person has for you. If they'll tolerate, "Why don't you love me," then you can really get away with a lot. Here, a quick and dirty guide to making friends Rach Scott style:

1. Tell an anecdote about a situation in which you were guileless, out of touch, or unattractive. For instance, "I don't have the right kind of yoga pants-- you know, the expensive kind that wick away moisture-- and so sweat pools in my groin and at the creases underneath each butt cheek and is visible to passing cars as I'm walking home down a major thoroughfare. It looks like I've peed, or worse." Ideally, your audience is now thinking, "How gauche," and is captivated.

2. Allowing no natural transitions to occur, abruptly shift from talking about yourself to an intense interrogation of your captive. If you don't know intimate details of their previous relationship, or you don't think you can fill out a health history/medical release form for this person, then you have failed.

3. Congratulations-- he/she hasn't run away yet! You can now assume that you share a cosmic affinity with him/her, and begin making startling confessions. Now is a good time to mention unrelatable obsessions, childhood humiliations that still haunt you, and any shrines you may have made to the Potential Friend.

4. Emphasize your availability and willingness to drink coffee at all hours of the day. Look forward to cementing your new friendship while feigning a taste for americanos.

Special Segment for Latchkey Kids

2009-04-06T20:48:00.000-07:00

"Hey Rach," you might say, "I'm a kid, I found your blog when I was looking through my dad's sites. My parents don't supervise me." Don't worry, kid. My across the street neighbor was a school principal, and whenever her school decided to get rid of a bunch of outdated and racially insensitive reading materials, they always got "donated" to yours truly. Here are two books written in the mid 20th century with cats as the main characters, picked up from the donation pile. You love that anthropomorphic stuff, don'tcha kids? If you have the sort of parents that take you to the library a ton, or who spend a lot of time sifting through garbage, have them pick these up for you.

Space Cat by Ruthven Todd
Cat in space, pretty straight forward. Not sure how they stretched this out to novel length. I did a book report on this in 3rd grade. The posterboard that accompanied the report, with drawings of the space cat doing cat things in space, is behind the couch in my parents' house. I somehow incorporated glitter. Very gratuitous. No sense of propriety at age 8.

Hotel Cat by Esther Averill
Tom the Cat, mouser extraordinaire and old soul, endears himself to a kindly yet refined older gentlewoman living in a hotel. Since, conveniently enough, she can speak cat language, they spend many hours wistfully musing over various sentimental ideas. This book introduced me to the concept of people living in hotels, the disease rheumatoid arthritis, and the dance "the sailor's hornpipe." The entire book is romantic in the way that Nat King Cole is romantic, but with cats. One of the cats wears a scarf! Get hip to it, children!

Automated Phone Service

2009-04-01T19:23:00.000-07:00

At my work, I spend a lot of time speaking to automated telephone services (robots), trying to see if a patient is eligible for their dental coverage. These robots offer a menu of possible options that I do not diverge from under any circumstances, but they often misunderstand me anyway. I'm used to being misunderstood, but unlike the myriad human responses to misunderstanding, a robot will always respond with, "I didn't catch that. I think you said 'associate,' is that correct?" I'd like to extend this simplicity to my life by means of a similar phone service that offers practical advice within the comfortable, meaningless parameters of career jargon.

"Thank You for using the Lifepaths(TM) Automated Service. Para espanol, oprima nueve. Please listen carefully, as our options have changed. For romance status or the Shyness Systems Management Department, say 'Communication Troubleshoot,' or press one. For what kind of food to eat and when, say 'Nutritive Integration Programs,' or press two. For information on what kind of job is best for you, say 'Career Placement,' or press 3. For the keys to total wellbeing and peace of mind, say 'Oprah,' or press 4..."

I'll immediately press some frantic combination of all the numbers and say, breathlessly,"I pepper conversations with unwelcome, uninformed references to astrology. I don't know what to cook for dinner, I eat like a bachelor-- cigars, frozen. I don't know how to find time to both exercise and fulfill spiritual needs and so I signed up for yoga but it's wildly unaffordable. I'm probably going to get fired from my job, I live in a state of constant limerence, losing several hours every day thinking about ways to describe my crush's hair-- I never get past 'beautiful'..."

"I didn't catch that. I think you said 'associate.' I'll connect you with an agent."

Then the agent would be some kind of guru that has an ethereal body that can't fully materialize in our galaxy and the head of an Egyptian god.

Song of the Post- "Omnispend Sway" by Sudden Sway

PBS Obscuro Pt. 2: Katie and Orbie

2009-03-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

The summer after 4th Grade, I got pneumonia, so instead of spending all my time at the public swimming pool, I spent all my time on the living room sofa in front of the tv in a hand-me-down Oakland Raiders t-shirt and underwear washing down saltines with 7up (7up=panacea, from the Rachel's Mom School of Medicine), coughing, and probably developing a mild coedine addiction. In other words, becoming who you now know me to be. We didn't have a remote control for the tv, so I would typically watch one channel all day long. If that channel was PBS, I could "look forward to" Katie and Orbie around 1pm. This was a show with an incredibly long, irritating, and infectious theme song sung by a real child, describing the means by which a lonely, sensitive pink space alien named Orbie lands in a toddler's backyard only to be immediately embraced and adopted by the toddler's family, thus beginning a series of adventures in grand Harry and the Henderson's style. The series was narrated by Leslie Neilson and the characters never spoke. Orbie's skin always made me kind of sick to look at, like if you touched it, it would be papery but kind of too warm and maybe oily. This was usually a good time to just give in to the sickness and sleep while the soothing, grandfatherly voice of Leslie Neilson reverberated around the living room.

Where did I even get hand me downs? I don't have any siblings!

PBS Obscuro, Pt. 1: Imagination Station

2009-03-25T20:36:00.001-07:00

When facing a social situation in which you have nothing in common with the other participants but age, TV Shows You Watched Growing Up is usually a safe conversation starter. People are likely to respond favorably to statements such as, "Rocko's Modern Life was the best show ever!", and "Who remembers the lyrics to the Tiny Toons theme song?" will get everyone talking. Don't say,"Who else has a childhood notebook filled with drawings of aliens giving thumbs-ups as they burst out of the circular windows of a cylindrical space station? Who else learned to draw 3-D with Mark Kistler? He had a mustache and wore the same kind of safety-orange jumpsuit my dad used to wear to work when he was a striper (prior to his subsequent meteoric climb up the corporate ladder), so he had a certain familiarity for me."
You will be met with blank stares. Everyone's focus will return to the girl who is shouting, "I drank SO much tequilerrr!" Meanwhile, the one person who remembers the show will focus his attention on you. He'll probably be wearing contacts to make his eyes look more like a reptile's and his facial hair will make you feel strangely ill at ease.
(the images are from Mark's site)

Last Weekend in Bolinas: Wiping the Crust Off My Third Eye

2009-03-21T23:39:00.000-07:00

Tacked to my wall is my best cookie fortune-- "You will experience endless love and total harmony at an affordable price." Correct-- it only cost $20 to put gas in the van and then off to the bird sanctuary with William and Kim, the shaman (shamen?) couple who, after becoming quite alarmed at the outcome of the tarot reading, insisted that I was in such dire need of a Native American-style spiritual healing ceremony that they'd do it for free. Walls are up, chakras are blocked...if someone doesn't help me then I'll have an extra hard time doing my life's work, which, evidently, is Spiritual Healer Teacher Nonprofiteer Animal Baby Women Helper. Ah! Perfect! I had been in the mood for a ritualistic cleansing. "Ask and you shall recieve," said Kim, who seemed to always be nodding sagely, threatening to dislodge one or more of the three floppy velveteen hats she was wearing. They implored me to call on my spirit guides. I breathed in the sea air and asked to anyone who might be listening, "please let me get something out of this." Soon afterward I'm lying down on their air mattress (I think they live in the van) as William puts me in a trance, all the while touching my head, hands, feet, or stomach in order to transfer his energy to me. In my head, I'm in the forest, gathering together my spirit animals, who all reveal themselves to me without much coaxing, and in this order: mountain lion, crow, eagle, deer, dove, otter. "They each have a message for you,"says William, who appears as a wolf, and they do. Me and this menagerie begin walking through the forest, confronting difficult people and hard times, which I am instructed to push in the roaring fire that appears behind each person. This proves to be exceedingly difficult, even with the pantheon of forest spirits, someone holding my hand, and a woman sitting in the passenger seat throwing positive intentions my way. When I confronted each person, I was crying and shaking. It took a long time to push them into the fire. When I did, I felt physically lighter. The tension in my shoulders that I've carried with me for as long as I can remember was gone. I felt wonderful. This happened again and again until the hour was up. William counted down from ten, and I awoke, feeling exhausted as though from laughter, and a little light-headed. They then suggested that they think it would be a good idea for me to come with them to Shasta to learn how to use my psychic abilities and become a healer like them. "Kim, explain to her what Shasta is." Kim turns around in the passenger seat, one of the hats obscuring her left eye, and says, with no vocal inflections whatsoever, "Shasta is a vortex between heaven and hell. I have a medicinal sage farm there. And 7 stores." I said I couldn't go right away, there was a fairly awkward parting, and then I skipped to the Coast Cafe to meet my worried friends for a night of hilarity.

The weirdest part of this experience was the gift basket Kim gave me. She must have been preparing it for me as I was shouting, "You aren't connected to my energy any more!" and convulsing. I didn't really look at it until the next morning. It was a wooden salad bowl filled with two bananas, an eggplant, a loaf of wheat bread, some potpourri, a wilted daisy and a gold bracelet of hippos.

I feel great and I can't believe that none of this is made up.
I am wearing the hippo bracelet.

Appendix to Insomnia and Ennui

2009-03-03T18:14:00.000-08:00

-eharmony.com has supplied me with about 20 matches, 80% of which list Tuesdays With Morrie as the best book they've read recently. Also, under the heading Can't Live Without, "my car" and "televised sports" routinely appear. I'm going to put on a blindfold, turn around three times and point my finger. Whichever 28 year old medical student of Indian descent I land on gets contacted, and the sound of the email hitting his inbox will distract him from what he is doing, which is placing his copy of The 5 People You Meet in Heaven on his Ikea bookshelf with exacting delicacy . The email will read, "Wanna come over and talk about some of the most influential people in our lives, aka Our Grandmas, and our individual approaches to the things we have in common (making our friends laugh, "through humor")? I on-demanded Sports Center."

-My new boss actually used a Myers-Briggs Typology test, photocopied straight from Please Understand Me II, to assess my on-the-job personality. I'm hired, even though I'm an ENFP! I'm working for minimum wage at a dental office with my mom. I'm going to bring my mug to work and drink instant coffee out of it. I'm going to be happy to have someplace to go three days out of the week where I can ease into working after a protracted absence and so I'm not going to complain about the more obviously lame facets of this arrangement. Maybe I'll start thinking Dilbert and The Office are funny. Who knows.

Love is alive and well.

Insomnia & Ennui: From the "Blog Topic Classics" Series

2009-03-01T03:19:00.000-08:00

When there is a disaster (murder, fire) in television and movies,there is oftentimes a scene wherein the mother/wife of one of the more high profile victims stands in front of a bunch of cop cars or ambulances while her face becomes a mask of horrific understanding--eyes dilated and vacant, dry lips parted slightly. Maybe half a second goes by before the vice squad detective or health care professional emerges with a blanket, which he places over the woman's shoulders with grim kindness and leads her out of the scene. We can't see what happens to the woman next, but I like to think that she is taken to a place of comforting anonymity, connected in no way to her broken life, where she can just go to sleep for a little while.

I'd like an authority figure to catch me shuffling feebly towards 2010 and identify me as someone who needs a blanket, then usher me into a place of sterile silence like some government-issue Sandman. I would go to sleep and afterward I would know what to do with myself. There haven't been any disasters; tonight I just did not know what to do with myself. I worked on a creepy internet project I've made as an elaborate joke for my housemates. Got a few cheap laughs out of it but ultimately productive feelings were eclipsed totally by creepy feelings. I wanted to kill time with an internet quiz in the style of a Which TV Character Are You? or Myers-Briggs Typology Test, so I went to eharmony.com. I'm happy to report that their personality test took almost an hour to complete. Apparently, believing in the creative potentiality experienced while eating eggs benedict with friends is NOT one of their 29 Dimensions of Compatibility. There were no matches.

Here's the official song of this post.

Stile Eyeconz: 4th Grade ad infinitum

2009-02-25T10:13:00.000-08:00

There are some pictures of me at around age 10 wearing a candy necklace and otherwise looking deranged. That's because I was just one step into the process of transforming myself into Nona F. Mecklenberg, younger Pete's friend on The Adventures of Pete and Pete. The F stood for Frances but it may as well have stood for Fashion, with her bowling shoes, tube socks, and elastic floral print skirts. She made me long for a pair of rainbow striped pants and a blue knit hat with pearl beads. It probably would have been cute to wear these things when I was in 4th grade, but I don't think it was quite in line with my mother's vision for me and anyway we shopped at Mervyn's. I still have latent Nona tendencies. The best thrift store in the world is a mere block away from my house and I'm making up for lost time. The translation of Nona onto an adult body, however, is kind of bag lady meets Blossom.

And of course there is Ramona Quimby, the reason I've had a bob haircut for most of my life.

Who are (were?) your style icons?

Indoor Games

2009-02-18T01:26:00.000-08:00

It has really been storming here in that dark-at-3pm kind of way. Wind howls around the house at night and the tree slaps against the window in the classic horror movie style. I cower under my 5 blankets (arranged in an ascending hierarchy of itchiness) and have appropriate miserable sweaty nightmares. The latest-- I host a dinner party, suck out the souls of my guests with a single glance, have my evil henchman drag their catatonic bodies away, then I rail against the heavens and my own evil ways for awhile before instructing my assistant to bring me a few fresh ones! I invite your amateur analysis. Also, as I was traipsing through the rain today, I stepped in a puddle so large that I was submerged up to my knees, soaking my ridiculous winter costume which now includes an electric blue wool cape with a pattern of Russian nesting dolls on the lining. It's ok, though. As a Californian, I believe it is my duty to spend at least an hour a day in total outrage over THE BUDGET CRISIS and THE IMPENDING DROUGHT... so I welcome the rain and many future soggy wardrobe failures if it means I can, without guilt, spend a few more minutes musing over Dear Abby's latest tawdriness. And, let's face it-- I'm always looking for an excuse to listen to that Cowsills song.

Sharing: Feelings, Files

2009-02-10T13:21:00.000-08:00

Gentle reader, have you ever fallen in love? If you're like me, this happens sometimes. If you're really like me, it isn't reciprocated. If you're really really like me, then the morning found you in yogurt-stained pajamas amassing a collection of songs that remind you of, on the one hand, that beautiful nervous feeling and, on the other hand, a lack of reciprocity. You suffered a sleepless night spent mining previous conversations for romantic subtext, remembering the sensation of your hand in his and how, if it were transmuted somehow to music, the song would be "Good Vibrations," then crafting impassioned, bleary-eyed declarations of loving intent which would bring you to new heights in vulnerability were you to actually utter them aloud, a few whiskeys in, after a party on some winter night in your hometown, your hands and feet freezing but with nervous-adrenaline sweat running down your sides.

Here's that collection of songs.

Superbowl Sunday Romance Insurance

2009-02-01T13:21:00.000-08:00

I think Superbowl Sunday is the perfect time to prepare an umbrella for next week's impending showers, aka, Valentine's Day. Grab yourself a domestic beer and gear up for romance. This Superbowl Sunday, I'm going to be testing a fragrance product I just made up called D00d Repellent(TM). I'm not really sure of the ingredients yet, but I'm guessing it's comprised of 14 parts Swarthy Italian Good Looks, 78 parts Glint in the Eye Suggestive of Clinginess, 1/5 wet cigarettes and spit collected from a bucket outside of a bar without windows, the rasp of an old bum as he sings "shoofly don't bother me!" and just a sprinkle of Essence of Unwashed (one of my other fragrance success stories, bottled right at the source-- my armpit). Good news: it's already working! Available at Walgreens and wherever fine fragrances are sold. Enjoy those sports, ladies.

Grandma Facsimiles Elicit Emotional Response

2009-01-29T13:24:00.000-08:00

Carla and I were in Target the other day, looking for a spray bottle with which to punish our bad cat, when in the toy aisle I chanced upon Abuelita Rosa. "This is the saddest toy ever. It's just a doll of a Mexican grandmother," said Carla, unaware that describing a toy as "sad" activates my Sympathy for Inanimate Objects Gland. This overactive gland is the reason why I have over 100 stuffed animals in a refrigerator box in my closet, many pairs of ugly, ugly shoes, and a collection of Garfield anthologies. "No one will love them if I don't," I tell myself. It is the primitive and incorrect form of rationalization most commonly used by pet hoarders. Abuelita Rosa remained in my arms until checkout, when I decided that I didn't have an extra $20 (frivolities fund hit hard by recession and recent move) and bought some $3 practical (ugly) underwear instead.

Fake Latina singing grandma reminded me of my grandma who spoke no Spanish and I found myself blinking back tears. This sort of thing happens more often than I'd like to admit.

Many of my flummoxed friends probably recall my response to the movie Electric Grandmother, which was roughly 8 minutes of uncontrolled sobbing. This movie falls into a genre I just made up called Children's SciFi/Hallmark Shmaltz. Plot Summary: A family of 2 boys and a girl receives an amazingly lifelike robot grandmother to help take care of them. She sings them songs, teaches them lessons, and shoots Tropicana out of her index finger--- you know, all the standard grandmotherly stuff. Here comes the part that brings on the waterworks: when the children grow up, android grandma is put in some kind of Electric Grandma brand storage facility and is otherwise forgotten about UNTIL the grown children grow old themselves. They hobble over to the warehouse, haul out Nanna, and she takes care of them in her gentle, grandmotherly fashion as their frailty and senility reduce them to childlike states.

Up until just recently, I couldn't even hear the title Electric Grandmother (it came up more often than you'd think!) without bursting into tears. Granted, the steady stream of fake estrogen coursing through my veins makes me particularly responsive to the sentimental, but this movie hit an especially tender place. I was partially raised by my grandparents, and it seemed like they remained 65 years old for 20 years. Some part of me wanted to believe that my grandma would really stay 65 forever, and that when I grew up and had children of my own, she would take care of them the way she took care of me-- with a serene, positive, and warmhearted energy, singing them to sleep in the orange tweed rocking chair, making them oatmeal but calling it "mush." To be able to have a grandma all the way through adulthood... it seemed so sweet, but Electric Grandmother reminded me that it's only possible in science fiction. Truthfully, I'm tearing up even right now.

Miss you, Grandma!

The Heirarchy of Need Shifts Ever Upward

2009-01-25T11:30:00.000-08:00

Time for an update from your recessionista: I have moved out of my parents' house and into the apartment belonging to friends Jon and Carla. They are a near-married couple, so the pseudo-parental dynamic has made for a smooth transition out of my family home. It is strange and wonderful to be living instead of dying in my hometown. Now that the need for friends and pleasant environs has been sufficiently met, I find myself able to focus on goals larger than "find modicum of privacy" or "make eye contact with acquaintances." In other words,

I NEED A JOB

and also,

I NEED TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL

and one more thing,

romance? Eh? Ok, nevermind.

I'm combing those want ads and pestering those contacts with renewed zeal. I'm reading books, in addition to Linda Goodman's Sun Signs (though I kind of love Linda Goodman's Sun Signs) with a slightly more academic bend. I will inject my life with much-needed meaning. 2k9 is already becoming great.

Holidaze

2008-12-26T00:03:00.000-08:00

The day after Christmas is always kind of lonely; I miss the contrived, pre-planned togetherness that eventually spawns actual feelings of togetherness. I miss making hot drinks last tasted or heard from in the 1949 novelty hit "I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas," and forcing them on friends and relatives. Worst of all, the holiday season is the only time when it is widely accepted to listen to Easy Listening shamltz (of which I have an abundance) and this precious time is almost over. Indulge, indulge, quickly while no one is judging!

"This is California. We can do anything we want to do."

2008-12-20T14:47:00.000-08:00

I'm housesitting in San Francisco until January 3rd, lounging in a sort of artist's loft that I will never be able to afford, with sun streaming in through giant windows and attractive houseplants-- species unknown. The house belongs to kindred spirits, I can tell, because the cupboards are bursting with specialty teas and Beach Boys albums. I've only been here 2 days, but already I'm receiving a higher volume of calls than I have during the past 8 months. It's like I'm being born anew into the mythological California of my dreams, with a positive, Donovan-tinged understanding of the world and myself, and a loving community of friends! Either that, or the new vitamins I'm taking are POTENT. The animals I'm taking care of are uncommonly beautiful and well-behaved. The dog responds to commands. I didn't know dogs could actually do this. It's great! They also have some interesting reading material, including the 1990 yearbook of a now defunct college in Vermont (it was a Humanistic Psychology experiment and it failed) and one of the earliest copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Finally, I can gain a gentle, 1970s understanding of my body the way I would have liked to at the actual onset of puberty. In reality, I learned everything I know about sex from the school bully, but that's a story for another time and/or a licensed analyst.

You should come visit me while I have this outrageously sweet set up. Throw some flowers in your hair or some shit.
Recommended Reading: Richard Brautigan

Confession: I lack the attention span for NPR; love jello

2008-12-16T21:08:00.000-08:00

If you are the sort of white person who has an art degree and whose heart lifts at the sound of the opening strain of the saxophone theme to All Things Considered, you might wrinkle your nose...oh woops, there I go alienating all 3 of my readers! Stay with me now!
This time of year always finds me thinking about my family's holiday menu, full of recipes plucked by my grandma from newspapers 40 years ago. The family holiday menu exists in a kind of 1960s Americana vortex. I didn't realize until I went to college that other people weren't eating Jello salads on Christmas-- that no one had eaten jello salad since 1983. When a marshmallow cream and cream cheese based fruit salad failed to produce the desired oohs and ahhs (and instead produced undisguised disdain) amongst my peers, I realized, with no small amount of shock, that my diet identified me as The Wrong Kind of White Person. Mainly for health reasons, and partially due to snobbery and embarrassment, I've wandered far and away from my food origins, trying, with a fairy-dust sprinkle of nutritional yeast, to make them disappear. Although I've learned to love health food as much as I formerly loved trash, there is no need to deny this part of myself. As a holiday homage to my now deceased Grandma Nina, I provide you with the recipe for Pretzel Salad. I dare you to make it-- though I'm warning you, this desert is in no way sanctioned by Terry Gross, and to your own horror, you'll probably love it.

Pretzel Salad
2 & 2/3 cups broken pretzels, in small pieces
1 & 1/2 cups margarine, melted
4 packages (3 ounces each) cream cheese, softened
1 & 1/4 cups sugar
1 container (9 ounces) whipped topping
1 package (6 ounces) strawberry jello
2 cups pineapple juice or water
1 large package frozen whole strawberries (no sugar added) or 2 to 3 cups fresh strawberries

Place pretzels and margarine in botton of 9X13 inch baking dish and bake 10 minutes at 400 degrees. Cool.
Mix cream cheese and sugar. Spread over top of lukewarm, baked pretzels. Spread whipped topping over cheese mixture. Chill.
Dissolve gelatin in boiling pineapple juice/water. Stir in strawberries and allow to thicken almost to jelled point. Spread over topping/cheese/pretzel layer and refrigerate until solid.

My Dearest Friends live thousands of miles away...

2008-12-08T19:02:00.000-08:00

... and last week, we reunited in New York. We sang oldies while traipsing through the crisp, cold streets. We snuggled. We drank hot toddies. We stuffed ourselves with African delicacies. We recognized that some of the most seminal moments in our lives have been heralded by the arrival of Andrew W.K. We came up with hilarious premises and inside jokes too numerous (and possibly irritating) to mention here, though I'll give you one: live-action movie based off of everyone's least favorite comic strip, Cathy, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfuss (who gains weight for the role) as Cathy. Aack! I experienced a joy so pure that I felt compelled to make cornball proclamations like, "I love the fun that we have!" every few minutes. Loneliness, insomnia, and paralyzing analysis were annihilated in the face of friendship and belonging. I could enjoy the simpler pleasures:

doughnuts from Doughnut Plant in NYC, Dr. Bronner's Peppermint soap, D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, genmai-cha, the pictoral inspiration for my free perm, Sesame Street memories.

Theme Song 2k8

2008-11-29T02:04:00.000-08:00

I thought for a few hours that I had pinkeye. I don't. Turned out to be a reaction to the mascara that ran into my eye after a challenging night at Club 2me. It is a tradition here in Sacramento, especially among Catholic school alums home from Chico/Cal Poly/LMU/Santa Clara for the holidays, to spend Thanksgiving Eve at Club 2me, a notorious East Sacramento dive bar. For reasons best explained by my facebook wall post (see left), I have declined to attend/tried to avoid/boycotted this event for the last 5 years. Feeling new boldness brought on, undoubtedly, by recent practice at this sort of thing, I decided to attend. You see, in the last two months, my social life has evolved (or devolved, depending on perspective) in a direction probably very typical of most people my age finding themselves back in their home town: on Friday and Saturday night I put on eye makeup and something too short or tight (quite a diversion from my usual), go out to bourgie bars to push through a sea of blue buttoned-down and Axe body-sprayed individuals towards a Vodka soda (or a shot of something that could be radioactive), then attempt to drink it quickly yet demurely whilst chatting with about 5 people from high school that were not my friends at the time but who are now staples, all the while wondering how the evening will play out in terms of flirtations, levels of inebriation, sleeping arrangements, and just what, exactly, will show up on the internet the next day to remind me of my fun if the headache and puzzling text messages fail to do so. To recap:

What I've Been Up To Lately:

losing my identity in a shallow pool of alcohol
attending a sort of weekly high school reunion

Mostly I'm just thrilled to be making intermittent eye contact with humans. It's been fun experimenting with a lifestyle that I never really tried in college. I do, however, find myself hankering after something more, or maybe something else. The casual levels of interaction made available through the bar scene, and the sort of defensiveness necessary to maintain that casualness is dissatisfying. This, and the desire for something (someone?) to add meaning is described perfectly by Roxy Music in "Mother of Pearl." I think of it as my theme for 2008. Skip the first 1:37 mins, unless you're like me and want to drink in Bryan Ferry for longer.

The search for perfection, your own predilection goes on and on and on and on...

What's your personal theme song for 2008?

Origins: My Name

2008-11-25T01:23:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite talking points with my childhood best friend was that we were both named from The Thorn Birds, her after the main female character, Megan, and me after the actress who played her in the successful 1983 television miniseries, Rachel Ward. Our television origins (and zealous, competitive collecting of Garfield memorabilia) formed the crux of our inextricable best friend bond.

Best friend has since disappeared and I've since read the book several times, and am currently watching the miniseries as it's airing on Lifetime Movie Network.

I don't want to expose too much just in case you are poised there with your remote trying to OnDemand or TiVo this "event," but allow me to acquaint you briefly with the plot: Inordinately good-looking priest is banished to the Australian outback for breaking vows of obedience, takes forgotten daughter of large farm family under his wing out of pity, watches her blossom into beautiful, desirous woman before his very eyes. So there he is, graying attractively at the temples, wondering "Do I break some more vows or follow my all-too-earthly ambitions towards moving up the Catholic hierarchical ladder and into a handsome red cardinal's robe?" as Meggie/Rachel Ward shakes her sin-scented hair within inches of sniffing distance. If you are enticed at all by the soap-operatic, this book/miniseries is for you. Come on folks--forbidden sex! Getting gored by wild pigs! Barbara Stanwyk as cruel benefactress!

I'm always left with questions after the completion of this story. Namely, "Mom...Dad, what were you thinking, exactly, when naming me after this?" and "At what point did you equate 'taboo temptress' with 'our new baby girl?'"

Also, Megan, where are you? Not on the facebook, apparently. Do you still have your Garfield collection?

New Ways to Forget: Old School and R&B

2008-11-11T20:50:00.000-08:00

Pharmaceutical-grade herbal mood stabilizers doing nothing? Up each night trying to silence that gnawing inner monologue with no success? Adopt the lyrics to "Boogie Nights" as your personal credo: "got to keep on dancin', keep on dancin'"--ignore your seasonal depression through incessant DANCE! Swap the word "dancin'" for "drinkin'" if you need to-- just make it your own! Use the following Dream Old School and R&B Playlist as your new guide to happy times!

1. Boogie Nights-Heatwave

2. I Like It- Debarge
3. Get Down on It- Kool & The Gang
4. Mary Jane- Rick James

5. Wishing On A Star- Rose Royce

6. I Wonder If I Take You Home- Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam
7. I Wanna Be Your Lover- Prince
8. Love Come Down- Evelyn Champagne King
9. Tell Me Something Good- Chaka Khan

10. Rock Steady- The Whispers
11. You Dropped A Bomb on Me- The Gap Band
12. No Parking on The Dance Floor- Midnight Star

13. Push It- Salt n Peppa

14. Special Lady- Ray, Goodman & Brown
15. Glamorous Life- Sheila E.
16. Tonight Is The Night- Betty Wright

Subliminal Loneliness, other ad mistakes

2008-11-03T14:27:00.000-08:00

There is an ad for a laser skin treatment center that runs daily in my local paper. It has a picture of an attractive, smiling girl and says, in bold, "Reclaim Your Confidence." I consistently misread it as "Reclaim Your Co-Dependence." Yeah...

Also, I word on today's google ad: I'm not sure what about the content of my blog allowed Google to generate a "Yes on 8" ad, but this does not reflect my own sentiments. I am staunchly against Prop 8. Staunch, I tell you!

Where Seclusion and Gaudiness Meet

2008-10-29T14:59:00.000-07:00

"The Blue Room" often plays on my internal AM Radio. The algebra of secluded hideaway+ secret life with cherished loved one+garish monochromatic decorating+Rogers & Hart jazz standard= stuck in my head since 1998. I like the concepts. I like the tune. Had I but known that the blue room, blue rooms, even, existed I would have taken my sentimental ass to the Madonna Inn long ago. Trip slated for winter 2k9. How excited am I?

all pictures by Phyllis Madonna, from the Madonna Inn site.

High School Rehashbrowns

2008-10-28T02:36:00.000-07:00

I'm going to go see High School Music 3. I haven't even seen the first two, but I think Zac Efron must be emitting yet unheard-of tele-pheromones, against which I'm powerless. Tie me to the mast so that I cannot heed his siren song! Incidentally, that siren song is about winning at basketball.

Picture Provided By: TeenIdols4You.com

High school has been on my mind lately, probably because:
1. People I know from high school have been hanging out with me, and it's been nice/sometimes I hang out with people who might be in high school, and it's been... I'm old.
2. The tentative flirtations exchanged with my math teacher during that time continue to eclipse the emotional intensity experienced in any of my actual romances.
3. My interactions with friends have been colored by an uncharacteristic unwillingness to be forthcoming, and my communication has taken the least-forward form modernity has to offer-- texting. Hey, I'm just fearing rejection(s) and savoring that high school flavor! (Tastes weirdly like caffeinated mints).

Dyspeptic Daughters of the Golden Fried West

2008-10-20T23:37:00.000-07:00

I looked into joining the fraternal organization The Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, because I'm a 7th generation Californian. I took a peek at the group picture of my local chapter, only to find about 20 overweight, middle-aged, dyspeptic-looking women in voluminous hairdos looking like they should belong to a club called Hometown Buffet and Applebees Enthusiasts of The Golden West. I'm not sure what I was expecting to find-- either something younger and hipper or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, women in prairie dresses and blue bonnets, having freshly escaped from some kind of Mormon sect. I don't need to join--the spirit of the pioneers manifests itself in my restlessness and wanderlust. I hear the El Camino Real bell ringing in my ears! The trains rattle my house at night and I feel I must go! Sometimes my grandpa gets up from the dinner table and inexplicably says, "Last of the frontier" as his parting remark!

Additionally, I just broke my cassette player listening to The Sons of the Pioneers tape. Outdated technology... last of the frontier...

Recession Romance 2k8

2008-10-09T23:59:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure the number of eggs I consumed today exceeded six. The weather's changing, so that means the same Danish clogs, but with the diabetes socks (bunching, as they do, at the ankles), and scarves over 2006's most threadbare shirts. Despite the cooling temperature, I seem to be developing what could only be called a sweating problem with accompanying smell problem (like pine-scented solvent meets carne asada).

And yet, I've never been more on top of my game. I'm just gonna kick back in my pajamas that double as evening wear with a Garfield anthology and a mug with my astrological sign on it and let the popularity roll on in.

File Under: Terrifying Early Childhood Memories

2008-09-14T13:44:00.000-07:00

In addition to Greatest American Hero, my other earliest childhood television memory is Zoobilee Zoo. Zoobilee Z00 was essentially a half hour of humans dressed as stuffed animals making wild facial expressions and erratic movements whilst singing about problems every human child faces-- like making silly mistakes. Or being an anthropomorphic cockatoo.

I mainly remember Ben Vereen, dressed in what appeared to be a dusty, bedraggled leopard costume stolen from a dumpster behind an off-Broadway production of Cats and one of Prince's least favorite jackets, slinking over the top of a piano while attempting to impart a condescending moral lesson. As always, I turned to YouTube to jog my memory further. I was pleased to find that the voices are badly out of sync with the characters' mouths, and sound as if they were recorded separately using a YakBak.

The characters whine and shriek in infantile voices while capering about an obvious soundstage, scattered with irrelevant props painted in garish day-glo colors. There is a pink thing that looks a lot like a live-action Popple, but is supposedly a kangaroo flautist. There is a beaver who looks like Orville Redenbacher, a Teddy Ruxpin-esque "adventure" bear (whatever that is), an irritating squawking bird with a Chiquita Banana style accent and headress (easily the most believable character), a lion whose interest in art is eclipsed only by his uncanny likeness to Chaka Khan in the "I Feel For You" video, and finally, the most terrifying character, Bravo Fox.

Bravo Fox, I believe, must have been styled heavily after John Worthington Foulfellow, the manipulative fox in Pinocchio, only with a curious middle Atlantic accent that usually sounded like he ran afoul of Betty Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. He is played by a statuesque balding man in a threadbare butler's uniform with orange tufts of "fur" bursting from every seam. Bravo Fox haunted me for years after I stopped watching the show, and was the subject of several recurring nightmares when I was seven. In these nightmares, he was usually a criminal mastermind with supernatural powers. He would send me puzzling letters ala the zodiac killer detailing his evil schemes. I eventually published a book about him and appeared on talk shows to educate the good citizens of our country about the impending danger. This only made him want to kill me, and I'd spend the remainder of the dream seeking protection from the skeptical, unfeeling police department.

Probably the weirdest thing about this show is that it's only weird in retrospect. When I was a kid, I loved it and wanted to be a Zooble.

The Man with Golden Buttered Popcorn Tresses

2008-09-06T01:54:00.000-07:00

I realize that, originally, I started this blog to catalog my adolescent experiences with Easy Listening. I realize, also, that I have become very tangential. Gentle reader, I apologize for straying, but I've only just begun. I want to share with you my first crush ever, who I had forgotten about until yesterday.
Here's how I remembered:
I'm on the horn with Amanda, discussing the trajectory of our journeys through life as ENFPs (I wish I were joking). I admit to her that sometimes, when confused about my personal trajectory, I listen to the original Broadway recording of Pippin. I identify with the main character, I say. I explain that the themes of Pippin-- coming of age, the restlessness and confusion of early adulthood, trying to find one's place-- are very relevant now. Pippin, I suggest, is a total ENFP. "Rachel," she says, "you sound like some kind of second rate theater school reject." Fair enough. This derisive comment didn't stop me from watching Pippin on Youtube for the next hour. I wrote the lyrics to this song in more than one high school yearbook. Second rate theater school reject. Once I saw William Katt as Pippin, I got a strange feeling of familiarity. Where had I seen him? After some truly wild synapse firings, I remembered:
Of course! He's Ralph, AKA Greatest American Hero AKA My First Crush Ever. Considering the competence of my television babysitter, it's no small wonder that the opening sequence of Greatest American Hero is, without a doubt, the cradle of some of my earliest memories. I remember forcing my dad to rush me home from my grandparents house so that I could watch this show, it being a life or death (tantrum) situation. I also remember him fashioning some homemade "I Love Ralph" stickers on a primitive label maker for me. I stuck them on the blue chair I sat in during rapt Greatest American Hero viewings. I'm not sure why, at age 3, I found him so appealing. Perhaps I was just recognizing the universal appeal of semi-androgynous men with hair the color and texture of buttered popcorn (see also: Christopher Atkins). I can't remember what the show is about, really... I think Ralph found a red suit which, when worn, imbued him with superhero powers. He never really mastered flying in the suit, and would usually make hilarious crash landings.
This is my first crush. This is my earliest memory. Second rate theater school reject. Something worse?

In Search Of...?

2008-08-22T00:22:00.000-07:00

"But, I want you to give me-- to give your spirit to me-- that golden light which is you--which you don't know--give it to me--" from Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence

I spent the last month or so reading Women in Love, and I experienced many instances of "Yes, yes exactly" along on the way. The fact that the movie of the same name is very aesthetically pleasing probably didn't hurt my affection, either. So often, that dark thing called What I Want is totally nebulous until the right combinations of words or images, in a book or song or movie, help give it its true shape. Then I'm struck with an epiphany; I know it is always what I wanted. Eureka. Insomnia is abated, if only temporarily, while I set to work obtaining What I Want.

For a long time (I'm talking most of my teen years here), my most penetrating desires could be expressed succinctly and perfectly with this early 60s folk-pop song.

I think I may have had (or at least, was on the long and muddy path to) What I Want before, both in the loftier, philosophical D.H. Lawrence sense, and in the simplistic cornball "Angel on My Shoulder" sense. So now what? How goes the "obtaining" part? Imagine me with a dog-eared copy of a Penguin Classic in one hand and a half drunk mug of Constant Comment in the other, searching for the answer now. A sillier picture you never saw, but just between you and me, I haven't slept well in days.

2008: Mission to Render Myself Totally Ineffectual Is A Success

2008-08-06T20:32:00.001-07:00

A quick timeout to acknowledge my self destruction:

Guilty of putting all of my eggs in one basket, the horse before the cart, and several other adages related to poor planning, I face, yet again, the monumental task of deciding what I want to do for money and where I want to live. Evidently, having no previous forklift driving experience can really hinder your ability to find meaningful work! I find myself pulled in so many different directions, that usually I just wind up wallowing in indecision and, let's face it, self-pity. I spend a lot of time on self-indulgent, masturbatory tasks like rating every single song in my itunes library, writing down dreams that I had (Nyquil + B Vitamins= hideous psychadelic landscapes), and worst of all, writing blogs. Refusing to build a life for myself here out of pure obstinacy and for fear of getting stuck here has left me, well, stuck here. Once a week I leave town to visit one of my many far-flung friends, wondering, "Should I live here? Should I get a job here?" then going back home to 4139 Pity Party Lane, Sacramento, CA before any progress can be made. At what point did I decide that I can't do anything by myself, and how do I unlearn this? Advice, lectures, and silent disapproval are welcome.

Indulge me now, as I'm so fond of doing for myself, and watch this Dean Martin clip. The song is about being pathetic, so it's the official anthem of this post.

"I caught a good one, it looked like it could run..."

2008-07-06T15:47:00.000-07:00

Typically, my mom would put on KCTC early in the morning to wake me up for school. There's a real absence of logic in using "easy listening" to wake somebody up, but this is the same woman who put me in itchy robes made out of what could only be leftover bedspreads from midwestern hotels every morning from ages 6 to 13. I guess she thought the music would combat my sour morning attitude, and it probably did. "Tom Dooley" and "El Paso" were two of my favorites to hear at that time, as the feelings imparted by their tales of rash stabbings or shootings, love triangles, and violent, inevitable death seemed in keeping with the horrible feelings of waking up before it was light, after having only fallen asleep 4 hours prior. The melodies were just jaunty enough to keep me from nodding off in my Cream of Wheat, and stuck with me all day-- much like the itchy neck from the frilled rayon zip-up collar of my robe, only not nearly as annoying.

Here, Steve Martin acts out the lyrics to Marty Robbins' "El Paso," along with a cast of chimps. I love Youtube so much.

Revisiting 'Friendster': Assumption That I'm Cooler Now Debunked

2008-06-25T01:09:00.000-07:00

My dad used to wear this tacky shirt around that said "Still Perfect After All These Years" on the front. What's tackier still is that I may have unwittingly adopted this as a personal philosophy.

Following an unlikely thread lead me back to the Friendster account I forgot I still had. It stands, along with my 2002-2006 livejournal, unedited, as a monument to age 18. Yes, that's Amelie you see under "favorite movies." Cringe along with me.

The worst part: my friendster is not really the relic I think it should be after nearly 5 years. I mean, remove about 5 of the bands, The Bell Jar, the highly affected side ponytail, and you've got a reasonable facsimile of Current Me. I consider it a great injustice that I have not become monumentally cooler since then!

And yet, I believe that taking the gradual (natural?) approach to identity building is more respectable than the wild and desperate taking up of (and rapid abandonment of) pre-made and readily available identities. The person who can shift from bro to ska kid to juggalo to radical vegan bike punk to Buddhist nudist every 6 months bewilders the hell out of me.

Of course, what I'm calling a commitment to authenticity could also be called stubbornness or unwillingness to try things. It is possible that I have changed too little. After all, I'm here in my childhood bedroom again, which is hardly a Madonna-style reinvention of myself. I've made gradual, minuscule "improvements." I've traded friendster for myspace, myspace for facebook, and livejournal for this blog; I'm still erecting internet monuments to myself. Despite the fact that one of them emphasizes what I feel to be the uniqueness imbued to me by a steady diet of grandparent-friendly music as a teen, I am still a product of our times. What's more, I am still well represented by my friendster account. Dammit.

While You Were Sleeping, Pt. 2

2008-06-12T01:13:00.000-07:00

I've always had trouble sleeping. When I was a kid, proposed 8:30 P.M. bedtimes would find me awake, sneaking out into the living room at 9:00, 10:00 and 11:30 P.M. I didn't want to miss something. I felt that as soon as I fell asleep, outrageous fun, secret lifesaving information, and greater truths would be immediately revealed to all awake persons. Time and time again, my parents proved this theory wrong, as their secret revelatory nighttime rituals involved nothing but Law & Order reruns and, occasionally, Hercule Poirot. Unfortunately, this lesson goes unlearned. I'll still spend nights awake, thinking I can prevent something unpleasant that might happen to me tomorrow by being awake to intercept the sandman and refuse to sign for his packages tonight. Is this line of reasoning totally nuts? Yes. Do I think it was influenced, in part, by over-analyzation of easy listening hits in my early teens? Well, that, my friends, is the hypothesis on which this entire blog is predicated.

"Softly As I Leave You" is the perfect example of an idea that might fuel my late night paranoia for years to come. The song is about a man who leaves his wife or girlfriend of many years in the middle of the night, because he "can't bear the tears to fall." How can I be expected to sleep when there is a possibility that I could date someone this craven? See, I'd never be in this situation. I would be awake, waiting for the opening strains of "Softly" and the sound of feet slipping into shoes. The fellow would have to overcome his cowardice and just tell me he wants to break up, or, if he's still hell bent on sneakin', slip a heavy sedative into my mid evening kombucha.

(A lot of artists have recorded this song. I chose this video because the accompanying montage is inexplicable and really stupid).

While You Were Sleeping

2008-06-06T00:19:00.000-07:00

As a lifelong devotee to insomnia, I've always had a soft spot for songs about being awake at night. Some of them just don't exactly fit my experience, though. Case in point: KCTC played at least 3 songs wherein male singers tenderly contemplate their female companions in the wee small hours while they sleep or cry nearby. Rather than offer any kind of tangible comfort or respectful silence, the fellow singing chooses instead to either ignore or annoy his groggy and distressed lover, (with the exception of John Denver's "My Sweet Lady").

Item #1: "She Believes In Me," Kenny Rogers
Kenny Rogers is working harder than a shoemaking elf to get some decent songwriting done in the middle of the night while his wife sobs in the other room over his repeated failures. All those circled newspaper want-ads smuggled in between the pages of his copy of Hustler and hours of despairing glances from her are enough to stymie his creative process, apparently, and he has to do all of his "work" at night. Insisting, with determination, that she "believes" in him, despite her audible weeping suggestive of the contrary, he hopes that this song, the one he's singing right now, the one that's keeping her awake as he belts it out, mouth filled with Gardetto's Snack Mix, will finally pay off the 2nd mortgage and make up for 4 years worth of unfulfilled promises.
(Be sure to watch for the fabulous surprise ending in this video!)

Item #2: "Mary in the Morning", Glen Campbell
Early bird Glen Campbell creepily catalogs every movement of his sleeping lover, Mary, noting the way the dappled sunlight freckles her face and hair, likening her somnambulist beauty to summer flowers, and similar flourishes evocative of a Summer's Eve douche commercial. He pauses from his dewy-eyed reflection only to disturb her ever so slightly with unauthorized kisses. If he loves her so much, maybe he should consider using this valuable time to make her a pancake surprise instead of inspecting her moles/trying out the shaving-cream-and-feather trick on her.

Item #3: "My Sweet Lady", John Denver
A wakeful John Denver, no doubt thinking about conservation and a New England Christmas with Kermit and Piggy, consoles his sweet lady as she awakens from a tearful nightmare, assuring her that he will never leave her. Honestly, I can't make fun of this song; I cried when I first heard it. At age 13, and now, I well up with emotion (and estrogen?) whenever I hear him wail, "I wish that you could know how much I looooooooooove you!" For some reason, the idea of waking up next to an overwrought balladeer who can silence any disparaging thoughts with vows of everlasting affection is really, really appealing to me.

Sweet dreams, readers.

Nat King Cole Urges You To Stop Crying, Retreat from Society

2008-05-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

Why does Nat King Cole have so many hits encouraging his listeners to become positivity-obsessed human automatons who play the song "Walkin' On Sunshine" by Katrina and the Waves on repeat while their unacknowledged negative emotions turn into ulcers and kill them? Granted "Smile" and "Pretend" are probably about the power of positive thinking, and not about unhealthy emotional practices, but as my mother noted earlier, I always assume the worst.
In "Smile," he suggests: "light up your face with gladness/hide every trace of sadness." Even if I made an honest attempt, I would fail. My emotions are always luridly displayed and inappropriate. Barely muffled hysterical laughing over the syntactical errors portion of the SATs. Open weeping over a movie called Electric Grandmother. Open weeping over nasal allergy commercials. Open weeping over an episode of Roseanne on the tube in a suite in the Sands Hotel in Reno. Open weeping in the trunk of a car on the way back from a biscuits n' gravy run at a local diner. What was I doing in there and why can't I just take Nat King Cole's advice?

The keep-on-the-sunny-side emphasis is maintained in "Pretend," with a further suggestion for keeping "bad" emotions at bay. Instead of facing your public with an insincere smile plastered on your face, don't go out at all. Why put in the effort to sustain friendships, buy groceries, or change out of those foul smelling tie-dye sweatpants when you can seek refuge in your daydreams, where you are never lonely and forever glamorous? Now, Mr. Cole, you are speaking my language.

Pre-Teen Obsessional Love and Glen Campbell

2008-05-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

He was about 36, with thinning black hair and red facial hair. He liked to wear a gray oxford shirt with a pattern of trout on it (irreverent!) He loved Elvis and The Three Stooges. Sometimes, whilst assisting me with some troubling pre-algebraic equations, he got close enough for me to smell his deodorant (the "spray-on kind," according to my friend, Kim, who knows about these things) through his Polarfleece zip-up. We bonded over 70s ephemera-- he lived through it, and I admired it. He was my 8th grade teacher, and because he was my only non-familial example of a real live grown man, he was also my first crush.

On days that seemed particularly fraught with bittersweet longing for this man-- those days when I really wanted to believe that his compliment on my Scooby Doo sweatshirt contained codewords of romance--I would typically get the song "Wichita Lineman" stuck in my head. I like how Wikipedia puts it: "The lyric describes the longing that a lonely telephone or electric power lineman feels for an absent lover who he imagines he can hear 'singing in the wire' that he is working on." Frankly, knowing all the words to the Brady Bunch theme was perhaps impressive to my teacher in a way, but it wasn't the sort of talent that would whisk a happily married man away from his family and into my skinny, though loving, arms. I knew this. The longing and loneliness described in Wichita Lineman seemed to match my own feelings; in my adolescent fashion, thoroughly unsure of what a "lineman" might even be, I felt that I understood the Wichita Lineman's existential predicament.

Of course, existential predicaments are hard to keep under wraps, especially at an age when subtlety is an unknown concept. My little obsession performed its grand finale on the night of our 8th Grade Graduation Dance. This final opportunity to fraternize as a class to the sounds of K.C. and Jo Jo was heralded by the removal of the tables from the cafeteria and the addition of fish or pineapple party decorations that barely fit the dance's Hawaiian theme. At previous school dances, I always asked a chaperone to dance. It was a running gag that my classmates seemed to find funny. Sticking within the parameters of my popular joke, I thought it would be a good idea to ask the teacher to dance. My friends would get some laughs, and I would get at least five minutes of dreams-coming-true. It seemed foolproof, so I asked him. He was reluctant. He pulled me aside, not for some dancing, but so we could have a chat. The I'm Old Enough To Be Your Father, You Should Probably Dance With A Nice Boy From Your Class, Very Serious and Concerned chat. He knew! All the time, he knew! Humiliated, I managed to choke, "Well I only wanted a dance, sheeesh," as I walked away. Back with my friends in the cafeteria's corner, I wondered how I blew it, what I was going to do now that my life was essentially over, what to do with these stupid pooka shells once this lame dance ended, and why I chose sheeesh as my parting retort.
Well, that witty zinger must have made an impression, because he changed his mind.
He tapped me on the shoulder and led me out across the linoleum, generously giving me back my silly fantasy for the night. "Hey, I think you're short enough for me to rest my chin on your head!" he said. My only wish at that moment (besides that it could last forever) was that Wichita Lineman could be playing.

"Your Music and Memories Station..."

2008-05-10T23:22:00.000-07:00

There used to be a radio station in my town with the call letters KCTC, AM1320. It played music from a syndicated station, first called Your Music and Memories Station, and later, The Music of Your Life. It wasn't meant to be the music of my life, exactly; PSAs about prostate cancer awareness ran between ads for Geritol and Centrum Silver, and any sweepstakes giveaways were usually all-expenses paid trips to Branson, Missouri. It was, after all, my grandparents' radio station, and upon my first introduction to the sounds of Sinatra and his contemporaries winding their way fuzzily out of the speakers (in mono no less), I reacted with the appropriate indifference of an 11-year-old.

Coinciding perfectly with discovery of the most sickeningly sentimental songs ever recorded was my hormonally influenced and ever-growing awareness of cute boys. The nostaligic songs on KCTC, with their euphemistic yet passionate lyrics, were giving me a sort of mental language for my new preoccupation with the adult world of love and loss the way the sexually explicit songs marketed towards my own generation could not. While I was aware that L.L. Cool J was "Doin' It," I was not--I was merely daydreaming about "some enchanted evening", the way that it seemed Perry Como must have been daydreaming. I would spend hours just listening, imagining what my grown-up life would be like.

So here I am, graduated from college, sitting in my childhood bedroom yet again, anxiously awaiting the passage into that mysterious next stage of my life. I wish Your Music and Memories station was still on the air to ease me through it. What better left to do in this strange, transitional time (besides send out resumes with ferocity) than return to, and re-examine my relationship with The Music of My Life?