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Saturday, November 14th, 2009
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12:42 am - a calendar of names
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the clinic today cost $15. my meds were $8. the wait time for each was about 10 minutes. everyone was professional and awesome.
i am fucking blown away. as we got in the car, i said to salmon, "there's no fucking way this could happen in new york," and salmon was like, "well, it could, but it would cost you $80, you'd have waited four hours, and you'd have to make the appointment three weeks in advance, not two days."
i really appreciate all your information, my pepys. thank god for that place.
not-fun part was getting weighed for the first time in, what, a year. i weigh more than i ever dreamed of thinking was possible. i know, numbers are just numbers, but it felt bad to see. go figure, gorging on leftover catering food and sitting around all day tippity-tapping away on my compubox has caused me to gain weight. life is a mystery.
also, the medical assistant said i was only 5'10.4". great. thanks.
not sure how to remedy this. i'm not walking anymore is the problem, and i'm not likely to start during the winter. the best fix, i think, is to move back to the city. a life of luxury does not agree with my ass, turns out.
relatedly: we picked up our zippy little chevy matchbox from enterprise this morning and drove all around town running errands. it's a special treat to ride in cars. i was like a golden retriever in the passenger seat.
i worked on a project the other day with this cree nation dude from alberta who's pissed about the government attempts to drill in the athabasca oil sands, and he challenged anyone listening to go "just one day without indulging your petroleum addiction." i got all shiny and smug about never having owned a car, but i get (more) why people depend on them after today. i get it. all the places i needed to go to today were SOOOOO far apart, and the car got us there SOOOOO fast. zero waiting around in the cold for a bus was asked of me. we just stopped at businesses as we passed or thought of them. why not grab some lunch in the central district or swing by rite-aid and pick up some transformers band-aids. there is no reason. why not.
i still don't want one, but i get it.
i just booked a room for tomorrow at a doubletree in portland. hotwire, $53. good price. the hotel is kind of ridix--i thought it would be semi-snazzy at first, what with the three whole stars, but the yelp reviews corrected me. i guess the building's in three separate eras of renovation and is all cobbled together so it's gonna be like bill & ted's bogus journey, traveling through the different decades. maybe, uh, it will be funny. ?
thumbs up: it's by the corny shopping mall with the skating rink. i kind of just want to hang out there all weekend.
current mood: yes, i know buses are cars
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| Friday, November 6th, 2009
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8:04 pm - the last ber-kaw
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it's weird how many different diets a single species can live on. i used to slightly be a Health Person, when i was employed full-time, and would eat sushi and $10 salads for lunch every day. now that i'm poor, i feel like a domino's oven-baked sandwich is a totally acceptable dinner. furthermore, i have a roommate who eats nothing but chicken-apple sausage and bell peppers, served in a big stir-fried pile that she calls "pile." H. P. lovecraft allegedly lived on coffee and hard candies for the last few years of his life. same story with elliott smith and ice cream. salmon would merrily eat nothing but chili and fried chicken if left to his natural devices.
meanwhile, i was flipping salmon all manner of shit last week when he didn't feel like buying more gerbil food and was trying to feed his gerbil 99-cent trail mix, because i was sure that the gerbil was going to eat it and die. gerbils are mysterious. what are you, a gerbil doctor? a rodent... ist? you can't just give them whatever you find on the impulse item rack at QFC. you can only feed them one thing, and that's whichever arcane and specific seeds that gerbil food comprises. you give 'em trail mix, next you'll be feeding them peanut M&Ms and fruit by the foot.
then the gerbil wouldn't eat it anyway. i'm not sure if this means he's stupid for refusing to evolve or smart for refusing to die.
salmon took over my trivia show at piccolo's last night, because i signed a non-compete agreement with the new company and was too pussy to ignore it and host them both anyway. it was fine. he's a pro. the crowd liked him. so that's a load off. i bristled a little when salmon was like "OK, bring your answers up to scorekeeper meg," and i was like um, they know me as hostess meg. this is my show. but it ain't no more.
i'm kind of hypersensitive when people refer to me in diminutives, though. it's not you; it's me.
what else is there to say. theater's still broken. i was gonna go to that house party at the art museum tonight but it's raining like a pissing racehorse out there, so we ordered greasy garbagedinner and watched one thousand episodes of "30 rock" in a row. doing laundry. being derelict.
i keep telling myself that i'm going to draw comics about all these sundry things but i have no idea what to draw in each panel. i can write the script all out, no sweat. maybe i should just do that part and make it up as i go along. that way, what am i gonna do? NOT fill in the panel? just leave it empty with just the caption and waste all that time?
(probably.)
a couple weeks ago, i mentioned this comic book about the life of freddie mercury that i bought in bellingham and that was very adorably illustrated but written by, like, the ghost of wesley willis. "freddie was rad! he was the world's biggest rock star! you rock forever in heaven, freddie!" terrible, terrible captions. so, i want to do that, but about, you know, J. M. barrie and with good writing.
the art part is where i'm rusty. my drawings are good and getting better, but i'm not confident about them yet, so i have trouble just trusting myself and sitting down and doodling whathaveyou. also, it's painful for me to mess up and throw things away. as though i didn't have like 40 empty sketchbooks to waste.
i think my issue here is less about creativity and more about having no balls. being afraid to suck takes up a big part of my daily routine. it seems so terrifyingly easy.
wow, blogging was much more enjoyable when i was pissed off about everything instead of depressed. back when i was funny. i need another desk job.
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| Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
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1:21 pm - love that chicken
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cohosted trivia with very short notice at the ballard loft last night. i was OK. a little stammery, probably tried too hard to be Funny, but i think i was more aware of it than anyone. nothing too damaging, anyhow.
there's a lot to know about this new show! tricky high-tech microphones that can switch between the house satellite DJ and the speaker, bonus questions, e-mail bonus questions, tiebreakers, joker rounds, audio rounds hooked up to the sound system that you have to MC with impeccable timing in between questions without looking at the computer. just sort of innately sensing when the clip is about to be over and the next one's about to start.
the howse was packed; there were at least 20 teams. i was scraaaambling to score everything in between rounds and got pretty sorely behind. my cohost for the evening, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ironmaus, who graciously shared his time slot with zero notice, has a fascinating excel spreadsheet that robots everything up for him. so that helped.
good time, though. i'm reportedly done paying my shadowing dues now and will know where/when my gig is by next week. i'm already fantasizing about making a living exclusively this way. regardless of the fact the ratio of e-mails and responses with this motherfucker is like 3:1.
(not ironmaus.)
after the show, we went hiking in the 45 degrees through northern ballard to find the copper gate, which salmon and i had individually read about recently, he on thrillist and me in some twee book about snotty restaurants in seattle that i paid too much for at anthropologie. it's nice, although more ballard-taverny than our sources suggested. i kind of like that, though. it's old ballard. the end of the bar was a wooden viking ship. we got drunk on salt licorice aquavit and drew salty, drunken pictures of each other.
"king boy" keeps popping up in all my drawings these days. i'm not sure what his story is yet.
got a big yeshivalanche of editorial work yesterday, and the transcription's been steady too. i have a few extra bucks right now, for the first time in probably a year. gosh, which of my myriad debts should i apply it to.
current mood: cold
current music: shockheaded peter
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11:39 am - do my job for me
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editing a brochure for yeshiva university's natural sciences and math college today.
twice, it has said something to the effect of "Students can earn their undergraduate degree and Doctor of Optometry in seven years instead of eight."
not doctorate. not doctor of optometry degree. you can earn your doctor.
i googled it and didn't see it anywhere else, but you know what the internet is like out there.
however, salmon points out that you CAN say, "i earned my bachelor's from FSU," or "i earned my AA from devry." i guess that's an abbreviation, though.
i don't know--"i earned my doctor from yeshiva university" seems fucked up. a doctor is a person. at least i was raised to believe so.
what do you guys think?
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| Sunday, November 1st, 2009
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4:54 pm - saturn face rides again
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internet says the gigantolor concentric circles under my eyes could be from allergies, which i know i have and am too poor/lazy to do anything about. always figured the circles were hereditary, since dad has them, and there's nothing to be done about them, it's my destiny to look like christopher walken by the time i'm 35.
but guess who also has allergies. to the same things. the eye-circles were always kind of around, but they tripled when i moved to new york, which is when the hay fever showed up too.
anyone know anything about this? i'm really, really bothered by them, so much that i've considered having them surgically fixed or whatever for my 30th birthday. botoxed. face-lifted. something. which makes me feel incredibly shallow, as you viewers at home must be thinking yourself.
anyway. even if i were to get on allergy meds, would they go away? or is the damage done? anyone gone to an allergist before? i probably have food allergies that i don't even know about.
current mood: lazywebbed
current music: air supply
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| Saturday, October 31st, 2009
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11:37 am - playmobil goat diagram
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a surprise long day yesterday. we were sitting at home with our thumbs up our asses one minute, and then we were hitching a ride with housemate jen to her work, which was the new via tribunali on the queen anne hilltop. then i dragged salmon all around my little hometown village in the drizzle for like six hours, pointing out bits of local and personal history. they were serving free samples of like roasted pumpkins with feta and arugula at the thriftway metropolitan market. an entire block of queen anne avenue up by the safeway, where the BP and pete's pizza used to be, has been replaced by condos. we want to the try the st. louis menu at the 5 spot. communique still has good toys. the community center where my dad used to coach basketball seemed so much smaller.
god, i miss queen anne. or just living in a real neighborhood, any of them. i'd take anything between the central district and 85th. i hate being stranded in the rugged wilderness out here.
salmon liked kerry park. we were tourists and took some picture postcard photos of the view. i was glad it wasn't completely clouded over.
we also stopped by that crazy sprawling tudor mansion on highland drive that the japanese consul general lives in, with the chrysanthemum seal everywhere. it really is more like a walled fortress than a home. we thought we lived in a mansion, but we don't live in a mansion, it turns out. highland drive has some fucking mansions. you can see very clearly how all the garages were originally mews.
walked down the counter-balance, poked through lower QA and the seattle center and belltown and downtown and up capitol hill kind of halfway. paused for a cupcake royale, checked out a possible theater for salmon's play on a hot tip, then had a pretty dinner at cafe presse, a sweet little french spot. that place is lovely and suspiciously cheap. the most expensive thing on the menu is $24, i think, and the average price is $13 or $14. you can get a nice pork rillette baguette sandwich for $5; all the salads and appetizers are $4. i don't understand.
i asked what the fish of the day was and the girl said rockfish and i said i didn't know what that was and she said, "it's a snapper," which i thought was funny, so i got it. over warm lentils and bacon and dandelion greens. salmon got the cold demi-poulet over salad, served with dipping mayonnaise. we shared frites. a young mother and her 5-year-old dracula sat behind us and we watched him eat macaroni and cheese with great dramatic forkfuls waved in the air.
i love that special butter they serve in the little croques. fancy eurobutter.
finished up the evening with zombieland, which was fine, whatever. the script was kind of written by a 19-year-old, and it got a little gimmicky, but there were some cute jokes in it. i'd never seen jesse einsenberg in anything but liked his delivery. "olive" from little miss sunshine plays a sassy con-artist 12-year-old and that was unsettling. woody harrelson looks remarkably unlike a 50-year-old man or however old he is. i liked how the characters are named after the cities they're from. all U.S. state capitals, i noticed.
it's the last zombie thing i will willingly see, though. no more zombies. we've been doing this for too long, all the stupid fucking hipster zombie walks and themed karaoke nights and shit. it's done. same with vampires. pick something new as the monster for everyone to be obsessed with and define their personalities by. i vote we usher in the era of the werewolf tomorrow morning. or, you know. um. the chupacabra. something else.
or how about nothing.
kind of dreading this party at the howse tonight. i like parties, but i like to leave them and go home around midnight, and i know motherfuckers will be here until 5am. i have work to do.
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| Monday, October 26th, 2009
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11:20 pm - return to camp meriwether
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lovely times prevailed in portland yesterday. salmon got fancy and at the last minute booked a room at the superhip ace hotel instead of a dorm with bunkbeds. same thing, really. we'd been peering around the seattle one here and there, fantasizing about taking a sexy little in-town holiday there sometime.
first, we got our excuse-reason for being in portland done, which was the hernandez brothers were doing sketches for wonder woman day. the store that hosted them was shitty and all their books were shrink-wrapped, but jaime hernandez! there was no line for him, confusingly. simon walked right up and got a sketch of maggie dressed as robin for $10. incroyable. also a sketch of cheetah, who i'd never heard of, by some dude i'd never heard of.
the hotel was really something. i just read in that link that the lobby, in its former incarnation, was in drugstore cowboy, but i'm sure i wouldn't recognize it. it was the kind of understated swank that pretend to be humble but still makes sure you know you're dealing with serious money. each room was designed by a different local artist. we checked in and found that ours was plain white with a sentence in ASL painted on the wall, which, whatever. the bathroom was stunning, though.
we stole a big fistful of designer hotel pencils and stationery pads, went downstairs to get chaied up at stumptown, and met up with an old salmonfriend, who led us around the pearl and china districts. salmon took photos of old signs. a group of overanimated middle-aged types asked us if they could do a good deed with us and then take a photo with us. they told us what it was for but i forget. the woman was carrying a bag of bell peppers.
portland is as crunchy as i remember but a little more compelling this time around, almost like a real city that a person could find, you know, happiness in. i've always thought of PDX as our scrubbly unkempt brother who has a band and does activism and lives in mom and dad's basement. nice guy, but he's never gonna be anything. but he doesn't care. maybe that's what i've become so i'm not bothered by it now, in my old age. anyway, it still feels, ahem, small, but it has more stuff that appeals to me now. more style. i kept looking at businesses and saying to myself, "i would patronize this business."
i was especially jealous of all the bike lanes and the geographical flatness upon which they lay. says the girl with a 50-pound two-speed who lives between the ocean and a mile-long hillside. 20 minutes north of downtown.
so i was thinkin' about it. too bad there's no jobs there. that's the other trick of portland--there's no jobs, but your rent is so cheap that it doesn't matter. so as long as you have no ambition toward money.
back upstairs to luxuriate in cable TV and win a parrot costume from ebay. then we met up with brodie purgatorius and julia _milk and their new milkatory baby. i went to school with purgy but salmon had previously only known him from the internet. but not through me, and before he knew me or lived on the west coast. internet's weird.
they directed us toward a pretty lebanese place in hawthorne that stuffed us full of eight different things for about as many dollars apiece. a dinner of puddles. some stuff that looked like baba ghanouj but tasted more yogurty was fucking amazing and i wanted to drink it in a thermos. baby frank was very good and can be taken to restaurants. i never know about stuff like that, how old babies have to be before they can do certain things. his cries were delicate and plaintive. he did fine at voodoo doughnuts too.
saw the ghost pumpkins at fred meyer while beer-buying, then adult time at the milk palace. i debriefed mrs. milk on her successful career as a comic artist and probably got more intense about it than i meant. doing that is on my list of goals and i don't know how to start. how big or small to draw, what size paper. i feel like everything i draw is too small and blotchy.
back at the art hotel, drunkenly snuggled up under the woolen blanket with a deer silhouette. the pillows were really heavy. i was in that drunken mixed-up state where you take everything personally, like why are these pillows so heavy. i don't understand why.
the room had an old-fashioned pull-down shade, and one of my favorite memories of the whole relationship was this morning, tangled up with salmon in the almostdark hotel room, a light-rectangle outline for a window, lucid dreaming and listening to the rain.
current mood: hunger
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| Saturday, October 24th, 2009
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9:16 pm - wall of thugs
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bellingham was just fine today. if you were wondering how it's been doing. we grabbed our little blue chevy aveo from enterprise (they really did pick us up!) around 10:30 and zipped right up there in about 90 minutes. the day was crispy and clear, incredible autumn leafery fireworksing everywhere we looked. still so, sew happy to be home.
we drove up chuckanut drive right away and chucked our nuts, then had turkey burgers at a '70s dick's-type joint in some extinct little old-timey town. salmon found an abandoned train. the vintage thrift store was owned by a 45-year-old woman in a beret, hoop earrings, and stiletto boots who kept telling me how much everything was, stinking of hope and breaking my fucking heart. her stuff was nice but way too expensive.
the comic con was tiny but we knew beforehand. it was the exact same conference room at the hampton inn that my cousin got married in, so that was weirdsad. we were in and out in under an hour. they didn't have much for me, as i'm pretty anti-superhero, but salmon got some watchmen figures and a sweet sketch from some Notable Artist of his little monster character looking out from the top of the space needle at elliott bay.
note to self: i gotta get one of those fancy watercolor pens those guys use.
i'd dyed my hair green last night and some geekboy walked right up my face and asked me if i would pose for a photo shoot. he had a whole set-up with lights and everything off in the corner. salmon had kind of a visceral reaction and blurted out, "do it, do it!" under his breath. he was very concerned that i wouldn't do it. i asked the kid what for and he was like "oh, just my own personal use." kind of creepy, but whatever, i kept my clothes on. well, he asked me to take my hoodie off so he could see my NASA shirt better. nerrrrrrds.
on a whim, we vroomed up to the peace arch park, i just typed "peach ark," and hopped back and forth between canada and the U.S. and snooped around all the maple trees and shit. salmon's passport expired so we couldn't go into canada, other than the 100-foot stripe within the park or whatever. i'm making a stupid face in all the photos. there's a residential street right at the beginning of canada named 0 street, as in zero street. you can live on 0 street.
back to belleringham to find some pumpkin patch in a swimming pool that turned out to cost five bucks. we fucked that and went over to the old town to poke around. god, i love that imposing municipal castle that lords over the kingdom. salmon picked an antique mall to try out, and the musky death smell bowled me over and gave me an instant headache when i stepped in the door. he said it didn't bother him any more than any other antique store's. the other patrons didn't seem to mind either. i was super-lightheaded by the time we left, like i feel as though there must have been a fetal pig in a jar of formaldehyde hiding somewhere under a staircase in the store and my brain detected it right away.
tried the pumpkin latte at "the black drop," whose name cracked me up for some reason. derp derp. how to describe our product? eureka! walked more. frowned at the fake hot topic, bought a little mini-comic about freddie mercury at the fake archie mcphee, had a teriyaki dinner, took some photos of the stained glass clock at the bellingham national bank and the public murals of dodos. hit the road again. cute little town. now i know.
on the way home, salmon kept turning to me and doing his impersonation of a samurai mask. while driving.
oh, we stopped at the dollar tree on aurora and salmon had evidently never been to a dollar store and kept holding things up and asking me how much they were. "how do you know?" it was like we were in a MADtv sketch. we got tallboy cans of shasta.
salmon's photogallery from today is here.
we ate something questionable today that made our stomachs murky, probably the fast food, so we missed two separate parties. holed up at home in our PJs on saturday night instead. i've been practicing my sight-reading on the accordion with my "hits of the '90s book," i.e., "it's all coming back to me now" and "end of the road." christ, that accordion is loud. can it be made unlouder? i try to, uh, bellows it more gently, but it doesn't seem to matter.
we're heading down to portland tomorrow to see jaime and gilbert hernandez at a comic shoppe for wonder woman day and possibly get a sketch. now we're talking--love and rockets is my all-time fave graphic novel of life. finally, some good treatment.
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| Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
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2:04 am - why work when you can type about yourself
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beautiful times all weekend. two rehearsals, wherein i both played prudence and understudied (no) as prince tybalt when he was a no-show. saturday was dinner with erin and greg at the new bimbo's, which i found to my liking--rarely are snazzed-up versions of crappy things better. we were pressed for time and i wolfed down an entire forearm-sized burrito and salmon was sitting there with three-quarters of his burrito left, like what the fuck, how did you just do that. then i washed it down with a pint of strawberry margarita. it's a superpower that i get once a month, instead of crying and being a bitch.
the lo'malleys ditched, and we went back the other way to the oddfellows hall and caught doug and friends graduate from their boylesque 101 class. the hostess was cringeingly, punishingly bad--some dime-a-dozen burlesque chickie in kathy kinney eyeshadow who just rambled on with a stream of stunted, no-sense-making ad libbing--but the boys were all total professionals. best show i'd seen in a long time. we liked the one who dressed up like waldo from the "hot for teacher" video and stripped to "you can leave your hat on." his G-string was a little tiny propeller beanie. eeeeeeee. we also loved the steampunk guy and the french orphan. i liked the tropical doctor but salmon did not.
a lot of the boys were transboys, which was surprising. the matador strips his manifold capes off to reveal . . . tits. i think it was 50/50, actually. the trio of lesbians in front of us made a scene by standing up and cheering, alone, whenever there were tits. hey, more power, i guess. what's not to like.
the organizational part of the show was a mess and a shame, especially after they had the balls to charge us $15 a head. there was allegedly to be a door prize drawing, which about six people had known about in advance when a show of hands was asked. soooo they sent a girl to hand out ballots in the middle of the (inept, so inept) half-time bantershow. you know people--they love free stuff--and so i became immediately crazed by the idea of it, psychic horns blaring, craning my neck all backwards and upsidedown to get the ballotgirl's attention. meanwhile, dumbshit the hostess was asking trivia questions? all i knew was that salmon elbowed me in the ribs and said, "do you know?" and the last thing i'd heard the hostess say was "what is the capital of zimbabwe?"
i barked out "HARARE" to a silent audience. then they stayed silent. then the hostess was like ". . . i SAID raise your HAND. did we JUST go over this?"
so i was that asshole. the one who yells out the answer. the asshole i hate most. great. i muttered, "well, i missed that because was trying to get a fucking ballot," accidentally loud enough for the entire room to hear perfectly, and oh, well, turns out i'm a fucking asshole. embarrassing.
sweet salmon whispered that no one had raised their hand at all and she should have given it to me. then the asked the former capital of rhodesia and some dude raised his hand and got it right the prize turned out to be: the privilege of drawing the door prize winner. so i'm a triple asshole.
yesterday, we walked from turkfest at the seattle center to fremont, via westlake. the trees at the sea center were righteous and glorious, red and yellow and everything and whatever. i was kind of getting a big head about it and tried to cut my pride and say like, yeah, you know, i guess there's stuff like this in central park too, but not really as distributed through the city, is all. "no. there's nothing like this in new york. nothing is this beautiful." redeemed! salmon took many photos.
turkfest was a little pathetic but then i found an old coupon for steamer's so we got half-price clam strips. the little mini-bazaar was adorbs. i liked the evil eye talismans. talismen. then we sneaked around upstairs in the center house like total criminals, where there used to be little jewelry shops but now it's just admin and that weird fake high school, and photographed the plywood ceiling and what have you. wandered around the public part of the EMP until security kicked us out at closing time. salmon keeps calling it the sci-fi museum, even though i've explained that the sci-fi museum is a little afterthought hot dog stand inside of the EMP.
we were taking photos outside by those weird 30-foot vertical rusty film strips and i turned my ankle in some fucked-up parking lot and it fucking hurt. salmon took photos of that too, as seen on facebook. thanks.
didn't see any beavers or canada geese on westlake. i like that little walking path made out of the old railroad.
missed the flea market, so we played trivia at the dubliner but didn't win despite a respectable performance. i was kind of shocked. i am used to being the best.
i used to go there with sopwith to play "rock band" every week before they canceled it, and he couldn't ever say "dubliner." he always sticks an extra D in the middle, after the N, and it kills me. don't know if it's new england's fault or what.
today, we went to the university district to mail original comic art to ebayers in spain and crazy crazy bossladies's copies of adobe back to her. them. pho at some cruddy old place. i used that suspicious-looking oily chili jelly with the spoon stuck in it. enh. it made my pho look ugly. the owner came over and told us that in a quacky voice (is that racist?) that we shouldn't pour extra water into the little mini french presses to make more coffee because it will taste burnt. he went through great lengths to communicate this to us, laughing the whole time at the notion. or our idiocy. who knows.
we did it anyway after he left.
identical orange cat-counting at twice sold tales (i think there are three, but there could be as many as five), morning glory v. oregon chai at sureshot, a pair of brand-new army-issue boots for $22 at buffalo exchange, shut up please, and then an obscene treasure trove at goodwill. including: a costume of bolivia. i like to imagine that it was from a kids' play. it looks like it was made out of the skin of an old couch. a big navy blue upholstery-canvas tunic and matching sweatpants, and someone cut out the letters for BOLIVIA in red felt with his left hand and stitched them across the front. there is prismy reflective tape around the neckhole. the whole thing weighs about 12 pounds and my arm got tired from lugging it around the store.
spookily, i feel as though i've encountered this bolivia costume in my life before and that i once had the opportunity to buy it and didn't. i saw it and i got a jolt. it's important that i am the owner of the bolivia costume.
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| Saturday, October 17th, 2009
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12:01 am - the more you know
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Ashley: "comprise"
Ashley: sock it to me
me: how people use comprise:
me: "my sandwich was comprised of mayo, olive loaf, and cheez whiz"
Ashley: right
me: how people should use comprise:
me: "my sandwich comprises mayo, olive loaf, and cheez whiz"
me: the whole comprises the parts
me: when i first learned it, the little mnemonic device i came up with was:
me: "comprise sounds like compress, and they basically mean the same thing, so just substitute compress and see if that works"
Ashley: ah i see
Ashley: seems like there is a plethora of words people misuse almost daily
Ashley: did you know people misuse negative reinforncement all the time?
Ashley: i'm too drunk to tell you what it really is
Ashley: but i'll tell you that what i just said is a fact
me: the only example i know of negative reinforcement is when the toadstool in super mario bros. says, "thank you, mario, but your princess is in another castle"
me: because that's what it says under that picture of that happening in the wiki for super mario bros.
me: and i was like, "oh, huh, negative reinforcment, you say"
me: "well, i will be damned"
Ashley: people use negative reinforcement as if it's punishment
Ashley: but it's actually promoting NOT doing a behavior
me: heh
me: don't come to this castle
me: get the fuck out of here
me: mario
Ashley: pretty much
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(12 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, October 16th, 2009
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10:10 am - pretty much
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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20 - Feb. 18):
Writing in *The New Yorker,* Adam Gopnik named two characters from literature that well-educated people tend to identify with. "Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch," he said, while "women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think that they are disinherited monarchs."
That's a funny thought in light of your current omens, Aquarius, which suggest that you're a reasonable creature who clearly sees how much you're like a disinherited monarch. The omens go on to say that there's a good chance you will have excellent intuition about what to do in order to at least partially restore yourself to power.
current mood: thx to suxdonut
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| Monday, October 12th, 2009
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6:19 pm - i wrote this yesterday and then forgot about it
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simon the simmering salmon had his little birthday weekend all weekend.
on friday, the day of, i was throwing all these schmancy restaurant suggestions at him for Birthday Dinner, and he's like "i want fried chicken," and everyone in the house chorused, "ezell's!" and i was like, hrm, i went to high school acrost from ezell's and it's gooooood, but the 5 spot is better and also not in the ghetto. but salmon had already found their web site, all covered in animated pieces of sweet potato pie. he informed me that he is a southern boy and had made his choice and would be taking his supper at ezell's fried chicken in the central district this evening.
so, i got off cheap, right? we took the bus out there and ezell's was where i had left it 10 years ago. the seating inside was not where i had left it, though, and in fact had disappeared in the last 10 years, so we carried it over to the medger evers pool cement park area and got to work. it was good. we liked it! yelp informed us beforehand that "spicy" doesn't mean spicy; it means with spices. coleslaw was nice. a big part of our friendship, salmon's and mine, is based on trying new things, which is what led him to order a faygo redpop, which is just, um, shockingly disgusting. i like disgusting soda, like i like crush grape and shit like that, but holy lord, was it gross. tasted like a bottle of red dye. the smell reminded me of the stuff my mom used to spray on the plants in the front yard to keep aphids away. i was washing the taste away with that chemical sludge that nestea makes, if that tells you anything.
salmon seemed unfazed. god bless him.
a pleasant walk through the CD, which was nostalgic for me. i glimpsed NOVA out of a corner of my eye but we didn't go over there. everything else pretty much looked the same. "update" hair salon is still there. haw haw. and that am/pm with the amazing soft-serve that tastes way better than it should.
salmon found some good graffiti:
on to trannyshack! at chop suey, which was . . . okay. one girl had a zombie skeleton that she'd bought at the dollar store and sang a very good parody of "my boyfriend's back" about zac efron. (i'm not totally sure who that is. i guess: high school musical.) another dressed up like a prossy and did a knife fight to "welcome to the jungle" and we liked that. one girl stripped but got all tangled in her tube top dress and we liked that too.
chop suey's layout is for sucks--it's clear that it wasn't designed to be a show venue, just a regular drinking one. we stood by the back windows, on the rungs of bar stools, and rested our butts on a drink rail, craning our necks. we could sort-of see. everything from the waist up, anyway.
i've come to not expect anything specific from variety shows, because some of it will be good and some will be stinky so you get all mixed up emotionally about whether you were right or not. about half of it was stinky, and i spent a quadrillion dollars on superstrong drinks that made me not feel good inside, so we left after about an hour. showed up at the mercury and were denied entry for not being members. i know, it's a private club, but i've never, ever had a problem getting in there. the girl with 16 face piercings was hell of rude and basically called me a liar when i told her i come to the rock band tournaments and am always admitted without issue. it kind of hurt my fucking feelings. i was like "choke, come on, let's just, choke, go!" and we went. i am not Dark enough to get into the mercury, apparently.
oh, salmon's madgascar 2: escape to africa cake was a hit.
yesterday was better. sleeping all day, then almost the entire mansion headed over to schmorgasborg! at the balagan, starring housemate stephani as Fanny Tragic the Burlesque Clown as an egyptian goddess on rollerskates. she is a fucking professional. it was a free event with a real good-time crowd, plenty of cheering and repartee. the show was 20 3-minute acts and the audience chanted a countdown from 10 seconds while they set up and then the clock began and if you weren't set up yet, too bad. banjo players, jazz singers, monologues, a list of tweets from levar burton, some pretty quality stand-up, an obama-themed musical theater performance. it was a dozen times the show we paid 12 bucks apiece for the previous night. i dropped the impresario girl a line as soon as i got home, asking her if she'd let me play the accordion in my dragon costume next month.
funny, how i can write 15 paragraphs about stuff i didn't like, but i'll only spend one paragraph on something i love. i always had that problem with writing arts reviews. it's easy to assail the awful.
today, we had play rehearsal, followed by simon's official birthday party. we carved pumpkins! he had never carved a pumpkin in all his tiny life. they don't have halloween in florida, evidently. he found it distasteful, all the stabbing and innard-scraping, but his (L) kind of turned out to be the best one.
mine is the septopus. i ran out of room for the eighth tentacle. i'd dressed up, to get in character for rehearsal, and didn't get any pumpkin carnage on my dress. total grown-up, right here.
then we all climbed in the theater and sorted through the netflix on-demand movies and found a russ meyer homage, pervert!. throughout the whole thing i kept going "hey, guys! that's mary carey! she ran against schwarzenegger in the 2003 gubernatorial recall election!" but nobody was really interested.
now eating halloween cheese puffs that look normal but make your mouth turn green and editing yeshiva university's regrettably named alumni newsletter, inside YU. heh heh. say, dean, i was wondering . . . how do i get inside YU? do i need to be in some kind of exclusive club? all i wanna do is get inside YU. for the love of god, what do i have to do to get inside YU?
current mood: heh heh
current music: vicar in a tutu
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| Saturday, October 3rd, 2009
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4:44 pm - millions now living will never die
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forgive me, but i can't stop watching this:
you don't even have to watch it (although it's cute and has kids dancing); just listen. i'm ambivalent about the original, but this version is just so beautiful.
we went scavenging at grocery outlet yesterday and brought home 80 dollars' worth of off-label beans and almost-expired cottage cheese. those all-natural ito en iced teas in the fancy fruit bottles are three for a dollar. snazzy tofu is two bucks. avocados are two for a buck-fifty or something? can't get enough of that place. i'm ruined--i feel like a fucking moron when i go to a real supermarket. we borrowed steph's truck and filled up half of the bed with bags of treasure.
on the way home, we stopped at burgermaster on aurora, which i hadn't been to since i was about eight and grandma betty shamed me for not telling her that i'd had fast food the day before too. we did the drive-in thing like it was 1951. the little hispanic waitress comes out when you turn your headlights on and then brings your food back on the hang-off-your-window tray. 1951 knows how to make a fucking cheeseburger. i tried not to inhale it but did anyways. we ate while listening to NPR tell us about buffalo soldiers.
no one's around today. we're upstairs together, just me and salmon and the ocean view. i've been working on my stupid handpainted shirt of the one you win when you complete a gig in paris on "rock band." derpa der. it's painful on principle, but, uh, it's looking pretty good. i'm gonna make the berlin one next. heim vom eber.
queerjctheatre is in a fashion show tonight and we are going.
the waves are all choppy.
current mood: sunny
current music: chicago
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, September 19th, 2009
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9:24 pm - amateur dahlias
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currently reading the wiki on middle english and waiting for the washing machine to finish up. this is english:
Syððan wæs geworden þæt he ferde þurh þa ceastre and þæt castel: godes rice prediciende and bodiende. and hi twelfe mid. And sume wif þe wæron gehælede of awyrgdum gastum: and untrumnessum: seo magdalenisce maria ofþære seofan deoflu uteodon: and iohanna chuzan wif herodes gerefan: and susanna and manega oðre þe him of hyra spedum þenedon.
luke 8:1-3 in old english, c. 1000 A.D., just prior to the norman conquest, as you know, which changed english's shit up pretty drastically. that is the same language that i am typing in right now. check out all those eths and thorns. it looks like fucking faroese or something.
translation:
Sith (since) [it] was worthen (had come to happen) that he fared through the towns: God's rich (kingdom) predicating and boding, and he [had] twelve (disciples) [along with him], and some wives (women), that were healed of suffocating ghosts and un-upright-nesses: Mary, Magdalene, out of whom seven devils out-went, and Johanna, Chuza (Herod's steward)'s wife, and Suzanna, and many others that (gave) him of their speeds (things thought of as "fast").
we went to the puyallup fair today, me and salmon and housemate jen, for whom i have no boopsy internet codename, and it was found lovely and fine by all. salmon wore a little olive-colored tyrolean (i always think that would be a good name for a ghetto baby) hat and devoted his time to taking photos. my mission statement was "animals" and i feel as though i only saw about half of them before i tired myself out. the goats were a hit. we met a pony with cataracts. i fell in love with all the rabbits and i want a flemish giant for the mansion and also for snuggling at night. they're as big as cats, and they don't pee on everything. ostensibly.
we made a point of staying for the mutton bustin' exhibition. what is mutton bustin', you ask. well. it is a rodeo comprising children and sheep. they try to ride on galloping sheep for six seconds. that is what. one of the kids had the name of emily_swank's little girl and it's not a super-common name and i wondered.
i'm so exhausted i can't remember anything else. zuh. the ring toss offered as prizes some realistic stuffed tigers that i coveted as well as CD players embedded in fake electric guitars so that kids would think they were winning guitars at first. kids are so stupid. god. i ate an onion burger and it exchanged some sharp words with my digestive system. we played "'tucky derby" where you roll the skee-ball into the different holes and it makes the little tin horses run. the little country teens and their pet heifers were fucking precious--one was sitting on her lying-down cow like it was a couch. cowch. i saw that ornate german swing ride that i love. we found free street parking.
at the end, we all shared a elephant ear, half-raspberry and half cinnamon/sugar. the puyallup fair raspberry jam is quality. some old ladies were in line and came up to us and said, "that raspberry stuff looks really bad! like, gross!" very frankly, and laughed at our food. uh. you do.
as we were driving home through milton, washington, we passed two teenagers at a bus stop and one yelled into her cell phone "VICTOR IS NOT MY BOYFRIEND" at the exact moment we zoomed past and it shot like a bullet right into the passenger window, all dopplered perfectly. life is beautiful.
on thursday, salmon and i went down to grubby old ozzie's and auditioned to host trivia. this company that produces quiz shows in dozens of sports bars across the west coast needs a few people. we were e-mailed a question-list in the morning and then given five minutes to read it to a live audience, which was instructed to shout out the answers, in an entertaining way.
kind of a fun audition, as they go. after applying, i received short notice that i was indeed invited to audition, so it took some schedule-scrambling after work and i got there at the last possible second before my time slot began, so i only saw a couple of my competitors. salmon did great and cracked an awesome off-the-cuff joke; i think i did just fine. reminded myself to aim for "friendly and open" and not come off like a smug shithead who gets off on stumping people, since that's endemic to trivia hosts, and i think i succeeded. but it's totally subjective in that situation, of course. all about who you're up against.
then cool kids karaoke at that shabby chinese place on greenwood avenue that i keep calling won ton garden because i can never remember the real name. yen wor? it's yen wor. love that place. it's just sincere, no affectations at all. lots of our improv pals showed up and all brought their karaoke A games. i poured some real tyler-ean effort into "cryin'" and became very popular with the table of squealygirls next to us. one was holding up her cell phone (samsung flip-type, not iphone) up to the speaker while i was singing. flattering? creepy? salmon sang "downtown" in his voice of king john from disney's robin hood and conducted a drunken bar chorale.
we were trashed as well and drew pictures of each other on an old program for cocktails at the centre of the earth in between the table next to us stealing our pen every time we weren't physically clutching it in our hands. and we figured out that you can say the word "dick" while just smiling and not really moving your mouth visibly, just a tiny covert click of your tongue, so we were doing that all night and giggling all over one another. comedy geniuses. let me tell you.
oh, yeah, by the way, my house is in TIME magazine right now, no big D.
current mood: koff koff
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, September 18th, 2009
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10:55 am - you can tell me one more time what you don't like
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hello. lately, i've been relishing in my righteous enragement whenever i have to listen to men criticizing women's bodies. i enjoy being enraged about it. i don't want to work it out. like, i realize that there's nothing for it, men are gonna do it with or without my approval, but seems (suddenly, wtf) so reductive and insulting, i can't not.
a male associate called a friend of mine fat yesterday, who is so not fat by any wild-eyed, coke-fueled stretch, and in a very brusque, this-is-an-accepted-fact-and-it-is-my-god-given-station-to-point-it-out way, and i was ready to claw his fucking face off and throw it on the floor.
if that girl's fat, then i'm morbidly obese. and i am not. morbidly obese.
then i was watching "lost," where the african dude was parading around shirtless for all the world, and he had a substantially medium-sized tum-tum. and it's fine and he looks good and healthy and his body type is my humble personal preference, but i got upset when i thought about how there's no way in heaven above that a girl with the same dimension of tum-tum would be cast in a similar role and/or costume choice on the same show. not even with a smaller tum-tum. it would never even be considered. female tum-tums are forbidden from all media.
and GIRLS ARE THE ONES WHO NEED THE TUM-TUMS. they have important purposes, such as: populating the planet with humans. they come standard on most models.
it's even more face-off-clawing when the men in question could stand to lose a few themselves. or more than a few.
just so sick of being made to feel bad about my body for my entire fucking life. it is very healthy and strong and right smack in the middle of its ideal weight range for its height. i would say that my health is exceptional, actually. i can run a mile, comic book guy, while you're sitting there watching TV, demanding that the women on it meet your personal expectations.
stop telling me to be shorter and weaker and smaller. you can think it, i can't stop you, but i don't want to hear it. about my body or anyone else's. you don't have the right to tell me. fuck you.
current mood: kick me in the head guys
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(37 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, September 5th, 2009
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7:16 pm - summer of salmon
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when you grow up in the pacific northwest, the summers are so flawless and flowery and there's always 150 tons of chatter about how it's paradise, and as a native, you're required to smile grimly and remind them that the rain starts on labor day and doesn't stop until the end of april. i think i started bumping it up to september 1st as i got older. it was right on the money this year.
everyone at the house is in the throes of bumbershoot, which has been a big fucking ripoff since about 2002. (they're performing in it, so they're off the hook.) mom sweetly offered to buy me a full-price ticket this year, and i declined. yet another disappointing lineup.--it's like the yeah yeah yeahs and that's it--and the crowds negate the experience anyway. i'd rather have the 40 bucks. if i were gonna go to an overpriced festival, it'd be PAX over bumbershoot, easy.
my grandmother said she wants to see the black-eyed peas but i couldn't tell if she was kidding or not.
i'm snuggled up at sureshot on the ave right now, in my old teenage flannel and men's jeans, watching the drizzle instead of working. had a humbow at mee sum pastry and a salad at pagliacci and a cafe au lait with honey now for dessert. i think when the mansion lease is up, i'll probably move back to the U district/wallingford area. i love the parky old campus and the crusty little bookstores and thrift shops and movie theaters and how nothing matches.
now i'm all excited about autumn and winter. about wearing overcoats and sweaters and woolen things. but also being able to go outside, because it's 45 degrees and not 12.
all the seasons are distinctly nice up here. i think. seattle's like the third bowl of porridge.
very glad (still) to be home. a whole new flavor of gladness.
current mood: happy
current music: the notwist
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, August 29th, 2009
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1:13 am - a demon and an englishman
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we watched the whole season of "colonial house," which didn't really take very long. god damn it, these people are so fucking stupid. hey, so, i forgot to check what the word colonial means when i signed up for this shit. does it mean that i can just, you know, not go to church if i don't feel like it? and then can, as cavalier as you please, announce to everyone that it's because i don't believe in god? and then fucking complain about it constantly for the next three months? and also, i can proclaim to everyone that i'm gay and expect them to throw a party for me, right? and i can sleep in until 10am every morning instead of working? what about feminism? they have that on the plymouth plantation in 1628, right? i can just boss the men around and whine about it when no one does what i say?
oh, my god, this one lady's husband was chosen as the governor and she acted like she was the fucking queen of england. tried to sit in on the council meetings, and when that didn't work out, she'd hide in the curtained bed and listen in. what a joke. you'd be in the stocks so fast. later, she threw a preteen temper tantrum when her indentured slave had the temerity to try to live in her house, with her and her governor husband. right there, in the same house. interrupting their privacy. i got news for you, babe: queen elizabeth lived with like 15 handmaidens and shit. nobody had privacy, especially not a bunch of starving shit-for-brains colonists in the wilderness.
two of the people were black and they both quit early when they figured out that the colonization of the americas was kind of sort of the birthplace of the african slave trade. if not the birthplace, then it was where it grew up. new england was slavery's hometown. it took a few weeks for them to piece it together, too. jesus christ. have you not ever opened a fucking book?
i don't know, like. i had sympathy for these people, who were not from the 17th century and were not used to being oppressed in these ways, and their lives sucked and were nothing but work, also unlike their normal lives, i get it, but i thought it boiled down to plain poor sportsmanship. if you're going to play the game of "colonial house," fucking play it. if you're going to pansy out and go wander away to the next town and have a beer at a tavern when you get upset about how hard working is, then just stay home.
we went to '80s night at neighbours last night and it was kind of, like, good. the DJ was quality, drinks were cheap, everyone was attractive and friendly and neighborhourly. i've been lied to.
while making our way to IHOP at 1am, we veered too close to the mercury and had no choice to go in. it was mostly the novelty of it being in the basement of an auto repair shop with no sign. i thought salmon would like it, and he did. i win at salmon.
it was just crickets inside, only the waitstaff and us, but we were already drunk and didn't mind so much. we sat around and had a lascivious conversation and watched something with cillian murphy in it and the subtitles on. salmon knew what it was. he knew all the gothmusic too. being a trivia master isn't just a day job, folks.
IHOP has a nice cobb salad. a boy in the next booth had a dina martina T-shirt on and i said i liked it and he introduced himself as "phoebe . . . i mean my name's brent, but i go out as phoebe." i told him i "went out" as dagmar.
it made me think of how my mom describes it when people are dating--she says they're "going together." that used to embarrass the shit out of me when i was like 12, even if no one was around. just hearing her say it, i don't know why. so then i got really super embarrassed at my own self for saying that and had to be quiet for a while until i forgot.
salmon and i have been pretty exclusively living on different kinds of chili. he goes to QFC and picks out a bunch of booty kroger-brand beans et al and i make up a stew out of them and other various variety. today's was pinto beans, black-eyed peas, canned corn, a little tin of that mexican salsa that has a mallard on the label, sauteed onions, and a couple ounces of like pace picante sauce. it's not really chili, more of a descendant. it has chili ancestry. anyway, i don't have a name for it yet, but it was particularly nice today. we put muenster and some weird organic vegetable chips that tasted like doritos on top.
tomorrow's rendition will involve great northern beans. i don't know what the fuck they are, but they look basically like navy beans on the can-picture. i imagine them to be all frozen when i open them up.
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| Friday, August 21st, 2009
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5:01 pm - dodi died and di died
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i kind of went commando yesterday, after tripping over everything each night for two weeks whenever i get up at 3am to pee, and got all sulky about it and dragged the 20-some remaining boxes out of our tiny bedroom and into the party room. now everything's piled up on the couches in a common area, so we're racing the clock to get it sorted before someone makes a passive-aggressive comment. which is 100 percent what i would do if someone else in the house piled up all their personal shit in the party room.
the days have been a summerblur. more fun tymes singing drunken songs at the rickshaw, which salmon seems have to transitioned well to. it's much divier than the gaybar we went to in brooklyn, but everyone is friendly and funny and authentic. welcome to seattle: come as you are. the old people get up and sing "unchained melody" with serious purpose and then we sing "ghostbusters" and that's fine too.
i get happy when salmon likes a seattlething.
last weekend, was it really a week ago?, we went to the 10th anniversary carnival at the live girls theater, which was a little hokey, but we had our faces painted
and got some really quality bahn mi at some teriyaki hole on market street and the lady couldn't believe that a tiger and a bacchusface were sitting in her restaurant and kept smiling at us and asking us how much we paid. after, we went walking down ballard avenue, poking around in grubby old bars and taking photos of ghost ads and back-alley architecture and picking wild blackberries
and i can't find the rest of the photos now but they're cute. a good summer memory.
on wednesday, we did the same, more or less, around 85th and greenwood, with all the crusty, churchy old thrift stores. that area kind of has cool shit these days. double the restaurants and coffee shops from when i volunteered at the space travel supply co. greenwood seems so close to us, but it was kind of a chore to get to, even from 121st--i need to save my pennies for a moped or something, starting now.
we power-walked over to aurora and around the lake, then luncheoned at kidd valley because salmon liked the logo. he was all texting his BFF in long island about every old '50s song that came up. i got a pineapple malt, which sounded gross as it was coming out of my mouth but was kind of, like, really good. going in.
i'd exhausted little simon the salmon from all the walking but ignored his pleas to catch a bus because we couldn't not go to archie mcphee. when i am not there, i have this idea about mcphee that it's just full of a bunch of snarkily packaged, overly zany rockabilly garbage--asdf devil ducks! disgruntled housewives! lunchboxes with flames on them! are we wacky or what!--with like two cool things in the whole store, but it's always a treasure trove once you get inside there. and i always forget. i guess they just market the obnoxious stuff aggressively, and you have to physically go in and find the swiss air force hats and anatomical dog statues yourself.
so i got schooled on hatin'. salmon and i kind of had a spiritual experience, actually. once i get money, i'm going back and spending two hundred dollars.
that weird "the prisoner"-themed gift shop on 45th was closed when we got to it, but i made salmon walk all the way down to I-5 anyway, which was about the time he confessed that he'd gotten a stomachache from kidd valley, or possibly from those little plastic animals in the bins at mcphee, where you press the base and they collapse, which he was kissing and then i was making them swoon. and it wasn't just indolence that made him so anti-walky. i'm a monster. turns out. we saw all the juicy vintage wallingford stuff, though, the sun drycleaners sign and the guild 45th facades, which i had long planned to show salmon ever since the week i moved back and i was wandering around green lake/wallingford all the time and hollering about all the daffodils and shit. AT WHAT COST THOUGH
then we took eighteen buses back home, with poor salmon's suffering tum. i cared less about this when no one was around to notice it, but i'm getting progressively embarrassed about the remoteness of the house. it was different when i was walking a mile to the QFC alone--slightly irritating, but i didn't really mind that much. it was private ipod time. but we walked by my old place in wallingford, before i moved to new york, and i ached for the taco truck and the trader joe's five blocks away and the pub trivia across the street.
it just feels like (and is) sacrilege to complain about anything ever if you live in a mansion.
we're spending all our time in the dark movie theater in the manse lately and it's kind of a disgrace, since summer is happening outside. tiny, fleeting northwestern summer. i went out earlier to water the lawn and then scurried back inside like a silverfish, but. you should see the puffiness of the clouds out there.
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| Thursday, August 20th, 2009
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1:19 pm - and also the theory of probability
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those pipelines that lead from whatever makes twittertweets and then dumps them on your livejournal should be outlawed. it's like dan savage's thing about a bacon-flavored bagel. goes against everything that a bagel stands for.
as soon as i see those pound signs, my eyes aggressively glaze over and i scroll down. it's the principle, man.
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(12 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
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3:38 am - glitter lipstick
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when i was a little queen anne child, my brother and i would go to the park with mom--specifically big howe, which is the larger of the two parks on howe street--and occasionally meet these little long-haired chirren in lintbally sweatshirts, and we'd be like, "MY name's MEGAN and EYEM FIVE," and they'd be like "my name is serious."
and we'd be like, what the fuck did you just say, and they'd be like, "yeah, my name is clean." "my name is honesty." and we'd pause some more and be like, well, you're probably still capable of swinging on the swings with me, even with a fucked-up name like logic, so how old are you? and they'd be like, "i don't know. we don't keep time."
that's what they would say. we don't keep time.
anyway, it was the love family, of course, and eventually we learned to spot them from afar and would get stoked about what kind of crazy names they were gonna lay on us, and then the cult broke up in the mid-'80s and we'd see less and less of our urchin friends around the hill. but that always blew my tiny mind, that they didn't know how old they were. i could piece together and understand their hippieshit names--i remember rationalizing that it was like how my own name translates to a thing in, what, old welsh, so it's just like if we were in ancient wales, cos then my name would just be the word for pearl or whatever. so this kid's name is just the english word for, you know, new. that part scanned. but our ages so define us, especially as kids. how could you not know your age? how would you know what grade you were in? or who your friends could be? what about birthday parties? oh, my god, i, a 5-year-old, love my birthday so motherfucking much. i couldn't even comprehend. total system meltdown. bolts falling out and shit.
i don't know what reminded me of it lately, but something did and it stuck like a ceiling pancake all week. maybe since there are only a few precious months to go until my 30th birthday. what if you didn't know how old you were? you guys? how would your life change?
i'm mostly thinking about societal expectations regarding careers and marriages and and babies and homeowning and tripe like that. but then, also: what size i wear. whom i am allowed to date. how late i stay out at night, and how much i drink. the progression of my nose-to-mouth lines and the circles under my eyes. what age i can pass for. all the creative projects i don't have the self-discipline to get around to as the birthday clock ticks by and i become less and less marketable. what i eat for breakfast and if it is ridiculous. which stupid fucking dumbass childish movies and TV shows i like to watch. whether i like the new britney album and secretly want to buy it. what i feel like wearing when i wake up in the morning and if that thing happens to be a shirt that i drew my own face on with a sharpie.
who i compare myself to, as a standard of excellence, both older and younger.
they're not big-deal issues that i care about as deeply as i used to, but i still stop and reflexively reprimand myself a little about this stuff. you can't hang out until 3am with a bunch of potsmoking 19-year-olds, dude. act your age.
all of that artificial fear-of-being-judged bullcrap would just sizzle and evaporate if you didn't know how old you were. you could kind of just do whatever you wanted.
a cat doesn't know how old it is, and it seems to be pretty cool with that.
i'm thinking it might be the way to go. maybe that will be my birthday present to myself.
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