| This Month |
| 2007 |
SNAP COUNTRY USA
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May 30Something that I think is ridiculous about moving is how paralyzing unopened bank statements are. Do you keep them? Can you throw them away? What if someone looks at my Washington Mutual savings account? What will they see? I don't know, because I haven't looked at my bank statements in about 2 years. I just kind keep throwing them on the floor because I don't remember if it's OK to recycle them without a shredder. I don't have a shredder, I just have WHISKEY AND MEMORIES.Anyway last night Danya and her friend from Kansas named Natalie made me pack. They are nice people, I am going to say that. Today Kelly came out from OR and we will drive onward with Electrical Tape Moustaches. And we are going to embroider Matt Saracen sweaters. 
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May 22Today I wore I'M THE GUY WHO SUCKS / PLUS I'VE GOT DEPRESSION, and it was true. I went to the coffee shop that is kind of gay and got dollar refill coffee and wrote in my JOURNAL. Do you see what it is? It is like being fifteen. That is right, guys: Twenty-four is the new fifteen. However instead of Fiona Apple's Never Is A Promise I am listening to Fists Up by the Blow. it was perfect you know with just one little problem / the fact that it turns out you don't really want it / my love is a fortress, my love is the louvre / but it can't ever thrive if i'm forced to keep proving it. I have been playing that song a lot in the car, and like I will be on the highway or something with the windows down and do that loud singing thing that they do on TV shows.Like on the Football Show when Lyla Garrity gives her dad back his nice new car because she is mad at him for breaking up their family with his cheating (!), and she buys a used car from his competitor dealership, and she is driving to the state game in Dallas, and she is singing along with a song really loud, and she is hitting the steering wheel with enthusiasm. And THEN! Her car breaks down and she has to get a ride with Landry and Tyra, and she and Tyra have words! But they kind of make up! I feel that the Football Show is great, and everyone should watch it this summer. It is going to be renewed for the Fall season, but they are putting it on Friday nights? That is not what I want, because no one has watched TV on Friday since TGIF. It is true. I guess this thing I just wrote is a little embarrassing, because I have revealed several things: A) I care about network television scheduling like a nerd, B) That I sing in the car dramatically and C) That I know that Fiona Apple song's name. I guess that is fine, because what is dignity. It's just this thing that you say you have for a while, and then you look in the mirror one day and you say "Hey, where's all my dignity?" Like you left it in your other jacket. I have to take my car to get a lookover tomorrow so I can drive it across the land, I hope that the verdict will be positive. |
May 21R.I.P. LES SCHWAB.
Additionally, Leslie says Sunny Kobe Cook no longer appears in the Sleep Country USA ads, but her website reveals that she sold her business and retired at age 42. That is actually quite an achievement. Good job Sunny. Oh my god! Also look at her page about BagMate! Um, this is a skit from Almost Live!, a local sketch comedy show from Seattle that I watched with my mom on Comedy Central when I was 10. This is before Comedy Central had The Daily Show (even the Craig Kilborn version!) or South Park, so they pretty much just had SNL, SCTV, and Almost Live! on all the time. It was Hilarious, and Bill Nye was on it before he was the Science Guy. Anyway, the skit features several Northwest Entrepreneurs. Ahhh. The Men's Wearhouse guy! |
May 20Today I had my garage sale and to be true, it was a bust. No one came, but then friends came, and it was fun. I have a small keg of Tremont Ale. It is fine. Fine. I enjoy having friends and ales and the selling of items. It was like being in America, with a grill and a small keg, and capitalism? I wanted to eat a burger, but I didn't. It was ground chuck, but I didn't eat it. However, I watched many others eat chuck, and that was nice.In Legally Blonde Luke Wilson is not very attractive. I think that he is the finer Wilson brother, but in this movie his hair is not very good. However, his jawline is still preferable to any other Wilson all of the time. Especially at the end of the movie, his hair is very bad. Why did they not address this? It has rained very hard for the last few days. It's nice, I suppose, for the sake of spring, but it is also not nice for the sake of May. And ummmm Garage Sales? Jesus. My garage sale was kind of officially rained out. I was sad about that. But hopefully I will strike a profit with the power of Craigslist. Happily, my aunt and uncle came to visit the sale today. It was a nice surprise. They bought all my wine and christmas lights. I hope that they enjoy them. |
May 16
BARBECUE GARAGE SALE THIS SUNDAY YOU GUYS EVERYONE SHOULD GO |
May 16I went to Kansas and I saw Danya and we went to see the Kansas City Royals. Maybe everyone knows this already, but Kansas City is actually in Missouri. If you want to go there then you will drive to Missouri from Kansas. BUT. Do you know what is really awesome? Seeing signs to commemorate the Oregon Trail just around! Like you will be driving on Route 10 and there will be a sign for the Oregon Trail Auto Tour Route. And on the KU campus I found a memorial plaque on a rock and stuff. How exciting it is.Anyway, Danya and I saw the Royals and it was completely surreal for many reasons. One of them is that I guess Major League Baseball is where middle school girls and boys go to mack. Also that a beer cost $6.25 in a cup. And it was Bud Light. If I had preferred a bottle, it would have been $6.75. Then the Royals lost 17 to 3. And there were Dodge sponsorship things around. However, we had a nice time. By the end of the game we were the only people left in our section, and we spent the entire game talking about how we knew nothing about baseball and various political agendas. Also after the game we saw this kid in the parking lot kicking a glass beer bottle many times. He was little, and his dad didn't tell him to stop. That made me mad, I guess, because if it were my kid I would have told him to pick it up and bring it home to recycle. Like, I bet that kid will grow up and kick bottles forever, and leave them there in many parking lots for people to pick up. Or cut themselves on! Tragedy! I will maintain that personal responsibility for waste is still the best policy. If you litter, then it's probably going to keep being litter, even if it is someone's job to pick it up. Why? Because when it is your job to pick up other people's crap, it's depressing, and frankly kind of classist. Like, to say that it's OK to litter because you are giving someone a job is also saying "It's easier for me to throw this styrofoam cup on the ground than to wait and put it in a trash can, and it's not really my problem, is it? I have enough privilege so that I will never have to pick up other people's litter as a job." Yes Chava: I AM TALKING TO YOU. And America. And then it is important to recycle also, and but if you don't even believe in being responsible for your own crap then I guess it is not fruitful to have a dialog on recycling. ONE DAY SOON I WILL RETURN TO CASCADIA AND MAYBE THEN I WILL NOT BE OBSESSED WITH CRAZY DIATRIBE RAMBLINGS. |
May 14God I have really very little to report, except that I saw the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie yesterday and it was Really Really Bad. Like, I love them: when I was 8 - like many of my generation, I'm sure - my {only} friend Cottie and I played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the playground and drew them all over our homework. She was Leonardo, I was always Michaelangelo. I will now make a list of things that were awful about the 2007 feature film release.1) CGI: Low-grade 2D animation or live action is excellent, but CGI is so so over. 2) Anatomy: I guess I know that I am old when I am disgusted by the impossible smallness of April O'Neill (and every other female character)'s waist line. 3) Completely irrelevant plot?: I'm sorry but WHAT is the point of bringing in all this ancient Central American civilization baggage? It was way unnecessary. 4) Too much L & R, not enough D & M: The whole story was about Leonardo and Raphael having drama, and not about Michaelangelo and Donatello in any way. For all the FOUR BROTHERS talk talk talking, it was plainly obvious that the writers felt some brothers are more important. Anyway, the point is that you should not spend money on it. Today I went to Russo's produce market and I know that I will miss it when I am gone. There are many fine comestibles to be had. You guys, ALSO - Kelly showed me the Bust a Bucket video last night and it's really important that you watch it. It is difficult to describe how much Rip City is missed, but it is just gone. I think it began with the transition to the Rose Garden from the Coliseum, and then it became more about expensive tickets and silly sponsorship spots during the games, and then there was the issue of certain players doing "illegal" things and "abusing women." But for now... your Portland Trrrraillll Bla-zers! |
May 8Universe update? I looked on wikipedia for "Ultimate Fate of the Universe" and it is kind of scary. These are the options: Big Freeze, Heat Death, Big Rip, Big Crunch, and then there is the possibility that our universe is not the only one, and that there might be other universes out there with different physical laws! Isn't that crazy. This is like, in an unspeakable number of years with many many zeroes, by the way. But it will happen some day I guess. When a "day" isn't even a relevant amount of time anymore because the sun will not exist. Whoa!I like when you watch a movie that involves people dying tragically in one way or another, such as Titanic, or Pan's Labyrinth, or whatever, and it makes you say "Well I certainly would not want to die drowning!" or "Man, that must be the worst, to get stabbed in the face with a broken bottle by a fascist military officer until you die, I hope that never happens to me!" I mean, I have to say that it is dramatic and tortuous. I definitely don't want to go like that. I guess I'd prefer to be a nice old lady laying in a bed in the springtime. With a nice breeze coming through the window? Sorry if this is really weird. The point is that one day all the atoms could run out of energy, and we might very well one day reach 0 Kelvin, or we could shrink down and explode all over again, OR just keep expanding so hard that we are going so fast that it will just be off the charts, and rip apart. These are the options for the finite Universe. Which one do you want? Note: I'm totally not a scientist. I uh, enjoy learning about space with very little context or education on physics? I'm like, reading all these internet things about cosmology and I have read Carl Sagan books and seen NOVA and I'm like "yeah I don't know what that is, but how interesting! How bizarre!" Like Bill Murray in the Royal Tenenbaums with his Heinsbergen syndrome observation. And I totally take it as fact, even though it's like "We don't know what that is, dark matter, or dark energy. It's just a mystery. I think we just made it up so our math equations would work." I mean, honestly. What baloney does that sound like. I'm sure that in due course there will be another Einstein genius figure and they'll figure it out and look back on this time and be like "Oh, those fools. With their dark this and that. Trying so hard to make sense of it all." And they will put our great thinkers in a book with the people who thought the earth was flat or something. Hardy har! Anyway: I'm going to Kansas today to see Danya, my friend. She and I will have cheap wine and think about what it is like to be in the middle of the continent. 
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May 6Konono No. 1! They are always excellent to see live. Tonight I saw them and I totally danced so so hard. For the record I will say that there was wicked B.O. around me. But it did not matter. If you do not know, you can listen to them on NPR. It took so much to get them out of the Congo and into this country! But they came! And it is excellent!Today I watched Dances with Wolves and I realized that I want to live on the prairie in an outpost completely alone. I know that I would really be afraid in the night and have terror about people killing me for my coffee grinder, but O! the beauty of the frontier! I will say that I know that the frontier is not what it used to be. Sometimes I get really mad at the human race for being so cruel and destructive. I get mad that good things have been destroyed, and that we will probably all drown in Waterworld, aka after the polar ice caps melt. Except you know who won't be here to save you? Kevin Costner. I mean, he might. But Kevin Costner is not going to make everything better. He will just be in movies about the prairie and a planet covered in ocean. Just think about this though, OK? Every time you look up into the night sky and wonder if anything out there in the stars could be your friend, if there is any intelligent life out in the universe: Do you think that it is still there? I think the thing that is most perplexing about our situation is that we have a wonder about whether we are the only things walking around looking for other beings in the universe - but due to the expansive and massive nature of this universe, it is just not feasible right now to contemplate. For example, the planet that has a potentially similar atmosphere to Earth? It is 120 trillion miles away. Trillion. That is more than I can imagine. And apparently that means it is close. So any stars that we're looking at are really old. Like, if our sun is 8 light-minutes away, then imagine how far away any intelligent life inhabitants might be. Probably at least 1,000 light-years away. Do you think that Homo Sapiens are going to be here in 1,000 years? I don't know. I feel like we seem to have this self-destructive species-ist quality. We don't want to change, we just want to stay the same, and comfortable, at the cost of the planet, and other species. I guess it will all be resolved one way or another. Anyway, the point is that intelligent life, if we thought it existed because we saw it in a telescope, is probably over by now due to the fact that the light that is showing it to us is so old. Isn't that scary? Maybe in the future, 2,000 years from now, there will be some person with a telescope watching me RIGHT NOW. He will be focusing on the brilliant light reflecting off of me from my desk lamp and into space. Hopefully before a billion years passes, the human race will get in touch with another planet. After that though I guess our sun will have a supernova and it won't really matter anymore anyway. |
May 5My job is over now. I have been pretty weirded out for the last few days that my job is ending. But then I guess I will embrace it now and just go on long walks and drink coffee in the day taking time to contemplate my life and feelings, and oh, also relocate myself to the opposite side of the country.It is Cinco de Mayo, and Kentucky Derby day. It was also Boston Derby Dames day. The Wicked Pissahs won the bout, but I ended up rooting for the Cosmonaughties. It was because I was sitting behind their bench and because I liked their outfits better. I would like to thank Abby Tinker aka Wanda Whipya for getting me "into derby." I enjoy a good derby match these days. Have you read the Most Emailed Article about martinis? And how martinis are NOT supposed to be made with vodka? Because they aren't. Martinis by definition are made with gin. My favorite part is this: "...You have to revisit which generation is drinking the martini," she said. "We might be classicists, but is the newer generation?" Still, after perhaps 8 or 10 martinis, Audrey fessed up, referring at one point to "a generation lobotomized by vodka." Honestly, how true is it? The answer is "very." I would like to take a trip to a college affair that features Solo cups and razzberri flavored vodkas and inform everyone that they are pretty much getting lobotomies. I am sure they would not care that much. Then I would drink a fine martini, and I also would not care. Lobotomies for all. |