j o r d y ' s b l o g

shake baby shake

2011-08-23T20:37:00.005-04:00

i wrote this on the day of the earthquake.

since my summer life is a hazy halcyon landscape of perfect days, punctuated with vegetables from the backyard garden and lethargic card games on the deck and slow, sweet afternoon happy hours, i have imposed a "one activity a day" rule: going to the beach is an activity. same goes for reading a book. or watching half a season of mad men in one sitting.

so, yesterday was the day i fell asleep on a beach with a breeze and woke up with a toasted lower back. today was shaping up to be the day we did the crossword in the times that mysteriously appeared on the kitchen table, when around 2pm, nature defined the day for me.

obviously, How Social Media Is Changing The World is a favorite topic of social media-ists (media-tors?) preening behind computer screens everywhere. my first omfg moment was in june 2009, when michael jackson died and basically crashed the internet. twitter buzz far outpaced reports from any official news sources, which makes sense as twitter requires of its authors nothing more than speculation, sarcasm, and/or exclamation marks. it was a favorite party game of mine through that entire autumn to gather opinions on who else could crash the internet by dying-- it's a pretty short list, which i suppose could also be termed something like "the universe's ultimate a list." in any case, i was fascinated by the lag time between frenzied rumor and confirmation-- rather like seeing an explosion before you hear the boom. sorry, faulkner, but these days, there's the fury, and then there's the sound.

growing up in southern california, i have experienced a few earthquakes-- and by that, i mean actually just a few. (all of these people that are like ZOMG EAST COAST GET USED TO IT WE HAVE EARTHQUAKES ALL THE TIME are sort of confusing me, implying that the left coast is always a-rockin'.) they've all been small, and most of the time it takes a few seconds to be sure of what's happening. (it's like seeing a yeti in plants vs. zombies: "wait... is that?... no way, it can't be... i think it is... oh wait, it's gone. i really think it was, though!") the most interesting thing about earthquakes is how the ground rolls, as though it's changed consistency. everything feels suddenly more elastic, time included.

so when i opened my facebook today and there was a post at the top of my news feed from a high school acquaintance that said something along the lines of, "was that just an earthquake? the whole building was shaking!" i assumed she was in california. and then, at that precise second, the chair i was sitting in because to very subtly dip and roll. the mirror on my wall moved, not far, but perceptibly, from side to side. i thought i was having some sort of psychosomatic hallucination--see the word "earthquake," imagine an earthquake!-- so i asked around the house if anyone else had felt it. everyone told me it was impossible, and that there are no such things as earthquakes on cape cod.

and then the internet exploded.

everyone had something to say about it-- east coasters freaking out or celebrating (i was jumping up and down with glee at having experienced something so weird), west coasters turning on the smarm. but i was the most fascinated by that first status, that managed to get to me before the actual earthquake did. (i was not alone.) even in something as instantaneous as a natural disaster and as impossible to predict as an earthquake, we move so quickly now that there was a tiny bit of fury before the sound and the fury itself.

creature comforts

2011-07-29T18:51:00.004-04:00

i come from a family of surfers. in elementary school, i spent hours with my dad, sitting on the overstuffed chair in front of the tv watching surf videos, which are exactly what they sound like: footage of surfers shredding amazing waves set to rock music, intercut with scenic landscape pans and shots of guys with their wetsuits peeled away from their torsos holding boards under their arms and staring into the sunset.

i myself never progressed far beyond hesitatingly crouch-standing on a foam longboard in the shallow breaks of the pacific, and even that pursuit i abandoned for fear that my fourth grade crushes would see me struggle. because, of course, all the boys that are desirable in fourth grade in coastal san diego are tan little groms in rash guards and hawaiian board shorts. out of their natural habitat, they can be identified by their quicksilver and billabong tshirts, and, in the mid-90s, their butt-cuts (ear length hair, center part. ryder strong in boy meets world. you know it.)

but whether there was a board under my feet--or, as was more often the case, above my head as i got pummelled--or not, i spent a whole lot of my childhood brining in the pacific. in the summertime, it's a rite of passage to become a "junior lifeguard," so for weeks in july and august, there are hoards of bronzed kids sprinting up and down the beach and swimming out to buoys and learning first aid under a tent pitched in the sand. at the end of the summer, there is a competition against all the surrounding junior lifeguard factions, and i always did the long distance swim, which was probably a total of 200 yards but felt like the first leg of the ironman. all of this is to say that i take to water like... a fish to water. i even played one season of high school water polo! which amounted to a hilarious life tangent. i quit to become a cheerleader. please stifle your surprise.

but i will maintain that no matter how comfortable you are diving headfirst into an oncoming whitecap, the ocean itself is uniformly terrifying. shortly after i decided that the little mermaid was my all-time favorite movie, i expanded my fascination to the more perverse or mysterious depths: the ruins of the titanic, the mariana trench, the loch ness monster. i mean, you guys, what the heck else is out there?

my roommate sarah is flat out obsessed with sharks. we had a "world's most dangerous sharks" poster in the reading nook of our cambridge apartment that i am sure will continue to occupy a place of prominence once we've relocated to new york. but even now, with the biggest national celebration of sharks beginning tomorrow on discovery channel, sharks dont thrill me or haunt my nightmares, or both.

though what advertising genius came up with using gaga's "show me your teeth" as this year's theme song? i give you one million points.

however, as befits a girl/teen/adult obsessed with mermaids (yes, still), i am petrified of ursula and her cohorts. (HOLY *#@^&*! check this guy out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampyromorphida. now you know my nightmares for the next decade). in grad school, we had a teacher whose sign-in sheets for class always asked a cheeky question, and once it was "what is your irrational fear?" i wrote giant squid, but i would like to retract that. because a fear of giant squid is COMPLETELY RATIONAL.

cut to: i am working on cape cod, and i go swimming, somewhere, every day. people are freaking out this year because there have been great white sightings up and down the atlantic side of the cape, apparently much earlier in the year than usual. you also cant go 30 minutes without seeing a seal (aka shark's filet mignon) within 100 feet of the beach. but sharks are not my concern, even despite the great white's position of prominence at the very top of our dangerous poster (is he drawn bigger on purpose? no? that's just his size relative to the other most dangerous sharks known to man? alrighty then. noted. the great white: the michael phelps of sharks. you're welcome, discovery channel.) and actually, in an uncharacteristic move, my concern is not even tentacled. (do you feel cheated for having read my octopi-diatribe? well, dont be crabby, because my fear of summer 2011 are: CRUSTACEANS!

most specifically, these crustaceans:

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! have you ever seen anything more terrifying? my research (i love referring to reading a wikipedia page as "my research") tells me that these guys are living fossils and that they get up to 24 inches long from tip to tail.

as i started walking over the dunes to secret beach the other day, which is so called because it's a million miles down a dirt road after a turn off from a side-side street in rural wellfleet (so: remote), set on taking a dip in the warm bay water and reading and maybe skipping some pretty stones, i heard that immediately recognizable sound of a seven year old's shriek. "oh my god oh my god look at this one ahhhhhhhhh oh my god ahhhh it's so big!"

i crest the final dune, out of breath and with toes hot from the toasted sand. grasses are whipping at my legs and my hair is billowing and looking romantic as i survey the windswept cerulean bay. (okay, my hair is like 6 inches long, so actually it was just lashing me in the eyes.) the beach is predictably empty, dotted with maybe three umbrellas in either direction as far as i can see. and i can see quite a way: on a clear day, as they say, you can see forever, or at least as far as the lighthouse in provincetown, at the very tip of the cape.

but right in front of me, the three little shrieking boys are gathered in ankle-deep water. and they are holding BEASTS. little dinosaurs. living fossils, round, the size of medium pizzas with tails. water armadillos, or as val described them later, the ocean's mini darth vaders: two enormous horseshoe crabs.

i swam in the freshwater pond that day.

eggceptions...?

2011-06-21T16:51:00.001-04:00

am a sucker for a good coffee/sandwich shop. one of the primary reasons i am devastated at having left cambridge is losing darwin's, the semi-famous place around the corner with sandwiches named for the surrounding streets. appropriately, since i was a resident of its namesake, i only ever ordered the magnolia-- hummus, avocado, carrots, tomato, sprouts, granny smith apple slices (!), and vinagrette. i always said no cheese but every now and then it would make it on there by mistake, so i can vouch that it's delicious both ways. so a magnolia and either iced or hot coffee with soy milk & 2-ish splendas.

or, when i lived in skagway, alaska, we frequented glacial smoothies, where one could maintain a monthly tab. i was omnivorous then, and besides, i was training for a marathon and dancing the can can four times a day, so i would get the super bagel-- garlic basil cream cheese, ham, and fresh basil. and a coffee. and sometimes a scone, since yesterday's pastries were a buck and I LOVE SCONES.

yum, scones.

anyway, in the two weeks i have been in wellfleet, i have not found a coffee/sandwich shop that suits my needs. in fact, a google search returns dunkin' donuts as the first result (@!!!@&$#@&*(@#*@), which makes my soul ache, and not just because they dont have soy milk. there's a place called box lunch just off main street that has "roll-wiches" (which are just wraps) and they're good, but the atmosphere is lacking. and man oh man, i just cant get over it! wellfleet a cute little place populated with people with time and money to spare and, i would guess, town gossip to dissect. and besides, where do youths get their sandwiches to take to the beach with them all season? kyle and i couldnt go a summer's day in high school without careening up to board & brew in the defender with some ridiculous song blaring too loudly from the speakers to get turkados or tub o' tunas to go.

all of this is a typically long-winded way of saying that i have been bringing my lunch to rehearsal and drinking rehearsal coffee and spending my lunch breaks READING BOOKS (what the WHAT?!). this amounts to a lot of coffee, a lot of reading (i started under the banner of heaven at lunch yesterday. i finished under the banner of heaven at lunch today.) and a relatively strict adherance to my self-imposed, pretty-consistent-but-in-no-way-above-temptation effort to eat vegan.

i started this effort nearly a year ago, purely for vanity's sake, since i was going into rehearsals for cabaret and knew i was going to soon be nearly naked, painted white, and in front of an audience. immediately after that show closed, i became tytania in the donkey show. she wears a lot: 2 pairs of tights, thigh-high boots, purple shorts, a cape, a peacock-feather collar, an elaborate wig, a mask-- and pasties shaped like butterflies. and glitter. then it was our mfa showcase, and you have to be skinny or nobody likes you. and now it's summer, and i want to be an actor, so for the forseeable future, it's kind of, "goodbye, cheeseburger and all of your assorted delicious friends."

but a girl has to be reasonable. last night, we were watching tim and eric awesome show great job and someone made pizza rolls and i ate them (I KNOW that the equation you are mulling over in your brain is: tim & eric + pizza rolls = omg how high were you, but the boring answer is i stay primly & prudely away like a real womp womp kill joy). they were cheese pizza rolls, and they were trashy and delicious. sometimes, i eat ramen noodles. if you have spinach artichoke dip, why then, yes, i will have just a bit. but for the most part, i'm a rabid devourer of plants and their derivatives.

EXCEPT

OMG

I CANT GET ENOUGH OF DEVILLED EGGS!

i think it is so weird, and yet, i want to eat devilled eggs all the time. the only reason i sat down to write this blog is that i had already eaten my allotment of devilled eggs for the day and i was sad and needed a distraction.

this is a brand-new obsession. in fact, i hated devilled eggs growing up. every easter, i would pluck one from the buffet and bravely put it on my plate, and every easter five minutes later i would chuck the nibbled egg somewhere into the surrounding garden. they always had dill or relish or tasted like a mouthful of yellow mustard, which still makes me gag. but in grad school, my roommate annika rocked my world with her dill-less, relish-less devilled eggs that she'd make in wild varieties-- sriracha, wasabi, barbeque-- for our parties. when she finally shared with me her two secret ingredients, which i obviously cant divulge, it was a serious passing-down-of-the-hallowed-family-recipe moment. i remember looking up at her in awe, nodding reverently at her age and wisdom and experience, dreaming of one day enlightening another deserving student as she had enlightened me.

which is totally absurd of course, since she was 22 and i was 25 when this happened, and unless i was sitting on the kitchen floor, she was undoubtably looking up at me, as very few females stare down lovingly at someone close to six feet tall. but it is true that annika opened my eyes to the wonder of the devilled egg, that it has become my late night snack or my dinner main course, that boiling a perfect egg makes me feel like a culinary champion, that sarah and i have discussed devoting a blog exclusively to our pursuit, creation, and consumption of devilled eggs, and that i have even subtly adapted the recipe to make it my very own and want to do a little dance every time i employ my own [wildly common and easily guessable] secret ingredient. most things i missed when i began what i would term my vegan-effort i can happily approximate with subsitutes, but a lady's gotta have a vice, and by golly, mine is devilled eggs!

and sometimes cheese.

i want to ride my bicycle, i want to ride my bike

2011-06-14T16:29:00.006-04:00

last summer, after getting back from moscow and all our assorted european adventures, and before starting rehearsals for cabaret, i worked every now and then as an usher at the ART. the show was "johnny baseball" and it was all musical theater and summer and americana, and i just ate it up with a spoon, especially when i got to wear my cute little red and navy vintage skirt and a red sox tee and get complimented by all the matinee-attending blue state blue hairs. there was even a hot dog cart in the lobby, so it smelled like the good parts of a stadium, and all in all, it added up to a really straight musical (fine) or a really gay baseball game (awesome).

one day, as we were doing our post-show sweep to pick up playbills and wine glasses and forgotten umbrellas, i saw, at the end of a row, a folded bill. and i thought what everyone thinks: SCORE! life is giving me a TIP! but as i went to pick it up, i was suddenly bummed-- it was a hundred, folded in thirds, and lying there, lonely, in row L. i was actively annoyed at this hundred. i mean, if it had been a 5, i would have gone to charlie's and bought a raspberry UFO with it and toasted myself. if it had been a 10, i would have treated a friend... or had two toasts to myself. i even could have found something to do with a 20 if you really twisted my arm. but once you get much higher than that, that pesky conscience gets in the way, and i couldnt help thinking that i would be wrecked to lose a hundred dollars. that's twenty toasts to myself! or an electric bill! or, more exactly, a bike!

so i turned it in. sighingly. it was tuesday, and the house manager told me that if no one had picked it up in a week, it was mine. and the following tuesday, she called and said, "no one's claimed it!" and i skipped over to the theater and picked up my franklin in good conscience and informed everyone i met that i was going to use it to purchase a bike. and, i kid you not, a half hour later, when it was already resting leisurely in the bottom of my bank account, that same house manager called me back with dread in her voice. "i hate to do this to you, jordy, but some guy literally just called about losing a hundred last week in row L. he's coming in right now." i think i made a face roughly like this one:

but i begrudgingly returned to the theater. the guy gave me a $20 reward for finding his cash, so that was very nice of him. AND THEN... the company manager at the ART gave me a bike! there were some old ones that the theater had bought for previous cast members, and since i had made it very clear with my big mouth that i wanted a bike, they gave one to me! it was really a wonderful gesture, and i rode it all fall, especially after i came out of rehearsal on my birthday and found jared had equipped it with a basket and bell.

jared also got a bike (his, of course, was very fancy and sleek and had very skinny tires and many locks and, of all ludicrous things, a rear-view mirror) and the two of us flew all over cambridge, usually precariously holding coffee in one hand and steering with the other, until one day, as he was pulling into the theater right in front of me, he braked too hard with his front brake and went over the handlebars. it was VERY dramatic, since he also squeezed the crap out of the iced coffee he was holding, which exploded and went flying and then rained down on his head as he tried to remove his bike from the middle of the intersection and himself from his bike. i initially thought he had hit a landmine. the end result, besides me losing it laughing as soon as it was established that he was fine and that we were not in a war zone, was that he bent the back wheel. his bike stayed locked up at the theater for months after that, and thus our little bike jaunts ended, which was fine, as it was getting much too cold to go speeding into the icy harvard square headwind.

fast forward six months to me leaving cambridge to move to cape cod to spend the summer doing a farce called "boeing boeing." i took my bike (which, i might add, is probably the ugliest bike you'll ever see. if it were a child, you might say it had a face only a mother could love) into eastern mountain sports and had it spiffed up, and even got a student discount despite my harvard ID having expired three days prior. it somehow got squeezed into zach's car with all my suitcases, the mandolin i adopted from derek, and the six pack of homebrews that vince sent with me to ensure i'd be tipsily nostalgic for the glory days of grad school. and man oh man, thank goodness it did. i have been zinging all over an unseasonably cold cape, doing very important things: spending hours at the library, seeing plays, going to small galleries with lots of paintings of boats, making special trips into town to see if the general store has any tasty smelling candles (they dont). every time i try to lock it to one of the many bike racks around town, i get chastised by some stranger generous enough to remind me forcefully that no one steals bikes around here. so it just sits around this lazy little town, outside our giant, rambling actor house, or the methodist church where we rehearse, or the library, where i am probably reading vanity fair and not actual literature.

but all that being said, please dont come and steal it. id be gutted to have to walk to the beach when it finally heats up around here. and besides, its very existence is owed to the honor code.

once up on a time

2011-04-05T23:08:00.005-04:00

when i was 22, i briefly dated a 28 year old that i met on the subway. it was one of those times where an interesting person sits near you and you keep making eye contact and you keep expecting the other person to exit and you're already beating yourself up for not talking to them even while they're still so close you are actively trying not to take out their eye with your bag as you shuffle around other passengers. and then suddenly, they stand up to go, and you're like "I AM SO TERRIBLE AT SEIZING THE DAY BLAHHHHHHHHHHH" but then you realize they arent leaving at all but approaching you and being cute and charming. and then you go on some dates for a while and it's very check-that-new-york-experience-off-your-list and you tell your friends from home about it and they tell you your life is so exactly like carrie bradshaw's and you wince exaggeratedly because you want them to know you're too cool for sex and the city and besides you're so comfortable with yourself you are willing to identify with miranda anyways but somewhere in your mind you're like yeah, that's right, if carrie rode the subway and multiplied her clothing budget by .001, this would totes be something that would be featured on an ep. you know those times, right? blerggggggggggggggg anyways, briefly dated this guy and have been reminded of it recently because on our third or so date, he made me dinner and we watched this little movie called "once" at his apartment. he lived rather near me and had a great house, but he had a roommate and i was a little horrified. i distinctly remember thinking "a roommate at 28? this is terrible. i quit this," and so that colored the rest of the night. and that was kind of the end of things for me, and i [wrongly] lumped the film in with the rest of the lackluster experience and hadnt returned to it for years. NOW! this idea that i had that people who are 28 are supposed to like be self-made millionaires with personal private estates IS THE MOST LUDICROUS THING I CAN THINK OF. (second place: ashley and i promised each other at a very skinny 16 that if we were still not super curvy in ten years we would get boob jobs. 9.5 years later, i am not sure what is more absurd: that i thought, nay, LAMENTED that i would be a rail-thin size 0 at 26 or that i thought i would be able to afford vanity surgery. if i broke my femur right now, i think i would bind it to a yard stick with some masking tape and roll myself around in a stolen office chair.) so as i edge into my late-ish 20s living in what generally amounts to an actor's flophouse (plus the usual guest of one second year harvard law student) i return to that idea and laugh/try not to cry that college kids probably think i should be a millionaire by now or something (that "something" is standing in for "at least have a job.") and i pay frequent mental atonement to the aforementioned male and wish him the best and future of not dating whackjobs with ludicrous expectations such as myself. my former self!! ive been thinking a lot about my roommates this evening because they're all in new york meeting with agents and managers and other fancy people following our MFA showcase yesterday. ive had no one with whom to drink the southern tier pale ales in our fridge or eat one of the three things stocked in our house (beans & rice, trader joe's thai veggie gyoza, and morningstar buffalo nuggets), nor did anyone yell at me as i accidentally spent four hours pounding on the keyboard i'd relocated to the kitchen counter, rehearsing the music for a new show im working on. and here we come to the other connection to the previous story! ONCE! the wonderful and charming film that i unfairly ignored so i could be indignant about twenty-something artist types living with roommates because they obviously have no money as they pursue their passion. i was going to call karma a bitch, but it's really that she has a wicked sense of humor, because it's looking like my first job out of grad school (the paycheck from which i will use to pay rent on a roommate-d apartment, i am sure) will be the new stage production of once. right now, we're workshopping it at the ART in cambridge, and it's just the most amazing thing i have had happen to me...ever? (and i have had some amazing experiences. like, one time, i dated this cute boy i met on the subway. it was SO discount sex and the city, let me tell you...)

in which i use nauseating words like "blessed" and "fantasy"

2010-11-15T17:56:00.003-05:00

i played a hilarious joke on myself today. i rode my bike home, shivering, telling myself that i was going to enter my cozy, warm house, with its pumpkin candle waiting to be lit on the counter and the bottle of red wine shooting me come-hither glances from the kitchen, and that i was going to change into my gym clothes, turn a cold shoulder on all the comforts of home, and return through the blustery, dark cambridge streets on my bike with the broken brakes to fight law students for an eliptical exactly during what i believe is technically termed "gym rush hour."

really absurd.

since i had just come from alexander class, which teaches one to accept both oneself and others as they are in each individual moment, rather than through the lens of expectation, i decided to apply similar principles to my embracing of creature comforts, and i am now wrapped in my boyfriend's giant polar fleece robe listening to the stephen sondheim pandora station. and have no fear, i didn't leave the cab sav in its lonely cubby by the degas print and the oven. and i am distinctly not feeling bad about standing up the stairmaster.

i'm not generally someone who says they feel "blessed" by something, but if i were, i would absolutely say i feel "blessed" by the course 2010 has taken. it's been one of those vertical years, the kind that flies by day to day, but upon reflection, is stuffed with SO MUCH. since april, it's been one surreal experience after another, really culminating in october, which was like living in a theatrical blender or kalidescope or spin-art machine.

i spent two months of this year painting my body white every night. how weird is that? it was for cabaret at the american repertory theater, and the whole kit kat ensemble looked like powdery anime ghost fetish corpses. approximately. two and a half weeks after closing, the last vestiges of pigment are finally leaving the spots between my toes. not that the paint really made much of a difference, since, except for a brief trip to greece with jared in june, and a few hazy weeks in encinitas, i have spent this entire year in either boston or moscow, neither of which are what one might term "mediterranean". pasty. pasty is my exact hue. i've lived on every organic-vegetarian option in the freezer section of the grocery store down the street. i used to aim to make it to trader joe's, a mile or so away, on my day off, but then in october, i never had one of those. a day off, i mean.

since cabaret has closed, i've started rehearsals for the donkey show, which has been running in oberon since last summer. it's a disco retelling of a midsummer night's dream, and i'll be playing what jared is terming my "third giant sexual deviant role" in two months. but things are finally a little more manageable, and tonight i may even venture around the corner to the thirsty scholar for the monday night football game.

my ability to balance artsiness and bro-iness is something about which i've always been very proud-bordering-on-smug. but man oh man has this fall been illuminating. i would list my priorities after theater (professional or scholastic) in this order: sleep, food, maintaining my romantic relationship, maintaining my other relationships, fantasy football. and depending on who you ask, every single one of those priorities has suffered, but HOLY COW MY FANTASY TEAMS ARE BITING IT THIS YEAR. as a cute little gesture, i named one of them, in july, "i love musicals." i have changed my roster once this entire season: i drafted matt stafford to fill in for alex smith in my extra offensive spot the week before the jets game and his shoulder fiasco. but i forgot to put him IN the starting line up. so, on my bench, he scored 76 points and then was out for the count. sorry, people who like sports and also musicals. fantasy fail.

it's okay though (warning: cutesy wrap up in 5...4...3...2...). i think i would probably term this whole year a very successful fantasy (PUKE!)

MORE UPDATES WILL COME!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

update:
30 minutes after i posted this, still sitting in my little cocoon of happiness, wine, and musical theater, my roommate sarah rang the doorbell. she'd been to the gym and couldnt find her keys. i set my wine glass and my laptop down, stood up, tripped over the cord, and sent them both flying across the room in different directions: computer to the floor, red wine to the white quilt covering the chair behind me. these things would not have happened if i went to the gym. STANDARD

moscbow

2010-04-01T11:23:00.002-04:00

ive been mulling this idea over for a while, and perhaps if i were snappier it would have become a punchline for a joke or something, but as it stands it's more just a vague cultural observation: i think it's very telling that russian culture, which is stereotyped (pretty correctly) as a culture in which one is always being watched by someone, champions the theater as its primary art form. there is always an audience for theater in russia, on every level-- our little adaptation of alice in wonderland that runs in the school studio theater at MXAT and seats around 120, is sold out for its whole run, through the end of may, and we actually just added a show for the employees of the american embassy. when i saw don quixote danced by the bolshoi ballet at the kremlin palace (as the actual bolshoi theater has been under construction since 2006,) there were 5,000 other people there. this was a tuesday night, to see a ballet that has been in repertory for decades. every time we venture out to see theater, the audience is so vast and so varied it's inspiring. actors take four or five curtain calls, audience members bring flowers to people they don't know and wait around after the show to continue applauding as the performers exit. and the theater spaces are everywhere here. the aforementioned kremlin palace is a 6,000 seat behemoth built during soviet times to host national meetings housed within the walls of the kremlin, past rows of police and metal detectors and coat checks; we've seen plays in old theaters, new theaters, converted churches, even an improvised theater in the very lobby of an actual theater.
but it's not just within the confines of a stage, appropriated or not, that russians are performing. it's a hugely performative culture. the women are always dressed to the nines, ready to be looked at, fully "done" in furs and spike heels and perfect makeup and attitude. there are flower stands on every corner, and people are always carrying roses they're giving or receiving, as though a boyfriend is appreciating his girlfriend's performance (yikes... take that as you will.) jared actually got self conscious the other night walking home from the show, and not because i was still wearing heavy stage makeup and had wildly teased hair. he was half-jokingly worried that people passing us would think he was a bad boyfriend, because i was carrying only one measly flower, which i had received from an audience member.
but it goes beyond this benjaminian theater of the streets stuff. indeed, that's not even an apt comparison, because there is not really a flaneur figure in moscow culture, as everyone has a distinct direction and purpose. there is no sense of leisure in moscow, no one trolling the avenues searching only for things to appreciate. there is an overwhelming sense of direction and responsibility, of seriousness, which makes the meal that i had the other night all the more surreal.
sarah's parents, who live in manhattan, were in town for the last week, and on friday we met them at their hotel after rehearsal for a drink. out came the guidebook when we decided to choose our dinner destination, and we settled on a nearby restaurant that promised a triple menu: uzbek, arabic, and chinese food. the guidebook neglected to mention that the restaurant, which was called Uzbekistan, would also deliver triple the camp.
we entered through huge, carved doors, into a tiled foyer with hookahs, fountains, and foliage. the waitstaff all wore heavily embroidered costumes, and someone led us to our table in a dining room with vaulted mosaic ceilings, carved wooden walls, gold draperies, and tables of sweets. our menus, which were enormous, had an illustration of a mosque on the front, housed under a sheet of plastic, and between the two was white sand, so you could shake your menu up into a desert sandstorm. (the wine list achieved a similar effect, with red liquid and the shape of a decanter). the menu had all your hometown favorites--whole sturgeon, horse sausage, and the ever-authentic sounding "rabbit a la arabic," which is what i ordered, and let me tell you something... it was all russian food. i think the curry powder maybe winked at my rabbit from across the kitchen. it was delicious, do not get me wrong, but our selections, whether from the uzbek page, the chinese page, or the arabic page of the menu, were distinctly russian. i will say though, in our plate of sweets that sarah and i split for desert, there was a mean baklava.
aside from the totally over-the-top but very expensive seeming actual physical space, drama in all forms surrounded us. there was an ever-changing rotation of belly dancers in elaborate costumes that made their way between the tables and were ogled by russian men eating shishkebobs and drinking vodka; there was a live band for when the belly dancers needed a break; and then there was the boozed up woman who stormed out of the restaurant in tears, only to return with three very menacing police officers, who stood about 20 feet away from her table with a strict eye on her male dining companions for the rest of their meal. finally, at the end of our meal, the drama came home: after sarah's dad signed the credit card receipt, our waitress mumbled something about his card and whisked it away. a nervous while later, she returned with the card and the manager and asked for his passport, as the signature from the receipt did not seem to match the one on the back of his card. once she was satisfied that he was indeed the same guy, she returned the card. jeff turned it over to inspect the discrepancy. the back of his card says "please ask for i.d." somehow, though, i dont think that he meant for "i.d." to stand for "interminable drama."

kartoshkwha??

2010-03-15T13:06:00.002-04:00

I was sitting in the cafeteria today during lunch, a small café on the fourth floor of the building that houses the Moscow art theatre mainstage, where all 23 of us traipse almost daily around noon to point at various combinations of cabbage, beets, sour cream, potatoes, and chicken that are generally surprisingly delicious, when suddenly something freezing and wet started spraying my back with alarming intensity. I leapt from my chair, breaking the cardinal rule of representing the united states in the caf (which is to be as polite and quiet as possible) and repeated “oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh” many multiple times. Luckily jared was on hand to quickly turn off the water spigot I had turned on with my back that just happens to stick out of the wall at an arbitrary location in the middle of the dining room. I spent the rest of the day in a sweatshirt that has “Harvard” emblazoned across the front, and “idiot” implied in a big soaking patch across the back.

Living in russia so far has basically been a series of attempts to avoid doing such things as spraying your dining companions with cold water while they’re in the midst of enjoying their borscht. There are the cultural funny bones you don’t know about until you hit them—apparently our class baffled the stage manager the first day of rehearsal by draping our coats over the back of our chairs in the dressing room as opposed to hanging them up; you’ll be on the receiving end of a death stare if you don’t have exact change when purchasing your groceries. But while these specificities can be overwhelming, they’re not so much obstacles as secret missions, passwords you have to learn in any culture so you stop being a day tripper and begin understanding the code. Though after two weeks in Moscow, I still belong in a beatles song.

Living in paris, I remember using the analogy of cultural “chutes and ladders,” and I’m finding that I’m still very proud of that comparison. There totally is the aspect of play, of luck, and of taking small steps that build your confidence only to find huge pitfalls you couldn’t have possibly prepared for. Sarah and I have started measuring our Russian cultural aptitude in our ability to order food from a specific street vendor. Phoenetically, it’s pronounced kroshka kartoshka, and the green and yellow carts are as ubiquitous on Moscow streets as halal grill carts are in manhattan, but the premise behind these carts is the noble baked potato.

Though it should be easy enough to order a kartoshka, our first experience with the fabled cuisine was one of the first nights we spent in russia. Sarah, jared, and I got lost looking for a grocery store, and to calm mr. eaton’s perpetual hunger, sarah ordered him a potato. She thought she asked for cheese and butter. She got sliced hot dogs and something that tasted like sauerkraut. I will remind you that all of the available toppings are in plain view and ostensibly, one could just point and say “eta.” Sounds sure-fire; doesn’t save you from hot dogs.

The second time we kroshka’ed was on a stop on our bus tour of Moscow the first Monday we were in town. Our whole class piled into one of the bigger outposts, near Moscow state university, atop a hill with a view of the whole city, next to a near mile of tables covered in matroshkas, which are Russian nesting dolls. Man, you can get enormous matroshkas in Moscow. Anyways, we had a Russian student with us, who offered to help me with ordering, but when I asked what she suggested, the answer was imitation crab sour cream. I went with a plain potato, with butter and cheese.

Finally, yesterday, jared and I experienced serious street food success. After a wonderful tea thrown for us by the TA’s of our acting class, we wandered home warm and with warmer feelings for Russian culture and all its accoutrements—and by accoutrements I specifically mean pastries and this wildly delicious caramelized condensed milk used to sweeten thick, strong, black tea. We took side streets and ogled architecture and stopped into stores and read signs aloud (quietly) and speculated and I dutifully agreed with jared’s comments about all the amazing cars parked on the sidewalk. (jared feels very vindicated that his favorite cars seem to abound in Moscow; I feel very legitimized that anytime I have tried to park in manhattan, I have been tempted to treat the sidewalk as viable real estate.) our wanderings led us to a kroshka, and we left victorious: cheese, butter, chili, sour cream, and chives! Most satisfying, in many ways!

snow way jose

2010-02-25T10:48:00.005-05:00

i think it is so novelty that this bolt bus i am taking to new york right now has wireless. it's like a mobile techno pod! in my mind. i mean, i think i am just about the human equivalent of a magnet-- put me next to a computer or a credit card, and i will do some serious damage (yuk yuk). see, for example: my backspace key. wasnt working, so i took the plastic key off in an effort to "fix" it. likely. now i have to search for a nubbin the size of a pinhead every time i need to make an edit. useful!

im headed to new york to meet the boyfriend's parents, see a show, eat some food, and generally have a three day sesh of kicking it before leaving on sunday night for beautiful, tropical, exotic MOSCOW, where i will be studying for the next three months. now, given this impending departure, it has been very useful that the winter olympics have been on this week, for a few reasons: 1. there's no break from packing more satisfying than ramen, a leffe, and some ski cross, and 2. there are many russian cultural lessons to be learned from watching russian athletes, and, more specifically, from noting their choice of dress.

for example, the speed skaters wear these wildly swirly red and white numbers that make them look rather like someone tried to draw a damask pattern on a spin art machine. i obviously love them. who needs sleek when you can have sassy? who needs aerodynamic when you can have just plain dynamism? is what i say.

and then of course, there's the much-ballyhoo'ed ice dancers. say what you will about the russians' (ab)original dance, im inclined to love it for two simple reasons: it so easily becomes a pun that the choice had to have been either tounge-in-cheek or lazy, and secondly, DID YOU SEE THEIR FACIALS? ice dancing is olympic musical theater but more DANGEROUS because there are BLADES on their feet.

but all of this is just about the trendy russian dance and the offensive team. there was another pair representing russia that truly stole my heart on sunday night. i did some minor research on ice dancing and learned that there are three programs, the longest and last one being the free dance, where a team chooses their own theme, music, costume, and technical elements, as opposed to having them perscribed for them. now, i will offer you a choice: which of these pairs, pictured below performing their free dance, represents the country i will soon be inhabiting?

(this is not a very difficult question)

thankeekindly

2009-11-28T11:43:00.002-05:00

so, there are quite a few awesome things in my life right now, for which i am very thankful, and since i am a crier, ive been doing a lot of happy-crying recently. walking back from this huge thanksgiving potluck thrown by our class that was an embarrassment of riches, i kept blubbering on to jared about "how lucky we are" until he was like "you're gonna be feeling a little less lucky if you dont shut up." (the second part of that conversation is a complete and total lie. please excuse the defamation in the name of a more dramatic narrative.) but of all the things that make me smile, i really have to say that one of the top contenders for the title of most awesome is the glee cast radio on pandora. for example, i just turned it on as i sat down to write, and the two songs it has played so far are "dont stop believin" and the full version of "defying gravity." combined with the fact that i am alone so no one knows how cliche my musical tastes are, and that i just brewed up a cute little mug of french vanilla coffee, im pretty much set.

[long pause]

i now remember why i never listened to music while studying. i am dancing around geo's apartment to "tale as old as time." why is mrs. potts australian?

[long pause]

i learned to play gin rummy last night!

you say existentialism, i say fosse

2009-10-01T14:10:00.004-04:00

well, this is really a moment i did not expect. i was sitting in our dramatic lit lecture, still reeling from the professor's announcement that "jordy is directing a production of les mouches," which could only mean one of two things-- that there is another person in our 50 person lecture named jordy, which would be really weird because 45 of those people are fellow ART students whose names i know, OR that i had blacked out for some indeterminate amount of time, during which i had developed a passion both for sartre and for directing, and decided to lead a cast en-tightrope over the existential canyon, which would be really weird for... well, a lot of reasons-- when suddenly our class rep, chris, told me that singing class was cancelled today because our professor had just texted him that she was sick. scanlan was tossing off quips about getting drunk with ionesco and burning potatoes when beckett called him on his homeline in his new apartment, and outside in the yard, there was a flash musical mob converging in front poor john harvard's statue, and suddenly i was faced with three hours of an unforseen break, during which i knew i could not go to the gym, because for god's sake, i am wearing ankle boots and tights and that just doesn't fly on the treadmill! so i sashe-d across campus to lamont and promptly got lost in the musical scores stacks.
rows upon rows of librettos constitute the architecture of both my psyche and my personal happy place, and during undergrad (and sometimes even secretly thereafter, while i was still living in manhattan), there were days when i would quietly disappear into the 7th floor of dodge hall, and i'd sit on a rotating stool and read music to myself like it was a fairy tale or a map to somewhere i'd never been. that sounds very, very hokey--im aware--and it's a great irony or paradox or something that the artform with admittedly the most potential for cheesetastic campiness is the thing that inspires in me the most genuine emotions of joy. today, after frolicking through the stacks and snatching grey gardens, candide, she loves me, camelot, and annie (ha!), i took my candy shopping a bit further and wreaked some serious havoc on harvard libraries' "request" button. i anticipate with bated breath the imminent receipt of emails telling me that my "urgent" and "immediate" requests for reefer madness, bat boy, dirty rotten scoundrels, the little mermaid, and jerry springer the opera have been fulfilled and are awaiting my loving arms and the protective plastic sleeves of my audition book! for while mystery-jordy-in-my-dramatic-lit-class might love when sartre has jupiter say to orestes-disguised-as-philebus, "The gods take pleasure in such poor souls. Would you oust them from the favor of the gods? What, moreover, could you give them in exchange? Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom—ah, the soul-destroying boredom—of long days of mild content," this jordy is a sucker for menken scoring for ursula to ariel, "Come on you poor unfortunate soul/ Go ahead!/Make your choice!/I'm a very busy woman and I haven't got all day/It won't cost much/Just your voice!"

the goods for yoo-ou!

2009-06-24T18:20:00.007-04:00

every now and then, i think "perhaps i should update my facebook profile. i may have changed since i last itemized my interests, and it is of the utmost importance that my online presence reflect the most accurate possible portrait of myself." this usually happens when i am avoiding doing something, and in this case, that something is finishing packing for my move back to the east coast. i am exactly at that supremely annoying stage in packing where everything is folded and strewn in "organized" piles around the living room; some things (namely, winter clothes) are placed in open suitcases, but the piles are twice as tall as the walls holding them; shoes are lined up, standing at attention, but it is plain to the passerby that there is no way they are going to fit anywhere; those god forsaken yellow hunter rainboots that i cannot live without during monsoon season but that i hate with the heat of a thousand suns at all other times because they are impossible to pack and weigh a ton are trying their best to look innocuous in the corner of the room. i'll be wearing the same pair of workout shorts and a zip up hoodie for the next five days because i packed everything else. you know the drill.

anyway, i figured maybe i wasnt truly encapsulating my personality on facebook, and since ive spent quite a bit of time utilizing the "harvard" "grad student" "class of 2011" search filters and sifting through the results, i assume (hope, so i am not alone) that SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE is probably doing the same, and i wanted to be sure that i seemed, you know, sufficiently charming and idiosyncratic and enigmatic and succinct, and all those things that i work so hard to appear on facebook and then completely negate as soon as i sign into this blog.

but i realized that alan rickman, mariachis, and a video of miss tandi iman dupree falling from the rafters into the splits pretty much sums me up, and i just decided to leave well enough alone. but in looking at my own self-created reflection in this technological mirror, i suddenly noticed something i had forgotten about: COP ROCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and i realized i had to share it with you.

caitlin elizabeth shure introduced me to cop rock during the summer of 2007, and it changed everything. you can read all about it if you enjoy wikipedia's "objective-where-fun-goes-to-die" tone here. (i love wikipedian synopses, because the commitment to formal writing produces such sentences as "Inspired by Dennis Potter's 1986 BBC drama serial The Singing Detective[citation needed], Cop Rock attempted to combine musical theater with the police drama." please tell me what is not to love about everything contained therein?) dancing law officials are ALWAYS A GOOD IDEA, so i was on board with this concept before caitlin had even opened youtube. but what really makes cop rock special is that it's produced with a dearth of irony akin to the writing in a wikipedia entry: this is serious, serious stuff.

allow me to introduce you to the chorus of the opening number from the pilot, entitled "let's be careful out there," which is sung by the sargeant to his police corps:
homicide, arson, robbery, rape!/
everybody gets their share/
crime never sleeps, so stay awake/
and let's be careful out there!
then he spins his podium around and surprise! it is actually a supersweet double synth keyboard! and the best part, i think, are the faces of the policemen listening to him sing: they are completely stoic. there are only three possible ways you could sit through this with a straight face:
1. you are blind, deaf, and dumb
2. they actually shot these scenes separately from the guy singing, or
3. they hired actual civic employees, for whom humorlessness is in the job description, a fact of which i was reminded when i went to get my liscence renewed at the dmv on monday.

i leave you with two videos-- the aforementioned "let's be careful out there," and arguably my favorite, "baby merchant."

total eclipse

2009-06-22T01:37:00.000-04:00

i die. everything about this is so good.

a winkle in time

2009-06-10T04:21:00.003-04:00

please excuse the following moment of earnesty, but i really get so encouraged any time someone mentions to me that they like my blog. it's because even though i am unabashedly addicted to the internet and will freely admit it to anyone in a trademark moment of self deprecation disguised as self aggrandizement disguised as self deprecation, i somehow also am in total awe and envy of people who are too cool for the internet, and i go in fits and spurts of wanting to be mysterious, and if anything is the opposite of cultivating mystique, it is blogging. especially blogging about nothing, or worse, blogging about blogging, as i am so frequently wont to do. (it's a terrible paradox that when i have time to write, it's because im doing nothing worth writing about. i guess out of this situation was born that niche genre they call "fiction.") but at least if i am to admit to myself, and by extension, the world, that i am actually not too cool for really anything, i suppose i should try to update with less embarrassing infrequency. (that is supposed to just mean "more frequency," but if you combine the rules of math and grammar and simply subtract the double negs, it reads "more embarrassing frequency," which really is so apt.)

i have been doing a lot of lollygagging around my own brain recently, sort of wandering through and checking out the scenery, if you will. i am very sure that the aesthetic of my neural landscape has a pop art meets americana collage/montage vibe going on; sort of a dada sensibility in an expressionist palette on art deco wallpaper. (it's a very colorful place to be, but not really for the neat freaks or the 5 paragraph essay writer types.) anyway, one of the things i have been considering a lot recently is whether it's possible for my generation/my friends/me to appreciate or process ANYTHING without running it through an ironic filter first. i have been really trying to figure this out recently, using the very scientific example known as "everything with which i come into contact in a day." (have no fear, the sample size is much smaller than it would be for someone who is, say, "employed," or perhaps, has a "life"). the most easily accessible example is songs on the radio. it was, in fact, kelly clarkson who inspired this introspection.

auditorily, i am pretty easy to please. as long as it is played at a volume appropriate to a given situation (driving the convertible with the top down, drinking cheap beer, having an impromptu dance party, working out = LOUD; other times = not), i pretty much can listen to whatever. but i literally LOVE kelly clarkson. this is not new, but it is new that i will unabashedly admit it for all the world to know. it's really "my life would suck without you" that did it: the song makes me smile and dance. no matter where i am. i am such an avid car dancer/hair tosser/steering wheel drummer. before this song came out, i liked kelly, but i had always assumed my enjoyment was ironic. i mean, her live version of beautiful disaster is unequivocally funny when your 24 year old long island born julliard trained male roommate sings an r&b version of it while walking around the kitchen wearing a plaid robe and eating chinese while will and grace plays in the background, no matter how good the actual song is. but i really realized the other day that it is no joke at all: kelly is awesome. she has a sweet voice, her songs are catchy, and they make me want to car dance. literally, there is nothing else: those three things constitute my definition of awesome.

so do i like kelly because she's a little bit campy? this brings another dire issue facing our generation to light: in the past few weeks i have used the term "campy" in the presence of a couple of straight males, and they have looked at me with utter confusion. this has been a really difficult situation for two reasons. the first is that i really thought that i chose my friends more carefully, ie. that i would never really have an extended conversation with someone who did not both fully understand and appreciate the societal necessity of camp. and the second reason is that it's insanely hard to define campiness. dictionary.com defines it thusly:
camp [kamp]
--noun
1. something that provides sophisticated, knowing amusement, as by virtue of its being artlessly mannered of stylized, self-consciously artificial and extravagant, or teasingly ingenuous or sentimental.
which is all well and good, especially the part i bolded, and defines the term with all the succinctness one has come to expect from a dictionary. but when webster is not on hand, "campiness" is one of those ideas you really can only hope to illustrate through example, and so you end up sounding something like this: "cher! feather boas! glitter! gilligan's island! lady gaga! slutty halloween costumes!" and instead of adding a new word to someone's adjective stable, you've just whetted their appetite for las vegas.

in any case, liking something because it's campy implies you like it ironically, or to borrow a phrase from the definition, your enjoyment is a "knowing amusement." but i think that i actually LIKE glitter and feather boas; like, they both bring me great personal joy, and it's society's fault that i feel i have to justify or make light of my enthusiasm. i suppose that makes me a source of camp rather than a consumer of camp, and you know, that is a mantle i am willing to assume. sometimes you just gotta be the light, people.

but there is another example that is troubling me (i literally feel like all of this thinking is going on in the part of my brain that is wallpapered with those optical illusion things that were on the wall of every male elementary school teacher's classroom where you started with it at your nose and then pulled it further away until you could see, like, horses frolicking on a beach in 3D for a hot second). there's a guy that's commented on a couple of my blog posts who writes a blog of his own based out of DC that is this totally misogynistic basically advice column for guys on how to land as many hot girls as possible. it's very well written but so rude, crude, and terrible, and i absolutely love it. i will forget that it exists for like a month at a time and then go back and read all of the posts ive missed, and i just think it's amazing. and i cannot, for the life of me, figure out just how i enjoy it. is it ironic? am i laughing at the author for his candor and ego? or am i actually enjoying getting a peak into a way i know a lot of guys actually do think, whether they make the effort to write provocative and incensing posts about it all? i suppose i feel the same way about him that i do about lindsay lohan: i think they are fascinating characters that i forget are actual people and whom i love to observe from afar but pray to all that is holy i will never actually have to meet.

so i suppose that's interest tempered by some sort of irony. thank god i can rock out to "i do not hook up" without that ambiguity. but i think i have spent enough time on this. im going to go put on a feather boa and throw glitter in the air. and love every minute, without an ounce of wink.

bowing bows

2009-06-08T16:55:00.005-04:00

i am sort of sitting here not knowing what to do, because i just finished my online traffic school course. now, this has been hanging over my head since i got that [super annoying and unnecessary and totally lame] speeding ticket in march, driving an f150 super crew somewhere just outside of barstow (gives hemet a real run for its money in the armpit-of-california-and-maybe-the-world race) en route from san diego to flagstaff, arizona. the end of the interaction with the cop went something like this:
me, holding ticket: so now does this mean i have a free pass to speed the rest of the way? like, i already got a ticket, so you cant do anything to me?
officer (very serious, taken aback): no. no, it doesnt mean that at all.
me: i was not serious.
officer: well you know, sometimes i even have to give tickets to nice people like you. and i just tell myself, maybe i saved a life today.
me: that's nice, but i can tell you right now that as soon as you drive away, my mother here is going to murder me, so you'll have that on your conscience. bye!
officer: drive safe!
mom: jordan, talking to a cop is not the time to pretend you are at improv rehearsal.
i have been not looking forward to traffic school, and then today when i logged on and it told me it would take EIGHT HOURS to complete, i really began to despair. so, after asking me a lot of identity-verification questions (do you wear glasses? do you have kids? have you been to hawaii? have you ever eaten sushi? have you ever taken a martial arts class? have you ever taken a marital arts class?) (only one of those questions was not actually asked of me.) to which literally every answer except the one about sushi was no-- dont steal my identity now that you know i dont do karate-- i dove head first into the first section. and promptly had an epiphany: something along the lines of "ah, hell naw." so i just skipped to the end of section quiz. four times. and i was done with eight hours worth of traffic school in 26 minutes. and so here i sit. i had mentally committed myself to being in this seat for so long, im not quite sure what to do with the remaining 7 hours, 34 minutes i've just been afforded.
i suppose i could rewatch the dvr-ed tony awards from last night 2.5 times, or just the end of the opening number, from when bret michaels eats it through the hair cast looking like they are experiencing more unbridled joy at their awesome lives than i can ever hope to feel, which was the first of several times i cried over the course of the night, and coincidentally, also the first of several times i was laughed at by my family. also, i just would like to take a moment to say that, far from respecting bret less for lipsynching his way through "good time," i am sort of obsessed with the fact that he decided it sounded awesome to perform on the tonys, and that he hob nobbed with angela lansbury backstage. that image alone makes me like both bret and angela a LOT.
but seriously, in the five minutes that follow bret sacrificing his nose for the sake of a few moments in the radio city footlights, you get stockard channing (i want to be you), DOLLY PARTON, allison janney (i would be you, too), LIZA BEING INSANE (literally, i am listening to it right now, and she sounds like a liza minelli muppet), and then the cast of hair, including the super dreamy will swenson, who apparently is taking hair's "free-love" message so much to heart, he's just left his wife, to whom he's been married literally forever, since they met at BYU, for the older and sultrier audra mcdonald, who also has left her husband! it was like campfest of the world. so campy that i did not even mention that elton john and three little dancing gaybys started the whole thing off!
in all seriousness though, it was a really cool show to watch. seeing tom kitt and brian yorkey collect awards was sort of surreal, since they're columbia and varsity show alums and all around awesome people. and then of course, there's diane paulus, the director of hair, who is beginning her tenure as the artistic director of the american repertory theater in cambridge, mass, where i will be beginning the MFA program in just under a month. she seems like a whole lot of crazy, and she's harvard undergrad columbia mfa, so im hoping our mirror image educational paths will mean we're destined for artistic puzzlepiecedom!
im off to harvard-mandated 3 hours at the gym! ill be reading chekov on the treadmill and hoping huge, campy bows on every dress will stay in fashion FOREVER.

snobs, blogs, & baconnaise

2009-04-24T19:30:00.003-04:00

i spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet, especially now that i am a) not employed, b) on twitter (@jlievers!), and c) trying desperately to figure out who my grad school classmates are through grade-A super google sleuthing, also known as being a huge creep. in rare moments i am not on the internet, i am doing yoga, reading all things ever written by ruth reichl, and/or admiring my new gladiator sandals. unfortunately, however, i follow The Ruth on twitter, so it all comes back to glassy-eyed clicking.

ew ew ew! i just went upstairs to turn off the tv, and it was oprah interviewing the inventors of baconnaise, WHICH is apparently and counterintuitively both kosher and vegetarian. OPRAH! colbert already did a segment on baconnaise. i know because i watched it on the treadmill and very nearly vommed.

anyways, i forget that i have a blog, because i have actively used my brain for a total of maybe 10 minutes in the last two months, one of which was while trying to figure out a way to get out of the speeding ticket i got on the way to arizona, and the other nine of which were spent just now unsuccessfully trying to think of times in the last two months that i have used my brain.

but today, when i was idly checking to see if i had any comments on the most "recent" entry (a very relative concept 'round these parts) i found a wonderful exchange about whether or not i have a condescending sense of humor, which i loved, because what?! what a funnyweird thing for people i dont [think i] know to discuss! in case you wanted an opinion from someone near and dear, my mom falls on the side of "yes jordy you are condescending"--today she judged me with her heart when i said thank goodness susan boyle got a makeover so i can listen to her amazing voice without being distracted by all the crazy. which i think is a valid thing to say! (unfortunately for us all, however, pandora and the music genome project have not yet jumped on the s.boyle bandwagon, and so i continue with the old silken-voiced standby, sarah vaughan.)

my old roommate ted wrote a book called the diamonds, which is available at a bookstore teen lit section near you, and i pretty much hit the roof when i flipped to the acknowledgements section and saw my name. theodore is one of the most hilarious people i know, and as i plowed through the whole thing in three hours, i couldn't stop picturing him shuffling around our apartment in his blue and green plaid robe, eating ollie's and singing original acoustic versions of obscure, obscene r&b tracks and/or danity kane's "damaged." in my googling of reviews of his book, i found one reader who called him "anti-female and anti-gay," and i literally burst out laughing. peeps can be so off-base, yo. except for people who call me condescending. i AM a monster snob. like i am super, super choosy about my monsters.

little dorfan annie

2009-04-05T01:45:00.005-04:00

so i had a sort of crazy day in los angeles yesterday that involved a sprawling, rowdy happy hour populated mostly by conan obrien's loyal staffers, who have recently transplanted themselves from new york to follow the employment, the pompador, and the funny. joining the cast of characters were grace and paul, a couple of my columbia friends; somewhere down the table to my right, there was an "i'm-dating-your-friend's-roommate-and-we've-met-in-the-city" type. next to me was a former winner of "the amazing race," who is currently occupying himself by preparing for the world beard and mustache championships, to be held next month in anchorage, alaska. needless to say, he was sporting a formidable amount of facial hair. also he was wearing a pirate's coat. directly in front of me were two very necessary pitchers of margaritas: one rocks, one blended, that fortunately seemed to keep refilling automatically. in this whirlwind of ivy leaguers and fiercely competitive comedians, i recall conversations about being gay and preppy in east coast boarding schools; ryan seacrest's hairstylist; the cast of the big bang theory two booths over (i dont know what that means); and a missing, mysterious roommate with a past in west end musical theater. eventually, i crawled under the table and sprinted from the scene. i had somewhere to be!

that somewhere was the play of a highschool crush whom i had not seen since i was 15. somewhere in a converted warehouse space in downtown la, i bore witness to puppets and talking couches making theater jokes and dances with glowsticks and a song about a crocodile. i had a beer with the aforementioned crush, who is currently filming a disney-backed webseries called "i <3 vampires", and he told me that his day job is teaching preschool to special needs children, and then i flew down the 5 and was home by 2am because i had to be at a callback for a regional production of andrew loyd webber's fabled "cats" at 1130 this morning.

this morning dawned, and as i was predictably running late, i decided coffee was a necessity, so of course central casting released a prototypical saturday morning starbucks crush on my local outpost just as i pulled into a parking place. (all of this driving, by the way, is being done in my 16-year old brother's 2005 white ford ranger, which boasts a jack in the box antenna ball as its only bell and/or whistle.) the woman taking my order was short, older, and not super awesome with english-- she's been there forever, and even though my brother worked with her at this exact starbucks all the way through the second half of his high school career, she is not only the only employee that doesn't know my drink-- four shots, over ice. easy peasy!-- she also never fails to ask my name. now, she was working yesterday, when i ordered the same thing, and she asked my name, and then spelled it perfectly correctly, even ending it with a "y" instead of a pesky "ie". today, however, after saying "jordy," i picked up my coffee, and very clearly in capital, sharpie letters on the side of the cup, was printed: "DORF".

that is a new one.

i was obviously late to the callback, and then even more obviously there on completely the wrong day, so i immediately drove back rolling my eyes at myself continuously in the rearview mirror.

tonight was an audition for another regional theater company, whose summer season is "annie" and "high school musical". after preparing strenuously for the 9pm audition by spending the 6-8:30pm time slot eating a cheeseburger, drinking beer, and watching unc murder nova, i loosened my belt a few notches, did a couple lip trills, and camped out in the waiting room at the intersection of stage motherville and aspiring teenage popstartown. the girl who sang directly before me was arianna afsar, from this season's top 36 on american idol. pretty ideal circumstances when one's throat is clogged with pasta salad and hieneken.

i sounded like a disaster on my song, and then the director asked if i was interested in high school musical, since i had only checked the box for "annie" on the audition form. i was sure i had misheard. "i just figured i was too... big?" was my response.
he looked down at my resume. "you were a cheerleader. do you tumble?" he asked. i raised an eyebrow and said, "i've thrown two semi-successful backhandsprings in all my life. let me tell you: six feet is a long way to fall."
"great. thanks!" they said, and i exited.

two minutes later, the monitor came out. "we'd like to see you again on friday for 'high school musical,'" she said. the expression on my face responded, "i'm 23, and five foot eleven, and i am also considering my weight and measurements at this moment, which i am not going to post to the internet under any circumstances, but let's suffice it to say that none of those facts or figures are high-school appropriate." in short, i looked at her with complete confusion. in shorter, i made a face that can only be attributed to my alternate persona: the perplexed, the dubious, the unsure. in shortest: hello, DORF.

triple nine eight two one two

2009-03-10T04:53:00.004-04:00

my pals peter and rob have a blog that is very funny. i generally read it in two-week chunks, and then comment on entries that are so far off the main page they will never be seen again. i guess this is probably poor blog etiquette. tant pis!

this is a short film about how their blog entered conversation this weekend, on a mother-daughter roadtrip between san diego, california, and flagstaff arizona.

the camera begins on the moon, looking down at a world beneath. zoom, so fast you almost vom, to an overhead shot of a long, straight, long, four lane, long, faded, long, black, long, empty road. it's long. the only car travelling down said road is a giant, dark green extended cab F150, with the license plate "1 MIHI 2," which sounds like the sequel to pineapple express, but is actually a reference to the fact that this truck belongs to owners who used to live in the san bernadino mountains at elevation: one mile. driving the truck is the grandaughter of said owners. she is eating a highly delicious root beer freeze with a long red spoon, which is occupying nine fingers, and propelling the vehicle and its v8 by a fool proof combination of cruise control and her left pinky. in the passenger's seat is her mother, playing bubble-wrap on her itouch. action.

mom: "have you ever googled yourself?"
daughter: "i am googling myself right now." this is untrue. she is actually spending her time wondering very seriously about where the heck the people who work at the dairy queen in ludlow, california live, since there is nothing but a gas station and said dairy queen for literally 80 miles in either direction, AND why the heck dairy queen got rid of the cherry shell you used to be able to get on your dipped cone. that cherry shell was delicious and sort of like the dairy queen equivalent of animal style fries from in-n-out, in that it was an off-the-menu item that makes you seem sly and in with the in crowd, like you know the bouncer and are a fox. (fox the sly animal, not fox the slang for dank biddy. dank biddies probably dont eat a lot of dairy queen, since it is made with a lot of anti-dank, also known as fat.) since she is such an incredibly skilled actress, the audience will understand all of this without words.
mom: "do you know that one of the first results is peter calling you a tranny?"
daughter: "yes."
mom: "and a shapeshifter?"
daughter: "yes."
mom: serious mom face and voice "why is it again that your friends call you a tranny?" pause "and how many boys have you turned gay?" the mother is obviously a master of the sensitive turn of phrase.
daughter: ignores questions. is inspired to make a list like the blog referenced. cut to: two days later. she posts said list... here:

the top two things i think about that new soulja boy song, kiss me through the phone.
2. how, exactly?
1. ew, no.

scene.

mine is still a shampoo bottle.

2009-02-23T17:23:00.003-05:00

i am having some major issues with last night's oscars. i love musical theater, baz luhrmann, top hats, and tails probably way more than the next person, unless that next person is jerry mitchell, but that jackman/beyonce trainwreck was ill-advised. why is no one talking about the fact that she looked like she was wearing an ice dancing costume with overgrown crotch fringe? (wow, i really dont think i have ever written a grosser sentence.) seriously, if there was gonna be a musical number, it should have been Drunk Meryl (TM) doing kareoke spring awakening and the single ladies dance.
and please forgive me as i continue to expound upon the 'yonce's fashion choices on the evening, since i may actually be the only person in the world that was really into her red-carpet dress that looked like it was made from a louis XIV couch parading as a chaise lounge from a gothic horror thriller--all of which i mean in the best sense possible. and let me tell you this: as i am sitting in starbucks writing this, sam sparro's "black and gold" is actually playing. IS IT A COINCIDENCE that that is the color scheme of the dress of which i speak, or is it divine justification that peeps be on crack for putting mrs. jay-z on the worst-dressed list, while frieda pinto's mother of the bride bodice and tulle petticoat are praised? the latter! i say. the latter.
finally, if in another life i come back half as crazy-awesome-campy as even just one of sophia loren's sleeves, i will laugh my way triumphantly all the way to the looney bin. i believe the correct word for that woman is "outlandish." incredible.
thanks, bizarro oscars.

dartistic votivation

2009-02-08T23:55:00.004-05:00

i have previously mentioned that on sundays during football season, caitlin, matt, richie, deebs, and i play darts at black bear lodge, which is a sassy, seedy little dive bar in gramercy that is decorated inside to look like a hunting lodge, and is always empty. its faux-log entrance takes up only half a store front, and i still always seem to forget if it's on 23rd or 22nd. as you enter, do not be distracted by the snowshoes nailed to the wall, or the buck hunter on your left. if you get there before 7pm, be sure to get really thrilled about $10 buckets of natty ice, pbr, or rolling rock, OR-- try not to die of excited envy-- A COMBINATION OF ALL THREE. (i know.) also, today deebs and i taught the bartender how to make hot toddys, so those are now an option as well. (is the fact that the bartender was not aware of a hot toddy recipe telling? because it should be.)

anyway, since last sunday was the superbowl, it was a great worry that our tradition would end, but since the male contingent of our dart team is gay, we figured that today would be an excellent day to play, because it's the grammys, and that's sort of [absolutely nothing] like football. so earlier this week, caitlin sent out the following poem (which she wrote at work, during work hours, instead of working) in an email:

"I propose a sunday darts

Twill be the last til tranny (1) departs (2)

We'll take over black bear like we do each sunday,

Take in from the diner (3) and make it a funday

Though my haphazard skills (4) will fail on the board

We'll all be winners and get QT with Jord

So, won't you join me, trannies, straights, gays?

I propose 5-ish, (5) but i'm free all day (6)."

i realized after copy-pasting that this probably demands a couple explanations, so i have annotated it in my best approximation of no-fear shakespeare (which, in case you've never spent an afternoon hiding happily in the billshakes aisle of your local b&n, is an actual line of paperbacks that translates his plays into contemporary english, and is a hilarious way to read the bard.)

1) everyone in my life calls me tranny. the other day i related a text message to my own mother that said "heard any good tranny jokes lately?" and she replied, "your life is a tranny joke." true.

2) i am going to san diego on wednesday. i do not know for how long. more on this later.

3) we bring in food from lyric diner, across the street. caitlin eats almost exclusively mashed potatoes and gravy.

4) she is also tremendously bad at darts.

5) we got there at 4:05, and it had just opened, which was very weird because it's usually open at 2 on sunday. when we asked what had been going on, the bartender told us there had been a photo shoot. i cannot express to you how inappropriate/gross this venue is as a backdrop for a photo shoot.

6) lie. we went to brunch this "morning" (at 2pm) and she was "busy"-- ie. in bed until 3.

anyways, as i said, deebs and i got there at four and taught a toddy class. we were the only people in the bar. we spent a solid 20 minutes laughing at what we're perpetually laughing at these days-- our erstwhile dalliance with the dreamy men of new york comedy (rudd, sudeikis, forte, segel, ferrell, fallon, meyers, etc) at the you're welcome america after party on thursday night-- and then were joined by the others (not to be confused with the Others, though tangentially appropriate, as they were late on account of finishing an episode of lost). we acquired the requisite bucket of awful beer and headed toward the dart room in the back to find it dark. like pitch, pitch black. no lights to be found. none of the light switches working. the bartender left her post to check the circuit board, and change the plugs, and probably kick some things, since that's what you do when they're broken, but to no avail. and so, emboldened by our solo command of the establishment and driven by the need to throw small sharp things at a cork board, we set about collecting all the candles from the entire bar, and setting them up in this musty back room, the dimensions of which cannot possibly exceed 10 by 3 feet. we even made the bartender go into the storage closet and retrieve the back-up candles. the result was pretty much dan brown's ideal bar-game environment. we also shadow danced when it was not our turn (see photo.)

the situation was complicated slightly by caitlin's admittedly erratic dart-throwing skills, which were not helped in the least by-- oh, i dont know-- pretty much complete and total darkness. on any given day, it's deserving of praise when one in three of her darts actually hits the board, and then we all have to go scurrying around searching for the other two behind the erotic photo hunt console, or under the table tangled in all the cords that power said erotic photo hunt console, or stuck in the ceiling-- the other room's ceiling-- so you can only imagine how much this was exacerbated by us doing our scurry-and-searches holding votives. deebs accidentally dumped an entire candle's worth of wax down her leg. i did not realize the candles were yellow until about an hour after we left the bar, when i looked at her jeans.

by the time college kids who had apparently time-travelled to black bear from 1995 put dave matthews on the juke box for the tenth time, we decided it was time to head home. we put on no coats (for it's 50 degrees, and that's toasty on this side of winter!) and headed outside, where we noticed a(nother) distinct sign of the rece/depre-ssion: the psychic who occupies the other half of the store front had lowered her price for a palm reading from five dollars to two. (the first sign i reference was last night, when caitlin and i were watching rupaul's drag race, and she announced that the prize money was $20,000, and caitlin rightly expressed indignation and bewilderment. "when was the last time a reality show prize was less than $100,000?!" she asked. i concur. even the tool academy prize is $100,000, and they don't have to have half-- nay, any!-- of the skills required to do drag! all they have to be is the least full of suck!) because caitlin, deebs, and i are three little peas in a pod, just like three little babies in an anne geddes photograph, none of us could think of anything more appealing at that very moment than getting our palms read for less than a venti coffee. so we did! and guys, she told me that i have a very exciting opportunity waiting for me in california before may! which is quite convenient, since i am going to california this week! so pretty much, if you have any extra opportunities, you are obligated by my two-dollar psychic's prediction to send them my way. she also said deebs would meet her soul mate by july and that caitlin would birth four children (date not specified). all of these things sound hilarious and awesome to me. bullseye! wink.

today is the present!

2009-01-22T18:03:00.002-05:00

today, around 2:45pm EST, i exited the C train at the west 4th street station at west 3rd and 6th ave, carrying a marry-poppins packed black longchamp and a grande soy chai and wearing my converse all stars that used to be pink with white laces but now just look grey with grey accented with grey with a hint of grey. with characteristic impatience, i stepped from the curb into the street, even though there was a mack truck waiting there and i wasn't going to be jaywalking anytime soon, and immediately and dramatically ate it. we're talking feet above head, expression of wild panic on face, desperate subconscious attempt to keep coffee cup vertical activated--and then i landed, literally in the gutter, right on my hip. people who have met me know that it's a very long way from the ground to my hip, and somehow, my left ring finger got caught under all the wreckage, and it's not doing much for my typing skills right now. it was horrifying. i am limping. and i am sitting on an ice pack. and i am drinking red wine. and i am looking at the extended family photo we took the day after christmas that was recently sent to me, and i am marvelling at how cute my 5-year old cousin's tiny red crocs are.

speaking of cute and tiny, on tuesdays and wednesdays, i pick up a 3 year old named kevin from preschool, and we walk from 83rd and central park west to 86th and central park west, where we wait for the m86 crosstown bus. on our ensuing 4-block bus trips, there are always antics of some sort, including but not limited to seeing a boy i dated senior year of college and watching him go through the requisite emotions and math one must have upon thinking a former fling now has a 3 year old child, and just the standard toddler-kicking-old-ladies routine.
this tuesday, i was in a particularly good mood, despite toes frozen from watching the inauguration standing outside on the arctic tundra that was a packed low plaza, and like most of the greater new york area, i was floating a few inches above the sidewalk rather than actually walking. "kevin!" i said, once i had retrieved him, "do you know we have a new president? his name is barack!"
"barak in my class?" was his reply. (i happen to know 'barak in my class,' which is why i know that his name is spelled slightly differently, since the origins are hebrew.)
"no!" i exclaimed, charmed by his lisp. "his name is barack obama."
kevin thought about this for a moment. in fact, he was very quiet until we got on the bus, when he turned to me and said, "i want to open my new present."
like most things he says, my response was something along the lines of, "mommy will take care of it when we get home," or, "we'll see mommy in a little bit and she will answer your question," or, "i am not your mommy and thusly do not understand your toddler language." but he kept on talking about his present, and it wasn't until we walked by a bodega and i pointed out a picture of barack and he repeated his refrain, that i realized the confusion was between "present" and "president." at that point, i turned to him and very seriously said, "kevin, that is a very apt pun. many people on this very street feel the same way." and we kept walking, hand in hand, along broadway.

finally, i have a challenge for you. i was standing in line at starbucks yesterday, when i really started to wonder: if someone offered you a million dollars. or a billion dollars. (the number doesnt matter, so long as it's a lot) DO YOU THINK YOU COULD EAT EVERYTHING IN A STARBUCKS PASTRY/SANDWICH DISPLAY CASE? you're not allowed to puke. and i mean like all the sandwiches AND pastries AND all the sodas and milks, etc. i really dont think you could.

i mean, no personal offense or anything.

but seriously...

you couldn't.

three part check in

2009-01-09T13:23:00.002-05:00

1. i started this blog like three and a half years ago because i was turning twenty and i felt old. at that time, i had a 17 year old brother and 12 year old brother who still was scrawny and had a high voice. if you call that scrawny one today, his voicemail is still a tiny, high, little boy's voice: "hi! this is connor! leave a message!" but if he happens to answer the phone, you might think that the low grunts on the other end of the line are, like, plate tectonics, or someone playing those notes on a pipe organ that you play with your feet.
and today, he turns 16, and at 3pm pst, he's taking his driver's test! it's all very bizarre.

2. on new year's eve day, i got stuck in midtown around 5pm. this was the fabric of my nightmares, because it was hovering around 20 degrees and there were infinity squared people running around--well, really totally at a standstill, not actually running anywhere--and i cant really stand midtown between 8th and 5th aves as it is. but i had just been to my favorite thai place for lunch and desperately needed to stop at duane reade for fake eyelashes and so i pretended not to notice the stress hives enveloping my entire torso and tried to walk in with a purpose.
almost immediately, i was stopped by a woman who asked me, in french, if i spoke french. i always like being recognized for a french speaker, mostly because i am an enormous snob, and it makes me happy to realize that other people notice that my nose is turned up so high in the air that i nearly drown when it rains. the following occured in french in the middle of the "snacks" aisle:
me: yes! i speak a bit.
her: fabulous. can you help me find hairspray? ("le laq?")
me: delirious laughter. she could have asked for nothing more perfect.
the rest of the conversation was not really that exciting, except for some complicated grammatical constructions that just came tumbling out of my mouth and surprised even myself.

3. the chargers!

gloggspot

2008-12-14T00:11:00.005-05:00

on the weekends, i spend about eight hours a day as the only female employee at a swedish shoe & clothing shop in soho. i was hired because i look/am swedish (well, swede-ish) and because on sundays i play darts and watch football and drink buckets of rolling rock with one of the managers at a tiny bar in gramercy that looks like a log cabin. sometimes we also dance to beyonce's "single ladies," and/or make fun of the people playing photo hunt at the machine adjacent to the dart board. it's shocking that they're brave enough to play there during the hours of 7 to 9:30pm, what with us flinging dull darts and sharp insults with wild abandon in every direction.

today, however, richie was not at work, and i began the day working with the only three straight males on staff. the morning was so cold that those calling it "brisk" were met with derisive laughter and a slight eye roll (i speak from experience), and the only auspicious thing on the day's horizon was a vague promise of swedish snacks. i was busy debating the best way to cover a folding table with brown butcher paper on which to display said said snacks with my boss when a girl from behind me said, "excuse me?" i turned around. "i called yesterday and put some boots on hold for my husband?"

i squinted slightly and did my best not to reveal that i was examining her every pore, looking for an answer to a question that had suddenly arisen. "what's the name?" i asked, and she replied sweetly, "tiffany."

let me just let the picture do the talking:

yes, gentle readers. i realized, as you just have, that at that moment, i was speaking to kelly kapowski. and like the benevolent older sister i am, i referred her quickly to one of the boys, and quietly took the other two aside to inform them that the subject of their first slightly pervy obsession had most likely just walked in the door. and i was not wrong. all three of them confided in me over the course of the day that kelly kapowski was their first crush. so of course, in retaliation, i made some crack about how i really had a thing for zach morris and his huge... cell phone. (i will admit that i felt a little dirty after that one. not for the pervy allusion, but for the nauseatingly easy joke.)

it's pretty hard to top tiffany-amber-kelly-kaposwki-theissen, but somehow, magically, things improved even from there. corporate had decided that in celebration of st lucia day, we should have swedish treats. i personally was initially a little disapointed that they didnt require us all to wear wreaths of burning candles on our heads, but then these fabled treats began arriving, and the liability with which they presented us far trumped hot wax dripping from headgear.

to answer your question, there was narry a meatball in sight; nay a lingonberry. there were, instead, literally 25 boxes of sticky buns about which we were initially skeptical but proved delicious, and the same amount of ginger cookies, and three of those big, ten-gallon hot-drink dispensers that usually spew instant coffee or hot water for tea at church functions. i immediately set about fulfilling the noble and dangerous role of taste-tester, and was very pleased by an appropriately spicy spiced cider that cleared my sinuses and made me forget the winter settling in for a long stay all along bustling spring street, brisk or otherwise. i moved on to the next giant thermos.

the color of this second drink was dark red, and steam rose from the top of it, and my first thought was "lingonberry juice? is that a thing?" i took a sip, my three coworkers an expectant and attentive audience, and as my tastebuds fired messages ("!!!") to my brain, my eyes popped out of my head. i swallowed. i was speechless. i found my speech. i sputtered. if hot lingonberry juice is a thing, i have still yet to taste it. "you guys," i confided quite seriously, "this is mulled wine." it was 11:15 in the morning. three more sets of eyes popped out of three heads. i took the opportunity to gulp down a serious second mouthful.

"GLOGG," the order form said, when the caterers presented it to nick for a signature. i will now present to you a recipe for glogg, adjusted to make ten gallons, the amount we were now facing as we stood in the middle of the sales floor at work:

8-1/4 (750 milliliter) bottles red wine
1/2 pound dried orange zest
1/2 pound cinnamon sticks
85 whole cardamom seeds
100 whole cloves
4-1/4 pounds blanched almonds
4-1/4 pounds raisins
4-1/4 pounds sugar cubes
2-1/2 cups and 2 tablespoons brandy

and sinceour store does not have a liscense to give away free alcohol, all ten of those steaming gallons were soon moved just beyond the door to the stockroom, and adorned with a succinct sign depicting a skull and crossbones. next to it, our boss placed a stack of cups, one of which he filled and raised in a toast. we had ten gallons of glogg, five employees working, 500 sticky buns to chow down on, and eight hours to have the best. work. day. ever.

tiffany, it's not that my excitement for you was trumped by my excitement for the illicit mulled wine. the thrill was cumulative. thank you very much for contributing, and please come visit again soon. i hope your husband likes his boots.

gumption

2008-10-28T12:02:00.005-04:00

i was babysitting for my new independent, creative, very upper-west-side charge when she asked me over chinese food for a list of my favorite books. i always clam up when asked to list my favorite anything, out of fear both of judgement by the asker and of neglecting something important. but then i realized i was speaking with a 10 year old, so not only did i not need to stress myself out listing all the requisite influential books from columbia's core augmented with obscure texts that prove i majored in english lit, she would undoubtedly appreciate it more if i just kept within the parameters of "books read by the age of 12."

this list i have readily mentally available, and the two most important titles on it are william pene dubois' the 21 balloons, and norton juster's the phantom tollbooth. they're both fantastic, in the sense of wonderful, and in the sense of filled-with-fantasy. when i mentioned these two, she immediately asked if i had read the secret of platform 13, ran to her room, plucked it from her shelf, and popped it onto the table in front of me. and since i am a sucker for kids' fiction, instead of watching a rerun of "rock of love: charm school" or "paula's party", i sat down and read [all 231 size-12 multi-spaced illustrated pages of] it cover-to-cover.

it begins:
"if you went into a school nowadays and said to the children: 'what is a gump?' you would probably get some very silly answers...but once this wasn't so. once every child in the land could have told you that a gump was a special mound, a grassy bump on the earth, and that in this bump was a hidden door which opened every so often to reveal a tunnel which led to a completely different world."

there are a lot of gumps in new york city.

about four hours before i read the secret of platform 13, i had gone to pick my babysit-ee (i am trying to protect her identity because i think i should, or something?) up at volleyball. her school is attatched to the cathedral of st john the divine. i was told to go "past the playground," where i would see "a tunnel," from whence she would appear, presumably in her blue converse high tops and toting her red wheely backpack covered in obama buttons. i got there early, and stood, mystified, in the shadow of the cathedral, my back to the hungarian pastry shop and the sculpture garden in which my lit hum teacher facilitated our discussions of lolita when classes were cancelled due to TA strikes during my freshman year. the cathedral casts quite a shadow--literally, artistically, historically--and the bells that gong the hours are of similar magnitude, and i had absolutely no idea where to go. i felt like i was standing at the edge of a labyrinth, because every where i looked, there seemed to be a tunnel leading to and coming from somewhere, and none of them were spewing fifth-grade volleyball players.

and then, i looked up at the mead, mckim & white-style building that is nestled into the side of the cathedral, right at the transcept, with its imposing columns and characteristic brick work. i was already in a sort of panic-daze that i was in the wrong place, or invisible, or blind, when i noticed something on the railing near the columns that solved it all for me: it was very clear that i was hallucinating. there, perched as though 112th street and amsterdam avenue was the most natural habitat in the world, were a pair of peacocks.

"oh yeah," the two girls replied nonchalantly when they finally appeared from somewhere (i still could not tell you where) and i could ask about the wildlife, "they live here."
"you mean, they just, like, kick it here?" i asked.
"yeah." shrug. then they turned to each other and doubled the conversational pace: "ohmygoshdidyouhearwhatlilydidtodayyy..."
i had lost them, and as they rolled their matching monogrammed llbean backpacks down the road and away from the ramps and the tunnels and the quotidienne peacocks, i stood in a little bit of awe and a lot of wonder at the crazy amounts of people and places and things and exotic birds that are hiding behind doors and gumps all over manhattan.

this morning was a rainy one, and if there's anything that can make the metropolitan maze more monotonous, it's spending all your walking time staring at the wet sidewalk. stomped-on gum and soaked pages from the new york times look no different in the financial district than they do in midtown (though i suppose if you took the time to read the print, you might find that different neighborhoods prefer different sections of the paper?). generally, my only visual memory from days like today is the tops of my yellow wellies pounding 42nd street and the thighs of my jeans getting progressively darker with rain.

so when i finally stepped through the swinging doors of 520 8th avenue--where the man at the front desk makes a game out of guessing to which floor you're headed (ripley-grier rehearsal studios are on the 16th; the building also houses facilities for an orthodox jewish group, a salad-bar and sandwich type cafe, the ASPCA, and apparently lots of things that require people to wear suits) and for me, he's never guessed wrong--i shook the drops off my north face and lifted my head to face the world for pretty much the first time all day.

the audition was a dance call for the victoria's secret fashion show, one of those postings that you read and think "yeah right!" and close the window, and then a few minutes later you're like, "well, why not?" and reopen the window and write the details in your planner. i saw a lot of the girls i always see at dance calls, and a lot of precious new gems, all of whom seemed to be in competition with each other to see who could wear the least amount of clothing. i had on a backless black leotard, tan tights, and tan fishnets, which is pretty much the showgirl-type audition uniform, and as risque as i get. (the illusions of theater, right? this summer, as a "soiled dove," even when i was wearing my "skivvies," that meant tights, fishnets, garter belt, dance briefs, calf-length bloomers, a frilly tank, corset, necklace, earrings, several birds worth of feathers in my hair and many more around my neck, and jazz boots. that's a lot of clothes to represent a state of undress.) but the costumes some of these girls had come up with! i sat there, alternating between reading the aristotle chapter of david denby's great books, and gaping at the lack of fabric and proliferation of accessories going on around me.

one girl, who had spent the first hour in the waiting room clad in sweats and chatting earnestly to an acquaintance about the difficulty of finding friends with similar conservative morals since she moved to the city, suddenly disrobed before the call to reveal black fishnets, teal booty shorts with a black lace waistband, a black crop top, and-- my very favorite accessory i have ever seen at an audition-- handless gloves. essentially these tubes of spandex that approximated sleeves. oh! i know a reference! basically what hedda lettuce freaked on suede about during this season's drag queen challenge on project runway. one was black, which made sense, given that she seemed to have settled on a black-and-teal color scheme. the other was silver lame.

excuse me?

the musical-theater dance girls sat on one side of the room, all laduca character shoes and rosy cheeks. the contemporary-dance/model types sat on the other side, all skin. it was as though the girls who one day want to play gypsy rose lee and the girls who might be pamela lee anderson had entered through the same gump a world where no one quite knew who was wearing the right amount of clothing.

afterward, on the downtown-bound a train, the voice of the announcer came over the loudspeaker. "this is 34th street, penn station. the next stop will be 14th street. please stand clear of the closing doors." i snapped out of my denby daze (he was now talking about aeschylus and euripides). someone had not stood clear of the closing doors, and the announcer had to ask again. when he spoke the second time, i was sure of what i had heard: a completely fake forced french accent. i started laughing. at every stop, the accent increased, and i pictured the speaker in his tiny little car up front, lightening his day (and mine) with a subtle joke, a vocal gump from a world i couldnt see but just travelled adjacent to for a while.

a j annonymous

2008-10-24T00:35:00.004-04:00

i was sitting on the downtown a train tonight, heading from 50th to fulton (well, broadway-nassau, but forgive the discrepency and appreciate the alliteration), when a guy sat down next to me. he piqued my interest because i totally couldn't categorize him: he was a tall, young, black guy, probably about 25, with skinny dreds almost to his shoulders, a pierced lower lip, and huge safety pins in his ears; he wore tight, pinstriped black pants with zippers placed in all those arbitrary places that identify an item of clothing as "punk"; his leather jacket was also covered in the clothing-fastener equivalent of the bridge to nowhere. but for all the accoutrements, his aura was still overwhelmingly clean-cut. i liked him immediately because he intrigued me aesthetically, and then i noticed his obama pin and liked him even more, and really liked the two of us sitting together in some tableau-vivant, some sort of study in contrasts, as i was dressed particularly preppily for me, in a cream wool marks and spencer mock turtleneck and high-collared black peacoat, hair straight and long and parted especially far to the right. united by our obama/biden buttons, we sat quite contentedly (i imagined; he probably did not notice me at all, which is fine) from penn station to about spring street, when an urge hit me that took all the physical effort in my person to control.

i can usually talk myself down from these urge-ledges when i find myself teetering. for example, i fortunately did not attend a college with many large lecture classes, because when i find myself in situations in which many people are quietly focussed on one thing, i occasionally become totally terrified (and also sort of empowered) by the possibility that i am going to just shriek, right there, right out loud. this urge usually passes into some sort of awe at the social mores that cause us to remain quiet and attentive in such situations, which is a positive development within my psyche, and so the sense of broad, social awe is usually accompanied by a distinct sense of personal relief that some demon in me did not decide screaming was an awesome idea. this inner struggle is akin to the feeling i sometimes get (and i really hope i am not alone in this) when i am in a restaurant, and i see a waiter take away a plate full of food that has hardly been touched and looks totally delicious, and i sort of just wish i could nibble at it, and to stop myself from just reaching out and grabbing it, i sometimes i have to physically sit on my hands. i mean, if everyone else has had their share, what's the harm?

so anyways, the guy with the safety pins in his ears.

i was just happily sitting there, mentally congratulating the two of us on looking the part of a still from some sort of young democrat psa, the very picture of politically engaged, diverse, urban american youth, when out of the paper lunch bag in his lap, he produced and opened a bottle, and started nursing it as though it were the elixir of life. i was "i had a glass of white wine two hours ago at luciana's gallery opening and then ate many tortilla chips and salsa at arriba arriba, along with a bite or two of birthday fried ice cream, and this feeling has been exacerbated by having worn a wool sweater all day" thirsty--you know that thirsty--and the roof of my mouth physically started itching and watering. nothing had ever seemed so tasty as what he was drinking. i had to have it. it wasnt "hmm, that lemondrop martini looks refreshing; i'll have what she's having, bartender!" it was "i will die if i dont have that exact thing he is drinking right this minute." i had to avert my eyes from the bottle as he drained it like he'd never drink again, and as i dramatically turned my head to the left, i came face-to-chest with a USC sweatshirt, and i think somewhere a homeless man started soliciting very loudly for change, and i suddenly was being closed in on by my own personal hell, and the spiral was endless, because what more do you want in hell than an icy beverage?

finally, we sped into broadway-nassau, and i flew out of the train, away from the tableau vivant and the empty bottle, accidentally bashing into the usc sweatshirt (and the man wearing it) on my way out the door, only taking time to mutter a muffled "sorry" as i almost ran up the stairs toward the cold night air that meritted my suddenly scratchy wool sweater. i almost stopped at the 24 hour supermarket to buy a bottle of what he was having, to chug as a nightcap. but the craving was so strong, i felt it would be giving in to weakness to succumb, and that i'd probably drink it so fast i wouldnt appreciate anything about it, and isnt that addictive behavior? and i'd fall to a heap somewhere between the elevator and the door of my apartment, and the residents of the seventh floor would have to step over me tomorrow morning, shaking their heads at the girl who just ten short hours earlier was the very picture of engaged youth, and who now lay in a heap of inevitable low, the empty bottle that led to my downfall on its side beside me, announcing smugly to the world what finally did me in: "APPLE JUICE".

and besides all that, for the life of me, i CANT STOP SINGING BRITNEY SPEARS' WOMANIZER!

the glamourous banana

2008-09-04T01:14:00.002-04:00

as per alaskausual, i wrote this a few weeks back, but have not actually connected my computer to the internet until now.

I have always been a fan of frozen foods. Not like foods that are frozen before you heat them up, after which they become a sort of B+ approximation of awesome foods—though I could write tomes on the wonders of the Picard stores of Paris, or die a happy, early, guilty death brought on by a gluttonous gorge on Stouffer’s Macaroni and Cheese—but foods that don’t ever make a stop in the nuker. Like, one of my favorite snacks is frozen veggies—peas, corn, carrots, green beans—you know, the sorts that come in very handy if you were to ever, say, sprain your ankle or throw out your back and find yourself up a creek without an ice pack. For me, frozen veggies are a great alternative to popcorn as a perfect movie snack (not least importantly because it’s usually dark during movies, so I can eat my veggies in peace without people telling me how weird it is. I know it’s weird.) It was only slightly distracting the other evening, when we were all gathered together to watch something very serious—the season one finale of LOST on DVD, or Nacho Libre, or something—and I went to open my bag of frozen fodder and managed in one spastic move to explode them all over everywhere. We are still finding formerly frozen carrot cubes under the couch cushions.
Slightly more labor-intensive but no less satisfying is the frozen banana. My affinity stems, I believe, from under that halcyon heading of “Good Childhood Memories,” which included Friday night trips to Rubio’s for bean and cheese burritos, and then two doors down to Swensen’s for dessert. I still have never really been an ice cream person, and even at almost-23 I will still order rainbow sherbet if given the choice, and Swensen’s had just the alternative: those intimidatingly large bananas, stuck onto popsicle sticks, dipped in chocolate, rolled in peanuts, and frozen. No matter that in their respective temperate forms, I’ve always been sort of ambivalent towards bananas, and verged on negative towards chocolate (though if I’m really being honest, my distaste for chocolate is encouraged by my flare for the dramatic, for there are very few things one can say that will more consistently get a shocked, confused, and often hurt look than, “I don’t really like chocolate, thanks.”) When the two are married in subzero temperatures, ambivalence and negativity be damned! That’s a delightful dessert.
You too! can enjoy the tasty benefits of a frozen banana at home, since as you will know if you have ever danced in a musical with me, and subsequently gotten muscle cramps from said dancing, and subsequently still complained to me of said cramps, I will very reasonably and very seriously inquire after your banana consumption, and if I determine it lacking, I will tell you to take three and call me in the morning. They are, admittedly, delicious on peanut butter sandwiches, or simply spread with peanut butter if you are of the carb-counting variety; it’s easy to hide a few in a smoothie, or slice one onto your cereal in the morning. However, my most! favoritest! way! to eat bananas is rolled in a little lemon juice and frozen. I always have several Ziplock bags of banana quarters in the door of my freezer, where they serve as an excellent sweet snack that also happens to boost your potassium levels! I mean, what more could you want in life?
Tonight, though, I had a thought—a thought I have had before, I believe, in some form or another. Perhaps I never let myself actually flesh the thought all the way out, so it lingered, somewhere in my brain, dancing between the realized, the verbalized, the delineated, and the abstract, the subconscious, the vague. This thought came upon me sort of like my realization during my senior year of college that of all the machines with which I come into common contact, I feel the one I would least like to be, in all the world, is the elevator. It took four years of standing in front of elevators on a daily—nay, hourly!—basis for me to finally promote this thought from an abstract sympathy for an inanimate object to an actual opinion. Today, I had a similar epiphany. About bananas!
I was showered, this evening, in a spontaneous presentation of early birthday gifts that included vintage head scarves that portray international locations to augment, appropriately, my collection of vintage head scarves that portray international locations, a long gold chain with a pendant of a mermaid hanging from it, which was carved for me from fossilized woolly mammoth ivory, and whose body and tail make the shape of a “J”, and a shirt for which I have searched everywhere: a royal blue tee with a picture of an igloo on it, and the words “Alaska’s cool!”. Then I finished reading my book, a novel about a lesbian Londoner at the turn of the 20th century that was one of those that leaves you saying “Love isn’t all about glamour! It’s about work and compromise, but look how worth it it all was for Nancy!”, and was just on my way to bed when I realized that if I left my bananas out on the table even for just one more night before freezing them, they would really only be appropriate for banana bread. This is a particularly grave crime in Skagway. Our lone grocery store always seems to order four times the necessary amount of bananas, and at least once a week you’ll enter to find a shopping cart full of almost black ones and a sign, written in permanent marker on neon poster board, offering “FREE BANANAS!” The next morning, every baked good in the coffee shop would thrill a monkey. It’s only yellow bananas that are hard to come by in this town, so I rolled up the sleeves on my John Deere sweatshirt that I think I have been wearing for a week straight, and I started chopping up my six bananas, bagging them up, and dousing them with lemon juice. And with every peel, I stared in a sort of wonder at the pale fruit on the cutting board.
I think that using the word “flesh” is a very colorful way to describe the edible parts of fruits. To me it rightly attributes life-giving properties to the fare, as if there’s so much more to that apple than 60 calories and ten more minutes before you just give in to your junk food craving anyway. Talking about the flesh of a fruit is something I feel like people do on deserted islands, when they’ve been away from the world so long, probably living on wild boar and like, sea urchins, that when someone surreptitiously stumbles upon a grove of some exotic vegetation—starfruit, or papaya—it’s the most wonderful taste anyone has ever experienced. Bananas, however, had never figured into this fantasy of mine. Bananas are not a very glamorous fruit, mostly I think, because they are not really all that refreshing, especially when found on a desert island, where they’re probably pretty warm, and so the epicurean variety they offer isn’t too great. Also, it’s very important to note that bananas lack juice, which is totally necessary to be classified as glamorous, because once you bite into your fortuitous fruit, that sweet, sticky juice has to run down your face, and then your lover with whom you are obviously stranded but whom has gotten even hotter than when you first fell for him because he’s super tan and buff from hunting boars and building all sorts of huts, has to lick that juice off your face while he’s making out with you to thank you for your invaluable contribution of finding the fruit grove. I mean, it’s like not even weird for me to write this, because it’s all very obvious. However, though bananas are not glamorous, I sort of realized while I was slicing them tonight that they would pretty much have been the coolest fruit EVER to discover. Like, they look awesome hanging in the trees in big, bountiful, formidable bunches, that seem to challenge you with their abundance (like that shopping cart with the neon sign challenges Skagway every week). They’re yellow, which is bottom line cool. And then, you cut them open, and they’re like the weirdest texture ever, and if you have like some Dharma Initiative peanut butter around, you’re set for life. And you’ll never get muscle cramps again, no matter how many huts you build or boars you chase.

also, happy 3rd birthday, blog.

2008-08-08T13:08:00.002-04:00

i wrote this a while ago, but am only posting it now because my parents are in town and their hotel has wireless.

Despite the connotations of utter bagginess, I am as much a devotee of WE and Lifetime shows about weddings as the next single 20-something female. I like pretty things. I am very good at being appalled at Bridezillas and awed at the ridiculousness of spending tens of thousands on centerpieces. I, of course, have my own wedding plans stored in a very convenient part of my brain, where they are easy to call up and edit when inspiration strikes. One of my biggest quandaries continues to be the color and style of my bridesmaids’ dresses. Perhaps it is a telling fact that the bridesmaids’ dresses remain of paramount concern while the “groom” position remains noticeably unfilled. I spend a lot less time worrying about him than I do about whether peonies will be available in the Adirondacks in September, or if I want a standard tiered cake, or how, exactly, I plan to be young enough to look the part of the blushing bride but established enough to afford the extravaganza, than I do about the penguin waiting for me at the altar. He’s a vague shadow about six foot five with a thousand-watt smile. A good majority of these weddings apotheosized on my home television take place in Manhattan, and even if you manage to miss the lissome ladies in white ball gowns that seem to populate Central Park in the spring and fall, and pose on the steps of Brick Church or St. Paul’s Chapel, the New York Times is always ready to report on what fabulous twosomes were united in mutual amorousness this weekend. For those pursuing their Mrs. degree at Columbia, the diploma is a means to an end, and that end is a wedding announcement in the Times. Many of my friends, I have no doubt, will have lines in their lives that sound like this: “The bride graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University and works for a non-profit. The groom played football at Harvard and works for a private equity firm in Manhattan. The couple plan to honeymoon in Bora Bora.” Somehow, though, on Saturday, I ended up at a wedding for which I had not received a save-the-date card.
Tony and I both had the day off and had decided to spend the day taking the Glacier Point tour. It’s a serious perk of dating a guide up here that you can decide to take $300 tours of nature’s ridiculously cool (literally) features at the drop of a hat and for free. But nature decided to be extra ridiculous last Saturday, and gales to knock Dorothy out of Kansas started sweeping up the Lynn Canal into Skagway. Now, “Skagway” is Tlingit Indian for something like “Valley of the Ridiculous North Winds,” and before I moved up here, my speedometer for ridiculous winds topped out at the very scientific measurement of “however windy the corner of Claremont Avenue and 116th street gets in the winter when the breezes blow up off the Hudson and whip around that round building that Patrick Dempsey’s character lives in in the movie ‘Enchanted’ and perhaps aide a certain college junior probably running late for an art history lecture by pushing her a little closer to campus”. That particular speed of wind is icy and efficient in rushing one along, but the fact that the Hudson stays in its riverbed means it’s nothing compared to the Great Cold Hairdryer God turns on Skagway. (As I write this, I am in legitimate fear of my house being blown over by the chorus of self-important gales that seem to be puffing out their muscles as if to legitimize my claims, saying, “Go on! Go on!”) The sixty-person ferry that tried to land at GP that morning had been picked up and turned around a full 120 degrees on the water, which prompted a swift return, away from the 8-foot faces appearing along the canal. The boats going into Glacier Point that day were subsequently cancelled. No problem! We say, shrugging off a glacier and setting our sights instead on the Eagle Float tour in Haines, which is a small, far less touristy town that can be reached by a either a 15-mile ferry ride or a 350-mile drive, depending on your level of patience and expendable fuel budget. But the winds thwarted us again, as all the tourists originally scheduled on the Glacier Point tour had been conveniently switched to the Eagle Float tours. But we would have an adventure—we had decided! And taken off work, to boot. It was only when we got off the fairy in Haines, and Tony was satisfied with how I looked zipped into his bright orange, men’s size large Patagonia rain jacket, hood up, and we stood on the dock with our travelling companion Danny, a guide who lives in Glacier Point and couldn’t get home, and Danny’s gorgeous golden retriever Taos, that a new idea was sprung on me: “Theresa and Rustin are getting married today. Let’s go to their wedding!” It took everything in me to suppress my inclination to shout “A wedding?! I am wearing jeans and wet running shoes and a sweatshirt and no makeup and your rain jacket and AHHHHHHH!” Instead, I looked from the dog to the ExtraTuff waders Danny was wearing, which he had artfully paired with a hooded sweatshirt with his radio handle emblazoned on the back (“Fabio”), to the backpack and the fleece vest that Tony obviously thought was perfectly appropriate wedding attire, and I girded my inner fashionista and said brightly, “Great! Who are Theresa and Rustin?”
Theresa and Rustin, apparently, are two Chilkat (river) Guides based out of Haines, who had been even more screwed by the weather, though you’d never have known it to meet them. Their wedding was supposed to be held in its entirety on the Davidson glacier, but winds had blown them off, too, and so their “rain location,” which schmancy planners always inform you is a necessary thing to have, was the Tribal House, in the middle of Fort Seward. None of these things made sense to me a week ago, either, and I “live” in the crazy little world that is southeast Alaska. Basically, around the turn of the 20th century, the US apparently decided that Alaska needed some serious military presence just to act as a reminder to that terrifying nation of pacifists to the east. (Up here, remember, that means Canada. Appropriately, as I am typing this, my roommates are downstairs watching the South Park movie and it is literally and perfectly at that part with the “Blame Canada” song.) Anyways, the US basically wanted some peeps up here lest the Cannucks decided to push their luck and their borders to try and claim any of “our” gold—gold, which, by the way, had been gone for a good three years. Fort Seward remained as an active army base until the end of World War II, and as most history books will be pretty consistent in telling you, this little hamlet we call southeast Alaska didn’t see a whole heck of a lot of military action in those fifty years, so it was a pretty cushy place to be sent to finish out the end of one’s service. So up on the hills of Haines sit rows of colonial houses, white with blue trim, or orange, or purple, perfectly maintained as they are now privately owned, and fronted by rolling greens and views of mountains and oceans and glaciers and the not infrequent bald eagle. In the middle of this huge square is the Tribal House, a square wooden building about sixty feet to a side, with a high vaulted ceiling and totem poles at each of the four corners. Inside, the walls are painted with Tlingit designs, and a small stage once used for rituals sits at the west end. On Saturday, however, the stage was occupied by Haines’ hometown band, The Fishpickers.
I met Rustin first as we walked up the hill. The groom stood over the outdoor barbeque, drinking Amber Ale from a coffee cup because alcohol isn’t allowed in the public square, and tending to a never-ending supply of fresh fish sizzling on the grill. He was wearing cargo pants, Tevas, and a short-sleeved, plaid button-down shirt. Suddenly my apprehension about being accompanied by a wet dog was assuaged. Once inside the Tribal House itself, I found a full third of the guests had their jeans or heavy khakis tucked into their own knee-high ExtraTuffs, as if to be ready if at any moment someone should propose a wilderness adventure. One little boy, probably right around two years old, had on these fantastic pants, bright yellow and made of rain boot material, that became boots around his ankles and seemed to me very functional , not only for a toddler growing up in a Northern rainforest, but pretty much for anyone with an aversion to wet denim. No one on the dance floor could dance to save their lives; their most distinctive movements were the frequent beelines to the keg of Amber nestled in the dark yellow, slightly rusty wheelbarrow in the corner. The only circumstances that make dancing more fun than dancing with a bunch of people who don’t care what they look like is dancing with a bunch of people who don’t care what they look like and are getting progressively drunker with each passing song. I really did identify the bride by her newlywed glow, because she was wearing a green rain jacket over and green rain boots, with a long white linen skirt and a white cap-sleeved tee. Her hair was wet and she had no makeup to speak of, and she looked so happy. Take that, Vera.
It was about 6:30pm when Tony told me we had to leave if we were to make the last ferry back to Skagway. “Or,” he said, “we could just stay at Jake’s.” I had no idea who Jake was, but since at the time I was very engrossed with sitting on the ground building a teepee out of sticks with my new best friend, a three-year-old towhead named Holden, the offspring of the owner of Chilkat guides who kept thanking me for hanging out with his son and asking if I needed another beer poured into my coffee cup because his progeny was restricting my access to the keg, I told Tony staying at Jake’s sounded fine, nay, awesome! and we continued to enjoy ourselves. Somewhere around drunk o’clock two miraculous trays appeared, piled a full two feet high with fresh crab legs, and us revelers dug in with our fingers, cracking and pulling and making those ridiculous faces people make at each other when deliciousness defies vocabulary. It was a good thing that crab appeared, too, because it had been at least 45 minutes since we had gorged ourselves on the 80 pounds of fresh Alaskan salmon and the same amount of halibut that had spent the night before swimming right off Haines’ coast. Eventually, Holden left (giving me first a cool high-five, then returning for a kiss), the aforementioned and subsequently misplaced orange Patagonia jacket was recovered, the Fishpickers packed up their trombone and their banjo, the happy bride and groom headed off to conjugal bliss, and the wheelbarrow keg was kicked. The party headed to a bar called Fireweed, where we once again discovered those Fishpickers jamming away, and we washed down our Alaskan brewed Amber with Alaskan brewed Pale, and we finally ended up at Jake’s, our host for the evening. What my darling Tony had neglected to mention as I flippantly agreed to take the morning ferry was that Jake lives in a converted bus. A retro bus that has been relieved of the terrible burden of its seats and engine, and lives in the equipment yard next to the river rafts and the transport vans, alongside another bus that houses the kitchen and company rec room. Tony also failed to mention the two and a half mile walk to the ferry the next morning, but even despite his superhuman stride and occasional disparaging remark about my purported “marathon-runner” fitness, I spent the whole time smiling. And once we got back to Skagway and were heartily tucking ourselves into huge plates of biscuits and sausage gravy, we both looked up at each other and started laughing at the wonderful and crazy directions the winds had blown us in the last 18 hours.

photo op

2008-06-09T20:08:00.004-04:00

the two main towns from whence klondike stampeders started their expeditions in the late 1890s were skagway and dyea (pronounced dy-ee), which are nine miles apart along a windy and mostly dirt road. both were tent cities that swelled to over 10,000 during the gold rush. skagway was the more useful port town, due to the deep waters just off the coast-- the sea floor drops to over 600 feet almost immediately, which explains why you can see humpback and orca whales swimming literally twenty feet from the shore, and why it's such a popular destination for enormous cruise ships. dyea, on the other hand, sits at the base of the infamous chilkoot trail, a forty-mile pass up to bennett lake that every stampeder had to traverse-- over a dozen times. this was because every man that passed into the yukon had to bring with him enough supplies to last a year, and before he was allowed into canada, he had to weigh in at the border. so they'd all carry burlap sacks roped to their backs, weighing just about 100 pounds at a time over the 40 miles, drop it off, turn around, and pick up the next load until all 1200 to 2000 pounds had been carried up over the pass. EES CRAZE!!!
anyway, while both of the towns boomed to a similar population at the height of the goldrush, skagway now maintains a year-round population of just over 800 and swells to a summer number of around 2500, while dyea holds steady at a respectable 20 citizens. all social butterflies, i'm sure.
we make the drive from skagway to dyea pretty frequently (and once i get into my 18-miler training runs, i will be making the run. my hammies just got sore from typing that sentence) and along the way, tucked between the dramatic rock formations torn thousands of years ago by glacial ice ripping through the earth (extreme enough for you?), on a ledge that overlooks one of the many green valleys and in front of yet another mountain that might be the most beautiful thing you've ever seen, there is one of those blue metal signs with a clip-art picture of a camera and these two words: SCENIC VIEW.
everytime we pass the scenic view sign, i start cracking up, because you could literally spin around with a blindfold on and play pin-the-scenic-view-sign-on-the-mountain-side, and unlike similar party games, no one would ever laugh at your aim. in other words, i'm hardpressed to think of a view that is not scenic. and all of this is a typically long-winded way of saying that that's sort of how living in alaska is: every experience is so incredible and so out of the ordinary on its own that you're immediately spoiled and at a loss for accurately descriptive adjectives. and that, my dears, is why, if you've asked me how i like alaska, i've probably just said, "i LOVE it," and expounded no more.
i have a day off today, which apparently is a monday, though you could tell me it was any of the other six and i would absolutely believe you, so mitch (one of our esteemed piano players) and i took the whitepass railroad trip that rises 3000 feet over a windy and windy (are those words really spelled the same? confusing! i suppose that means you get to choose in which order you think i intended them) 17 miles and ends just over the border into canada. along the way, there are mile-high waterfalls, abandonned bridges, century-old evidence of dreamers past, black bears, sheer cliffs, clouds, tundra, and all the swirling mists you could ever need. if you were blind and just sat on the train alternating saying "ooh!", "ah!", and "wow!", no one would realize you couldn't actually see because you'd be having all the appropriate reactions. in fact, they probably wouldn't be able to hear you anyway over their own similar exclamations.
however, should you ever find yourself along the whitepass having such an experience, there's still no way you could have as amazing a time as mitch and i did, because we got a bonus sight during our tour: the couple next to us, from south padre island, texas. i noticed the man first, average height and build, in his mid-to-late sixties i would guess, wearing an alaska beanie. now, the beanie is not really of note except that it allows me to mention that EVERYONE in alaska is ALWAYS wearing Alaska! clothing, which i'm sure has probably helped many a town drunk, who, upon waking from a rowdy night (sort of repetetive) has awakened and only had to wonder, "where am i again?" very breifly before someone walked by wearing a convenient geographic reminder. but, beanie aside, what really thrilled us was the rest of this man's attire: he was sporting a full purple track suit (FULL. PURPLE. TRACK. SUIT.), made out of wind-breaker material. and have no fear, it most definitely was of the style with the tapered sweat-pant style ankles and the neon accents on the jacket. and lest you not be totally jealous yet, yes, his wife was wearing matching purple track pants, a HOT pink (emphasis necessary) turtle neck, with her coordinating jacket jauntily tied around her waist. and just when i thought there was no way they could be more magical, she produced from her enormous hot pink canvas bag with ALASKA! written across it in neon rainbow embroidery-- you know, each letter a different color-- a four-pack of screw top white wine mini bottles! all of which prompted mitch to sigh, "well, i guess there really is someone for everyone," to which i exclaimed in despair, "how can you be so insensitive as to say that when quite obviously the man for me is already taken?!"
talk about a scenic view.

we've got a backstage bigger than texas.

2008-05-10T15:39:00.002-04:00

let me preface this post by saying i really cant see a thing. im sitting on a bench under an awning in the historic district of skagway and the glare on the screen is so intense that instead of "historic" i actually just typed "shitoric", which is not an accurate description at all. writing a blog here is hard for more reasons than just that, though, because i am having one of those inevitable new-place experiences where everything is interesting and worth talking about and as a result you have nothing to say. im looking around my for inspiration and i just have to laugh, because im literally sitting in the valley between twenty postcard perfect snow covered mountains, down the street from alaska's most photographed building (its front is made from two thousand pieces of driftwood). two doors down further is the red onion saloon, a former brothel that is now a brothel museum, and the place of employment for the other girls in this town who make their summer cash being very knowledgeable about the habits of whores. it's the red onion madams and the days of 98 girls you'll see clomping down the street in full stage makeup with feathers in our hair wearing sweats and ugg boots on a wednesday morning. and when the cruise ships have left for the night with a final blast of the foghorn, you can find those same red onion madams and days of 98 girls and everyone else in town back in the red onion saloon kicking back pitchers with the mountain guides-- that group of burly twenty somethings in the corner wearing all flannel.
yesterday, we went on our first hike. you only have to walk ten minutes to be surrounded by the most beautiful scenery you've ever seen, and as we stood there on the rock looking out at mountains and smelling the spruce tips that are almost ready to make tea out of but not quite, an orca whale started dancing for us in the water below. then we went home and john and brendan made us homemade fettucini with bacon wrapped shrimp and spicy pesto, spring greens in handmade vinagrette, and fresh baked bread.
yes we can can can!

dobby's sock!

2008-04-18T14:29:00.002-04:00

my best 11 year old friend, anna, and i are obsessed with rupert grint. only in our world, rupert speaks exactly like ron weasley's character in harry potter puppet pals. yesterday, she sent me this exact text message:
rupert grint fan club i already signed up u in?
to which i responded:
hahahaha i dont know who i love more you or rupert
and she shot back:
so ure saying u wish it was an anna fan club.

this is the same girl with whom i once had this text conversation:
anna: [photo of me looking less than magical] check out this loser
me: you are so lucky to have such an awesome looking babysitter
anna: shakes head slowly

i'm moving to skagway, alaska, guys!

val?

2008-04-10T01:51:00.001-04:00

today, a man in a full batman costume riding a bat-bike made kissing noises at me as i stood holding a bag of watermelon and waiting to cross park avenue.

days for legs for days

2008-03-28T13:35:00.003-04:00

if there were a soundtrack to me going crazy, it would be the ding-dong of subway doors trying to close over and over when im running late, and young children playing the recorder. i think about five minutes of that would be just about enough for me to totally lose it.

but if there were a film of me actually going over the edge, the scene would probably be one from a dance call. more specifically, from a showgirl call-- you know (actually, you probably dont know, and i am jealous of you), for a show like will rogers follies, or the producers, where they dont really care if you have a brain, just as long as you can kick as high as your empty noggin.

setting: a dance studio, actually creeptastically about two doors down from the apartment where heath ledger's body was found. mirrored walls, wooden floors, ballet barre. thirty or so girls with limbs much too long are draped around the room like a crowd of worn-out gumbie dolls dressed by someone with a sort of subversive sense of humor in fishnets and dance skirts. the weirdest sight is when you catch a girl stretching against a wall and wonder if she's found a section of the room without gravity. sometimes i think all the spandex is the only thing holding them together. there are legs for days for days. somewhere way above the studio, there's a big new hole in the ozone, which is actually good because that aerosole has been used to tease hair so high it sort of needs a sunroof.

a fabulously sassy gay man teaches a dance combination, aided by his willowy female assistant, who is inevitably wearing "special" character shoes: they're silver with bejeweled heels or black and teal with three straps and buttons or an authoritative red, and they announce to the wannabes that she's done shooooows.

blah blah blah, some tap combo or something. but then, the comic gold: the showgirl walk. (there's a lot of showgirl walking going on in this video if you need an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIcWJSNyqls) the direction is always "walk like you have a secret!" but i somehow dont think that my secret, which is "i think this is the funniest ish i have ever seen" is the sort they mean.

you guys, i have to do the showgirl walk kind of a lot. your arms either are straight out to each side or sort of in slight curves with your elbows back, and you lead with your sternum and imagine you're wearing an enormous feathered headdress. also, you just have a face full of sass. step left, cross right. work your hips enough, but not too much. show off your imagined sequins, but also your [imagined?] personality. take about ten minutes per step. at some point, stop and swing your leg around and bevel your foot. if you're doing the rockettes' bevel, your calf is straight toward the back wall. if you're doing the producers' bevel, your calf should be at a 90 degree angle from your ankle. does that sound impossible and feel like your muscle might spring off and unroll down your leg? dont worry, your fishnets will hold it in place! you're doing it right!

i have a personal limit of no more than 4 8-counts of showgirl walking every six months, and as soon as im done sassing, i clomp around as if to make up for it-- like i need to prove to everyone that i dont wish we all walked like showgirls all the time. i dont think people get that though. i think they just think im spazzy.

two encounters i had today which proved to me that showgirls--not subways-- might send me over the edge:

(we're in a kickline, waiting to do like forty thousand kicks)

girl next to me: can you make sure you float your hand instead of actually touching my back?
me: no, im probably just going to push you over? because it will make me look better. that's okay, yeah?

girl: (look of wrath) that's totally not okay. dont.

wonk wonk. and:

(im at the waterfountain)

another girl: are there cups?

me: (pulling down one of those annoying paper water-cones) dont set this down! (get it? it has a point on the end!)

her: why not?

me: (indicating the point of the cone) you're gonna set this down? you must be magic.

her: um, can i get some water?

me: showgirl walks away. my secret is you make my soul wither. but my imaginary headdress is so fabulous.

just so you know...

2008-03-03T16:43:00.004-05:00

...my nanny house has two computers. one's screen is sort of vertically stretched, so it makes you look skinny. the other's screen is tweaked just a bit horizontally, so it adds a few pounds. i use the skinny computer to look at pictures of people i like, and myself. i use the fat computer to look at pictures of people i dont like, and celebrities. which computer do you think i use to stalk YOU on facebook? it's a question you might want to ask yourself.

or not.

someone that obviously doesnt know me very well told me the other day that the way to solve all my problems is to find a gay best friend. i think my eyes popped out of my head at the suggestion, and i said something along the lines of, "visualize something for a moment: i am sleeping beauty, in a tower, waiting for whatever, but there is a thicket of briars all around me and any potential suitor must hack through said thicket. okay, now replace the briars with gay best friends."

then later that night, tom said to caitlin and i, "you guys really need to help me find a group of gay guy friends. i mean, i love you, but i feel like all of our friends are straight." (tom is gay and newly back on the market.) caitlin and i guffawed and said, "all straight?! we feel like all our friends are gay!" and then the three of us looked at each other and had to face the music: according to that math, we just dont have any friends. oops...?

these are headstrong, crazy days!

2008-02-08T14:18:00.001-05:00

well, guys, i dont have internet anymore. my benefactor, whom i knew only as "jonathan," has locked his wireless network and left me stranded. about two weeks ago i turned off my computer. yesterday i noticed the top is gathering dust.
this is not to say i dont check my email, because i do get to it about once a day, and more on fridays, when my favoritest 2-year-old on the upper west side, kevin, is napping (as now). but in that narrow window of quiet that disrupts my zen of watching max & rosie, doing clifford puzzles, and building the longest line of consecutive magnitized thomas & friends choochoos ever, i have internet priorities, like celebrating when i get the q and already have a u on scrabulous, or catching up with eva from across the globe. and now, LOST! LOST goes online on fridays, and there's that to watch and laugh at in a combination of awe, incredulity, and disbelief at my own willingness to suspend disbelief. (polar bears polar bears!)
okay, some things.
1. i've never seen the naked cowboy in new york but i found him wandering down bourbon street in new orleans the friday before mardi gras
2. which rightly indicates that i was in new orleans for mardi gras.
3. which was awesome. anyway,
4. that dude has somehow come up with the best gig of his or anyone else that has a good body and is sort of creepy's life, which is
5. just to cozy up to every girl that approaches him, take a photo, whisper sweet nothings in a gravel-y southern accent, grab a good handful of her ass for another photo, and then ramble on down the road while
6. his manager informs the recently deserted that she owes $1. now,
7. just after i finished cracking up from this encounter, some southern frat boy tried to start a brawl with our fair hero and his (sunglassed, clothed, and covert) manager stopped waiting for my hundred pennies and ran off into the crowd of bead-bedecked revellers, which
8. is more appropriate if we just pretend it's the sunset, so
9. i got to keep both my single and
10. the precious memory.
11. ashley tisdale's headstrong is my new favorite song.
12. for some reason, i feel like that last one should actually say, "no offense, but ashley tisdale's headstrong is my new favorite song," so,
13. no offense, but ashley tisdale's headstrong is my new favorite song.

i'll steal you

2007-12-22T20:23:00.000-05:00

here's a series of sentences that contains no surprises:
we saw sweeney todd last night. we loved it. we spent the rest of the night at a gay vodka bar on 51st street making a one-stop string of jokes about it. that one stop was to have a totally inappropriate dance party to "one night only."
i now will reproduce for you the series of wall posts that resulted today. so, literally, as the [cut] ballad of sweeney todd instructs, "ATTEND THE TALE OF SWEENEY TODD (and sing the parts written in all caps)!"*

jordy lievers wrote at 2:36am
i was throwing this big dinner party at my weekend house in the english countryside the other day and i was all set, had done all my shopping, except for the main course. i knew i wanted to serve a wild poultry of some sort, and they're all over the place on my estate, so i just figured i'd go out hunting that morning and shoot enough birds for dinner. so that day, i get up and go to put on a pair of hunting boots, and they're totally worn out. luckily, of course, i have many, many pairs of hunting boots on hand just in case. but i tried on pair after pair and there was something wrong with them all-- soles were too thin, sizes were wrong, colors clashed with my outfit, etc. finally, when i had been at this for almost an hour and had used up a good majority of the time i had allotted for hunting, i conceeded that i would have to order my birds in from the grocery store down the street. i turned to my butler in defeat and requested, "PLEASE SEND FOR QUAIL-- I'M MEANLY SHOD!"

Caitlin Shure wrote at 12:35pm
That's so funny because I was also going hunting this weekend--with our little friend Michelle. We were hunting deer and I was really hoping to get some antlers for the wall. The whole day was quite trying as I had to carry TWO guns since michelle is too small to carry her own (ugh). Anyway, the hunting path was really confusing and didn't match up with the map. The path kept bending and changing directions and I didn't know what to do, so I said to Michelle, "This path is SO long and bend-ey which direction should we go now?!" And Michelle was all like "I think it's pretty obvious it bends to the left, see?" And she started to walk ON THE MAP which she thought was the actual path. So I was like...I MEANT THE TRAIL, YOU TEENY BOD!

jordy lievers wrote at 3:51pm
that's so funny you shoud say that because i was in class the other day and we were reading that robert frost poem, you know the one that's all "two road diverged in a wood and i took the one less travelled by and that has made all the difference" and everyone was like "woah that's so deep, i want to take that road, too," and i was getting so exasperated until i finally stood up, in the middle of class and said "i'm here to DEFEND THE TRAIL ROUTINELY TROD!"

Caitlin Shure wrote at 4:26pm
I had a really similar experience! I remember vividly this time I was CC when we were reading Nietzsche. As you know, I am a big Nietzsche fan and was therefore disturbed when people starting speaking out against his work. All those Kantians could not accept the relativity of the morals they take for granted. Just like you, I became increasingly frustrated until I through down my book, stood up, and screamed, "I'd like to DEFEND HIS PROPOSED DEATH OF GOD"

jordy lievers wroteat 8:21pm
well i know this guy who saw the little mermaid on broadway the other night and he was talking to me about how much he liked it and wanted to write a review of it for his blog, but he was totally overwhelmed with all the parts he enjoyed and he didnt know where to start. so i asked him what stood out the most to him and he told me he really liked ariel's costume and the sets. "well then, that makes it easy," i replied, "just COMMEND HER TAIL; THE SCENE'RY, LAUD!"

*if you dont know the melody, i conveniently linked it for you. i'm watching the 2001 san francisco symphony orchestra concert version and i am pretty sure tre from top chef season three is in it.

heroin(e)

2007-11-20T10:54:00.000-05:00

what is that saying? something like "sometimes you're the pigeon and sometimes you're the statue?" ew. i think a more applicable way of putting it is some days you just miss the trains and some day you just make them. today has been a just-make it sort of day, every time, and even though it's only 11am, i've been on four.

also, in the approximately 45 seconds i was in the women's locker room before kickboxing, i managed to lose my wallet. i am pretty sure that if someone had been watching me the whole time, they would have seen me walk in, set my wallet down on the counter, look in the mirror, and leave, as if i were making a delivery, or leaving an offering on the altar of lady luck. she returned the favor by depositing said wallet in the lost and found, unscathed. i suppose that makes me the pigeon.

i have expressed to a few people recently that sometimes i dont believe the new york city (okay, the manhattan, as i'm pretty much helen keller to those other boroughs) i live in can possibly be the same manhattan of great film montages and sinatra tributes. caitlin and i saw the totally logical double feature of bee movie and michael clayton last night at the not-unreasonable times of 8:20 and 10:35 respectively, and as we sat in the 42nd street regal amc e-wok whatever theater with a thousand names, we saw our immediate surroundings about a million times, animated and not. but despite all of those people just outside-- those actually there and those in-the-movies-there, i think we shared our two features with a sum total of 15 other people and about 900 empty seats. sure, $11 for movie is expensive, but when you think of it in comparison to the rental market, you're getting a whole lot of space to yourself for your dollar. i just sometimes feel like i must be living in some sort of small, bizarro new york, and that the real, bustling, important version is somewhere (that's vague) else. a subtle knife* cut away, perhaps?

*golden compass: one of many kid movies that i unabashedly want to see.

another feeling i have is that i must have been a heroin user in a past life, because i frequently get these jabbing pains in my right forearm.

play by day

2007-11-07T12:37:00.000-05:00

a play-by-play of the last 10 minutes:
entering the apartment from ballet class by way of the gym, listening to the "o! brother where art thou" soundtrack, my very dear roommate ted told me i looked "long limbed" and asked my opinion on the best way to get to 50th & 3rd, as he was on his way out the door to a meeting. ted has lots of phrases that he uses to assess me when i've just arrived home sweaty from a workout. the most popular one is "athletic," usually saved for when i've done said working out in boy's basketball shorts that reach past my knees (which is, admittedly, quite a long way to reach). they're all very creative and they all mean roughly the same thing: that i'm looking point-blank disgusting.
after he left and i finished reading the perezhilton item about george clooney and fabio getting into a fight (nope, dont really believe those two worlds actually coexist, let alone intersect), i heated up the rest of yesterday's turkey burger, peppered it with a healthy dose of red pepper flakes because if it's savory i think it should be spicy (see: monday night popcorn, chicken noodle soup, all helpings of the deadly, huge aluminum pans of every possible incarnation that can come of combining pasta, sauce, cheese, and love that ted brings back to our refridgerator every time he goes home for the weekend), and chopped it into forkable pieces. i sat down at my desk, tried to stab a bite, and promptly dumped the entire thing onto my lap and subsequently, the floor. i cursed, rather loudly, and to no one, as i am alone. then i scooped it all up again, wiped up the wood slats, and sat right back down to eat. i really do think it's karma, as i was saying over the first incarnation of said burger yesterday, at our 8-person "WHY IS NO ONE AT WORK AT NOON ON A TUESDAY" lunch, i really do believe it's my liberal interpretation of the 10-second rule that has stregthened my immune system so much i only get sick once a year. for a week. round about february.

except right now i have an ear infection...? too late for caution. im already done eating.

play-by-play for the rest of the day: get pedicures with 10-year-old babysitting charge. until then i guess ill just dance around my room to showtunes.

bagel what a beautiful morning...

2007-11-02T14:22:00.000-04:00

oops. sorry, october.

what the heck do you mean it's november 2? it's sort of exciting, i guess. i like thanksgiving. i like christmas. hopefully these things are not surprising.

truth is, i was scared away from my blog for a while, because people were telling me it had gotten crazy. many people mentionned this, and used many different adjectives, my favorite of which was "zany," and was used to describe not only my obsession with surrealism but a characteristic that has increased in my entire person since college graduation. to that, i say FINE! and put my hands on my hips that are covered in super-high-waisted jeans. super-high-waisted-jeans are definitely zany, and definitely new since college graduation.

so i have been trolling the streets of manhattan for a new blog topic that is neither obtuse nor surreal. i decided it's everything bagels toasted with an egg sunnyside up and cheese. and iced coffee.

ive started going to the gym this month, which is great because it means i can eat macaroni and cheese to my heart's content. well, my heart actually isn't very content with that choice of cuisine at all, im sure, but it will have to do something very dramatic, like clog up and stop before i get that message. so, to my stomach's content. and when im done with morning kickboxing and ballet, and my legs are feeling like some magical combination of jello and unbendable steel, i duck into a cafe somewhere and have a bagel, an iced coffee, and a break from my very hectic schedule of--what is it i do again?-- oh yeah, singing, dancing, and hanging out with children.

if you are a frequenter of upper west side new york sports clubs looking for a bagel after your workout, allow me to recommend the best two i have found.

1. gigi's cafe, on 71st and broadway. their bagels have just the right amount of salt on them, and the same two ladies that work there every morning will know you inside of a week. also, there is a contingent of old men that sit in the back room every day talking new york gossip and drinking tea. it's like my mom's starbucks group, only old. and men. and with tea. and in new york. so basically, the gossip part. also, you can get strawberry pancakes. also, once i saw woody allen's wife at the starbucks next door, and chris "leave britney alone" crocker across the street.

2. europan, on 78th and broadway, is the closest bagel oasis to the 80th street nysc. which is kind of ridiculous, because there is an H&H ON THE GROUNDFLOOR but you cant get anything but dozens. europan has the best iced coffee, the best friendly tablemates who will share their new york times arts section, the best smell of bakery-ness, and the most amda kids whining about going to rehearsal whom i want to slug in the face because i want nothing more than to be going to rehearsal.

...get it? because a bagel is shaped like an "O"?

five six seven eight

2007-09-29T19:47:00.001-04:00

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I MEAN!

as a disclaimer, a post like this can only be written while drinking boxed wine from a coffee mug, listening to MIKA, and wearing sheer black tights instead of actual pants.

im dancing with myself, thinking someone could film this for a reel of twenty somethings in new york pretending their lives are artsy or bohemian in a time when that's not possible, because if you live in manhattan you're either comfortably wealthy or dead. which is why i politely declined the subway guitarist's marriage proposal last night, as charming as it was: "marry me. i'll take good care of you." strum strum strum. "you could do worse. you probably already have." then he played landslide and i remembered that ive heard him play before, one monday night in august, while i was waiting for the L train to alphabet city.

i tend to discount cater waiters unfairly as dumb or aimless; it's really unjust since i dont think those things about myself. i am a loner in this service subculture. i sit by myself and think about auditions and if i'll make rent and if that's a cliche and how the vertical social ladder also has a chute that drops you at the back door: i always know which wine glass to use when im sitting at the table because ive poured into them while standing at attention.

but last night i got into a conversation with craig, who was dressed just like me: black tux pants, black collared shirt, black cuff links, black tie. i decided it was less embarassing and more katharine hepburn. there were 80 of us dressed like this. how, i asked myself, could i judge these people? we're a real-life surrealist happening. we're a chorus. we are the ensemble, ensemble.

talking to craig, who "teaches yoga to children upstate" and "studies himalayan art," i finally figured out the end of the last post, which i actually wrote most of yesterday and not september 19.

i dont want to hang a surrealist painting on my living room wall. the necessary surrealist renaissance (movements i would argue are separated only by the baroque and modernism) can only happen in the format of the musical. it's because things are dull. excess pollutes because we fetishize the commodity, which means we've lost sight of the fact that it's supposed to be about the abstract emotion stirred or memory triggered by the object, and not about cradling its physical thingness in our arms. i dont want a surrealist painting, but i dont want any other kind, either. the reintroduction of the surreal experience, a cousin of the dada happening, is the new artistic trajectory.

hence the above article from the times. the most important part is the way it reverses that primary argument against musicals: that they're unrealistic. especially in a city where guitar-playing homeless men in the subway tell you they'd treat you so well, and that you could do worse-- and they're probably right-- i really beg you to define for me what is "realistic." and please dont say verasimilitude. it's stagnant and narcisistic and mimesis is boring me. after all, i try to be like grace kelly but all her looks were too sad so i try a little freddie ive gone identity mad.

words words

2007-09-17T13:58:00.000-04:00

usually on monday afternoons, i nap. today, i decided my time was better spent slopping orange paint on my walls and trying to sort out my thoughts on neo-surrealism.

ive been living in this room for almost a month now, and i started painting it sometime about three weeks ago (i would be able to tell you for sure, but for this gleefully sinister text message i got from caitlin earlier: "uh-oh! i have your planner/diary!" much to my chagrin, i left it there last night after our sunday night movie sour patch eating extravaganza. i'll go get it after nanny duty this afternoon. i hope she doesnt hold it hostage.

anyway, when i did the first round of painting, i just rolled color as high up the walls as i could reach because i had no roommate and thus no furniture on which to stand. combined with the color i chose (and love)-- i'm not exactly sure what you would call it, but i know it's got something to do with road rage, between traffic cone orange and stoplight red-- it really did look like i had tried to paint my room to look like the ninth circle of hell. which, depending on your opinion of rooms filled with many, many boas, many, many pieces of ancient greek literature, and a huge poster of rosie the riveter, and a terribly inadequate shelf to clothing ratio (with the deficiency falling on the side of the shelving), perhaps it is. eighth, if we're being generous.

i'll come clean: i saw "across the universe" again. the day after i saw it the first time. now, i try to stick to a relatively strict budget of $10 a day, which covers coffee and a rice krispy treat first, and whatever else only afterward. but since seeing a movie in manhattan is a ridiculous $11, i had to make some sacrifices. aka i have been eating a lot of oatmeal with splenda and peanut butter. and i just really cant stop thinking about it. all summer, i have been wrestling with (at first i wrote "toying with," but "wrestling" is much more accurate: it's been violent.) how i am supposed to reconcile my vague aesthetic distaste for the surrealist art of the dali-ernst-chirico 1920's genre with this increasingly urgent sense that the art world will remain stagnant until the surreal reigns again.

technology has a lot to do with it. when the creators of ratatouille admit in an interview that they had to make the animated food and hoards of swarming rats look less realistic, it's pretty clear that verasimilitude can no longer be held as the ultimate measure of artistic merit. it's why the movie version of rent didnt work: no one wants to see actual heroin addicts actually in alphabet city singing as they desperately stab their own veins. (also it's like, if that junkie has that great of a voice, is there anyone in new york who isnt talented? depressing.) suspension of belief is necessary to engage an audience; it creates an alternate world, and that's what art is supposed to do. but technology has made the image so accesible that we dont have to leave our own world to fill the time. we can just remain depressingly mired in xeroxed copies of what's around us, surrounded by mirror images of what we already see.

digital cameras, photoshop, and the internet have robbed the image of its power to prove: you can find a picture of britney from her vma performance looking like someone pasted her head on the body of 9-month pregnant charlotte church, or like those shadows on her stomach are actually relatively well-defined abs. and then, with a click, you can send it to all of your friends as "proof."

im very tired of the use of the image only to prove, to demonstrate. it's a one-step forward, two-steps back sort of deal, because, while you've provided evidence to support your original claim, no therefore statement follows. it's just "britney is fat" or, "britney isn't actually that fat," and then the picture, and finally, instead of actually supporting the original claim in the representation of an ultimate truth, you've actually just limited the claim to the exact circumstances of the picture. and since the opposite argument could be made by holding another photo as exhibit b, by the time we emerge, britney's probably been photographed exiting five separate public restrooms across america with a different hair color each time. time for a new photo-fueled debate!

basically, our image-obsessed, celebrity-infatuated, technology-infused society has reversed the artist's adage that "a picture is worth a thousand words." these days, a word-- for this base, pop-culture example, that word is "britney"-- conjures up a thousand images. (well, according to google image, it conjures up "about 1,720,000"). the word has become simply the key that unlocks the treasure troves of youtube.

if it will always be impossible to completely separate the word from the image, at least it sheds new light upon them both to drive a musical stake between them. this is the intellectual reason i like musicals-- they function on yet another artistic level.

the real reason i like them is TAP SHOES and SEQUINS.

all you need is more

2007-09-14T21:41:00.000-04:00

if you like the beatles, movies, surrealism, british accents, eddie izzard, bono, bono resembling a tripped out robin williams, the sixties, musicals, salma hayek making weird cameos as sexy nurses (yes, multiple), fake shots of your alma mater if that alma mater happens to be columbia, real shots of your alma mater if that alma mater happens to be princeton, skyline concerts, rooftop romance, or enjoying yourself at the movies, then i suggest you go see julie taymor's "across the universe."

i remember seeing the preview for this a really long time ago, but then i got it mixed up in my mind with that other movie musical that came out this summer. (aaaahahaha i didnt mean to imply hairspray but that's a hilarious comparison. someone should think it all the way out... shot not.) I MEAN that movie i didnt see that everyone seemed to like, "once," or something? in any case, i had mixed them both up in my mind and all i remembered was that one had evan rachel wood (this one). evan rachel wood was one of those girls whose career seemed so amazing that her life was probably perfect and i was jealous of her everything. until i found out she's dating marilyn manson. somehow, at the same time, that fact made me take her more seriously (because she's crazy, and crazy people are creative, or at least v-v) and also never ever ever want to be her. ever. we both win!

i really do try to steer away from movie reviews, because i just havent seen enough movies to have original insights or insightful comparisons (unfortunate that you're supposed to be able to both create and cite. ugh.) the only leverage i have is that the movie doesnt open in regular release until next friday, and i saw the second showing today at lincoln center. (and when i bought my ticket for the 340, the 715 show was already sold out. if it hadnt been for the private viewing of the nanny diaries i took in afterward, i really would have beat most bloggers to the pink punch. oh well.)

anyway, i enjoyed myself so much that im sure it will be cliche to say you have a crush on jim sturgess and/or joe anderson within the next eight days, so all i'll have going for me is the time stamp on this entry. but to anyone with whom ive discussed the need for neo-surrealism (and if i talked to you in the months of june and july, i probably mean you), i can only properly express my excitement like this: ! the juxtaposition of aesthetic excess with emotional desperation echoed in the absurdity of form of the movie musical, takes a sad song and makes you think about it. "across the universe" does on film what grey gardens did onstage earlier this summer: really employs the music and the book in a symbiotic relationship. and it's a credit to the team that "across the universe" manages to do that with a score of 33 (!) songs that come heavily contextualized.

!

a title? too soon

2007-09-12T01:49:00.000-04:00

the two little girls i start my mornings with three times a week, claire and delia, had a new unofficial word of the day today as they flipped through that treasure, that gem, that masterpiece of advertising and imagination that arrives in the mail every september: the halloween costume catalogue. the word was "awkward," which, along with "random," has become so overused in conversational collegiate vernacular that it now functions more as a meaningless excuse for personal social ineptitude than in accordance with its dictionary definition, which is
"1. lacking skill or dexterity; clumsy.
2. lacking grace or ease in movement: an awkward gesture; an awkward dancer.
3. lacking social graces or manners: a simple, awkward frontiersman.
4. not well planned or designed for easy or effective use: an awkward instrument; an awkward method.
5. requiring caution; somewhat hazardous; dangerous: an awkward turn in the road.
6. hard to deal with; difficult; requiring skill, tact, or the like: an awkward situation; an awkward customer.
7. embarrassing or inconvenient; caused by lack of social grace: an awkward moment.
8. Obsolete. untoward; perverse."

but since im relatively sure when 8-year-old claire and 6-year-old delia asked their mom what the word "awkward" meant, she didnt reply with, "oh, awkward? that's the way you act when you run into that guy you accidentally hooked up with, and this time you're both sober. and he's with another girl," they actually seemed to have a much more accurate grasp on the meaning and proper use of the word than most people i hear use it. that is, they employed it as the proper form of speech: an adjective.

example: "this hannah montana costume makes her feet look big and awkward. i would never be that," (meaning 4) or, "jordy, you cant be the same thing as me because i am in third grade and that would be awkward" (meaning 7).

when used to encapsulate social situations, however, the term frequently borders on usage as a noun, as if saying it would somehow fill the empty space between persons a and b, and replace whatever action verb caused the heavy silence in the first place.

so after thinking myself through this refresher course this morning (and still not knowing what i'll be october 31), i feel it's not only okay but inevitable to use the word, though among my very least favorites.

it's awkward to be a new new yorker on september 11.

seriously. any other day of the year, im totally qualified to make sure you understand it's 5th madison park lex second going east and cpw columbus amsterdam broadway riverside going west. or inform the curious where to go to happy hour on tuesdays in the village; where to get a cupcake that's better than magnolia; where there's a starbucks within a three block radius of your exact present location (as long as that location is confusion and caffeine deprived and in manhattan). i really can say i have lived here four years (although i usually say "almost five"), and ive grown up here and blah blah blah everything about coming of age and <3ing ny. but six years ago, a whole bunch of factors added up, and when that equal sign came crashing down, it left a very different city. i know the after picture, and it's never more apparent than when you open the post or the daily news and the three page insert falls out of the center, thousands of names in tiny fonts, and you know they lived here before you even knew what the city could mean, and that in this cramped, cozy metropolis that constantly inspires cries of "it's such a small world!", there are some things that arent bent by coincidence. new yorkers are bound by common experience, from the gates to the inconvenience of a slow Q train, but today reminds me that in this place that really is a twelve-mile island of home, there's a whole lot of people with whom it was never possible i shared a subway car.

falling in love

2007-09-05T23:54:00.000-04:00

i mean, let’s not be dramatic: i just mean ive decided on my favorite season (obviously a very important decision). don’t get me wrong: i love summer, but… it’s autumn! turtlenecks and pumpkin flavored lattes. Halloween and thanksgiving. it used to be back to school. pencil shopping is my favorite kind. scarves!

i live in a house now, and have been yoinking internet from surrounding apartments to varying levels of success. right now, all i want to do (in the whole world! im so easy to please!) is see if there are youtube videos of the Denver out-of-town-tryout of the new Disney musical the little mermaid (uhh… i am writing this in Microsoft word, and it’s a disturbing comment on societal importance what has been auto-capitalized: Halloween. Denver. Disney. Microsoft. those are the priorities of a bizarro world.) but internet keeps shutting down, so im sitting on the floor writing a blog in a word document and drinking diet coke. it’s one of three edible things in this house: i have beers that people have dropped by as housewarming fuel, diet coke & like kind of a lot of sprite zero, and then a big box of emergen-c (lemon). i used to have raw cashews. i ate them. making a feast out of the ingredients of my kitchen should be a challenge on top chef.

living in new york—like actually living here, as opposed to just going to school here—is turning me into woody allen, which is a statement im not prepared to justify and that you should take as you will.

it’s fashion week, which to me is annoying because it just means that there are no more Monday night movies in Bryant park. (more auto capitalization: Monday. Bryant. these things must be important.) Monday night movies in Bryant park are the summer proof that new york is a city populated solely by 20-35 year olds. on labor day that was proven by sheep meadow, in central park at 66th.

about ¾ of the way through college i realized that i thought (think) of nyu as an all girls school. say what you will about elitism blah blah blah but when i consider of new york schools, the three that pop immediately to mind are columbia, barnard, and nyu, and i realized after three years that i just ignored the fact that males attend nyu. i think of it in the same category as barnard, for better or for worse, like uptown and downtown colonies of hipsters and empowered women striking it out on their own in the big city. and now, a similar realization has dawned on me about my perception of the city of new york as a whole: i recently realized that ive forgotten straight men exist here. between my theatrical, dramatical cronies and the time we spend in hells kitchen and piano bars and auditions, this summer i really honest-to-goodness have forgotten that some boys like girls.

drinking pink samurai lemonades at lobby lounge and then lemon samurais at sushi samba and then seeing wicked (almost four years to the day of the first time!) last night, and then vintage hunting all day in soho and the west village with three straight Australians did nothing to emphasize hetero masculinity. especially when our lunch table bore a cobb salad, two lightly dressed plates of mixed greens, and one artichoke parm with hollandaise and a side of fries. one of these things is not like the other, and here’s a hint: my meal did not contain arugula.

thought.

2007-08-22T01:41:00.000-04:00

cab drivers in the city use stoplights more as a suggestion than an ultimatum.

artificial intelligence & wickerwork picnic baskets

2007-08-15T14:09:00.000-04:00

yesterday i was sitting in starbucks writing, and when i got bored i would read the new york times online. i'm not very thorough or exact when i read the times-- the order goes something like headlines- scan opinion titles- glance at most emailed- browse the titles in health, u.s., sports, tech- and then read any article i havent already read in arts, theater, travel, dining & wine, and maybe movies (because i usually wont go see the film itself).

(that paragraph took a long time to write because i was doing each thing as i went along, and then, following the review of "delirious," i spent a good amount of time wondering whether steve buscemi is the most unlikely looking movie star in hollywood. then i stared at the picture of pasta with shrimp ragu that is taking up like the whole page. then i made oatmeal, in hopes it would satisfy my craving for pasta with shrimp ragu. it did not.)

but yesterday, once i had exhausted all the articles on the broadway softball league in central park and opinion pieces on karl rove's exit from the white house, an article in a section i never even skim caught my eye. it's this one: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/science/14tier.html?8dpc

okay i hope you read it. it's hard for me to actually consider because i cant quite get my mind around it, but once i accepted that australian guy's way of saying it doesnt matter anyway because it's all real to us, i started wondering what sort of people devote their lives to conspiracy theories.

i have always tried to stay away from them (the theories, not necessarily the theorists) as a rule because they usually make my mind feel like it's on a very short fuse. also, most conspiracy theories involve things that are much more powerful than us, and that are eventually going to destroy us, like aliens or artificial intelligence (or fate, or capital F Fate.) but i can already name any number of things more powerful than myself, right off the top of my head, not the least of which are the manhattan real estate market, casting directors, and my addiction to starbucks.

i spent quite a while looking for that shakespeare quotation (i think it's hamlet), the gist of which is "he who looks too long at his own death goes nutso," but i couldn't find it and it's bothering me. please let me know if you have the citation. many thanks. the point is, conspiracy theories, and really philosophy of science in general, feels to me like trying to fit round abstraction into the square hole of reason, and as a result like im on the verge of losing my metaphoric marbles.

but by defining philosophy of science as the application of the abstract concept to the concrete skeleton of reason, i realized it's a process defined just the same way that one would describe stretching a modern canvas over a standard frame, or more generally how one would explain the contrast between imagination (abstract) and skill (concrete) in modern art. ("skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. imagination without skill gives us modern art." --tom stoppard, artist descending a staircase). so although i feel crazy considering science and philosophy together and would never take it up as a way of life myself, i respect that it interests other people, and so i guess they probably feel the same way about dedicating a life to musicals or paintings: what seems ridiculous or risky for some people is an all-consuming passion for others. (i also love the idea of artificial intelligence philosophers having a secret obsession with tap dancing.)

i also decided that far from being terrifying, which i originally thought it was, it's actually a set of very liberating ideas, and makes me feel better about wandering, literally and symbolically-- my new goal is just to be one of those "interesting" characters so i'll get kept around for the next simulation.

cake

2007-08-13T15:26:00.000-04:00

yesterday i started writing a post and then i FREAKED OUT for two reasons: 1. facebook's (i originally wrote basebook, which is, perhaps, very telling) biorhythm application told me that my intellectual and physical levels were basically like 20,000 leagues under the sea, and though i was having an okay day emotionally, it was not the afternoon to go for a run or read proust. or write a blog. all of which would be fine, because the multitude of mediocre posts on here means the entirety of the blog itself is only as good as the lowest common denominator, and that's pretty low. (see entry on: secret, the; note reliance on: food description to bait readers' interest; consider that: i get REALLY HAPPY whenever i get a comment because they're few & far between.) but that's where the second reason comes into play. 2! when i signed in yesterday, the dashboard told me that it was to be my 100th post!

landmarks like that frighten me, and since facebook had already told me the odds weren't stacked in my favor, i decided to take a moveable feast out to the steps instead (the book, and also a milano salad and dried mango slices.) but having something like -46% intellectual capacity--and believing the word of an online social networking site lowered that number even further, im sure--was even less conducive to reading hemingway than it had been to achieving the necessary greatness befitting a centenary post, so eventually i just fell asleep on the concrete stairs like a true homeless person.

i do have a home now, though! it's the apartment of the red door, mentioned in the last post, between the fate and the saxophone. come visit. bring a couch.

but when i was lying in bed last night not being able to sleep because i have everything to think about and nothing to actually do (active waiting, etc.) i realized that at least one of the 100 "posts" is a draft i never published, and the same fate befell the fetus of yesterday's entry, so it's not really about 100 exact posts, and the pressure lifts, and i can hearken back to that grammatical dilemma that has plagued me for so long that it inspired 1/100th of this blog: the question of less v. fewer. i can say, despite the seemingly total countability of the number of posts in a given blog, that i have written less than 100, because none of the baby drafts count as a whole. however, with this one i do believe i will have published a whole-number 99 times, so that is what i will say, and leave you to wish you knew my password so you could read my half-written review of grey gardens, which rests peacefully in my draft box as the show rests peacefully in the past, in the company of "shows that will change the world but might take the world a while to notice". suffice it to say, i loved it, and ben brantley was much more eloquent and shared similar sentiments, so i was rendered moot & mute.

i've been sitting on the steps a lot recently because it's the last week or so that i can. it's perfectly acceptable to stay on campus for the summer after graduation, "easing out of it," as i have been telling everyone since may. it is not acceptable to still be on campus when the world returns, ready to be a year older, and you're passed out on the steps. still. again. always? it's one of the silliest things about columbia, which is a very silly school: it's weird to decide when and how to actually leave.

but i've circumvented the 100 post fanfare. moving 7 blocks north should be cake.

unexpected pleasant things

2007-08-08T17:47:00.000-04:00

CHAPTER ONE
until this summer, the winner of the my-favorite-shower-award was undisputed: at a pseudo-"family" cabin compound in middle of nowhere dirt road northern california, there's a shower head mounted to the tree, about 20 feet to the right of the main cabin. the tree trunk makes up one "side," and there's a hook where you hang your towel. the other three sides are a thick canvas shower curtain that comes up to about my nose and down to about my mid calves and is sturdy and rugged and the sort of cloth that means something. the hot water is piped out there, and in the middle of summer in the middle of nowhere, it's just you and a huge expanse of long grass and trees and hills in the distance and a stream right there and a deer if you're lucky (and i guess a dear if you're lucky?! but it's a family place! stop thinking like that!) the point is it's so relaxing and about as "one with nature" as i'll get, because while i'm all for bathing outside, it's on the condition that i can then throw on my robe and flips and go inside, and not be like splashing the dirt off my face with a melted-snow stream on my way to fry a fritter in a shovel (i saw paula deen do this). my life is not the oregon trail.

anyway, that was hands down my favorite shower in the world until this summer. perhaps it is still my favorite specific shower. but let me tell you, cold showers in the hot city are quickly becoming my very very favorite genre of shower, or general shower. (it took me so many years to realize and appreciate that genre and general have the same root. generally could be defined as belonging to the same genre! COOL!!!!)

and i mean COLD and HOT. i dont mean "i just finished a hard cheer workout in 80 degree heat and now i am going to get in the shower forever and the first 20 seconds of my eternal shower are going to be cold". i mean "it's 95 degrees and i feel like i have been walking around in an urban shower all day and i am going to stand in this cold real shower until the glaciers have all melted and poured onto my scalp." it's one of those things that is so good by comparison it ALMOST validates the misery that heightens the satisfaction.

ALMOST.

CHAPTER TWO
today when i woke up and rolled over and texted eva to see what time we were doing lunch, it was 10am. she informed me that a rainstorm roughly equivalent to "the war of the worlds" had occured during the exact 7 hours when i was sleeping. this t"war"ential downp"war" (aaaaaahahahaha) was enough to close the subways and inconvenience pretty much anyone within a 3o mile radius of manhattan (that is a lot of people.) however, i assert that no one was really all that inconvenienced because everyone was screwed and it actually gave new yorkers quite a nice thing to chat about with each other as they waited for the trains that never came. kind of like when jeanclaude and christo put the gates into central park and everyone either loved it or hated it, and i loved it but didnt care if you hated it because it brought the city together since everyone had a thought. kind of like when informed republicans argue with me about which candidates theyre supporting in the primaries and i just smile (genuinely) even if i disagree because at least it's not boring and my generation is getting slightly less apathetic.

CHAPTER THREE
my lunch today:
strawberry gaspacho
green asparagus with herb risotto and white asparagus foam
red snapper in chili oil with radish salad
& peaches with buttermilk shave ice, mascarpone cheese, and raspberry syrup

CHAPTER FOUR
the world seems to be divided into two groups of people, at least for the purposes of that which i have recently been considering: those who think everything happens for a reason, and those who will vehemently disagree with you and call you loony if you say that, reassuring and loving as you try to sound. i fall into the former group, mostly because i dont really understand how you can stay sane if you dont. it really must seem quite open ended if you consider everything to be up in the air, much like that idea of the "undiscover'd country from whose bourne no traveller returns" or whatever the exact hammie quotation is. what i would like to do though, is refute a common misconception: that everyone who believes everything happens for a reason also believes in fate, which is manifestly untrue. i am ambivalent in my feelings on the idea of fate because it makes me worry that im powerless and i think as a social idea it promotes laziness, apathy, and irresponsibility. so, the two are not inextricably linked, and i am here today, ladies and gentelmen, to perhaps posit that far from being synonymous, they're actually inverse ideas.
if we use whatever that property is called where a+b=b+a, then "everything happens for a reason"="there is a reason everything happens". or, to paraphrase, "what you do now is affected by what youve done in the past"="everything you've done in the past affects what you're doing now", so it follows, just as future follows present follows past, that "everything you do now affects everything you'll do in the future." by this line of reasoning, far from being fatefully fixed, the future is actually frighteningly flexible, and the weight of each passing decision shapes this "undiscover'd country."
the point of the story is i think it's actually not so much an ideological division as it is a grammatical one, and the great debate can be solved just by divorcing reason from fate and citing an example such as the one that follows: i am wearing a black dress tonight, so i am wearing a black bracelet. A affects B, and no matter whether the combination results in commendation or in catastrophe, the outcome is a result of the past.

CHAPTER FIVE
my new apartment has a red front door

CHAPTER SIX
i want to learn how to play the saxophone

terribly two!

2007-08-08T01:10:00.000-04:00

it's really still the 7th by my mind, even though it's the 8th by the clock, so im only actually two days late in wishing my blog a happy birthday.

new gelato place on the east side of christopher. two blocks south of the uptown 1 station. forget what it's called, but the cantelope = frozen yes please.

a question: HOW DO PEEPS ON THE SUBWAY GET THEIR IPOD HEADPHONES TO PLAY SO LOUD?! do they have outer speakers? if i can hear your tunes from all the way down the subway car, how do you hear anything more specific than deafening perpetual explosion? DO YOU HAVE AN EMPTY SKULL? (this is not a judgement question, merely an acoustic one.)

the secret of this post is it makes no sense.

2007-07-31T01:15:00.000-04:00

i am pretty sure it was winter break 06-07 that i was sitting at the computer on the kitchen counter one night, wasting time doing god knows what, probably fresh from my mother asking me if there was any particular reason i never left the house or if it was just because i actually had no friends, when my dad looked up from his paper that he reads every night in the blue chair except for sometimes when i am monopolizing it watching my kagillionth consecutive hour of food network or who's wedding is it anyway or baby einstein (what does that even mean why would you write that) and said, "have you heard of that book the secret?"

i had not. he went on: "it's some stupid book that oprah put on her book club about how the secret to the universe is your attitude."

the part of that dialogue i did not express well through the very literal structure and total lack of explanatory notes and dramatic motivation was his humorous disdain and disdainful humor. basically, my dad thinks hokey things are hilarious and terrible and we laugh about new-age nonsense together rather frequently, ESPECIALLY when we've just gone to monday night power yoga and denise has informed us about our moon chakras while we're in the middle of an unspoken competition to see who can stay in a headstand for longer: father or daughter.

but today i had one of those crazy days where i started in a good mood, spiraled into a terrible one, had silly things happen all over the place, had my emotions follow, and finally just quelled everything with a strong vodka soda and a serious bowl of dos caminos guacamole. throughout the day, i kept thinking about this concept of the secret, which i think is hilarious as well because the apple didnt fall very far at all-- though the drop from the tree may have caused brain damage being exploited in this blog-- and wondering just how much of this concept can be valid.

now, i just wikipedia'ed "the secret," and realized after i had clicked the > button and before the results appeared that i might have just launched myself into a motherload of collaborative articles on multiple conspiracy theories, or that i was about to be delivered the html code for all of wikiworld or the reason that lindsay lohan is not already dead, in jail, or dead in jail. however, the most interesting thing that came up related to my search was this: "Secret was a chocolate bar that was manufactured by Rowntree's (now part of Nestle) in the 1980s and 90s. It consisted of a bird's nest-styled chocolate coating with a creamy mousse centre similar to the filling of a Walnut Whip. It was packaged in a white protective card sleeve and was encased a gold-coloured wrapper with the product's name printed on it in purple.
A television advert for the product, first shown in 1990, featured an elegant lady sat on a train eating a Secret bar 'in secret', accompanied by the song Have You Seen Her by the Chi-Lites.
The Secret Chocolate Bar was discontinued in the early 1990s due to high production costs and low volume of sales," all of which sounds delicious, hilarious, and like the brainchild of marketing and epicurean geniuses.

so it made me hungry and nostalgic, both for the days when i ate candy bars and for the early 90s (which, come to think of it, was the same time, and means i missed dallying in secrets because of a long-standing allegiance to snickers) and all in all gave me no information that applies to the [loose, vague, tentative, and questionable] literary subject of this post. so as a disclaimer, before i continue, if i actually dreamed all of this-- my dad's disdain, my coworker's mention of a film version-- i hereby take total credit for that which i previously called "hokey" and fully intend to write said book and create said film and reap great commercial success and become bffae with oprah, because it hasnt already been done but THERE IS SUCH A MARKET! and let's be real, is there any other beaming mug you'd rather see smiling up at you from the back of a book jacket in the self-help section?

sometimes i finish a sentence and reread it, i actually have no idea where it came from, where it's going, whether it was necessary, and if the fall from the window a foot to my left would be far enough to kill me, and then i spend many subsequent minutes wondering whether the suicide would squelch or magnify accusations of me having written meandering nonsense and then forced the world wide web bare its weight.

but then i say to myself, "the secret is you make your own luck! through attitude! so smile!"

however, if how i feel now is a precursor to the path my life is going to take tomorrow, i am not sure im ready for everything to get hot, sweaty, and sticky which is maybe what she said but i'm not sure because that's become such a reflex, like
Person 1: "Hi."
College student or recent alum: "THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID HAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
so i suppose it's kinda like the secret in that way: the response used to be really just a reaction to the past, but now both actions and inneuendos are being set up for the purpose of serving the future: either the impending one liner or tomorrow's destiny.

didn't understand that? i would pretend it made any sense and explain, but according to wikipedia, "A secret is information that is kept hidden from others as in the practice of secrecy," so i guess i'm practicing. thanks, internet community!

ps. flying west to east around 7 in the morning is amazing because the sky around you is dark but you are actually physically flying into the sunrise. flying toward the future with every moment! now that's wing'd victory!

wistful list...full

2007-07-11T23:00:00.000-04:00

summer leaving you feeling listless? let me see what i can do about that.

1. they say only boring people talk about the weather. but boy oh boy it is difficult to be interesting in the summer in new york.

2. today while i was at starbucks i was suddenly struck by an urgent! question!: HOW MANY GALLONS OF MILK DOES AN AVERAGE STARBUCKS GO THROUGH IN A DAY (ALL THE KINDS OF MILK COMBINED?!) conveniently, i have this brother, and this brother works at the starbucks near noodles & co. and pep boys and ohmygosh i cant remember what else is in that little line of stores thank goodness i am going home in a week! so i text messaged him: HOW MANY GALLONS DOES AN AVERAGE STARBUCKS GO THROUGH IN A DAY (ALL THE KINDS OF MILK COMBINED?!) and he replied: At least 20 or more.

IMAGINE HOW MANY GALLONS THAT MEANS ALL THE STARBUCKS IN THE WORLD GO THROUGH IN A DAY!
Imagine, or find out how many starbucks there are in the world, and multiply that by 20.
wow! that is a lot of milk! and you are good at math!

3. today is 7/11 which makes me think: it is so cool that they are transforming 7/11s into kwikee marts for publicity for the simpsons movie. now, regarding this i have heard two conflicting stories:
a) that the majority of 7/11s in the nation are getting the special treatment OR
b) that only like 10 are being cartoonified. now,
c) i walked by one on like 42nd & 9th or so the other night, and
d) if that is one of 10 in the nation, i say COOL!

4. harry potter last night harry potter last night

5. addictions with which i am currently dealing:

rice crispy treats
alliteration
that plain white tees song about delilah
watermelon (this is an every-summer problem)

6. THE WEATHER OMG THE WEATHER

a post to say hello.

2007-06-28T16:03:00.001-04:00

i cant believe that when i first started this almost two years ago (almost TWO YEARS AGO!), i would be upset at myself if i went more than four days without a new post. i cant decide if that means i was living a much more interesting life and thinking much more interesting thoughts, or if it means i actually had NOTHING to do but write about the nothingness.

neither of those possible scenarios is a plausible excuse for the derth of posts this summer because i have discovered that the "beginnings" of pursuing an "acting career" (sidenote: if you ask me what i am doing with my life, two things will happen: i will hate you a little, and then i will say i'm "figuring things out-- working very part time at a boutique and catering silly parties." i'll make a distinct effort to not mention theater, and if you say to me, as a surprising number of people have, "oh, so you're an actress," i will not know if your tone is pitying and sarcastic or understanding, and i will shrug. i will never say, "yes i am an actress," because that's like the kid running for 6th grade student council saying "yes, i am a united states senator" because that's his lofty ambition.) is a perpetual paradox of both doing nothing for extended periods of time and also witnessing very interesting things.

it goes back to that active waiting thing that seems to be the inadvertant theme of a lot of my posts. a typical day of auditioning involves signing up around 830am, sitting for >5 hours, dancing for 30 minutes, and getting on the crowded subway in your dance clothes and heading uptown. sometimes i go to happy hour wearing calf-length tights, an oversized tshirt tied in the back, and my leotard around my waist so it looks like some cross between a bodysuit and suspenders. usually my character shoes are hanging out the back of my bag. usually i forget to turn off the "stand in forth" default setting in my brain. always when i get home, i am exhausted from doing nothing and everything-- reading, trying to block out the sounds of girls one-upping each other next to me, talking tours and shoe brands and broadway dance center classes, sizing up the competition, hoping there are enough girls about 5'10" around that i wont look like a FREAK but not so many that my height doesnt help me stand out. when i take my tights off at the end of the day and my quads can breathe for the first time, i wish i could also remove my brain.

the next best thing to actually removing it is watching many episodes of girls next door.

not many relationships you make at this stage of the business (oh, talking about stages of the performing arts business resonates on so many levels! bravo! bravo to puns.) will be maintained with any sort of permanence. so i have begun a very serious relationship. with a 13 year old girl. tentatively named kelly.

if you read that without blinking and your only thought was "that explains so much!" i hate you. i am not announcing illegal and immoral fetishes or crying out for help. i am merely writing a young adult novel. which, in fact, is the reason i am in starbucks at this moment. not to write to you. not to write to you!

write. right. right. write.
i leave you with something you should probably check out, love, comment on, disagree with, read religiously, and suggest to all your many beatiful friends, you popular little devil, you: http://www.graightnyc.blogspot.com/. you can even play the game "guess the alias". (it's not a very hard game.)

questioning can(n)ons

2007-05-19T11:00:00.000-04:00

i dont really feel qualified to write an end-of-college post. my facebook profile lists me as "columbia alum '07," but i changed it less because i was eager to let everyone else know i was done and more because i thought if i saw facebook saying it was true maybe i would believe it. i laughed at myself when i did it, because i was hoping that by reading something on a webpage that i had put there myself, i would believe something that had already happened to me. "that's sort of silly," i thought. "how did people come to grips with new permutations of their identity before the internet?"

and that is kind of a silly thing to write in a blog. i mean, i have obviously had those thoughts a lot of times by now, so why did i need to not only write them out, but put them in quotations marks to come to terms with them?

i think that before the internet, people must have spent a lot more time talking to themselves in the bathroom mirror.

during move-out, otherwise known as the craziest day of my life in the sense of hectic and in the sense of surreal, i literally kept myself sane by breaking things up into anecdotes and conceiving of them literarily. but then again, endings and beginnings have a way of making me do that.
it's definitely a product of four years analyzing. in looking for symbolism in art history and images in literature, i began to see them in life, and i eventually lost track of what really comes first. byrne mentioned this in her blog, but varsity show serves as a perfect example: at the beginning of the process, we were taking things on campus and putting them in a varsity show. when we finished, we were taking things in a varsity show and putting them on campus. the creation takes on a life of its own. in other words, to quote miss byrne herself, "we spent pre-v (as the weeks heading up to our theatrical culmination will now be known) examining everything in our lives, wondering how we could fit it into the varsity show. varsity show is meta-columbia. now that it's over, everything reminds us of varsity show. my life post-v has become a never ending reference to the varsity show."

so events and reflections become the chicken and the egg, and who really knows what came first, and who can really know, and does it matter at all at the end of the day? i dont think so.

the columbia theater cult has a phrase that is either accusingly affectionate or affectionately accusing--i cant decide which, but i am leaning toward the latter--that we use with each other. it's "you WOULD!", emphasis, obviously, on the "WOULD!" we use it when someone does or says something typical of themselves, something that they WOULD do. but it also shapes our personalities. when someone says, "lievers, you WOULD have your huge can of aerosol hairspray neatly tucked into a beer coozy," i obviously agree, because i do. but then i obviously never take it out of that coozy, because it's how i WOULD do it. so even though initially i just needed somewhere to put my coozy since it's the product of my $1 senior fund donation, says columbia college class of 2007, and i prefer to drink corona light, the official beer of misplaced san diegans and seniors watching their caloric intake but sick of budlight tall boys everywhere, and that comes in bottles and not coozy-friendly cans anyway, once someone backstage announced that i WOULD do that, i decided i liked that gimmick, and the coozy remains. (well, remained... mom, what did you do with it while you were packing? (my mom WOULD pack up my room for me)).

so that's kind of retrospective self-definition.

there is also conscious self-definition, like when i think about how i am going to phrase something when i write it down later while it's actually happening to me now, and i was doing a whole lot of that during the last days of school.

so, back to the endings-and-beginnings thing.

my freshman year of high school, i started a journal-with-a-gimmick called "freshman firsts". i decided it would be the first of four volumes, and i knew the next one would be "sophomore seconds," and that's as far as i got in the alliterative planning stages. which is fine, because i only recorded like three "firsts"... i think they were my first pep rally, first dance, and first kiss. (LAME I KNOW DONT TELL ME I KNOW IT'S LAME!) but i was very conscious of the fact that living is creating the character of yourself. so i've been the same way when it's come to senior lasts: tom, shure, and i were very concerned that our last time at jj's have freshly fried EVERYTHING, and when we went a week or so before the end of school and that was the case, we vowed never to go back. on the last day of classes a group of us got into a food fight in john jay (which i will PROUDLY admit i started, by giving laura k. a wet willy with a carrot stick dipped in diet coke) and i knew that i couldnt ever top that (and that i probably wouldn't be let back in anyway). you always want to save the best for last, so when the best happens, it better be final, right?

so it's some sort of combination of what happens to which you retrospectively say "that WOULD be the case," and what you consciously script to have happen. and then you find symbolism in it, and cut it up into bite-sized pieces, and write a post about it, and that's how i file my life. in a canon of anecdotes that WOULD and that DID, and that WILL inevitably because they're in the trajectory of the archetypal character i'm creating every second and that i HOPE because they're wishes to close to my heart and vulnerability to assume or admit.

but the outline of the average semester-long columbia class goes something like this: study the canon of a genre of art, music, literature, etc. know it so you can comment on it. then question just why it's all in that canon in the first place. use knowledge you couldnt have had before studying this artificially constructed collection to argue that it shouldnt exist. on the final, don't talk about the pieces themselves: talk about the social constructs surrounding the pieces, and the extenuating circumstances that landed them where they are. sit around a table vehemently discussing whether or not jane austen deserves a place on a syllabus with homer, plato, and dante, and then realize her ability to spark debate has insulted your pride and exposed your prejudice, and that probably means there's worth in her work even if you arent a member of the facebook group "mr darcy, get down off that horse and ride me instead".

or spend the evenings of that same freshman year learning the traditional round of the bars of morningside: the west end, the heights, 1020, soha, amcaf, cannon's. watch over the years as the west end becomes havana central, the heights gets too crowded, the kids in 1020 seem younger, soha becomes mona, mona closes, amcaf goes highbrow, and cannon's changes its name to o'connells. every night before you go out, it starts to be, "really? local bars AGAIN?" but you know them so well and even though they're populated with freshmen, it's a chance to prove just how blase you can be, and you'd never call it o'connells: even though you're questioning, it's still established: cannon's.

dean austin quigley of course had one of the most memorable soundbites of class day (and yes, i do think he concieved of it as a line to stand alone): talking about the little engine that could, he said, in his 2-pints-deep-accent, "what did it say? puff-puff. chug-chug. kinda like college". the baseball team sitting on all sides of me roared, appropriately, in approval. but he said something else that i almost lost to pretending to not be effected by that whole "graduation" thing: he looked out at our class and said he saw amongst our generation perpetual students that would preserve great works of art, translate ancient literature, restore historic architecture, cure long-mysterious diseases. he never said new; he never used the word create; instead, he painted our generation, in his speech telling us that we're the ultimate, as a generation of preservationists, and not of creators. and it made me wonder if it's even possible, in this age of virtual mirrors and technological sounding boards, to divest from the retrospection necessary for creating the script and description of one's own character, and create something that's not a commentary.

presbo said the next day in his commencement speech that the world is hovering on the cusp of something new. i agree with both of them, but i cant figure out how i reconcile the two.

i guess that the answer is in the questions that we ask and not the ways we respond.

contemporary company

2007-05-04T00:29:00.000-04:00

i have a loop of websites that i visit when i have time to waste... or, more honestly, when i have absolutely no time to waste. it's pretty standard: facebook, bwog, ivygate, the slew of gossip websites, and by then it's about time to refresh the gmail inbox. but when i am feeling particularly crazy or particularly inspired (which is usually one and the same) i have been known to go on video-watching binges, taking a tour de force of broadway.com, broadwayworld.com, and playbill.com. i really promise i dont do it THAT frequently, but not because they're low on my totem pole. i know if i catch myself on myspace or reading my horoscope that there really are more valuable ways to spend my time. like all the time i spent tonight after one of my friends from first grade added me as a myspace pal and oh my gosh he's married and OH MY GOSH SO IS HIS TWO-YEARS-YOUNGER BROTHER AND DAMN THIS DALE AND THOMAS POPCORN THAT I GOT AFTER THE SHOW TONIGHT BECAUSE I AM EATING THE WHOLE BAG AS PER USUAL AND DAMN THAT I WROTE THIS ALL IN CAPS ALREADY BECAUSE I WANTED "AS PER USUAL" TO BE EVEN MORE EMPHATIC AND INDIGNANT THAN THE REST!

anyways, i limit my watching of bway vids because i know once i pop i cant stop.

so when i usually watch them is when i get back from a show. after legally blonde, i watched the videos about the making of the show and many hours on top of the 2+ hours i had already spent in the theater wondering how on earth it was so awful. and having a little memorial service to my own naivete from just three short (LONG!) hours prior, when the world was still simple, and i was eating my 3,439th order of tofu teryaki from swish because i am a creature of habit, and i still believed that pink plus musical was an infallible recipe for success.

after spring awakening, i spent a long time watching videos because i wanted to see what these kids were like. they were totally like kids. or perhaps i should say, "they were, like, totally kids!" there's actually a part in one of the behind-the-scenes videos where one of the girls (cool voice girl) is talking about the kid she's dating (weird hair guy) and actually says the words, "we're boyfriend and girlfriend," a turn of phrase i dont think i have heard since my then-7th-grade brother expressed disdain for people "who say they are boyfriend and girlfriend". amen, brother.

there was a spring awakening open call last sunday, which sounds like the fabric of my nightmares. 2,000 kids were there, the first of whom apparently showed up at 1:30 am for 10am call. obviously, 60% of them were typed out, because just because you feel a spring awakening in you does not mean that 30 is ACTUALLY the new 20. the rest got to sing 16 bars of a non-musical theater song, and you better believe they were FEELING it. because spring awakening is DEEP! it's so UNIVERSAL! who cares that the show was written in 1802, the music makes it so NOW, and look, those kids dressed in plain clothes in the audience are standing up and singing because it's so EVERYONE, and that set piece of a half-butterfly wing is so about the destruction of INNOCENCE, and they're having sex on a platform lifted into the air by NOOSES, because SEX=DEATH, but it's so tragic because it's so NATURAL, and NATURE is what this PLAY is ABOUT, and HOMOSEXUALITY and being BEATEN and MOLESTED and having ABORTIONS and RAPES and COMMITTING SUICIDE and subconscious S&M all in TWO HOURS and I JUST SAW THAT GIRL'S BOOBS SO THIS MUST BE SO RAWWWWWWWWWWWWWW. sounds like your average 17 year old's wednesday afternoon.

really. at the matinee.

so it's great that 2,000 17 and "17" year olds lined up to EMOTE. together.

so in case i am unclear, spring awakening was a little heavy handed. which is an unfortunate mistake to make when, two blocks south--like, literally two blocks, like if moritz shot his gun through the fake stage wall set up to look SO INDUSTRIAL, because TRUTH TRANSCENDS THE CONSTRUCTED STAGE, it [the bullet] could fly with the spirit of youth (AND TRAGIC BEAUTY) and penetrate (SEX!!! AHHH!!!! KIDS HAVING SEX!!! FLOATING ABOVE THE STAGE ON A PLATFORM!!!! I LITERALLY WONDERED IF I WAS LOOKING IN A MIRROR, since that happens to me ALL THE TIME, and thank god someone wrote a musical that is SO UNIVERSAL!) the REAL stage wall of john doyle's revival of company.

this show is rivetting.

i didnt see doyle's sweeny in 2005, because when ted and i were in ollies in midtown that day, our heated argument was over whether to pay lots and see sweeny or get preview rush tickets for in my life. i wish i could say i had the foresight to be arguing for that gem of a god's opera directed by a gay angel about an obsessive compulsive girl and a singer-songwriter with tourettes (the entire spectacle being presided over by a giant lemon),

(WOAH, talk about UNIVERSAL! i have to stop for a second before continuing on. that is the most consice summary of in my life that i have ever verbalized, and i actually cant handle the fact that, reduced to its most basic plot, it's already more searing sarcasm than i can ever hope to achieve. i will, from now on, when describing a bad singer-songwriter, claim that his vocalizations sound like he has tourettes; i will refer to any and ALL musicals as "god's opera," and i will absolutely from this day forth call all theater directors, with utmost respect and reverence, "gay angels".)

but it was ted, who had already seen the show, who argued for spectacle over spectacular. so apparently, sweeny was mind-blowing, but my mind was blown in a very different way.

i can't think of a sufficiently eloquent sequay into talking about company, because it's an incredible eloquent show. and it's a very elegant production. it literally takes everything that spring awakening clobbers you over the head with and makes it subtle, beautiful, refined, and sophisticated. both stages are austere and feature ensemble members and instruments on them for the duration of the show. both utilize the musical effectivness of harmonies to express unanimity-anonymity, how it alienates, and how the central paradox of life and relationships is being totally alone while you're always around other people. both use very specific locations to make very universal points-- spring awakening's set in vintage germany; company's every line is specifically manhattan, and like joanne, never intends to leave it. melchior gabor floats above the scenes literally in a chair on a wall, that serves as a reminder that he's omnipresent in the situations of the show; the huge (yes, phallic) lone column slightly off centerstage stands in for bobby, and is actually stood ON by bobby at times as well. but you just cant tell me that the school boys pounding their feet, no matter how passionately, and spitting out their words and screwing up their faces singing about "the bitch of living" (which is censored on my itunes as "the b**** of living," i really think just because asteriks make things look more badass than a word that's allowed on primetime tv) is more poignant than the sad-happy lyrics of the equivalent song from company, "have i got a girl for you". spring awakening is a whole lot of angst meant to cause stirrings in your loins and tuggings on your heartstrings. company is a whole lot of paradox that is never shocking pain, but instead a dull, comfortable ache that makes you miserable and also reminds you you're still sensitive enough to hurt.

esparza for president.

flaming

2007-04-19T22:53:00.000-04:00

i am watching people dance about the beginning of the universe. that's cool for a lot of reasons, most of which i can't tell you, because they're classified until april 27th. but one of the reasons it's really cool is that i never realized that it's totally valid to "dance about" something. dancing has a subject!

if you're in the columbia college or seas class of 2008, i was stalking you earlier for teach for america, and that means i was reading your list of facebook groups. my absolute favorite moment was: misreading the two distinct groups "firedancing at columbia" and "life would be cooler if it were a musical", which were next to each other and spread across three lines, and i skipped the middle line, i guess? or else i just have wonderfully selective and selectively wonderful vision, and in any case, what i read was "firedancing would be cooler if it were a musical", a sentiment with which i had never before realized i WHOLEHEARTEDLY agree! musicals are obviously cool (is this at all an appropriate adjective? my ironic v. colloquial scale cant tell)--in a very my-alley way--and i think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone whose interest isnt sparked by firedancing/who isnt hot for firedancing/who doesnt think firedancing is smokin'/who doesnt understand how PRIME the subject is for punning, so the combination of the two can only yield hours of joy preceeded by many months of negotiating lerner black box's stringent fire codes.

i am very worried, because bryan outed this blog in a roundabout way in my varsity show bio. so suddenly, not only is the pressure on to [do lots of things i cant talk about, (and not in that also-bryan-told-my-english-prof-that-i-have-a-blog-and-my-mom-reads-this-etc sort of way, because i don't live the threesomes-and-coke-binges life of some of professor davidson's blogging students) (i mean those who are her students and also happen to blog, not those she teaches to blog, though that would be a reason in itself to get another BA, and i feel like a class on blogging is inevitable eventually because when i first wrote that i accidentally said a class on clogging is inevitable eventually, and i bet people used to think that was ridiculous and LOOK AT TAP NOW! thanks, riverdance!) because of that varsity confidentiality mentioned earlier] during the show itself, but there is pressure to have a worthily witty and wittily worthy entry recently written as well!

it's a good thing i wasn't going for clarity, because i would have just torched that effort. which would have been cooler if i was singing and dancing and moralizing while i did it. WHICH I WAS.

legally lost

2007-04-08T14:06:00.000-04:00

everyone involved with varsity show is suddenly on a diet. with load-in two weeks from tomorrow and opening night in 19 days and passover now bread is actually a forbidden fruit. and and since bread's just the tip of the carb iceburg, fruit is actually forbidden, too. our rehearsals in wein have turned into long picnics, and at the end of the night there are roast chickens picked clean, discarded sugar-free jello snack packs under every chair, and enough milano salad containers to make an art installation not unlike the tate modern's sugar cubes. we worship at the altar of lean proteins, leafy greens, and half gallon jugs of water. to mix metaphors, our bodies are our temples, and our temples are decidedly not purveyors of popcorn drizzled in peanut butter and white chocolate. but as holidays blend on that passover evening that drifts into easter, i mixed my metaphors and motivations and munched on some dale and thomas. an entire bag, to be exact. it was trashy food elevated to on high, a perfect antidote to the musical debacle i had just seen, the pinnacle of musical theater--the great white way--brought low by pop culture that couldnt decide between campy kitsch and opening the back of the stage to the street, and letting reality move to mediocre music. im talking about legally blonde: the musical, which should have been my mecca and was instead mostly mortifying.

i really dont know what the san francisco critics who raved about the show's out of town try out saw, because i actually thought it was one of the more horrific things i have ever seen. i wanted to like it. i really wanted to like it! i would even say i already liked it before i went! but i sat there through the reggae and the riverdance with my jaw on the floor and a look of confused terror on my face.

after i saw in my life in october 2005, i came back and wrote (what i hope was clearly) a sarcastic review of a show that took its ridiculous self seriously. (which is pretty much the opposite of what i am attracted to: serious things that take themselves ridiculously, or at least ridiculous things that are serious about remaining ridiculous.) i could not even write something like that about legally blonde, because that requires word play, and this one left me speechless.

hero

2007-03-31T14:25:00.000-04:00

twice--TWICE!--in the last day when i've walked through the broadway/hogan lobby, the radio at the security guard's desk has been playing mariah carey's hero. twice in the last day ive been pretty excited. coincidence?

grammatiphone's grammatiphobia

2007-03-30T19:15:00.000-04:00

let us now hear the defense's closing argument in the case of LESS v. FEWER!

witness's (me!) last begging plea: so even though i stand by the rule that fewer applies to things you can count and less to things you cant count, there is a grey area that both kills me and ruins less vs. fewer as an effective gage of someone's grammatical prowess! (tear drops onto witness's notes; smears bottom dot of colon to look like a semi-colon; that's unfortunate because now there's MASS CONFUSION!)

defense attorney (begrudgingly and confusedly also me): in conclusion, your honor, though i agree that the rule holds even in situations in which actually counting is not plausible, probable, or even possible--if the sky is darker tonight, it is because there are FEWER stars out, and not less stars; if the beach is eroding, the result is either FEWER grains of sand or just LESS sand--you cant know what to say about drinks and awards!

exhibit a: the inside cover of the dvd of "Fosse," the movie-musical about Bob, which says of a tv special he produced that it "garnered him no less than three emmys!" my initial reaction, prompted by another grammatical error i have since forgotten to begin the blurb, was "wrong!" but, much to my chagrin, further reflection has indicated that my initial reaction was just wrong, without the quotation or exclamation. you see, your honor, three emmys as evidence of just how great that tv special was is metonymous for the abstract (and in this case, quite notable) amounts of praise earned. so while he perhaps earned no fewer than three statues, he also earned no less (uncountable) honor than is represented by three emmys (and since it's bobfos, it's safe to assume he earned more.)
exhibit b: drinks. if one is to say "more than four drinks, i cant get out of bed the next morning, but fewer than four drinks isn't even worth the calories," that indicates that one only drinks in integers. "more than four drinks, i cant get out of bed the next morning, but less than four drinks isn't even worth the calories," however, allows for partial drinks, sips, spills, and that warm quarter pint you leave on the table at 1020 because it's only $2 during happy hour to get a new cold one.
exhibit see: why this is so confusing?!

i rest your case: confusion is meritted.

title.

2007-03-27T01:51:00.000-04:00

10 minutes to write a blog? this cant, wont, has never, and must happen.

nine things.

1. tom and i have been having similar dreams, which we confessed to each other in a combination of shame, laughter, and horror at coincidence over a lunch of happenstance and 212 sandwiches today. the dream goes something like this: tom/jordy wakes up in a cold sweat from a dream. the dream consists of having realized, 2+ months into the semester, that he/she hasnt attended a SINGLE italian/french class that is supposed to meet every day. sometimes, there is an impending test, which is scary. other times, he/she doesnt even KNOW if there is an impending (or past) test, which is scarier. after being awake for a few panic-filled minutes, relief sets in when he/she remembers that no such class exists. thankful sigh. then, his/her stomach clenches again when he/she realizes that, italian/french class or no, he/she still is not attending nearly as many classes as he/she should, and so that sigh of relief is actually not at all meritted. is there a test yesterday?

2. mom asked me if meta was a really trendy word. mom reads my blog. my blog says meta a lot. (meta a lot.) caitlin, shruti, and i got into a conversation: modernism, post-modernism, post-post-modernism; life, meta, meta-meta.
in other words, i said: modernism is montage, yes, but meta, no. example: an evening news broadcast that juxtaposes (depressingly, i recently realized) the most extreme stories from the day/week/month in the city/country/world.
post modernism is meta-life. example: the oreilly factor, which discusses the news, and in which the commentary becomes as if not more important than the news itself.
post-post-modernism (where are we? I DONT KNOW!): meta-art, or meta-media. example: the daily show, which parodies shows that discuss news shows.
if the modern is the world of the thing, the post-modern the world of the branded thing, and the post-post-modern the world of the brand over the thing, why havent i bashed my head into a wall? can we ever be in post-post-modernism? if we can, can we know, because wouldn't we want to preempt such a self-reflexive existence? WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY. (answer, not question.)

3. which brings me to: the theory kyle & i formulated over the course of many afternoons this summer, since nothing says real-life like drinking coronas in a jacuzzi on a 75 degree southern california late afternoon--actual real life, i see you looking poor and close on the horizon. you stay BACK!--that life is thrillingly self-reflexive, not depressingly. kyle, that's why meta is so popular! because it's just life.

4. WHAT IS A BLOG DISCUSSING META?

5. a black hole of abstraction.

6. WHAT IS THE INTERNET?

7. a whole lot of trust.

8. WHAT'S THIS ALL OVER MY KEYBOARD?

9. my exploded brain, which just overdosed on a lethal combination of pretension, meaninglessness, letters, the action of typing, and apathy.

sprung!

2007-03-25T16:21:00.000-04:00

nothing makes me smile more in that im-walking-down-the-street-alone-and-im-STILL-smiling-this-big way as springtime in new york. the steps are full. THE STEPS ARE FULL!

(i unabashedly stole this photo from bwog.)

zanna, don't jump in that bag!

2007-03-25T00:57:00.000-04:00

i wouldn't describe myself as "squeamish". (is that spelled right? uea is a lot of vowels in one place.) i dont necessarily LOVE spiders and bugs and worms, or actively seek them out, but i think snakes are pretty cool, and i think it's kinda funny to watch rats in the subway while you're waiting for an uptown train really late at night, probably at like 86th street coming up from the jake's dilemma-bourbon street loop, or 72nd, stuffed full of grey's papaya. when a suitemate (christina?) went shrieking down the hall, and i mean SHRIEKING, one morning a few weeks ago, and a suitemate's boyfriend (ward?) 's voice came next, saying "i'll get it, i'll get it," i just rolled over and went back to sleep. "it" turned out to be a mouse, and pretty much my only thought was "mice on the 6th floor? supermice! mighty! MIGHTYMICE!"

so we have mice traps now, and i think there have been more shrieks upon discovering a trap that's done its job. i dont really give our smaller suitemates much thought. but even i was caught off guard just now.

we have standard, wooden-framed, college-y extra long twins, and my bag that i use every day hangs over the bed post that's not against the wall up on the end where my head goes. my umbrella also hangs on this post. now, my daily bag is the same bag as 96% of the rest of the columbia female population: the tote-sized longchamp, in black. (i should start carrying my red one again maybe? a thought!) the straps on this bag are just long enough that, when hanging from the bed post, the body of the bag starts just about where the horizontal part of my bed frame is. this is all very hard to describe, and not THAT important. anyway, i was sitting here doing some tfa work (which means, if you're in the class of 2008, i was stalking YOU!), and my desk is about 2.5 feet from my bed. this is the BEST senior housing, i will remind you. and basically, i looked over, and there was a mouse basically standing on the edge of my bag, like he was about to dive in. and i said, outloud, "WOAH, mr. mouse. you cant be there," and he ran away under my bed, the world of all my old papers newly organized in crates, my rainboots, my printer that i claim is "broken" but actually has just been out of ink since freshman year, and my humidifier. also, there is a bag from a store in soho called yellow rat bastard, which is ironic, because i'm sure my roommate has a family, so he's actually a brown mouse non-bastard. but the point of the story is: what if he HAD dived in?! though, if given the choice, i wouldnt PREFER mice in my house (mouses in my houses? mice in my hice?)--at the end of the day, what's the worst that's gonna happen, he'll nibble on my notes from university writing? if you want soy sauce to go with your orientalism, we have low-sodium-- one place i would really rather not have mice is in my purse. like, sure, stop by for a visit if i leave it on the common room floor on its side, but do NOT dive in there mister mouse! i dont care how mighty you are, you're not gonna make it up those vertical nylon sides, and i cant think of anything more terrifying than reaching in to my bag during class to get my pink highlighter and pulling out a hitchhiker. it would be kinda like those "i'm so embarassed!" confessions from teen magazine that are all "i had a pair of underwear static clinging to my sweater all day and i didnt even notice until 7th period gym!" except, like, with a mouse. in your bag.

there's a voodoo doll on my desk. from africa. the varsity show party in my suite last night was themed "VS", (you know what starts with VS? VARSITY SHOW! me-ta.) and gorvy came as a voodoo sorceress (wow. if you knew how long it just took me to spell that. IF YOU KNEW! and then when i thought i had it right, i realized, nope, i had actually written: sorcesoress). WHAT IF I HAD A VOODOO DOLL OF A MOUSE!

re: the choice of punctuation. it's more of a realization and less of a question.

re: the voodoo doll, which is african-like-from-africa and also african-like-skinned.

today i saw zanna, don't! (re: that choice of punctuation. it's actually the title of the musical. re: other exclamation points. i'm not sure it's ever appropriate to replace "i"s in your name with "!"s, but nevertheless a cast member in zanna, don't! zanna did.), which is a musical (obviously) about what would happen if the norm was to be gay instead of straight. apparently, the answer is GLITTER EVERYWHERE, to which i say sign me up. and like, there is a straight couple and they get shunned and people are grossed out by them. and then tom and rob took it a step further and more controversial and were like what if it were about race relations, and everyone was black and then they discovered that two of the people were white. to which i said, guys. that is NOT an apt comparison, because being black is a choice.

meta-ing things out! it exposes ridiculous double standards regarding ethnicity and sexuality!

a musical where i get to ZING and dance? i'm there!

SOS

2007-03-08T19:24:00.000-05:00

also, i mean, i have always been a creature of habit. but really this addiction to soy coconut milk teas and aloha trail mix from 212 is getting out of hand.

productivity is personal

2007-03-08T18:48:00.000-05:00

thursdays, i have yoga.

like, that's all: yoga, from 310-4, and then sometimes i go to the gym. because it's so wonderful, it's still an epiphany each wednesday after jazz when i realize, "oh wow! it's the weekend!" it would have been great--if it weren't for the whole thesis thing--to finish our "midterm" yesterday and epiphanize, if you will, that it was spring break!

but, it IS for the whole thesis thing, so instead of raucus celebration, i had a drink with some jazzers that included the "if you weren't going to hell already..." drinking game, and then i came home and saddled up to the computer and pumped out quite a few pages, and even though one very quick proofreading exposed at least one-if-not-more times when i used the same quotation in two places, i was happy to see that page count soar, and besides, it was a good quotation, and the uses were at least 7 pages apart and in two seperate sections, and i am still not totally convinced that isn't okay. as it stands, both uses remain.

in other words, i didnt celebrate last night, but i did take a break today. because, you know, it's the weekend, and it's spring break, and it might not be a day of no commitments, but let's be honest, it's a day of fewer-than-many commitments, so a break was warranted.

shrutes, caittles, and i headed down to the west village to "get ready" for bathing suit season, though to be fair, shruti's only headed to paris ("ONLY PARIS?!" my mother shreiked when i told her this, since i hadnt realized that "only paris" might be a snobby and/or highly offensive turn of phrase), but caitlin and i have beaches and bikinis to brave. shruti had to leave us for class-- it's only class! ("ONLY CLASS?!")-- so shure and i picked a random french bistro called les deux gamins. look it up on city search. it gets the worst reviews ever. but that is because, and only because, it's literally paris. don't go if you dont have 2 hours for lunch, because that's the schedule they're on, and that's the schedule these two second-semester college seniors were on on a classy class-less thursday, and a little two hour lunch might do you good. especially if it's a two hour lunch of a goat cheese stuffed potato pancake with a poached egg on a bed of homemade ratatouille with tomato sauce. omg. omg you guys.

apparently, natalie portman likes paris, too, because she was one of maybe 10 other people in the place.

self improvement, a brunch, and a n. port? and i also got a bathing suit? that's a productive thursday.

me-TA!

2007-02-28T15:05:00.000-05:00

it's a relief when, after just having turned in a midterm in which the last page of the blue book just said "ACK! I'M NOT DONE!", underlined twice, the teacher confesses that he "just realized it was much too long" for the amount of time we had. related to the face of pure, unadulterated horror i made from the second row when he gave the two minute warning? you decide.

i went with the black manicure for senior formal tonight. because i am a senior. so i can burst into tears at every mention of childhood, or time. oh, obscure varsity show references. you're offensive, and unfunny out of context.

i can’t say it was a totally conscious decision to trek even further uptown to take in what was, embarrassingly, my first night of live jazz since coming to new york three and a half years ago. maybe it’s the snide nyu students getting under our skin with their taunts about nothing on a street with three digits mattering; maybe it’s that old columbia adage that the only time you’ll ever stay on the 2/3 past 96th street is when you’re a drunk freshman coming uptown at 3am, probably returning from visiting a high school friend that is now that snide nyu student, both of which are mistakes you make exactly once (since the former will cost you a gypsy cab ride and the latter a painful realization that you’ll never be as hip as the fighting violets). whatever the reason, the 116th street station always seems to have many more people waiting for a downtown train.

so it was more of an adventure than one might expect from a 12-block trip. but it never ceases to amaze me that at any given time on any given day in manhattan, there are people doing fascinating things. the zebra room at lenox lounge is home to a mean 1230am monday night set. chris washburne's jazz class, mondays and wednesdays from 410-525, theater community social hour (there are something like 15 of us in the class), and inspiration for a drinking game, is a mean reason to shell out $10 and two martinis and enjoy new-meta-york.

mom, i finally got my valentine in the mail today. you owe the post office for a "nonstandard surcharge (thickness/oversized) nonmachinable" charge. unfortch, there are no instructions on how, exactly, to pay this debt. don't say i didnt warn you when skipping that 13 extra cents to send a valentine shaped like a lollipop and a starbucks card across the nation comes back, with interest, to haunt you.

varsity show: it's written!

shampoo in vermont in january

2007-02-23T16:02:00.000-05:00

it took me a really long time to admit to becky that i read her blog. like, not just sometimes, but frequently, and not just since we've been working on 113 together, but for a long time.
when i did admit it, finally, she acted slightly sheepish, as those who blog are wont to do, because it is, by nature, a self serving and silly sort of situation... to think that one's alliteration is worth sending to cyberspace.

my nails are drying. typical time to write a blog.

they're taking forever. typical of the spring 2007 semester-- doing nothing takes a long time.

if there's ever been a quotable source, it's "someone said something," because it's accurate, alliterative, and abstract. and someone said something--i really dont remember who it was. maybe our minister at home? maybe a professor? ooh! i am pretty very sure it was my victorian poetry professor, eric gray--about waiting being the ultimate paradox. you cant do anything else while you wait, because you're necessarily focussed on the impending goal or deadline or event. but you're busy doing nothing. in other words, waiting is spending time being actively passive. active passivity is the definition of second semester of senior year. alliteration is just a convenient and apparently omnipresent bonus.

may 16th approaches, or perhaps more accurately, it looms. there is so much and nothing to be done before then. "everything is going so fast!" but "i cant believe we've only been working on this show for like a month!"

in ludlow, vermont, in january, everything moves slowly. the speed limit's 30 but people drive 18. there's no starbucks to be had because there's no corporate lifestyle to live or emulate. the shampoo is almost frozen in the bottles and even a hot shower doesnt make it ooze any faster. for a new yorker, a vermont vacation is all hurry up so you can start relaxing. for a second semester college senior with no post-graduation plans, february and march are all get everything done so you can make sure you're on time to do nothing.

oops, i skipped some life

2007-01-07T17:31:00.000-05:00

so this has been a silly semester. december 2006 is the first month to be skipped in my blog archives. OH THE HORROR!
oh
the
horror.

i'm watching ferris bueller's day off, which is a movie that lindow hates, but i havent quite figured out why. lindow! it's funny! it's quotable!

one would think that, having not written for actually like three months, i would have words dripping out of my fingers and onto the keyboard. but that's not really the case. i actually do not remember HOW to write.

i do remember that when i used to think about things i wanted to write about in my blog, i REALLY wanted to write one about how, if i had to choose any appliance in the world to NOT be, i would definitely choose NOT to be an elevator. what a thankless job!

o! 2007! so far, you're a lot of fun.
disneyland, four different columbia friends in encinitas, and a 4-0 beer pong record by allee and me against all-male teams! how COLLEGE.

so 2007 and i are going to write a sayanara top 6 in 06 list to wave au revoir to our friend 2006 as he fades into the horizon.

6. that time i accidentally missed the bus to beauvais and had to take a 130euro cab ride so i could get to dublin, you are the dumbest waste of money in 2006.
honorable mention: deleting my entire MY DOCUMENTS folder instead of transferring it to an external hard drive and then having to pay to get only part of it back. dahm.

5. walking down a cobblestone street in temple bar with hilary at 3am after pints of guiness and partying with lonely planet writers and rockstars and saying to each other "this is the reason we studied abroad!", you are the most meta-cliche moment of studying abroad in 2006!

4. san diego chargers being stars! and lt getting nfl mvp--you are the sports story about which i got most excited in 2006 (and continue to be most excited about in 2007.)

3. november 19, 2006. 6:55 am. you are the moment i was most excited to open the door and get a pie slammed in my face in 2006.

2. dada--you are the art movement that most changed my life in 2006.
honorable mention: seeing manet's dejuener sur l'herbe in person.

1. "RED AND GREEN WITH LOVE IN BETWEEN!": you are the LYRIC that most made me cry into my glass of champagne in 2006!

honorable mention: "this is urinetown/always has been urinetown/this place it's called urinetown...THAT WAS OUR SHOW!" (only honorable mention because i didnt have the champagne actually in my hand when i started crying.)

and while we're at it, one more candle, for luck:
musee de beaux arts, besancon, france, with g and lu: you are the moment i laughed the hardest in 2006 (and perhaps ever ever). oh gosh. i am laughing again. this is a problem.

2006, you were a long year. we worked well together. i'll miss you, but i've got to move on! (it's not you, it's me, etc...)
BYE!

shadow walking

2006-11-27T23:20:00.000-05:00

i wrote this for class and i liked it and i thought "oh yeah, i have a blog."

In the evenings in New York, the city becomes a canvas. Dark shapes encroach on the dirty light sidewalks and move in rhythm with the wind and the passing cabs and every person that walks by. Each square of ground is an abstract tableau, a pattern from one of Matisse’s cutouts, a still frame from a black and white film whose story doesn’t matter, or even exist, and then each square of ground is something else. The last rays of sunlight make more poignant and halcyon the shadows they cast, and more extreme the angles of the buildings and trees and bodies they distort. To walk in the shadows is to simultaneously invert the social norms of museum space and “efficiency” and most of all to ignore organization of time and place.

To step only on shadows at sunset means to walk on the west side of the street. To step only on shadows in Morningside Heights means no Oren’s coffee or greeting friends outside the 116th Gates. It means that buildings, reaching up up and away with their brick arms and glass faces, also have feet and horizontality that’s both ethereal and earthbound. To step only on shadows means I never see my own.

When I’m walking in the shadows, I seek out the trees. Their leaves are leaving as they’re wont to do, and the bare branches dance and their shadows dance in time, and following them, I skitter along the sidewalk like the wind up there is moving me down here. And I jump from one tree branch abstraction to another, and for a quick second in between them, there’s me, reflected, not touching any darkness or any sidewalk but totally dependent on it all and suspended somewhere in a system of light and dark and real and imaginary and now and then and later and then I’ve landed.

There are sounds that make us lean in and listen closer or jump back in surprise, and blinding lights or almost blacknesses that make us squint, and smells and textures that make us smile or recoil or remember, and so every moment is one of these interactions between the physical world around us, and the shadows of the physical world around us, and the fleeting shadows of our physicality that are our actions and thoughts, and our physicality itself. And so we’re every moment suspended: not only when jumping from branch to branch, but when standing on the branch, because we won’t be in one moment, or in ten. And when we move from that branch, or this chair, or from the east to the west following the shadows, it’s because this abstract organizational “reason” and that physical force called gravity mean the same thing, ultimately. Their constancy is as an impetus to force change; to force a difference through the moments; always typing the next letter, or recalling one comma and necessitating the next, or that just being toward that definite impending dot.

In the evenings in New York, to step only on shadows is to hope that cab doesn’t pull away before you’ve arrived at the next tree, and that those women don’t finish their conversation before you duck under the awning under the Heights. Urgency that you don’t owe to anyone becomes part of a system of things that aren’t always and spaces that aren’t places.

a riff on...

2006-10-09T16:14:00.000-04:00

...that "i dont know if i've been changed for the better but because i knew you i have been changed for good" song from wicked.

kyle started calling me "the queen of superlatives" sometime in my junior year of high school, though i really can't imagine why, because i absolutely NEVER exaggerate, speak my mind, or run my mouth off. the lievers' family joke is that every single day i will inevitably either announce that it's been THE BEST or THE WORST day OF MY ENTIRE LIFE. but to be fair to myself, it's never until after i've had ample time to judge the validity of such a claim, so, about 5 minutes. get out of bed and the inaugural step of the morn is arch-first into an upturned stiletto? this absolutely is going to be a no good, terrible, awful, very bad day. on the other hand, 9 hours of sleep, a sun shining into my 6th story window, my work's done, the shower's free, AND someone posted on my facebook wall? i'm walking on sunshine.

(woah-oh-oh.)

this semester, though, i have a new favorite superlative. i'm frequently wide-eyed and always earnest when i find myself proclaiming, at least thrice a day, that something is "changing my life." and not in a you-never-step-into-the-same-river-twice-because-you've-changed-and-so-has-the-river sort of changing my life. more like influencing my thought process and affecting my posture and everything in between. total overhaul. i feel like i'm living in a state of perpetual epiphany. there are two main factors i've been triumphing as personally revolutionary recently. one is a class, and the other is a kind of tea.

modernism, disorientation, and the city is my last class of the week. it's an english seminar, the professor of which i simueltaneously am utterly terrified of and completely smitten with (apparently at the expense of my grammar.) it's 6-8pm on thursday nights, and i still somehow dont mind, nay, love, staying 15, 20, 30 minutes over. i cant even be annoyed at myself for being so academic because i'm spending too much time thinking about baudelaire, benjamin, and breton. and a couple more things that start with "b", but would make this anecdote personal, and this ish shows up when you google me sometimes.

a friend-who-will-remain-nameless and i were having a very intense conversation about what female-stuck-between-two-males we would like to be (so, between which two male characters in contemporary pop culture we would like to be romantically and obviously VERY dramatically torn) the other evening when she admitted to me that for the last week, as she's fallen asleep next to her boyfriend, her last thought has consistantly been "i hope i dream about patrick dempsy." i mean, that is FUNNY, and she obviously chose grey's. i went with jack and sawyer from lost because i havent gotten hooked on ga, and matt fox went to columbia, and so did his character, and josh holloway is very typically rugged and asshole-ish with a very healthy dash of justification through psychological baggage.

the point is, when i go to sleep every night next to the class of 2010 snoozing or boozing (i hate myself) across the street in carman, the last thing i think about is the tea i'm going to get in the morning. it's ginseng oolong, and it's changing my life.

oops

2006-09-26T11:41:00.000-04:00

did i write an entry last night about how i think when i write an entry in my blog about how i think?

ew, meta.

the short of it

2006-09-25T21:57:00.000-04:00

i've fallen prey. 930pm, monday evening. butler. tea in mug, computer on desk. many books. all unnecessarily-- i dont have any work due until thursday night.
i'm wearing skinny jeans. who wants to meet outside at 11 for an existential, introspective cigarette?

not serious. though if i were, i would have posted that on bored at butler, and it probably would have been for a clove.

i just typed "the library air is thick with pretension," and then i realized that that sentence oozed hypocrisy.

i've spent all semester jotting down memorable quotes in the margins of my notebooks; everything from that first year womens' studies grad student in my shakspeare class:

professor di gangi: "what is this bond between man and wife called?"
girl: "domestic prostitution?"
di gangi: looks a little bewildered and a lot amused: "or... love?"

or the girl in my children's lit class (who, to her credit, is also in another of my classes, and has said almost enough smart things to pay recompense) that may have made the quote of a co[o]lumbia lifetime with her priceless "stories are the trellis [pause] around which we grow the ivy of our thoughts."

let's just take a moment of silence for that one. it's up there with my first semester cc final essay prompt, which was "in order to understand why it sometimes snows in winter, do we need a knowledge of divinely revealed texts, or an inherent faith in god?" in the "no matter how many times i repeat it, it's no less ridiculous" category.

this is apparently a game called how long of a blog can one construct solely of quotations tied loosely together with incredulity?

maybe i just had forgotten that pretension existed just because i'm too clumsy to decipher it in french? maybe it's because my friends only say things to me like: "i didn't even want to play footsies with you anyway. i wanted to play another game, called punch-you-in-the-facesies"? maybe it's because i live in a bubble founded upon the conviction that "musicals!" smileyfacesmileyface is a totally viable answer to the question "where do you see yourself in five years?" (it's bad 'cuz the grammar's not the scariest part.)

...then i wrote and deleted a bunch of paragraphs on taking things seriously, and they took themselves too seriously, and now they're gone...

so let's talk about the important things in life: namely, with whom did i alternate sets on the roman chair around approximately 130pm today in dodge fitness center? i thought you'd literally never ask. none other than the "quad king" himself, timothy goebel. (wikipedia that ish.)

and/or what book is the real reason i'm still in butler? (okay, the literary reason. the literal reason i'm here is ed promised he'd bring me carrot cake.) winnie the pooh!

and i am going to smoke a clove with a crook'd pinkie whilst reading and take every page very, very seriously.

[sweeping, sarcastic bow]
scene.

i shake my finger at you

2006-09-18T20:14:00.000-04:00

a shirt i just saw some awkward freshman* wearing in ferris:

doesn't expecting the unexpected
make the unexpected
the expected?

to which i say:

duh. your shirt is not funny. it also is not smart. boo.

*perhaps he was actually neither, but the words reinforce each other so nicely.
symbiotic vernacular--in this self-referencial world, is there any other kind?

a soundbite

2006-09-18T17:05:00.000-04:00

this is an actual conversation between martin and luciana, drunk, at the heights last thursday:

martin: "i'm on the verge of an existential crisis."
luli: "i have those every week. can i take a picture of myself?"
martin: "about conservation of energy."

believe it.

i <3 ny

2006-08-29T22:35:00.000-04:00

tomorrow morning at 630am my jetblue flight leaves on its san diego to dc leg, takes a quick breather in the capitol, and then continues on its way to THE city.

this last wednesday in august, or "vma eve" in mtv speak, is the four year anniversary, to the day, of the first time i arrived in the big apple in 2002. the last stop on our college tour, we spent the afternoon making a trip in the wisest direction of my life--that is, away from yale and toward columbia--and the evening being surprised by avril lavigne singing sk8er boi on the top of radio city.

i'm 5-year-old-night-before-christmas-can't-sleep-at-all excited.

the biggest empty

2006-08-26T22:06:00.000-04:00

pretty amazing, right?

the canyon itself, in all its grandeur.
a forced viewing of star wars has me in yoda codes speaking.

it's the grand canyon, guys. and a little, tiny me. new addition to the life to-do list: ride burros down the canyon and stay at phantom ranch, all the way down there in the bottom.

how's the weather up there?

2006-08-21T22:49:00.000-04:00

somewhere in the 20 minutes i was on the big stairmaster at la fitness today--you know, the one that makes you at least three feet taller than everyone else around you, and so, for me, about four feet taller than average--between "BEHIND MEL'S MELTDOWN" (which is really not the greatest headline as it begs to be punned but torturously and obviously is NOT) and jacquie forester sticking her head between the bars and trying to scare me out of my mind, workout, and daft-punk-on-the-ipod-haze, i looked up and noticed for the first time that, woah, that's a lot of guys who are over like 6'6" standing there.

which you would think i would have noticed before, height being the number one thing i notice in ANYONE, including but not limited to friends, enemies, waiters, waitresses, costars, crushes, starbucks baristas, other nordstrom employees, professors, study partners, and oh yeah, males of interest romantic or non, especially in the gym, where it at least makes me feel like a normal sized person when i am doing bicep curls next to those workout rats measuring 2 meters and up.

a couple of the guys in said group have been there all summer, one of them being that kid i accidentally spit water on a few days ago when i turned around from the drinking fountain and practically walked into his sternum, which is an experience i cant say ive ever had before, as my sternum is generally the one at average eye level.

oops, sorry luke walton. hope you didnt walk back to where richard jefferson was bench pressing and giggle too long about it. when i finally put height and lakers shorts together and had robbie do the math, i blushed a little, retrospectively.

2006-08-18T20:07:00.000-04:00

the accused.

mojitnos

2006-08-18T19:20:00.000-04:00

i would just like to take a second to expound upon my disdain for mojitos. the mojito is to 2006 what the cosmo was to 2004. passe. cliche. and every other word that implies snobbery, as typed on a qwerty keyboard.

none of this is to say that i dont actually enjoy mojitos themselves, in the right setting, so, say, a sunny day in paradise, which is why i changed the word from "distaste" to "disdain" in the previous paragraph.

let me put it this way. miss lena evans, with whom i had a wonderful, albeit rum-free cuban lunch date yesterday, touched upon something profound when talking about the new love interest of a former flame: "i dont hate her; i just hate who she is in my life." that comment changed my whole world, or, at least my whole view on negativity, which i actually do my best to make a very small part of my world, for karma's sake. (a paradox not unlike the dbag that stole my yoga mat and lavender eye pillow from the gym, which made me wonder: does s/he now have to use it to rid shis soul of the disgression of thievery? and do the energies balance, or will the scales come up uneven enough to out shim when s/he falls loudly to the floor from full eagle?)

there is something very freeing and actually very positive about hating "who someone is in your life," as it makes no judgement on their character and at the same time assumes all of the responsibility oneself and completely justifies simply not standing someone. it's like a very wise girl once said of her friend's chances at prom queen: "you know, it really should be karen, but everyone forgets about her because she's such a slut." it really is unfortunate that karen has to suffer because alcohol flows freely and she has a huge rack. thank god we have regina to remind us that it's not that karen's a bad person; it's that she's been pidgeonholed into an unfortunate position.

so now that blame has been sufficiently un-assumed, i feel that i can freely talk about how much i hate mojitos and everything they stand for, and judge you if you order one, or, more particularly, if you list them in your facebook interests, and/OR post on other peoples' walls about consuming them. because it's not that i hate you as a person, i just hate what your drink choice implies.

the first person to order a mojito in my presence was sitting across from me at noche, a cuban restaurant in midtown, in 2003. this trendsetter was my father. who was 46 at the time, and probably ordering it because they didnt have sierra nevada on tap, or because it was the only drink on the menu that wasnt pink or didnt come with an umbrella poking out of the top. it was very good, as mojitos continue to be, a classic, plain mojito, pre mango/blueberry/passionfruit infusion option, and when it still needed to be explained on a menu. props dad. maybe the gods of your tongue-in-cheek tropical shirt collection spoke to you and predicted the next island-inspired drink fad.

but hang on. let's return to the original comparison. what made the cosmo skyrocket to fame? surely not party girls with UTIs looking to get yet another dose of cranberry juice. we dont have to look any further than that pleasure so guilty it's almost come full circle: admitting that you love sex and the city now pretty much validates your humanity if you're a female. it's as if you're saying "i understand this is ridiculous and unrealistic and very cliche, and that is exactly why i love it, so damn you all. i'm comfortable being predictable." (if you're a guy, it still either means you're gay, or you just cheated on your girlfriend and the only way to pay penance is six seasons and six gallons of ice cream in six weeks, or you're gay.) so for a while, when SATC was still rather avant-garde and definitely shocking, even for hbo, it was very hip to order a cosmopolitan, as even the color was daring. a red summer drink against the backdrop of a white linen summer dress? dashing. flirting with disaster. she's probably great in bed.

and then sex and the city went into sindication and became s** in the city on tb-haha-s, and it's basically only got three characters now because 98% of samantha's scenes were too hot for primetime, and the same fate soon befell the cosmo, and it's now on a tgifriday's menu on every corner.

and mojitos, friends? they're coming soon to a make-your-own-salad bar near you.

some thoughts.

2006-08-16T21:05:00.000-04:00

im not really sure who still drinks sobe these days, but there was a sobe-lean in our lost drink corral at work today, so i snatched the diet grapefruit-cranberry bottle--12 calories in 20 ounces!--and was pleasantly surprised. less thrilling: giving the person in front of me a heart attack when i accidentally layed on my horn with said bottle while trying to talk, drive, and drink. sorry, person in front of me.

also, i have always been suspicious of those voicemails that go "...hi you've reached whatever blah blah blah..." and then at the end of the personal message, that electronic voice comes on and goes "if you would like to leave a callback number, press one. if you would like to leave a message, press two, or just wait for the tone." ...long pause... "at the tone, please record your message. at the end of your message, you may hang up, or press pound for more options." BEEP.
these sorts of voicemails make me think a couple of things:
a. who leaves callback numbers when 1. a missed call or 2. a "call me" text message accomplishes exactly the same thing?
b. thanks for the "hang up" instruction.
i refuse to believe anything except that they're ploys by the phone companies to steal your minutes. it's impossible to leave a voicemail that's under 1 minute. even "hi call me back" usually goes over the limit, and then rounds up to the next minute.
and c. i really should just press 2.
but that's why we've got free verizon-to-verizon, suckers.

actual quotation:

august 17, 2005. i have the day off today, the day off tomorrow, two days of work, and then my summer commitments are over. we're in the homestretch, folks.

this year, it's august 16, 2005. i had work today, work tomorrow, the day off friday, and work saturday, and then my summer commitments are over.
somehow, though, the homestretch feels final this time around.

project runway tonight? yes, please.

yum

2006-08-15T21:18:00.000-04:00

or

"why i identify with hurley from lost"

when i told robbie that i had set a "no shot" rule for my 21st birthday, i believe his exact quote was "who exactly do you think you are?!" but let's not talk about the alcohol. let's talk about the food. un REAL.

i also set a rule that i wouldn't drink anything until i had had a glass of champagne, as i wanted my first legal drink to be celebratory and not brutal. sue organized for high tea at the four seasons... time for the bullets.

my glass of champagne
pear caramel tea
tea sandwiches: buffalo mozzarella, tomato, and pesto aioli; spicy egg salad; smoked salmon and cream cheese; proscuitto and melon; sun dried tomato and cucumber; and my favorite, stilton and mango chutney.
cranberry and white chocolate scones with devonshire cream, passionfruit custard, and blackberry jam
white raisin scones
mini strawberry shortcakes, coffee-chocolate pies, fruit tarts, and peach custard bars

yeah, killer.

came home to change and meet hil and ash. we headed down to rice, the restaurant at the W where nic works, for:

seared tuna over avocado and edamame (sp?)
an albino cosmo, a porn star, and a persephone martini
the first rule breaker: a chocolate cake shot

dinner! small plates at CH1VE, on 4th and market.

crab macaroni and cheese
kobe beef carpaccio
risotto milanese
cheese plate
chickpea crepes
hamachi and ahi ceviche
alaskan halibut
blue prawn spring roll
braised kurobuta pork
and a birthday desert plate that included rice pudding, chocolate creme brulee, hot fudge and white chocolate gelato, chocolate mousse with a toasted mallow, and a raspberry truffle.

and the first formal id check, at confidential. first formal id check and best cocktail ever: a honeydew basil martini. stunner.

so i relate to hurley now both because we weigh the same amount and because my presence screws with planes. but this is a happy, hungry post, so i think ill go eat instead of expounding upon my many, many hours in the phoenix airport.

template?

2006-08-06T21:14:00.000-04:00

what i really want to learn how to do is make this photo the background of my jack kerouac quotation. google is failing me. can you help?

take me out to the ballgame

2006-08-06T20:31:00.000-04:00

As a general rule, I tend to try to steer clear of movie reviews, whether written or spoken. I notoriously have not seen any movies, and so am no where near enough of an expert to make claims like “my favorite movie is…”, especially in an academic atmosphere like Columbia, where people don’t even like movies, they like “films”. I usually stick with something safe, funny, and a little indie, the lines from which I can quote and laugh to on my own until I’m off the hot seat. Best in Show is the old standby. Waiting for Guffman, though more appropriate to my interests, is not quite as clear in my memory, but still always on the list. Sometimes I claim Wizard of Oz, which was validated for me when I was 12 and watched an interview with my then cine-thority, James Cameron, riding the wave (bad pun?) of Titanic’s success but harkening back to his innocent, driving, childhood passion for the silver screen. “Cool,” I thought then, “the ruby slippers are legitimate.” So I cut up a calendar and tiled a wall of my room with it, under the pretense that it was a passion for classic Technicolor, but mostly just cause I liked Judy Garland’s perfect ringlets.

And if Columbia acquaintances have monopolized authority on “film”, the male contingent of the 5Lievers (get it? long I?) have the final say on comedy. Family dinners frequently deteriorate into laugh-offs, Connor and Adam engaged in a to-the-death Monty Python quote duel, or firing Zoolander one-liners back and forth until Dad’s laughing so hard he’s crying, I’m trying so hard to come up with a line that’s funny but hasn’t been said that I’ve lost track of the score, and Mom’s playing with her food, rolling her eyes, and calling us all low-brows. When Dad came home from the new Will Ferrell movie last night saying it was as funny as his turn as Mugatu and trying to relay all the French stereotypes (“He’s French, so, he’s obviously gay, and he drives Formula Un cars...”) before dissolving into giggles, that was serious high praise. It’s on the to-see list, though really, what isn’t?

So that’s basically all a long way of saying I don’t see movies too often. So when we vaguely sent Robbie and Jayce to the video store tonight to get a movie, I stuck around in the kitchen making peanut butter brownies with Conner (Fitch, aged 15, as opposed to Lievers, 13) and acting squeamish as Craig scooped out cantaloupe, and letting the surrounding conversation about sororities/fraternities/real college life go in one ear and out the other, and not really worrying that they’d get something I’d seen, because that’d be pretty needle-in-the-haystack. The boys returned triumphantly with Syriana, which was definitely more hay and less needle, though I of course had been meaning to see it. Brownies and DVD went into there respective machines around the same time, and as Allee and Rob were a pair, and Jayce was sandwiched between the two girls whose names I never quite caught, and Conner was playing with the ab ball in the corner, Ash and I got cozy on the Fitch couch. All I was expecting was George, that kid from Columbia, and something about oil. I even forgot Matt Damon.

What happened was we sat down and watched a movie that made me think harder than I have in a long time, and that made a stronger impression on me than any movie—or film—I can remember. Their choice was, of course, stunningly timely, as even Facebook groups and profiles become starkly partisan over the conflicts in the Middle East, and more and more Priuses speed past me in the carpool lane on the way home from work every day. Syriana was an incredibly ambitious project, which left me at several points waiting for a resolution, or just an end, or like, a power outage. I didn’t enjoy watching most of it—my fingers still ache from the torture scene, I’m still jumpy from the interwoven conspiracies and the close-range fire. I don’t even understand who everyone was, nor could I name even half the characters, because there were so many, and if you were to ask me to summarize it, it might take longer than it would to just watch it all again. But the only thing I could say at the end was, “Wow. What a brilliant piece of propaganda.”

Subtle is not the first word that a lot of people would use to describe it: At its most basic, Syriana is a movie about Oil and Money, the Middle East and Texas. There are as many subtitles as there are English spoken lines; the iconography that separates the two worlds should be distinctly different. Sheets and suits, right? Sand and Skyscrapers? I actually turned to Ash at one point, when yet another location label flashed white at the bottom of the screen, and asked rhetorically if any two scenes were ever going to actually happen in the same place. I was confused, and concerned about the progress of my brownies.

But subtle is exactly what it was. And whether or not it is exactly factually accurate is moot—it achieves a stunning symbolic accuracy. Made for a partisan American movie-going audience, Syriana is a mirror. Its audience’s reactions to the film reflect their reactions to the energy conflict in the Middle East—it’s confusing, it’s hard to follow, the names are hard to pronounce, what language are they even speaking anyway, what does this have to do with that, woah that’s a big gun, and hey, we’re back somewhere I recognize. A corporate office. He certainly looks jaunty in that tux. Matt Damon. He’s so hot. (Here Connor and/or Adam would try and get a censored version of “America, F*@& YEAH!” past Mom, and it probably wouldn’t fly. Even Dad might pretend to stop laughing to purse his lips, and I might continue on: “We’re coming to save the mother…” because, hey! I know that one!)

Matt Damon. The All-American Actor. Massachusetts, born and raised, a self-made guy, looks like a football player and wins Oscars on the side. So straight. Down to grab a beer. Blonde. Tan. A nice guy. He’s perfectly cast in his role as the small-business accountant with the big brain and the big heart—though which is bigger, ultimately?—and the perfect family. It’s almost a cheap hook that he loses his six year old son so early in the movie, but a hook that made me cry (which, to be fair, so did the Harvard graduation scene in Legally Blonde with the postscript “Emmett is proposing to Elle… tonight,” when we caught the tail end of it on TBS during the commercial breaks of Jenna Jameson’s E! True Hollywood Story earlier this evening.) He represents everything that the contemporary Republican Party has tried to package and sell back to us as a part of their commoditization of “morals” and “family values.” Damon’s family is a picture-perfect unit from small-town America that becomes embroiled in the faceless, “anti-American conflict” in the Middle East that’s generally passed off as too big to understand, to religious for reason. The most interesting part of how Syriana is constructed is that it aligns the Absolutely American with the Anti-American, and then shows them, at their most basic, to be the same. George W. Bush, as he peddles his moral wares and blasts everything from gay marriage to that old-fashioned notion of church separate from state, is actually just using Western playing cards to incriminate the Other, the Oriental. Not allowing Rosie and Kelly to marry in the old US of A is actually a move to preserve the family like Damon’s and so maintain the insular and insulated family system that is proud of the hometown boys and roots, roots, roots for the home team because if they don’t win, it’s a shame. American objectified morals and religious justification is actually just being pitted against Non-American objectified morals and religious justification, a comparison set up with a proud and unwavering “greater than” sign that means apple pie and red, white, and blue, ignores the identical suffix and just reiterates that American > Non-American. Syriana attempts to take on the other half of the equation and remind us that “objectified morals and religious justification > objectified morals and religious justification” is unfair. The movie reverses our propensity to “root for the good guy” because there’s not a good vs. bad comparison established. The entire attempt of the storyline is to eliminate the versus, to flip the greater than sign 90 degrees until it becomes a fulcrum point upon which the images are balanced in a too-perfect set of cultural and personal parallels, until the two circles in the American vs. Non-American Venn Diagram convene almost completely and those locating subtitles are necessary in order to locate oneself within the trajectory of the film, the scope of the globe, the web of conspiracy, and the scales of both relative morality and ultimate mortality.

happy birthday, blog.

2006-08-06T05:21:00.000-04:00

happy birthday, blog.

HaPpy birthday!

2006-07-31T20:32:00.000-04:00

when i found out last night that i wasnt working today (thank goodness), the first call i made was to adam, star of the last entry, and also my older-younger brother. (or bigger younger is perhaps more appropriate, as he is bigger-- both than myself and than my other younger brother, though the latter proportion probably won't last long.)

"hey slutty," i said, being as i have begun to refer to most people in names that are derivatives of the word 'slut', though it's flattering to neither (long i) me nor them, and i only do it directly and never behind the back; "i'm not working tomorrow."
adam, who was on a date, didn't really care. "okay."
"soooooooooooooo, i can go to the harry and the potters show!"
his tone changed. "rad! that's so sick. i think it's at like one. chill. it'll be so fun."

then i badgered him a little bit about the girl he was with, and raised my voice until it was rather loud and definitely shrill and did a little pro-ivy league cheer because she's going to brown. she officially never wants to meet me now, which is fine, as providence twice is enough for me.

and rhode island, as it turns out, in a weird twist of circular referencing, is the locale from which the potters' opening band hails. a little death metal-lite group (as in they had the look but not so much the sound and really not so much the subject matter, so it was totally fine as i am not so much a metal fan but i could close my eyes and then there was no more long stringy hair or veins straining to pop out of foreheads) called draco and the malfoys. do we see a trend here?

i have to admit the most recent reminder of HP and company was the triumphant fulcrum scene in the devil wears prada in which anne hathaway's character (name? dont remember. size? 6. boyfriend? hot. nemesis? the brilliant ms. streep.) has to get ahold of the manuscript of the seventh jk rowling masterpiece for her boss' twin daughters (of course streepy would give birth to redheads, as brilliance breeds brilliance.) i wont say i didnt feel more than a small tinge of jealousy as the twins burried their noses in their polycopies in side-by-side window seats on the train en route to grandma's house. consequently, as my attention was more book seven in addition to pair after pair of amazing boots walking street after cobblestoned (new york and/or parisian) street (and soliciting tear after ridiculous, nostalgic tear from precisely one person in the audience, whose name ive chosen to protect so i dont get made fun of anymore) than just harry and his entourage (which also happens to be the name of the show that ahath's character's boyf is on as his "day" job, and which i dont currently watch but may need to start on) and their annual antics, i forgot that july 31 is more than just a last day of a month, on which i dont have work, two days after facebook home announced that 'ashley roth has a birthday on august 2nd!', and so two days before her actual birthday, and, hey! nine before the birthday of a certain person who cries at inappropriate parts of un-sad movies. july 31st is also HARRY'S birthday!

that was the longest sentence i have ever written, and so i'll put in a random paragraph break.

so because i suck at remembering birthdays of fictional wizards, it was an "oh yeah!" sort of shock to me that when adam and i arrived at poway library's public square today around 1pm and noticed several teenage girls in happy birthday, harry! shirts. what we had happened upon, thanks to myspace and a guy that works with adam at the 'bucks was not just another stop on the summer 2006 reading and rocking tour, but an organized celebration of the famed spellbinder's birth to lily and james i-think-twentyish-years ago. hence the birthday cake, tea leaf and palm readers, and free pins. (at first i wrote "pints, " which is probably how it, like everything else, is celebrated in the UK.) my pin reads "how many monsters do you think this place can hold?" --ron weasley. i mean, ron could say anything, and you put quotes around it, and ill wear it as a pin. (redhead/brilliance/etc...) we also bought shirts that say 'voldemoort cant stop the rock.' i wish i was making this ish up.

adam says to me as we walk in, "oh, sweet, draco and the malfoys are opening." to which i'm like, what?! the heck are you talking about? but you, too, can find both of these groups on myspace. what you probably wont find is their witty commentary between songs, like "this song is about my literary foil. we have opposite character traits. like he's pretty much evil and i'm pretty much awesome." neither will you get the special song that's only sung "when we're in really close vicinity to a library":

we are harry and the potters
we're gonna rock this library down
we are harry and the potters
we're going to rock the roof to the ground

yeaaaaaaaaaaah!

thanks dude.

2006-07-21T19:31:00.000-04:00

starbucks: an americano of love.
a short screenplay.
based on actual events.

a tall, sweaty girl walks into starbucks, fresh from a very glamourous workout at la fitness, and so, obviously wearing boy's basketball shorts, running shoes, a sports bra, and a stretchy black headband over her slicked-back hair. a drenched grey wife beater is hanging around her neck, tangled with the ipod headphones that are attatched to the black ipod and holder strapped around her upper right "bicep". sunglasses over headband. columbia lanyard keychain, wallet (carried as a formality only), and cell phone (which will be dropped several times over the course of the scenario) in right hand.

an even taller white boy with an unprecedented afro, a starbucks employee, is walking toward the back room, away from the espresso bar. and... ACTION.

girl: ADAM!
boy: dammit. do you have to come in here every day? i work here and i dont even come in here every day.
girl: smiles. drops phone.
boy (whose every word is tinged with that elusive accent some call "surfer"): dude, you're so lame.
boy picks up an iced-venti cup. girl walks from cash register, where she didnt pay, towards bar. boy hands her the regular iced-venti-no-water-americano.
girl: can you make me a shot-sized green tea frappucino?
boy: dude, NO! ive been here for like two hours and do you know how many frappucinos i've made? like seriously 400. and here are two more.
girl: what kind?
boy: mocha double chocolate gross whatever.
girl: if there is a green tea one can you make me a mini?
girl walks away from bar to add "milk and sugar".
boy: dude, nevermind, it's banana creme.
girl: cool, will you make me a mini?
boy: jordan you are so lame. sure.
girl picks up "non-fat" milk dispenser and fills her cup to the brim. it's uncharacteristically opaque. she touches a pool of milk on the top ice cube, and licks her finger, and makes a face. determined, she picks up the milk, and the coffee, and drops her phone, and picks that up too, and almost spills one or both of the aforementioned items, and walks to the bar.
girl: adam, we have a problem.
boy looks at cup, starts laughing.
boy: dude, why did you put heavy whipping cream in your coffee?
girl: du-UH, i DIDNT.
boy laughs again, and takes the coffee and the diet-sabotaging milk dispenser, and then pours the banana creme frappucino into a cup and promptly dumps the extra into the sink.
girl: adam! that was for me.
boy: DAMMIT. you come in here and throw me off, and all the customers are like "who's the sweaty girl tormenting the barista, and im like, it's not just now, she does this every day, because she's my sister." laughs. announces another frappucino, which doesnt sound good enough to the girl to request a mini. boy makes a threatening gesture with the whipped cream dispenser, which looks disconcertingly like a piece of artillery.
boy: makes a new americano. i'll put your non-fat milk in for you.
girl: are you sure it's nonfat?
boy: shows girl the front of the carton. no jordy. it's butter sauce. it's diet-busters 4000.
girl: laughs. thinks her brother is really funny. what kind of frappucino is that coming up?
boy: decaf java chip.
girl: sick.
boy: bye.
girl: i might be back before my show.
boy: dude, that's in half an hour.
girl: smiles. drops phone.

and SCENE.

what?

2006-06-27T16:25:00.000-04:00

wafting from the kitchen into the room adjacent, the playroom-turned-musicroom-turned-junior-office (which still bares the scars of previous incarnations; namely, the piano and an armoire full of legos and art supplies) are two things: 1. connor and eric's screams about france's world cup bracket and players ("i like that guy! he's a quality player. doesn't shoot off his mouth like some other players. like jordy lievers." giggle giggle giggle), replete with much potty humor, peppered with requests that i make them chicken and lettuce wraps for lunch, and interspersed with lyrics from "teenage wasteland". or maybe that part im just imagining, as i set the scenario to a soundtrack. and 2. the smell-- nay, the scent!-- of baking cinnamon oat banana bread.

okay, im back. writing that left me no choice but to go get some of the first, mini-loaf that's cooling around the corner. sometime between cutting a slice and pouring a big glass of skim milk, connor came flying into the kitchen looking for tortillas, and then flying out again screaming "GOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAL! THERE'S A GOAL!" until he got to to the tv, where he announced that he was wrong with a "nevermind. no goal." and wandered back into the kitchen again to call me an idiot for putting the tortillas in the wrong place when i unloaded the groceries earlier.

both batches of bread are out of the oven now, because in true lievers fashion, i made four times more food than was necessary. come on over for this week's alliterative treat. (i wish there were an "a" word for treat, but microsoft word's thesaurus is failing me) next week, allee and i are making carrot cake, inspired by the bites we found hiding in the corner of the desert table at brooke's graduation party.

[insert photo blogger's being crazy about here]

and then we fed it to each other, and made robbie's dad take a photo of us, just in case he didnt already think we were weird, which he does, because we live at the hartley residence, and post signs in their lawns.

[more of the same]

not that many of you would know if that's really robbie's lawn, but take my word for it. 'tis.

half the time i spend in this room, i spend lying on my stomach on my chair, with my head on the tile floor collecting dog hair, with my arm at a weird angle trying to get my dog's ball out from under the aforementioned armoire. everytime i concede to his whines and dislodge his neon green friend, i tell him that "that's the last time i'm going to do that!" and to "go away!" which only works for about five minutes. then, i go back to how i spend the other half of my time, which is sitting correctly in said chair, with a vibrating lower back pillow on full blast, swigging water, downing painkillers like christina, hil, and i can take down a bag of reeses pieces (so, fast.) and staring out the window wondering if the clouds that are ominously hovering over the pacific, which must be good friends with the claps of thunder that woke me up this morning sounding like they had taken up residence in adam's room, right next door, while he was at NAU orientation in flagstaff, and that were the loudest and longest of my life and set the neighborhood abarkin' like every little dog had lost his faithful tennis ball under a big, bad armoire, will be gone by the time mr. walther (andy, not mark) arrives on the left coast on thursday. the other half of the time, i blog (...therefore i am... a nerd?), or read your away message. and yes, i am not so far removed from math class that i dont know that half+half+half=1.5, because afterall, i did attend a record-breaking four class periods of surfaces and knots in the spring of 2005. but that, my friends-- the impossible!-- is what's accomplished by a little thing called multi-tasking! (hyphen necessary, because i would like to know what a mul tit is before i start asking for one.)

oh, you want to know why all the painkillers?

well funny you should ask, because that's where this blog was supposed to start. but they say smell is the sense most tied to memory, and i was deeply lost in the mems of chocolate chip banana bread bake offs and gossips fests in 47 claremont suite 1 during that halycon fall semester that i think was sometime (the fall, perhaps?) in 2005, but seems so much longer ago than one little click on life's odometer could purport to indicate.

but this little blog was supposed to be about a different sense, which, seeing as how it is not especially tied to memory, and seeing also as how it's slipping through my fingers (please be appreciating the sensual diction), it's not surprising that one that can no longer really hear can also no longer really write about hearing. call me histrionic if you will, but it's all about to get worse when i can't even gage just how loud i'm actually being. my aunt and uncle used to live next to a deaf couple, which you would think would be fine and super quiet, but you would be WRONG, because, hello! deafies cant hear how loud they're being. so im just on my way to getting louder. get hype. get HYPE!

anyway, this entry was originally inspired by a phone conversation.

ted: you should write a blog about your hearing loss.

jordy: what?

case in point.

sunday started with something crazy going on in my ears. in the sunday-to-monday sleep schedule, i woke up screaming in pain a couple times, and collapsed on mom's floor while she came at me with the ear drops. all day yesterday, i couldnt hear anything except myself (which was a little gross). more of the same last night, with trips to load up on the ibuprofen every three hours or so, and a very worried director suddenly faced with a legitimately woebegone winnifred, or rather, just a frustrated fred, as the case may be. my original diagnosis was two blown-out eardrums, the only feasible cause of which would have to (very embarassingly) be my own singing. laugh it up. it's just going to get louder. didnt beethoven write his best stuff after he went deaf? or at least start to sound very ahead of his time?

three dots...

2006-06-22T02:19:00.000-04:00

so it's gotten to a point where facebook is boring, i dont get emails, i was only excited that i now have a top 16 instead of a top 8 on myspace for like three seconds, and there are no tv shows to watch since drunk allee promised ash we would wait to start watching the second season of LOST with her when she gets back from summer school on june 30th. i averted my eyes when it came on at the gym today, but it was like turning my back on old friends. that i hadnt seen in a while. who were stranded on a desert island. and who was that new guy that i accidentally saw? how are there new characters on a desert island?

damn that new guy.

also, damn the guy at the gym that chooses the tv shows. fox news and an out-of-context glimpse into that which will be thrilling me come july? honestly, where's dancing with the stars when you need it?

speaking of seeing old friends at the gym, it's really a warzone. you come around the corner and LANDMINE! there's the homecoming king from a few years ahead of you. you trip on the stairmaster and BAM! it's like some sort of guarentee that you will look up, face still bearing telltale signs of fear at the too-recent shave with potential humiliation, knuckles still white, and just then, sweat drips into your eye, and you're almost blinded, and there's that girl that was always so cool in high school, and probably really well dressed, right there, waving, and she still looks amazing. and well dressed. at the gym. isn't there a rule that that girl is supposed to get fat, or knocked up, or fat because she's knocked up (but usually not the other way around?)

so while we're at it, damn that girl, too.

if the common post-grad cry at columbia is "ibanking on wall street!", the west-coast equivalent is apparently "accounting in la!", because every boy i run into [in the gym looking crazy and listening to musicals on my ipod loud enough so it's like not at all hard for everyone within a ten foot radius to hear amy spanger belting away when i take one ear bud out] is "moving to newport and starting a finance job. in the end of august." even though it's "not what [they] ultimately want to do," and is, of course, always "a steppingstone." these were the boys for whom we were making green-and-gold sparkly posters and bringing game-day balloons and candy literally yesterday; "hey," i think, as i very un-glamourously try to towel my forehead and catch my falling ipod at the same time, "didn't he and his friends pile into a tinted, lifted chevy tahoe and chase the cheer sleepover toliet-papering caravan down with a serious stock of waterballoons?" desk job, indeed. college should last until we're 30.

and so the days slide by, one gorgeous tuesday following one incredible monday, san diego's notorious june gloom nowhere to be found. nights are all treadmilling, green tea, and whose wedding is it anyway?; days are all tiny tot clothing, beaches, and character shoe-ed rehearsals. all around me, away messages echo two things: "i'm 21 now and i am going to go out all summer", or "i am sOoOoOo bored."

im not 21. but i am also not bored.

it's relaxing. i'm content. i'm winding down, and gearing up, and it's okay, because im not moving to newport to start working my way up the accounting ladder. im not counting down the days to anything, nor am i panicking as i see them sliding into past tense. kyle, moving to australia shortly to begin three years at morgan stanely sydney, is suddenly a fatalist. three years might as well be 40; sydney is pretty much a black hole; he's pretty much going to wake up tomorrow dead. oh, kyle...

look! an elipsis! three dots for three years! and look how quickly they pass!
you're three dots closer to dying now, kyle. pretty much toast. speaking of toasts, johnny georgetown... (three more!) "i'll see you in the hamptons."

ithinkican...

2006-06-12T22:48:00.000-04:00

summer mantra:

only boring people get bored.

what time is it? oh, my watch is pointing toward yoga! bye.

this post is about nothing!

2006-06-12T22:24:00.000-04:00

sorry about that last post. it's been kicking around my draft box for a while, and i dont remember how i really was going to end it, except that it was going to be something about the davinci code. oh, and watching LOST. because those are the two pop-culture related items that i was participating in 'round about the 31st of may. no longer, since a tipsy allee promised ash we'd wait to start season two until she gets home in the beginning of july. til then, we just blame everything creepy that happens on ethan.

ethaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnn...!

but peeps have been giving me a hard time about not writing, and though i usually dont cow-tow (ha!) to peer pressure, i thought i would at least check in, and make sure i still remember how to type. so far, it's been rough going. (actual first draft: "so fair, its been rought going.;")""

how's the old encinitas?

oh my gosh! i thought that you would never ask.

well, things around here are goooooooooooooooood (sing-song voice included) ; adam's graduating on friday, he went to senior prom couple weekends ago, had a maxim model in his group, yeah no big, so things are pretty much status quo. beach? check. nordstrom? check. playing a princess, perched (upon twenty downy mattresses) ? why, check to that also! new song to listen to as one cruises along 101 in the defender? well, i am so glad you asked, because it just happens to be "at the end of the day" from les mis. there's quite a crescendo!

once upon a mattress!
at the carlsbad cultural arts center
july 14-23, 2006.

quote of the now:
connor: "and they's like 'why's you such a good dancer?' and i's like, 'i dunno! i guess i's just born with my boogie shoes on!'"

riiight.

sal?, a blog beginning.

2006-05-31T17:29:00.000-04:00

im kind of a terrible date. i love music but i cant name a favorite band to save my soul; "when i grow up" i want to act, but i literally never see movies. sure, i can draw you a map of who in hollywood is dating whom, and im usually up to date on mandy moore's newest hair color and who's on the inside of lohan's revolving hotel room door right NOW, but the rest of pop culture is kind of lost on me. television is the absolute worst. yesterday, kyle dropped a saved-by-the-bell trivia question on me: "what is the name of ac slater's salamander?!" he asked, very enthusiastically, and pretty much out of nowhere. allee, carlo, and i gave him very blank stares. almost offended, he rolled his eyes and finally gave us the answer: "artie."

go-OSH, kyle. we should have known.

so the moral of the story is that i pretty much dont know what you're talking about. no exception when luciana and geo walked me through the louvre, stopping every ten feet to grab each other and say something like "omigoshitwasrightHERE!".

an open letter.

2006-05-23T14:05:00.000-04:00

dear potential study abroad candidate,
look at me. i am standing here about to flex my big european-experience muscles (the only ones ive got, as my actual muscles have atrophied following 4.5 months sans gym, and my english vocabularly ones have done the same, since a originally wrote "apathied," which is also probably tellingly appropriate).
so you think you want to see the world, huh?
go.
but before you go, let me do the old "a few things i wish i'd known..." list.

before you study abroad, all anyone will do when you tell them you're going away is look at you with caracaturistic faces of envy, eyes very wide, head tipped forward a little as if they're letting you into their confidence, and say "oh. my. gosh. you are going to have THE MOST AMAZING TIME OF YOUR LIFE. i am sOoOoOoOoOo jealous..." etc, etc.
all of which is true.

it will be the most amazing thing you have ever done. but it will be really really hard, and that's something no one ever tells you.

the last door

2006-05-11T17:45:00.000-04:00

there are very few things that i look forward to more in the general short term than getting to the last door. i mean, i am very all-about all the "life is the journey, not the destination" crap in hypothesis, but really, what feels better than finally tossing down your bag and kicking off your shoes and finally being home?

when one exits the 10 line paris metro at javel-andre citroen, there are two seperate doors through which to pass. it's an idiosyncrasy of french culture-- the culture of avoiding eye contact, dying a horrible death before smiling at a stranger, and literally no customer service-- to always, ALWAYS hold the door for the person behind you. (notes should be taken by all those hamilton hall hipsters, who suddenly seem to be very late and in far too much of a hurry to do anything in their power to maintain an open door behind them upon having entered the building, despite having just very leisurely smoked their clove at the first runner-up of see-and-be-seen campus ashtrays, second only to the open-air drug den that is the hallowed benches of butler. perhaps the fear is that actual, real-live fresh air will creep into the buildings and polute both years of festering academia and the pure tar in their lungs.) and let's be sure we understand that it's not just if it's convenient. im talking the person you saw getting off the same train at the far end of the platform-- you better keep those hinges cocked until they can grab it with a "merci." in france, it is apparently your fault that they didnt plan ahead for their disembarkment.

that tension of potential conversation during the blinders-on trajectory home continues into my elevator, elevators being another of those confusing spaces where smalltalk is not only permitted but required. the elevator in my building has a mirrored wall, and all i want to do at the end of the day is get up very close to it and make sure the stress of three hours of grammar didnt inspire a new zit, or poke at the black bags under my eyes like they're sea anenemies. (dear dictionarydotcom: you're no good at all when i already dont know how to spell the word.) whether the day's been amazing or terrible, my ipod is no doubt out of battery, and im sure to be running low as well myself, and i always need some green tea with a splenda, and to mindlessly do a round of away-message checking during which i actually wont read anything, and will probably click on alleelee03 twice without realizing it, and to get into sweats.

a semester in paris is a very long day. i'm on the 10 now, headed toward encinitas. we're passing duroc, and segur. very soon, ill be making faces at myself in the mirror, and then flopping, exhausted, into home.

eve-ning, adam.

2006-05-04T07:16:00.000-04:00

some of us here (dont look at me) are a little behind the times when it comes to celebrity gossip. i, of course, check pinkisthenewblog, gofugyourself, thesuperficial, and idontlikeyouinthatway more frequently than i check my email, and so the two us weeklys (may 1 and may 8, which are Nick Tells All! and DENISE STEALS HEATHER'S HUSBAND, respectively) and people's 100 most beautiful issues that were brought back to paris courtesy of geo's trip to new york (and alex epstein's subscriptions) were fluffy, fun, and tactile, though no evian in a drought.

for others, however, (look at luciana), who perhaps have a life, or at least no internet in their appartments, things like "gwyneth paltrow had her kid!" are news. which spawned, of course, a rather usual conversation in today's computer lab about the naming of things (not the andrew bird song, the act itself)-- and by things, my stalled maternal clock and i apparently mean children.

so, i'm just going to lay it out there. gwyneth naming her son moses is not only ridiculous, it turns the entire percieved family dynamic on its pseudo-brit ear. namely, the apple of mum's eye (holy so many puns in a row) suddenly no longer has a monkier that also serves as a punchline of several of my favorite jokes, which include but are not limited to
"how many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"
"apple."
(sorry isaac, i changed it. fish also works, perhaps more effectively in life, but less effectively in this blog entry.)
and "hey, ask me if i am an apple!"
"are you an apple?"
"NO! what the heck are you talking about, do i look like a freaking apple? geez."
(old, always funny, classic christina+jordy, you probably didnt laugh unless you're us.)
BUT! is now rendered BIBLICAL!

will the paltrow family's next project be the old testament answer to passion of the christ?

quotation location

2006-05-01T18:40:00.000-04:00

new feature: quotations i like.

short, sweet, usually funny, hopefully poignant.

"C'mon. Jesse Jackson is here. I had him on the show. Very interesting and challenging interview. You can ask him anything, but he's going to say what he wants at the pace that he wants.It's like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is."

--Steve Colbert's White House Corresponents' Association Dinner speech, the video of which can be found here and the transcript of which can be found here.

all of which made me remember that time i introduced helen thomas at a leadership conference press brunch. mom was a little miffed that i had neglected to tell her that.

surreality bites

2006-04-30T13:05:00.000-04:00

when one leaves paris paris (nightclub #1) and walks toward le cab (nightclub #2), one passes, on one's right, this building.

which happens to be the louvre.

inside, italian renaissance sculptures dance for no one. outside, you shiver, and complain about your feet hurting, and wait for a taxi impatiently. surreal.

it's a four day weekend across europe because may 1st is some hold-over holiday from communism. this, combined with the recent realization that oh, wow, it's my second-to-last weekend in france, has led to much going out to of said nightclubs, nice dinners, and even the occasional house party, a la 11th grade again, and as a result, many mornings rife with heads that feel like bags of cement.

lu and i treated ourselves to a very romantic dinner in the latin quarter on thursday-- orange-infused rabbit over feta-polenta cakes, anyone?-- and then skipped on over to mary's very ridiculous appartment for wine and travel chat, our typical social diet, and then made our way to shannon's, the irish pub around the corner from lu's house, where we were teased and toyed with by a less attractive version of captain jack sparrow. to sparrow's chagrin, we left on the early side, somewhere around 2am, and made a very cozy luciana-jordy-geo sandwich in lu's queen. geo darted out early to meet a tutor, and luciana and i dragged ourselves out of bed around 1045 to make it to the centre pompidou for a field trip (yes, they still exist when you're in your 20s!). here is where the adventure began.

of course we could not have been traipsing around something easy on the eyes; there were no soft, flowy impressionists to be found. what there were were dozens upon dozens of installations that i believe were specifically designed to induce the symptoms of a hangover-- we were actually led into entire rooms filled with WOOL whose silence was physically painful; the two of us lost it and spent the whole time in the all hot pink room with the giant patent leather barbie shoe cracking up. videos on every wall looked like someone had tied a camera to a string and swung it around, so as to render the viewer as naseous as possible. surreal.

it's a very small place, this world. and it's a very fleeting thing, this time.

breaking the fast.

2006-04-24T09:29:00.000-04:00

the easy way to begin this post would be with a rhetorical conversation:

me: jordy, where on earth have you been for the last month?
me: i dont KNOW! not on blogger, that is for SURE!

but i DO know, and so i can't say that. perhaps a more appropriate conversation would go:

me: jordy, where on earth HAVEN'T you been in the last month?
me: NOWHERE!

it's been an adventurous four weeks. i hope loyal readers (hi mom) were satiated by the barage of posts that i left, like a pre-y2k stockpile, around the end of march. since then, i have been surrounded by all these little time theives. (sue, adam, christina, austria, hilary, the czech republic, poland, and hungary, i am looking at YOU!) and then poof! it's april 24 (which roughly translates to "like, the end of summer" in andy time), and columbia is in finals, and the leaves are finally rendering paris the subject of its legendary, very flattering spring, and my dark roots are ear-length, and dad's already renewed my gym membership at home so we can drive from the airport directly to monday night power yoga.

i have too much and nothing to say about spring break, so that i wouldnt know where to begin if i wanted to. it had a fun average that can be equated thus: [80's night at Lucerna with half of Columbia + Auschwitz] / 2. pretty eclectic. we also lived like queens for ten days because of exchange rates, and now the bottom of my bag drags on the ground with the sacks of now-worthless foreign change that have sunk beneath the rest of my life that i carry around with me. oh, and if you're me, you should GO TO BUDAPEST. it's my new favorite, but no one else's. hence, why you should only go if we are the same person. and since christina was there with me, i guess that means this advice applies to precisely no one.

currently listening to: once upon a mattress. to a song in which a mute king explains to his son the birds and the bees. figure that one out. and these are my summer plans, folks. sometimes im too thespian for my own good. actual line: "it isn't the stork, it isn't the stork, it isn't the stork at all... oh life is grand!"

greve digging

2006-03-28T10:11:00.000-05:00

i dont think i can speak for everyone, but there are few times that i feel hip-per than when i am strolling through the streets of paris, in all black and overly large sunglasses, of course, listening to madonna's hung up on my ipod. try it out.

so, the day of the grave grève. or the grève grave, depending on whether you're following english or french syntax. it didnt really change much for me this morning, since i still slept until 1. i got out of the house by 1:45, alotting a 15 minute grace period in front of my usual departure time in case the 50% metro efficiency was true. (which it was.) the 10 came quickly enough to Javel Andre Citroen, though crowded-- it was the transfer to the 6 at La Motte Picquet Grenelle that proved the adventure.

what began as a very crowded train almost became a riot on wheels as we pulled up to Pasteur. the entire station was packed with strikers, and instead of peaceably waiting five minutes for the next train, they rushed ours. i had the grease soundtrack blasting in my ears (i always have the grease soundtrack blasting in my ears these days. except when i am being hip and listening to hung up. which is followed on that playlist by kenny chesney's you had me from hello.) and the combination of sandy's rainy prom night and hundreds of sweaty, loud french college students made me want to die a little. i threw an elbow here and there in passive agressive counterprotest, and if i hadnt had a very protective french man in front of me to literally scream at them when they wouldnt move away from the door to let me off, i would have just ridden the metro off into the sunset with the entirety of angry young paris. and thank goodness my panini man did not go on strike. paninis in paris are to me what starbucks is in san diego-- a daily routine, in which they dont even ask me what i want any more.

though yesterday, i went CrAzY and ordered a nutella banana one. and the guy looked at me like i had three heads and said, "ah! c'est un jour de fete!" (it must be a holiday!) yeah, yeah, very funny. today it was back to apricot jam.

here's to strikers, adventures, grilled sandwiches, this being my 50th official blog, and this article in the spec which rendered my incredible 2777 housing number moot!

say AHHH!

2006-03-26T11:04:00.000-05:00

exciting things to do are not hard to come by in france. there are tourism sights enough to fill rolls and rolls of film (or many 512 memory cards, as the case may be), food to be eaten, paintings to be admired, clothes and shoes to be purchased, winding, narrow streets to get lost in. to be sure, ive done my fair share of eating, admiring, purchasing, and getting lost, but i have yet to scale the eiffel tower or the arc de triomphe; i havent taken a photo in front of sacre cour (i can't even spell it.)
just as one living in new york develops a proud distaste for times square, or can go three years without ever having visited lady lib or ellis island, prideful snobbery is a parisian trademark. we sat in geo's appartment this morning (afternoon) discussing new york to france parallels--how the champs elysees is OBVS that dreaded neon area that surrounds 42nd street, while the 6th and the part of the 15th it borders are SOOO the UWS, and the outer edges of the 15th are (disdainfully) brooklyn. self-congratulatory chuckles into our tea abounded, and the (finally!) spring breeze made the white curtains of the thrown-open french windows flutter across the hard-wood floors. a couple of little school children ran by on the street below, laughing and teasing each other en francais. c'est la vie!

then i spilled on myself, of course, and remembered that i havent showered in like a month.
(as an aside, ive noticed that i am being mistaken for french more and more frequently, and in every non-french country ive visited save switzerland, ive had at least one person address me en francais before english. ted asked me what my secret was the other day, and so i give you a sneak peak of my comprehensive, step-by-step guide to being mistaken for a frog, coming soon to a barnes and noble near you:
1. dont shower. like, ever.
2. forget it means to "brush your hair."
3. makeup? excuse me?
4. wear all black, every day. the same all black that you wore yesterday. and the day before. in fact, you only need one outfit.
5. NO GYM.
presto! vous etes francais.)
anyways.
when we got to reid hall on the first day of the semester, they gave us a long schpeil on safety, health, not getting pickpocketed, blah blah blah. like im sure im going to want to blow 100euro on a visit to an american-in-paris hospital. 20 years of following a leniant 10-second rule has made my immune system strong enough to survive anything europe can throw my way. that, and the fact that sue called dr. grandpa before i left and had him prescribe everything under the sun, all of which came with me in my carry-on, and none of which have been used. zpack, anyone?

but one thing intrigued me: SOS Medecin. it's a doctor! who makes house calls! it picqued my interest at least until i got up to get my next cup of coffee, which was a good 15 seconds later. jetlag. it's a bitch.

because SOS Med, which became a staple in our "ha! ha! we're so french!" sarcastic vocabulary, costs about the same as those fabulous, slouchy, blue leather boots i picked up at gallerie lafayette, it wasnt too likely that i was ever going to utilize the fact that the phone number is conveniently located on the back of our reid hall id cards. so i resigned myself from my dream a little early-- little did i know that SOS Med would come find me!

geo's friend leah is visiting paris this week, because she's studying abroad in exeter, england, and those crrrrrrazy british have 5 weeks for spring break. and, poor baby, she got sick, and is scheduled to leave tomorrow for venezia. are you thinking what im thinking? who else to rescue her from her death bed but our national hero: even available on sundays!

faster than texas rotisserie will deliver buffalo wings and onion rings to stoned carman freshmen 20 blocks uptown, monsieur med was rapping on the porte. 15 minutes and 60euro later, leah had in hand prescriptions for three different antibiotics, and in heart a very endearing "i hope that everything fast gets better!" from a short, balding man in a green blazer with a not-very-convincing-command of english but a tres confident use of a tongue depressor.

as geo and leah jetted off the pharmacy to pick up their almost-free drugs (socialism! it means free health care!), i sat down to blog. we also ordered pizza for delivery. as of now, the pizza has taken much longer than the health care to arrive.

i am lucky

2006-03-24T09:58:00.000-05:00

more like ifyouwintheratrace.BRAGSPOT.com.

i came to reid hall today to work on some classified projects, and i checked my mail to find i had a package waiting for me. it was a huge box, and when i finally made it through the layers of san diego union tribune pages that were guarding its contents, i broke into the biggest smile that ive worn this semester. (like, i just sat here for a good five minutes trying to think of a clever quip about the last time that i have smiled this big and came up empty.) in the box was a lime green easter basket, filled to the brim with pink easter grass and american snack foods like doritos, oreos, crystal light on-the-gos, and my favorite, favorite: jelly bellies. but the best part is, nestled in around all of these little american reminders are lavendar and teal plastic easter eggs, all filled with pastel easter m&ms, and each with a little fortune.

i brag about my family a LOT, and this is why. the fortunes read:
1. we miss your smiling face
2. we miss your comforting presence
3. we miss talking to you face to face
4. we miss seeing you at church
5. we miss seeing you at family birthday parties
6. we miss reed asking "when are we going to see jojo?"
7. we miss having you around to help make everything better
8. we miss knowing that the "queen of fashion" lives only half an hour away
9. WE REALLY CAN'T WAIT UNTIL YOU GET BACK!
10. i havent found yet
11. we miss your performances that make us way too proud
12. we miss having you "over for naps" says grammy
13. we miss your funny stories!
14. we miss your laughter
15. we miss your colorful shoes!
16. still looking for it...
17. we miss your hugs!
i would have to say that fifteen is my favorite.

a random kid, whom ive never seen before, just walking out of the computer lab, looked over at me and my easter basket and said, "well, that'll make your day." yessir! it will.

strikes and dikes.

2006-03-23T10:55:00.000-05:00

just last night, allee asked me if i had seen any burning cars yet, and i told her i'd been steering clear of the riots.

i spoke too soon.

this afternoon, our medieval art class discussion of abbé suger and the reconstruction of st denis was interupted by screams, sirens, and shouts. the walls of our little american oasis had been permeated by the sounds of the manifestations along rue montparnasse.
during our "petite pose" (little break), i left the 'hall and turned left, in search of an apricot jam panino. but as i walked back up rue de chevreuse, my curiosity (the same one that killed the cat!) got the best of me, and i passed the big wooden doors of our "school" and found myself in the middle of a premeditated chaos. rue montparnasse, one of the widest streets in paris, was filled with students for literally as far as i could see in either direction. every person looked like a walking signpost, covered in anti-cpe signs that i suppose were clever, though the nuances of french sarcasm and irony still escape me. still short of my morning coffee (yeah, it was 330pm, what of it?) i felt like i was watching a movie instead of an actual group of people who actually existed... in actuality. i stood there in slight bemusement, munching on my panini, kind of cold, and definitely late for my post-pose return to class. these french! they're wild!

they've even spawned a whole new repetoire of slang, suddenly à la mode betwixt (woohoo!) us reid hallions. actually heard, just now, in the computer lab: "shut up. i'll tear-gas your ass." i mean, that's funny.

the conference the student body heard last night explained the cpe as an "americanization" of the french job market, which would render these protests anti-american (or at least, anti the implementation of american capitalist ideals in france). i mean, people in america hate america too, but the overwhelming sense of apathy in our nation/generation was made only more clear by thousands of students asserting their beliefs before my very eyes. updates to come. tuesday's supposed to be the big strike. like, close the transportation, close the fromageries. we're striking.

okay, france, twist my arm. i'll sleep and not go to class. GO-OSH.

can't wait till sue and adam get here and live in their hotel on rue des ecoles. which literally traslates to "street of the schools", and is home to the sorbonne and jussieu. tell me how that goes, guys!

speaking of debauchery in the streets, i went to amsterdam last weekend! (good seguay, right?)
i partied less in amsterdam than i have on any other given weekend in europe. and, a week later, i still havent formulated any sort of definitive opinion. i feel like when i delineate my thoughts on the place, though, im going to get kicked out of my twenties. like, college students everywhere are going to be up in arms, and, like, march down my street with signs and bullhorns. it's like i can haaaaaardly imagine such a thing.

oh well. here goes.

my favorite thing about amsterdam was the architecture. there were so many times that i got intentially almost-lost, wandering the streets next to the canals, smiling dreamily at dutchies gliding past on their bikes, dreaming about one day owning a townhouse with a navy blue facade, white shutters, and ornately sculpted molding on the top floor. somewhere where i could wander across the street to get an apple dutch pancake and a latte to start my day, and then hop on my cruiser and, like, do pottery somewhere. amsterdam made me want to do arts and crafts, but not in like a "wooohoooo, im so high, the world makes sense to me now, and i want to do art to express it" sort of way. not that at all. there is a small town charm to the 'dam that feels like the best combination of friendly, beautiful, artsy, and communal--not to mention that my let's go! (! necessary) guide informs me that the dutch are the tallest people in the world--and somehow feels like someone bottled the hippie atmosphere of a northern california artists' colony, checked it through the lax (non existant) netherlands' customs, and then poured it into the canals of a gorgeous, 17th century port city, from whence it proceeded to waft through the air and inspire.

and then you walk past a window, and there's a prostitute in it. and she looks like she's 13, maybe 15 at the very oldest. her eyebrows are drawn on, and a blacklight illuminates her tiny white bikini. and half the time, she's dancing very suggestively, and the other half of the time, she's like clipping her toenails, or something equally quotidienne, like she's totally unaware that she's being drooled over by fat, balding men, roving the streets in packs. the sex-and-drugs culture of amsterdam is actually disgusting to me. call me uptight, but the nonchalance with which drugs are so readily (and yes, legally) available was disconcerting at times, and downright scary at others. maybe it was the freezing cold, maybe it was the "let's get wasted and laid!" spring break crowd, but there was a desperation to the tourist culture that was not becoming on a city of such distinction. it's a place that can stand on its own--more museums per square km than any other, history to spare, and buildings that bespeak the power of bygone days. instead of a city in which to get wasted, to me, it feels like a waste of a city.

but! van gogh! was amazing.

"f" you

2006-03-09T11:22:00.000-05:00

hanging in the window of an office in barnard hall is a black tshirt for sale. in white writing, it says "dare to use the F WORD:" and underneath, it says "FEMINIST". now, until a relatively recent simplification of my facebook profile, i announced proudly to the world that my political views were "very liberal", and i still align myself, albeit more subtly, with the left through my membership in the group "columbia students for gay marriage". dinner table conversations at the lievers households sometimes reach fever pitch before someone has to stop the madness and remind the rest that we're all playing for the same team and arguing for the same stance. but i somehow have always shied away from using that f-word.

feminism has a sort of inherent negative undertone to it that i assert has been created by the media--you know, that same media that is supposedly so liberal. it feels somehow extremist, even to one who spent a good deal of time hunched over an almost completed voter registration card, physically oscillating between checking "democrat" or "green party". the only persons i know who are more liberal than myself are my little brother adam, kyle gerrity, and condi rice. oh wait, that's right. why would a female member of a historically persecuted ethnic group possibly align herself with a political affiliation that purports to triumph the underdog? but, i digress.

feminism! is i believe where i was.

it's also always been something of a reverse (perverse?) rebellion, as if to say, look at me! i am an female with an overwhelming track record of remaining blisteringly single, indepedant perhaps to a fault, who still likes to wear heels and mascara. i actually was hesitant to do my cc presentation on mary wollstencraft because i wanted to see a male be the one to slave over her words during late nights in butler and then present the arguments for womens' suffrage to the class. there was a period of time at the beginning of college where i really wanted to be one of those cameron diaz girls, who can burp and drink beer and play pool and still look so hot doing it. i took my ice natty instead of smirnoff in hopes of being the most sought-after beirut partner in morningside. but sometime sophomore year, i realized that cosmos are the drink of choice for the carries and faries of new york for a reason: because girly and glamorous is so much more fun than stifling grimmaces after every shot of jaeger in hopes adhering to rule number 76: no excuses. play like a champion. i like college football, but i also like cooking dinner, and i coo ostentatiously when i pass an infant in the street. having doors opened for me is complimentary, not insulting. it's differentialist feminism, to use the correct term, and it's fun, but that f-word still carries a stigma.

so it's been with serious reluctance and conflict of interest that ive fallen in love with a field of academia that, even its best undergrad incarnation in the country, has a girl-to-gay-to-guy ratio so staggeringly depressing that it triumphs even nyu's student body. every time i admit that i am an art history major, i make sure to annouce quickly that im "doubling: also english" so as not to be blown off like a bit of pink fluff. it's a perpetual teeter totter attempt to strike a balance between someone to be taken seriously and something to be gilded, packaged, and topped with a bow. somewhere in the constructing of gender, social roadblocks were dropped with such astounding randomness as to really trip us as we're trying to keep up-- not to mention the famous quotation about how we have to get there: remember, ginger rogers did everything fred astaire did, but backwards and in heels. i love that idea. but then i feel like i cant love that idea, because im female and it makes me a cliche. but im the one with the blisters and the balance!

so i cant locate myself in the field of feminist theory. i have to take it issue by issue, which still leaves me conflicted, but feels slightly less overwhelming. i have a vague sense of approval for equivalency within the workplace, etc, and a rather emphatic insistance on the fact that anatomic mass and brainpower are not proportionately related. but that answer is too easy, because there are undeniable physical distinctions between the sexes, and when the issue at hand becomes directly related not to gender constructs but to that whole abrasive, objective "i bear the children" thing, my answers are black and white. im talking, of course, about abortion.

the decision by the governor of south dakota to sign the bill banning all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, unless the pregnancy is threatening the life of the mother, is one of the most upsetting political developments in the united states during the lifetime of our generation. im hoping that it's because im in france that the news is still surprising members of our mostly female study abroad program who havent been on cnn.com in a while, but ive been lying awake every night this week with a million thoughts swirling around in my head, none of which i can quite verbalize because of the huge exclamation point that is obscuring any coherent, linear argument. an aritcle i read in the new york times quoted the governor as saying that he felt that the time was right to challenge the 32 year old roe v. wade decision, and that's absolutely true. from a far right standpoint, there's never been a better time, or a more conservative supreme court, than right now.

spending time abroad has made me realize that america, while still the undeniable center of pop culture, may have had its moment in the sun. im reminded every time i spend $1.20 to have the purchasing power of a euro, that the political power of the EU is growing. and just as england passes a law legalizing civil unions for homosexual couples, a state in the middle of the heartland flagrantly rebukes the constitution in hopes that it will inspire a chain reaction so violent as to ricochet all the way from mt. rushmore to capitol hill. how is a splintered, leaderless democratic party going to counter this? sure, there's that whole impending-presidential election thing that's beginning to pick up buzz--cut to the "john mccain is speaking at class day"--"welp, yup, the campaigning is starting already" exchange between geo and i yesterday while cruising the spec website--but whatever feminist interest will be piqued by the possibility of hilary throwing her hat into the ring could very potentially be too late. george w. (silly) and his caibnet (terrifying) are comfortably couched right in the middle of the term, having managed to breed such a sense of apathy as to not spike suspicion, but also with enough of a bookend still left to be able to carry out a conservative agenda. and it's not even necessary to invoke the thankfully finite presidential term, or series of terms: the stacked supreme court will be left like a bad case of herpes.

or, hey, like a kid in the midwest.

there are certain people

2006-03-07T10:51:00.000-05:00

every time that i speak to andy, he loves to talk away time. as in, around february 24, it was suddenly "like, march!" last night, which was officially march 6th, was "pretty much almost april" in walther time. im terrified to talk to him again for fear that i wont get a summer, because he'll just tell me it's time to start packing up to start senior year. i'm also terrified to open my planner, because the weekends are quickly getting populated with little illustrations of activities--last weekend, for example, is tagged with many shamrocks and pints of guiness, while this one that's on its way in is like lovefest 2006: hearts, glasses of champagne, and cursive writing. my sweethearts are coming to town!

so christina missed her flight to dublin. i almost missed my flight to dublin. hilary took the prague subway to the wrong end of the line, walked around in tears for twenty minutes looking for a shuttle bus that was actually across town, and almost missed her flight to dublin. when i called luciana from the beauvais airport to tell her i was terrified to get on the plane because i thought it was going to crash, and that all of the delays had been warning signs, her eyes rolled so obviously that i could pretty much hear it over the phone. "no, jordy," she said. "you're just all friends because you're messes." thanks. i think?

in any case, the plane didnt crash. i guess she must have a point.

but if messy thursdays would always lead to weekends like this one, i would deal with it on a basis hebdomidare (try saying that with a french accent and welcome to my problem buying metro passes every week. thank god im here enough in march to merit a monthly.) ireland is gorgeous. it really does have this green aura. it's also a very international city with out-of-left-field good shopping. cue the christina and jordy in london "are we going to wear anything besides skinny jeans out next year?" "ehhh... no." sound clip. we've got hil in on the fun now.

in a very advenurous and proactive move (both of which are easy to be when in an english-speaking country: hello, comfort zone. i'd missed you.) hil and i boarded the DART train and headed out to howth penninsula on saturday afternoon. we got off the train and found ourselves on the irish cape cod. it was beautiful. and it also fulfilled my mother's order to "take a photo that is not just of someone drinking! you can do that anywhere!" so i made it, unscathed, through my first hostel experience, and even swallowed some grimmaceless-guiness so effectively that it meritted a "i mean, im impressed but also a little scared that you girls are drinking guiness instead of some silly vodka tonic" from a very friendly aussie with whom we were chatting. between the melange of languages in the hostel lounge, the shameless heeding of travel suggestions from the let's go! guide and resulting discovery of a very cute breakfast place that satisfied my craving for both scones (apple) and puns (queen of tarts), and the random san diego boy wrapping up a two and a half month irish soujourn writing for the lonely planet travel guide series, it was during one of our late night skips down a cobblestone temple bar street that hil and i turned to each other and realized that this is what studying abroad is about.

it's also about losing your passport on the shuttle bus and being paged throughout the entirety of the dublin airport to come to the information desk before you've realized it's gone, and then realizing that while you were writing postcards and updating your calendar over fries and a diet coke in the third floor mcdonalds, lady luck was working over time for you in the form of a black-uniformed, jolly redheaded bus inspector two floors below. not that that happened to me. it's just, like, someone i know. or something.

im in the computer lab for this 45 minute break between classes, and because we of course do not have itunes on the communal terminals, i log into myspace and browse through pages for good songs to listen to. right now i'm indulging my inner emopunk and listening to the fray. the first line is "there are certain people/ you just keep coming back to", and paired with trish's away message that excitedly announces that it's only three days! i am getting pretty lyrically-appropriately STOKED for girls from tulsa, bevhills, rockland, houston, and encinitas to all convene in the world's most romantic city for bonding and a weekend-long lovefest. kind of the most exciting ever.

i miss you!