| eggtown |
[Dec. 11th, 2009|02:07 pm] |
goddamn it, this is the second time my laptop has breezily informed me that it won't be charging the battery when the laptop is plugged in anymore. i went out and bought a new cord last time this happened, NOT CHEAP; now i'm reading other people moaning about the same problem and suggesting that it might be a vista bug.
i'm also really struggling with vista's version of word, which i use all day every day for work. after an entire year, i still have no idea how to save-as. i have to save over the file and then rename the icon with F2. it's distasteful.
this was a canned laptop that just came with vista installed; otherwise i never would have done this to myself. what a bad idea, guys. vista guys. your idea was bad.
what's the thing after vista, and is it better?
when we drove across the united states of america this summer, we'd originally planned to take I-90 to ellensburg, scoop down to tacoma, and go up I-5 to seattle so we could see bob's java jive. then we were too tired and just wanted to sleep, so we skipped tacoma. so, yesterday, we found ourselves still awake at 7am and it was a clear frosty day and we said why not get this finally taken care of.
it was really bright and really cold at 7am. i am cold.
it took a minute and we got a little lost, but we found it. all frozen and alone. it's kind of big! today, it is a bar. we didn't see the inside but i like that the windows imply that it has two floors.
before that, we stopped by the old milwaukee cafe, on recommendation from yelp. the review made it sound like it was gonna be in an old victorian house with painted eaves and dreadlocked college-student waitresses, and it turned out to look more like a truck stop, but we liked it. exceptional bacon and huckleberry pancakes.
i snagged a tacoma weekly and caught up on my pierce county news.
after java jiving, we just drove around south tacoma way and salmon pulled over every block and got a fuckload of photos of old signs, like he'll do.
on the way home, we stopped off at the relocated hat 'n' boots, which i hadn't seen since i was little and we used to hang out at the museum of flight all the time. now they are refurbished and in a green park instead of rusted out and in an old parking lot. they didn't move very far, i guess. i don't really know all the topsy-turvy geography in georgetown. georgeography.
salmon's been waiting on his haunches for season 5 of "lost" to come out on netflix for months, and it did that yesterday or something. so that's what we're doing all day, apparently. we're doing "lost."
i used to be into it, but it's dissolved into a big pile of terrible, terrible scoring and smug fucking nonsense post-season 3, and i've now decided that this show is really just a bunch of christian fundie propaganda. they all have total faith in an invisible omniscient power. this power has a specific plan for each individual character; everything is interrelated and happens for a reason. there's a strong emphasis on family history and lineage. at least half of the women have become pregnant and had babies since the show began. people rise from the dead all the time. the producers might as well be mars hill.
i'm calling you out, TV show. |
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| i eat bananas though. lots of bananas. |
[Dec. 11th, 2009|04:27 pm] |
dreamt i was at a house party with several rooms hidden behind frosted glass doors. mtv hyeong was there, along with caffeineguy and lexxy_pie. i told them i hadn't realized they were still in korea, and did they get their t shirts? i was careful to drink slowly, wandering around from group of people to group of people as is my wont. never sticking around for more than five minutes. i ended up lying down on a couch next to a 80s bedecked filipino girl with blonde hair. she told me she was happy to meet 2ne1. i guess they were somewhere at the party. it turned out the girl was some big star back in the day in the phillipines. i tickled her.
i don't really remember my dreams so much lately because i'm doing work as soon as i get up and log onto the computer. tis a boring life. wish i had time to buy more groceries. forever hungry with nothing to eat. |
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| life is stupid. so am i. this is not so bad. |
[Dec. 11th, 2009|04:24 am] |
i am playing dress up with myself. bought a black puffy jacket with thumbholes in the overlong sleeves, and a huge neck that comes up past my ears like this:
i also bought swoopy scarves and mufflers that are taller than i am, in a fluffy white cotton candy ivory and another hezbollah scarf. and a pink hat. and two technics 1200 turntables and a mixer. i am bleeding money filling the quiet bits of space in my heart with toys and i must say i do love it.
better spent on myself than stupid jaded teenage girls. or poker.
that being said, i need to buy my nephew some christmas gifts.
still trying to clean up and minimize every aspect of my life, including myself. caught up with an old friend from paris today who happens to live here now with his fiancee. went through africa, an MBA, and randomly plopped down in seoul. he's not korean american by the way. last i saw him it was ten years ago, we'd just gone through all the hostels in barcelona, got shitfaced on absinthe in a dank bar in a shady alley where i paraphrased a supposed picasso quote to some girl "how can you trust anything that bleeds for a week and doesn't die!??" (you sexist fuck, was her response i believe).
i also believe we spent a fair amount of time getting drunk on cheap wine and talking about william sleator's "the house of stairs" and babbling on about the greater things in life. the guy borrowed my "disintegration" cd from the cure and the single for "protection" from my massive attack singles collection and then left the country. for years i was bitter but now it's not such a big deal.
one of the turntables doesn't work bc it has a blown fuse or transformer or something. who knows. i just want to have them in the corner of my apartment so i can be a poseur when girls come over. i'll just stick my hand to my ear and then BAM instant dj.
seems silly since i am already a dj. |
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| recently in stuff |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|07:18 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | no, really, danzig | ] |
| [ | music |
| | danzig | ] |
salmon and i performed in a holiday cabaret this weekend. i was the hannukah dragon and he was the rabbi who came out beforehand and gave a shpiel about the magic and lore of the hannukah dragon, so people would get the joke. he's pretty fucking good at the rabbi voice.
we couldn't find a cheap menorah anywhere, so i made one out of toilet paper tubes, tin foil, and little LED tealights from bartell drugs. after he explained the basics, i came out and we sang a modified version of "eternal flame" while salmon held the lights up to the dragon's mouth on my head and surreptitiously switched them on.
people have been flipping me all kinds of shit for talking about how i fucked up the end, they say nobody noticed and i'm therefore a fool for pointing it out, and it's been making me kind of angsty. it's not about what other people think; it's about what i think. and i know i fucked up and i'm upset about it. so i can't talk with anyone about how i'm upset. they get really, honestly irritated about it. and so i'm not really over it.
i agree that it went fine as far as the audience was concerned, though. all they cared about was there is a girl in a dragon costume playing the accordion on stage right now, not her finger technique or the wrong chords or the verse she forgot that they never knew about in the first place. we got laffs and were invited back. et cetera. there, that proves you're stupid for being upset, meg.
the little song i wrote has been stuck in my head since saturday and it brings me shame.
we got a cute photo before the show, though.
it was intended as a photo bomb, but now i kind of like it. how crazed i look, and how hard he's trying to ignore.
i went to my weekly gig tonight, the one at the bar that refuses to promote it, and no one showed up for the third week in a row. it was the last day of their contract with us; it's clear they just gave up when the quiz night was moved to another night three weeks ago.
so i knew what i was in for but showed up anyway, just to trigger my fifty bucks, and we walked over to costas opa in the stinging, shocking, coldest cold i've ever witnessed in seattle and warmed up our frozen paws with dolamdes and avgolemono soup. that shit is good. shit. the waitress either heard me raving about it or she just knew my soul because some of it was dumped over the dolmades as well. we merrily ate and clapped whenever the group of toastmasters upstairs clapped and identified all the dudes in the giant amateur mural of ancient greek times.
i have a sharp memory of being a little kid and driving past costas opa all the time with my parents and being totally 8-year-old-girl-enchanted by the idea of greek food, what's greek food, who ever heard of greek food. i'd never seen it anywhere. we had learned about the greek gods in my private probably-not-licensed kindergarten that was really just some lady's house. anyway, i finally convinced my mom to take us there for my birthday or something, and i can tell you the booth we all sat in when i first tried greek food, which went well except for the kalamata olive which was the most revolto thing of my little life. THAT's your FOOD? greece? you EAT this shit? it tasted like a pickled clod of laundry detergent and i had to spit it out.
and i didn't go back until tonight.
now i think they're OK.
then we vroomed up to the crest to catch capitalism: a love story. i thought it was telling that we were watching it in the three-dollar theater. it was better than i was braced for--michael moore didn't cheat at storytelling as much as he usually does, and the parts that weren't about him gauchely inserting himself into the movie and were actual footage of real people who have been crushed/enriched by the recession were great. also, i learned to never pay bank of america back any of the money i owe them because they are bad and villains. big load off my mind. thanks, man.
gauchely doesn't seem like a real word. but i guess it is.
i've been sitting around all night reading about the space shuttle challenger and various people's personal opinions regarding whether the crew was conscious upon impact with the ocean. some pretty reputable sources say they were. i care less about whether they were or not and more about the fact that it was possible at all. |
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| son of return of thoughts |
[Dec. 6th, 2009|11:38 am] |
i just watched a trailer for smile pinki and it made me cry.
it's about an 8-year-old indian girl, pinki, who has a cleft palate. she lives in a fucking mudhole and doesn't own a pair of shoes. she used to go to school until the other kids got old enough to call her names. she is scorned and ostracized in her village. then, by chance, her family meets a social worker, who arranges for her to have her cleft palate repaired for free.
then i watched a short subsequent video of her and her father's trip first to varanasi, the closest city to their village, which they had never been to, where they got on an airplane and flew to new york city, hung out for a day or two, and then flew to hollywood, where they attended the oscars, which they then won, for best documentary short subject. pinki went from being an outcast to a national hero in india.
the look on their fucking faces, especially the dad's, who had a big mustache so you couldn't really tell how old he is but i bet he's around my age, was very moving. huge crazed smiles of wonder. can you imagine.
the two clips that got me were the one of the entourage eating indian takeout in a los angeles hotel and the one of a stylist putting long braided extension-pigtails in pinki's hair.
we also watched a wink and a smile last night, which follows a seattle cabaret maven and her class of burlesque students and the personal drama that surrounds their graduation recital. one of the instructors, "the shanghai pearl," remarks that her parents are immigrants from taiwan, where "women are nothing. just nothing." she's glad to live in the U.S. and be able to perform burlesque and be a sexy lady.
trying to figure out in how much of the world is true. certainly women are nothing in almost all of africa and asia. most of south america. i won't speculate about north america. i think the answer is safely just "most."
before the burlesque movie, we watched a goofy little doc on character actors who are in lots of stuff but will never be movie stars. all the dudes were scar-faced or bug-eyed or obese or whatever. cartoons.
you can't really even be an actress in the first place if you look weird. yeah, sometimes, but rarely. and you still have to be cute, on top of being weird. forget about ever being a leading lady.
it's mentioned in the trailer for smile pinki that women with cleft palates in india are generally unable to marry. and, it's implied, are therefore useless.
salmon seemed surprised by how much anxiety and tears and self-loathing the girls in the burlesque documentary went through when faced with the idea of taking their clothes off in front of an audience. "wow, these girls are fucking freaking out!"
i was so right there with them. what do they have if other people don't think they're pretty or sexy. that's where your greatest value is, even in this century. they were taking a major risk, however calculated.
one girl dropped out because she didn't want her family to find out that she'd taken a burlesque class. she said she could never knowingly do something that would hurt them.
because in our moms' era, you weren't supposed to be sexy; you were supposed to be good. good was sexy. i'm not sure what happened or why, but something did.
just sort of doing some word-math with all this input. waiting around to see where it will lead me. |
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| Poor Dini |
[Dec. 6th, 2009|12:48 pm] |
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Wood floors are cold, and so are my cat's feet! If not for issues of taking them off to use the litterbox, I would make Dini some bunny slippers! |
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