book club of one

attention 3 readers/friends:

i have just started 2666, so if you want to join a book club and have time this summer to swiftly get through 900 pages before i move on to, i don’t know what – get on it.  strand gives a fair price – $20 for the FSG paperback, beautifully packaged and what not.

last night i finished Strait is the Gate, which has kept me in a sour mood for about a week.  not because i didn’t like it, but because … SPOILER ALERT … perhaps i like to be grumpy.

i would also like to take a moment to let you know that I’ve joined a summer bocce ball league.  although i was expecting to be a liability for the team, i was pleasantly surprised to find myself a bit of a ringer.  at one point, i knocked an opponent’s ball away with mine at the last throw; my little ball curved around, and positioned itself right between the opponent’s and the pallino.  we won both our matches today, and also got a shutout game.

it was also nice to find that another sunday team features some ol’ del rio regulars; the closing of that bar still sends pangs of sadness through all the old ann arbor pals.  that pizza!  that crust!  that garlic!

well, good-bye!

24 hour panic attacks

Last night I joined some friends and coworkers at a 9:15 screening of Adventureland at work.  I came straight from class, where I worked on my computer, barely listening to the incredibly interesting guest speaker, who basically lobbies for the interests of the arts, commercial and otherwise–and told us about the conflict inherent in repping broadway and 501(c)3 and clear channel and pixar or whatever.

On the train, having been off my computer for all of 15 minutes, I loaded up my email on my iphone to find that I had 10 new messages.  4 of them group-self-congratualatory on an A+ for a presentation we did last week, that I can barely remember now.  What’s an A+ worth these days?  Who knows.

When I got to work, I bought a d.coke – sullenly.  My head was poundy and I was very clammy and overaware that my purse has taken on a very gross smell that can only be described as “unshowered hippie.”  How do you get this out of a purse?  Should I just drench it in sprays of various sorts?  I’m so embarrassed.  I shower frequently.

Adventureland was darker than I expected.  Depressing and relateable in the way that the main character is so middle class and so reaching above that and so unable to reconcile the fancy college education and rich social circle he has amassed with his alcoholic, newly less-than-middle class father and his weird steel-worker/catholic hometown.  Martin Starr’s character is a poor unattractive jew who reads Gogol and is too embarrassed to show anyone the inside of his home.  Ouch.

Anyways, I’m unsure if the movie only seemed desperately sad despite it’s rom-com format because I am so sad lately, or what, but I beat it out of the theatre fast and crawled into bed wondering how I got so sick when it struck me that I had forgotten to eat all day.  Oh, good job.

Anyhow, I bought new Rhodia notebooks and new micron pens to do my copyediting with, and this has been helpful to my mood.  Pens save the day!

I am excited to graduate, take a west coast vacation, and then startoversummer.  See you then, friends.

tumblr

i accidentally deleted the roadtrip tumblr and started another tumblr here:

http://woodhearts.tumblr.com

whoops.

blankest of walls

what to put on here? i had some other things framed, but then they went into the living room.

i have a mountain of dzama prints and a mountain more of steve keenes, but COME ON you guys.  basically i would like a huge photograph of a deer on that wall, will you make me one?

please advise.  here is my bedroom.  where the magic happens.

here is a song to make you want to move back to ann arbor

do you remember it, guys?

enjoy.

haha san francisco

my mother/spiritual advisor/tarot card reader sent me a link to JILL SOBULE’s new video for her song called san francisco. google it for yourselves, dudes.

and so, okay, obviously i hate the song already – i’m predisposed to hate the song.  but then i was like, “i know that person! in that video!”  I DO WANT TO GO TO SAN FRANCISCO, JILL SOBULE. you’re right.

i basically have already booked my next trip out.

things i want to do/see

• view depressing/romantic pictures of frontiertown. move west. burrow into a hobbit hut.  stop using words like “climate” “rate” “poverty” “unemployment” “disenfranchised” and cetera. oh my god, you guys, where is my therapist/woodsprite?  i love her.
• watch every showing of this on sunday:
  
• 
  do you see where i’m going with this?
• where is that magical woooooooodsprite?  she always tells me things like, “calm down,” and “why are you apologizing?” and like, “that thing you’re really upset about SOUNDS REALLY UPSETTING.” how great.
• also, do you ever feel like you’re just NOT at the NEXUS that you want to be at?
• but then you/i  realize that all of this nostalgia for the 70’s when talk therapy was getting really huge and everyone had a camper and divorce was like this great new phenomenon and all that is totally disingenous because you were born in 1979. barely.
• no more self-indulgence 2009.
• except for that, last night, i decided i’m spending may in my mother’s west coast love nest and letting her brush my hair every night.

warding off evil feelings

In a hotel room in Yuma, Arizona, I asked Jason to give me an extra pillow so that I could, you know, hug it while I slept.

So he threw one at me and yelled “HERE IS YOUR LONELYSHIELD.”

This is obviously the best word invented to describe my little pillow.  You can use it if you want.

In LA I had to make do with one pillow, but in SF I consistently fell asleep hours before everyone else (you know, at 4am).  Whoops, I’m a girl, sirs, give me your beds.  Then invariably they’d find me wrapped around all of their pillows in some odd contortion, snoring away. Delicately!

Before my next visit, frends, buy me this:

it will save us all A LOT of trouble.

whoops, sleepy! and here is a lesson

me: i slept from likewell i was planning on staying up until 10and ap was like, “just listen to me. you need to sleep.”at like i don’t know 7and i was like, “i can’t sleep. you don’t know how the world works! blah! i hate everything!”this is paraphrased obviously

chris: right

me: and then i was like, “oh, i’m being a total dick.  okay i will go to sleep”

i woke up at like 10:30 pm

talked to al and bhav

made myself the most confusing food

while they looked on in amazement

chris: the most confusing food

me: it was

chris: i like that phrase

me: a packet of chicken noodle soup like mrs grass style

with a whole bunch of couscous dropped in

which i then dumped some sriracha on

and ate with an emergen-c

what?

okay

i mean i drank the emergen-c

anyways, i got back into bed well before midnight

and woke up at 10

i don’t remember jet lag being so bad last time

i think that

it is because

one should never ever red eye

extended absence

I’ve been on vacation now, for a full week and this vacation will end early Monday morning before I go to work.

I found this trailer in a ghost town on the edge of a salty sea, and would like to move into it for the remainder of the fiscal crisis with a stack of books, connect four, and a friendly puppy.

would you care to join me?