Monday, October 29, 2007

Pre-Halloweenie

These pre-Halloween days brought clashing festivities, a gaggle of turkeys at the first party, two Rainbow Brights and a half-naked girl in her skivvies at the second, a costume in tandem (Tanto and I were the “Addicted to Love” girls from Robert Palmer’s classic video, and naturally, we had a choreographed dance, and we got a free ride home from the police because of it), and my first full-time writing assignment which instead of working on, I nervously procrastinated.

And the past 48 hours brought some pretty great pickup lines too. My favorite overheard:

Scenario #1

(REDACTED)

Scenario #2

Man dressed in a laundry bag: “You know, everyone here is convinced we should be together. Except for you.”

Confused girl, laughing: “But aren’t I the only one you have to convince?”

Scenario #3

Man dressed in a laundry bag, somehow at the next location: “Let me just tell you a joke.”

Confused girl, not laughing: “Okay. Shoot.”

Man dressed in a laundry bag: “Have you heard about the new corduroy pillows? They’re making head lines.”

Confused girl, laughing a really long time: “Ha!”

Thursday, October 25, 2007

The Greats

Quotes worth quoting:

3. "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." Neitzche

2. "Life must be lived as play." -Plato

1. "True friends stab you in the front." -Oscar Wilde

Tomorrow I start my first day as a full-time freelance writer! And for every moment before and after, I will use someone else's words as inspiration for my own...

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Quote of the Day

The celebration, round two, in the final hours of Passerby:

Her: “Come on, let’s go to (insert place that would only be farther away if it were in India).”

[REDACTED]: “Yeah, let’s go!”

Me: “But I (just got a drink with a lychee in the bottom/think this is the song I was talking about when no one was listening/am talking to a dirty Frenchman*).”

Her (frantically, as [REDACTED] winks): “Who cares? Let’s go!”

Me (motioning for her to come closer): “Hey, come here.”

Her (inching forward): “What?”

Me: “What did I tell you? What did I just tell you?”

Her (head down): “I know.”

Me (shaking her): “Don’t look directly into his eyes! Don’t you dare get lost in his eyes! Damnit!”

Her: “B-b-but, they’re the color of the perfect storm.”


* No offense intended for any dirty Frenchmen who may be reading this. You know I find you delightful. In fact; (me, motioning, making the international hand gesture for “call me sometime”).

Monday, October 22, 2007

Self-Portrait

What was important never is when you’re standing in front of an ill-lit mirror, trying to get your nose just right using broken graphite, the first time in a long time you really looked at your nose at all, you think, and you have to draw it because your art teacher said we’re going into portraiture and you wished to draw someone else, clandestine, but you were scared to start, scared to not finish, if that someone else, whom you did not know, turned to you and then away from you.

There is a glance between two people who do not know each other, a moment of invasion and of topical knowing that is private, rare, by the rest of the world’s standards. Maybe in a supermarket, maybe briefly at a red light, maybe years and nothing like it at all. But here, it’s every day, multiple times, and here people do not even try to avert their eyes, they stare, you stare back, you both go on for subway stops, steps, eons like this, and you see everything and say nothing, even though you could have stepped forward and introduced yourself. Even though you could have approached them, like the new kid on the block forced to ring doorbells and ask if any kids reside inside, you could have done this, you could have made a connection and yet you did not. You will not. And they will not approach you in return.

What you do get though is that moment from your perspective, whatever it is worth, which is probably nothing, until you are standing in front of yourself, tearing up another page because it does not look like how you think you do and you see how you look to someone else, maybe everyone else and it amazes you how small you still are, and yet how much bigger you have yet to grow.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

1980

Yes.

Yes, Dirt Nasty, aka MTV VJ Simon Rex. You have made me wish I was born earlier, if only because this is exactly what I think 1980 was really like.

Less talking, more blogging

Blog,

Come here, baby. Sit down. Let me light this here scented candle and set a soft glow. Aw yeah, that’s nice. It’s pumpkin. You know, for the season. You know how I like to get all seasonal up in relation time. Mmmm. Hmmmm.

Girl, look at that. Your type is all backlit and stuff. Just like I like it. You look so pretty when your type is hit just right by the flickers. Prettier even than the day we met. For real. Come here. Don’t be bashful. Shhhh. Less you talking about your day; more sweet, sweet meta.

I hear talking. What did I just say?

Sorry, baby. You just make me crazy sometimes. Crazy with love.

Come on, let me rub your html. I know it’s tired. Tired of waiting on me. I know, shhhh, baby I know. You’ve been waiting on me a long time and I haven’t been there for you. No, no. No need to get all up into that discussion right now.

Now I know what you’re thinking. I haven’t been there for you lately. You know how I know what you’re thinking? You tell me. A lot.

What, it was a joke! No I enjoy how much you like to communicate. No really. Hey, hey, I was not using a tone just then. Well, I’m sorry if you heard one.

I said sorry! What do you mean that wasn’t a real apology just because I conditioned it on an “if”? Sounds like somebody’s really learning a lot at Wednesday’s bi-monthly Blog Liberation Group meeting. No, I was not just making fun of your interests. Yes, I know you’re important too. Yes, we’ve all heard that you don’t “need an author” to “support” you.

Yep. Yes. Yeah. Uh huh.

I am listening! You just said that I don’t…do what I should be. Is that the gist of it?

Come on, I do respect you!

Really? We’re here again? No, seriously. I’m really asking. Can you please just stop for a minute and let me what I came here to do?

Oh boy, here come the waterworks.

Okay, so I haven’t been around. I haven’t been treating you right. But baby, this is temporary. Temporary on the way to the top. And I’m out there, busting my hump, trying to make it happen for us. I’m looking for an opportunity. For me, yes. But for us.

So chillax on it. I’ll be back to you, sweet thang. Taking you out like I used to. Showing you off. Snuggling and laughing with you until the day breaks. Just wait til I get my money right.

Now blow that out until you’re in the mood to do what we came here to do. I’m not made of pumpkin candles, you know.

Crazy job news and so I’ve been away. I’ll be updating you with stories as soon as I can…

Monday, October 15, 2007

Utterly Important News

Babes in Toyland sells vegan condoms. They are also organic. For when it really counts.

That is all.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Social Experiment

I’ve started to default to calling almost all awkward activities in which I participate, willingly or unwillingly, a social experiment. Lately, my life is full of them. And in the interest of science, I shall list them for you:

Dating a nineteen year old.

Buying a solo concert ticket in the hopes that by the time said concert comes to pass, I will know one other person who likes the band and also wants to go.

Staying at the bar when my friends leave, planning on doing so for fifteen minutes, and watching it turn into three hours after the bartender insists on buying me a Shirley Temple.

Acquiring a mullet by force. Or as the French call it, “moo-lay”.

Wearing a romper out of the house on multiple occasions yet wearing a dress to sleep.

Trying to draw someone who is sleeping in the park, and faking like I’m just drawing the spot next to them when they wake up and are suddenly freaked out.

Openly drinking Hawaiian punch, and Hawaiian punch only, for dinner.

Taping drawings to my walls to inspire me to wake up and draw, only to wake up in the middle of the night and think, for one second, that they are monsters. Then telling people about it.

Recording forty episodes of “Saved by the Bell” on the communal T.V. and then wondering aloud that it must be some glitch of the Tivo system if anyone asks who could possibly watch that much Zak Morris.

Making a playlist for a party that hasn’t even been planned yet (in a hotel room, the theme being “Snow Day”) which is full of both southern crunk and snippets from a CD I just found from 2000 called “K’s Hand Dancing Mix”. Then telling people about it.

“Interviewing” at American Apparel.

Having a staring contest with a baby. (He won.)

Planning a trip to Argentina with no money and no time off.

Planning a trip to Paris with no money and no time off.

Calling everyone I know and or see by a nickname they have neither approved, nor can understand. (Poor Man’s Winnie Cooper, Colonel Peachtree, Beards R’ Us, to name a few).

Boycotting texting, though it makes life incredibly difficult for everyone else.

Yay for social experiments! And I have so many more to come…

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Tales of Mere Existence

I’m a little late on this bandwagon but saw some of these shorts at the ending IFC rooftop festival and became completely enamored of Lev Yilmaz.

He’s like if Steven Wright was young and handy with a storyboard.

Here are some quick links to a sliver of his awesomeness:

How to break up with your girlfriend in 64 easy steps

Subtext

How to cope with depression

Conversation (at video store)

A typical conversation with my mom

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Where I don't belong...

There’s something about the smell of an art room that makes me wish I could fold myself into forever, where my hands are always ink-stained, where the ground is scarred by chairs dragged to the furthest wall to touch the imprint of someone else’s masterpiece.

Maybe because it feels ageless, timeless, as our best instructors have been dead long before we were born and wanted to feel clouds of sepia chalk in our nostrils. The quiet, the weird, they all have their places on the top here, their talent trumps their mastery of the language and we feel each other’s weight on the page. We make up what we can’t see until we can.

I have not completed any of my homework and I will be back in that room tonight, averting my eyes from someone’s bare body until I can see his shadows. I’m finding the exercise due incredibly daunting and so I’m looking into my keyboard, trying to pull out words from numbers, hoping to draw a blank in my mind and a little inspiration. In my office it does not smell like paper and pencils and acrylic, instead it smells of someone's re-heated Lean Cuisine which has carried down the hallway from the shared kitchen, and at this moment, I am very sorry for that.

Quote of the Day

“How was your date?”

“Great! I made a new friend.”

“Oh, uh. With him?”

“No, I asked our waitress for her digits. I think he was a little mad.”

“What do you mean?”

“I meant I thought she was so hilarious; I asked for her number. The only problem is, I think she’s really expecting that we hang out. But she was so excited about it that now I’m losing interest.”

“Are you a dude?”

Monday, October 08, 2007

The 10 Contact Commandments

Hear ye, hear ye, there is unrest in this wicked town! The downfall of our civilization is near. Heed me you heathens! I have been chosen by my own, unstoppable and glorious ego as a mortal vessel to right your collective wrongs. I too have indulged in these sinful ways for far too long. But I will change, have changed, if only I can share the prophecy and you too can spread the good word. And you must! Or else all are condemned to a lifetime of self-flagellation and a horribly evil fate in which you are in hell, ten messages on your Blackberry, all of which you will never be able to check as you have empty, useless eyes and fire for hands.

Thou shalt not forget thy primary and original purpose of thy phone.

The purpose is to call another heathen, not to text! Texting shall forever after be known as the last line of defense. Not the first. Sort-of-boyfriends and girlfriends, ancillary friendships, and all sorts of other, crappy, destructive, hanging-on-by-a-thread relationships are now held together by texting (and perhaps, myspace and facebook). If you are only texting, you are merely prolonging something that maybe should not continue. Stop the insanity and pick up the phone if you actually “miss someone” (Oh, love those texts. You miss me? Really? But not enough to call, right?) If you require more evidence, think about the people you call and then call you. That’s the short list. That’s the important list. The texting list is way longer. And that texting list, whether you want to admit it or not, is full of your backup people. Don’t do that to someone. And don’t allow yourself to be a backup person for someone else.

Thou shall honor thy company present over company not present.

Contacting someone unless you are explicitly making plans for that person to join your current party is kind of rude. If you must pick up the phone when they call, you should immediately say “I’m with someone, can I call you back?” If you must check a text, don’t immediately hunch over and respond, consider instead showing the current person what the text is, if it’s funny, unless it is about the possibility of you hooking up with current party. And if you are trying to hook up with current party, why are you checking your text about it anyway? Just do it! And send me a text about it later. With a lot of details, please.

Thou shall adhere to the following voicemail etiquette:

1. State your name.
2. State your reason for calling.
3. State the next actionable intent.

Do not, for instance, say, hey it’s me, call me. That is annoying. That is not helpful. That is not good. That is putting all the work on the other person when the burden lies upon you to give good message. I like to default to something along the lines of, Hey it’s K, I just bought fifty bucks worth of fried chicken, want to have a chicken fight, how’s 4 PM today? Or a really long one that only I think is funny that the other person might save. I think this is much better because then you can know what I’m talking about and ignore me accordingly instead of just ignoring me and then having to call me back when you think it’s been long enough that I will have found someone else for whatever it was that I was doing, and then you have to make up an excuse, and then, etc.


Thou shall honor thy form in which the communication began.

No following up an email with a text. No following up a call with a facebook wall post. Unless of course, you are sending a message to the person that you really don’t want to talk to them (or that you are too busy to talk to them). And if this happens to you, then honor the implied wishes of others (see commandment after next).

Thou shalt not half-ass it.

Do you really think you’re fooling me with a 1:30 AM “Where are you?” when you said you’d call me to hang out Saturday night? Do you? Cause buddy, I invented that. It’s a half-assed fadeout where I get to say that I “tried” but you were the one who never responded and therefore it’s YOUR fault that we didn’t meet up. Child’s play.

Thou shall back off.

Sometimes people get busy or they just need a break from talking or all their updates are depressing and they really don’t want to have to rehash them or they aren’t the type of person that feels the need to talk to all people they know every single day. So, I urge you, for the sanity of others, if you are sending multiple emails/myspace/facebook messages/texts a day, and you are not hearing back, take this as a sign. The rule of scarcity, people. Use it. Or heed the consequences of a quick fade (vs. aforementioned slow fade—see commandment before the previous) in which you find your overbearing love has bristled someone beyond repair.

Thou shalt not commit “sexting” (aka “sexy texting” aka “pet names and/or the electronic whispering of sweet nothings”) unless thy intent is to follow up beyond virtual reality.

Yes it is easy to become invigorated at midnight when say, no other girls in the bar will talk to you, but to text someone that you miss them, or that you are thinking about them, only to pretend said event never happened when say, your girlfriend gets back in town, is, as you are well aware, just a real d-bag maneuver. So quit doing it to my girlfriends cause then I have to nurse them back to health because you’re a jerk. This commandment could also be entitled, “Thou shall commit sincerity.”


Thou shall respect the pace which was set.

If you are emailing, and you email back immediately, the other person will become accustomed to it. If then you disappear for three weeks, the other person will become confused. Be kind and let them know if you are going to not indulge in the pace previously set. Also, understand the message you send when you respond really quickly. Do you really want to be sending that message? No? Well then stop doing it! (See I learned my lesson, Annabella, and I’m sorry I did this to you! I only responded because I was bored, not because your cat story was interesting. Seriously. Don’t tell that story to anyone again. It’s terrible.)

Conversely, if a person is not responding to you right away, respect the pace they are setting. It’s hard to be witty at work all right? I can’t like, be funny every two seconds. Or even every two years. I gotta work on my schtick first. Unless you don’t want my ace material. It’s up to you. Also, my ace material is really bad so I don’t think you want to see my toss-off material. I promise you.


Thou shalt not check. Obsessively. Obsessively. Obsessively.

Keep it on vibrate on your person, check it in the bathroom when you’re out, and chillax. Glancing at your phone every three seconds is a big and basic no-no. Even if you are alone. You are merely feeding your own compulsions here. And a watched pot never boils.

Never get high on your own supply.

Oh sorry, this is one of Biggie’s 10 Crack Commandments. My bad. Please then simply refer to the previous nine as I have run out of ideas.

I empower you! Take these tablets and spread the word! And feel free to break all of these rules at any time, even though you know you shouldn’t, because everyone else in the world will anyway.

Any contact commandments of your own to add?

Friday, October 05, 2007

Do You Like Robot Rock?

This is what the definition-of-hot-for-euro Frenchman asked me, and I answered sure, no, wait, yes of course, maybe invigorated by the gleam off his gold-plated canine, or that I was misplaced in Brooklyn for the night, and Guns’n’Bombs was kicking the second set and everyone was so young, or Danish, sometimes you just can’t tell, and then he asked me did I like to kiss on the mouth hard like he did (his English was not quite as good as he would have liked)?

Friday means another social experiment with my girlfriend so we danced for six hours in the dark, a rotating circle of people falling in and out with the beats and us snapping pictures in the bathroom, our hands slipping, the disposable camera clattering on the floor. The refrain, go hard or go home, so we looked ridiculous, poseurs, posturing in sweatbands, onesies, short dresses, neon, and it was the apex of our Brooklyn attractiveness, and we kidded later that we could not go out again for fear of ever falling short, never matching the pheromonal frenzy and the unce unce unce.

And when I was approached by the most ambiguously beautiful creature I had ever seen, I could not tell if it was a boy or a girl, what age, what sexual preference, what ethnicity, and it turned out he was a boy and his name was Jonas and he was interested in girls, possible in me if only I would say the right thing, and he could tell my outfit had come from American Apparel and that was good and he narrowed his eyes and tossed his long, straight, black hair from the horizontal sweatband that kept it off of his God-like brow and he leaned in and his hands were so elegant and they touched my neck without my permission and he asked, did I work there, and I laughed because I thought it was a joke and said no, did he, and he did not smile at all and said yes, he was an AA model and also some sort of director of corporate marketing and he looked me up and down and said it was a shame that I didn’t do what he did and then he walked away.

Still, I would say we ended the evening on a high note. This is where I met my nineteen year old among others, this is where our photos were snapped for Guns’n’Bombs personal use, we hoped at least, this is where resumes would be judged better if they were capped with mullets and this is what will provide stories where I sort of hang my head for the rest of the month.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Cougars, Inc.

“Well I wanted to know if we could go out sometime. Maybe we could do…some stuff or something.”

“Ha. Okay. I like stuff.”

“My schedule is pretty free during the week. I get out of class around 6.”

“You go to school? That’s cool. Where?”

“TK College.”

(Internal shift, sudden heart palpitations. Hmmm. That sure doesn’t sound like a master’s program…)

“Uh. Ha. Okay. So you are, uh, still in school. Well, then.” (Clearing of throat)

“Yeah, is that a problem?”

“Tell me you’re twenty one.”

“I can’t.”

(Voice elevating an octave) “Tell me you’re twenty!”

“Well, I will be twenty. In a few more months.”

(Sudden flashback reminder of last un-relationship with a twenty one year old. Now, a new low of nineteen.)

Stay cool. Improvise. Don't. Freak. Out.

“Okay. How’s your fake looking these days?”

“Oh, er, I don’t have one.”

(Pause)

“Maybe we should just go get some ice cream.”

Monday, October 01, 2007

To all the boys I love(d)

Our mix tastes just like Sunday night when the only light is the green glow of a dashboard. We’re driving* and the speakers are cracking too loud but we both like it that way and anything that is said is quickly drowned out by verse chorus verse and you not pushing up the window…

These are our songs, the songs that you don’t know are about us.

If this were a high school dance, I’d like to dedicate the following songs to the intangibles, what I miss and what I don’t:

The Presets “Girl and the Sea”

Menomena “Wet and Rusting”

Laura Veirs “Galaxies”

Greg Laswell “Sing, Theresa Says”

Spinto Band “Oh Mandy”

Calexico “Sunken Waltz”

dios (malos) “I want it all”

The Beta Band “Dry The Rain”

LCD Soundsystem “Someone Great”

Datarock “Princess”

3 of a Kind “Babycakes”

*—well you are, because you always drive, you never let me touch your car, and you shouldn’t, I’m a terrible driver, partly because every time we drive you remind me so and never let me touch the wheel, it’s a vicious cycle, really...


Today, what are your dedication songs?