Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly... All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise... blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these sunken eyes and learn to see all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to be free

Monday, June 28, 2004

This weekend was the opening of the Hiawatha Light Rail. I enjoyed the day with Kate and got to nerd out/go into tourist mode a bit and take copious amounts of photos (of which I will soon be posting, well half are digital, the other half I need to get developed yet)... but more importantly...

I saw the most beautiful man doing voter registration at the Cedar Riverside stop. Do I still need to get registered to vote? YES. Did I go and speak with the most beautiful man ever in order to get registered to vote? NO. Why? because evidently I am perpetually fourteen years old and instead took a picture of him while waiting for the train to take us to the Franklin stop. Kate said that he took a picture of us as well, although I do like to believe I'm invisible, I'm finding that pretty likely.Related to that --- I had an amusing conversation with Maria today that went a little something like this...

M: Do you know who Dale is WITH for helping people register to vote?
C: No, I was going to ask him though. the sign in front of the beautiful man’s table said ACT.
M: Hm…you should volunteer with them, maybe then you’d MEET him.
C: Who is it though… ACT… I tried googling key words today and got nowhere.
M: Jeez, it could be anything.
C: Exactly.
M: But you could be making beautiful babies for me to babysit to see if I want them…
C:And now the pathetic weeping begins.
Oh. I am a sad sad creature.
M: Woe is you…:)
C: *weep* *weep*
*weep**weep* *weep*
*weep* *weep**weep* *weep**weep* *weep**weep* *weep* (etc.)
M: No weeping. You’re fabulous.


Friends are really spectacular things to have.

I'm getting more exercise today than I did all weekend. This is entirely on trips to the bathroom alone!

There goes another 32oz. of Hawaiian tea which I brewed -- in my nalgene --- impressive, no? And yes, I'm still using the upstairs bathroom. Gotta get my walks in.

Monday, June 21, 2004

Go Skateboarding Day! via Gawker

I am so tired - this weekend was heaps of fun, but super exhausting as well. For starters - left work early on Friday to help out at Rock the Garden with David Byrne.

For two and a half hours of taking tickets, applying wrist bands, directing people to the exit and infoming people that they could not infact take beer into the garden, we received a nice little box lunch, water, a great t-shirt from american apparel and admittance to the show. We even saw Rex and resisted berating him for the lack of posting. The Walker volunteer coordinators were great and even let our friend from out of town volunteer with us since she had no where else to go really. We were positioned at the main entrance and worked with an azia security guard who reminded me of lorenzo lamas from his Renegade days.(which i thought was pretty hot at the time - i mean back when i watched the show) He was rather friendly and I enjoyed chatting with him, but the fact that he never took his sunglasses of (even in the shade) made it difficult for me to actually have a conversation with him. I hate it when I can't see people's eyes.

The Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra from Brooklyn was fun to dance to during our ticket taking stint. They were a huge maybe thirteen piece band with reggae, ska, afro beats and political language. I was loving it. We were finished with our volunteer stint in just enough time to grab a beer and head up close to the stage to see David Byrne perform. He moved about the stage sometimes running in circles, other times dancing in a slow sexy manner that also seemed to be directing the music and the Tosca Strings that were accompanying him. I was fairly unfamiliar with his music other than a couple Talking Heads songs from the radio but that did not take away from the excellence from the show at all. My favorite song of the moment is Finite=Alright off of the Feelings album. They also performed a live version of a dj remix of one of his songs. This could be the new trend in musical progression - forget just live bands or dj's or the mixture - the next step is the cover of the collaboration performed live. It made for an excellent evening and instead of being sad that we didn't have an after party to attend I was relieved. All that ticket taking, people watching, and dancing had worn me out.

I was in bed by 11pm.

Friday, June 18, 2004

Wednesday evening I ended up hanging out with Jes and Katie doing some chatting about whatnots and eating strawberries and shortcake.
After returning home (and successfully parallel parking my car) I headed over to the park to see what was left of the movie. Beat Street is the story of hip hop in inner city New York in the early 80s. By the time I arrived there were still two reels left of film and the bugs were biting like mad. Fortunately my friend Dan of soon to be Oh!Operator fame saw me sitting on the sidelines and invited me to share the Transformer blanket that he and his friend Tyler had with them. The movie was not a good movie, but was still great if you know what I mean with some great break dancing scenes, graffiti, and 80s hip hop music. The most amusing part of the evening however came not from the movie, but from the woman across the street from the park.
She evidently was unware that open windows + lights on = everyone in the park can see you topless walking around your bathroom and living room while watching tv.

neurosis for the morning.


Just because you start to find more extensive common ground with someone of the opposite sex over a couple of beers (ok... three on an empty stomach) does not mean that you might be accidentally falling in love. I, in my drunken, suddenly shell-shocked and excited naiveté have mistaken this more than once. Luckily this time the fall brief and minor and was over happy hour so I had time over dinner with a close friend to sober up and come to my senses.

I have many girl friends that over the years have complained about not being able to keep any close guy friends because eventually and nearly without fail they guys fall in love with them. In my case it turns out to be nearly the opposite. Almost without fail, when I start to discover something genius and special within another person, most often of the opposite sex, my first instinct is to get terribly excited about them, talk about them incessantly, and last, but not least, convince myself that I must be falling “in love” with them. In fact this happens so often that I rejoice when I hit it off with someone that I don’t immediately find physically attractive. The reason for this being that I assume or try to convince myself that if I don’t find myself attracted to them, I should be able to keep them as a good friend. Maybe I’ve just watched “When Harry Met Sally” one to many times, but I seem to fall into this trap.

Maybe it’s all about my incessant need to fall in love. If you need more pop culture references and labels I’ll put it this way. When “Sex and the City” came out all of the women I know rushed to identify themselves with one of the characters in the show. My former roommate was an obvious choice for Carrie with her penchant for spending money she didn’t necessarily have and her on again never truly off relationship with Mr. Big. No one in my group seemed quite ready to identify themselves with Samantha and her uber promiscuous behavior although her frankness about her not only her sexuality but also the rest of her life matched up well with another girl friend of mine. I, however, was left with not one, but two characters that I felt shared my styles, traits and whatnots (one mustn’t forget the whatnots.) I discovered that I am both Miranda and Charlotte. An, unlikely combination I know, and thinking about it makes me want to defend my affinity with that now horribly cliché Meredith Brooks song – I’m a bitch, I’m lover, I’m a child, etc. because isn’t every woman a combination platter. We don’t fit into nice little stereotypical packages of the slut, the domestic, the independent woman etc. But this is getting off the topic.

Back to the matter at hand. I identify with Charlotte because of her idealistic and unblemished view of the possibility of true love. Many see this as her naiveté, in fact often I do as well and it makes me question my own life. It makes me question y own faith that I will someday find “the one” and have adventures for the rest of my life with one person, have babies, send them to good schools, bake pumpkin bread, teach them how to ride a bike, and grow old with the same person. It’s a level of commitment that is hard to find these days – but I still believe in its possibility especially when coupled with “true love.”

Miranda and I are soul sisters however for the fact that I am utterly and completely terrified of everything that I just wrote above about matching with Charlotte. I am a strong independent woman who does not want to rely on anyone else for anything else – regardless of whether I need it or not. If we want to look into where this came from, the most obvious contributing factors seem to be that the fact that my parents raised me to be an independent thinker who didn’t accept things at face value who could do anything I set my mind to, because they had faith in me coupled with the fact that I have been - alone - single - for pretty much my entire life. Sure I had a boyfriend in high school (who lived an hour and a half away from me and neither of us had cars), and bizarre friendship/relationships in college that I think are just part of college and the fact that I tend to fall for flaky boys, but never a real relationship – never something where we called each other boyfriend and girlfriend or hung out regularly or called each other before we went to sleep at night or knew that someone was there for us. None of this has ever been a part of my life. So because of that I’ve grown to be a stronger independent woman who doesn’t make time for those sorts of things with possible boys I meet, and doesn’t even consciously expect a relationship as a possibility. Miranda didn’t want to commit to a relationship, sure our “histories” are different, but I think the driving force can be the same – fear.

So have I really figured anything out by saying these things? Probably not, my character is conflicted. Not that there is anything wrong with a conflicted character – they’re the great ones right? Every story has to have some conflict, mine just happens to be the internal sort. Maybe I am Miranda after all and it really isn’t about my incessant need to fall in love. After all, Miranda was the one who ended up with the career, the baby, and the clever guy with the round glasses and the curly hair. Will these issues get resolved some day? Possibly, after all I’m only twenty-four… and if we’re still going to follow the “Sex and the City” ladies I’ve got a lot of time left to figure things out for myself.

Tuesday, June 08, 2004

best thoughts on reagan i've seen so far...

RONALD REAGAN: NOT JUST THE PRESIDENT, PLAYED ONE ON TV.
R.I.P., Ronnie
Death of a Salesman
I Hate 1984: Ronald Reagan


of course i always remember my dad saying something about how reagan was the only president that was dead the entire time he was in office.