the day the music died

one of my favorite ways to kill time at work is to fuel my obsession with matisyahu. i realize it's a little silly that i had to go all the way to the caribbean to discover him, but i swear, he wasn't this famous before i left. when i heard him playing at target yesterday i realized that yet again, my attempts to be edgy had been thwarted.

edgy or not, it turns out that matisyahu is carried by epic records, and the epic records offers high quality, add-free, uninterrupted streaming of the music videos of their artists, allowing me to watch "king without a crown," and "king without a crown (live at stubbs)" over and over and over again. conveniently enough, epic also carries shakira, so i can also watch "hips don't lie" to my heart's content.


when i had finally managed to overdose on matisyahu and shakira i started perusing the other videos that epic promotes, and that's when i stumbled upon teddy geiger, who on first inspection looks like just another garden-variety angsty boy with a guitar. but the longer i watched the video, the more i started to hate him and his heart-on-the-sleeve drivel.

he looks and sounds like a younger, less good john mayer (see pictures), and he has an earnestness that makes me crazy, wailing on about how he's "gonna muster ever ounce of confidence" that he has to get some girl to notice him. but it was seeing the video, and examining the girl in question that put me over the edge.

unless she's his real-life girlfriend, there's just no excuse. the video features our young martyr dejectedly playing his guitar on the street, wistfully watching a very nice, very pretty, very plasticky girl who looks like she stepped right out of an abercrombie & fitch ad, stupid sherpa boots and all (she could also be a contestant on "the bachelor"). she's strolling down the street with her tool-looking boyfriend (who kind of looks like stiffler from "american pie"), giggling, talking on her cell-phone, and just being obnoxious.

it doesn't make any sense. teddy geiger has perfectly mastered the look of the misunderstood hipster: shy, skinny, shaggy-haired, perfectly beat-up jeans and thrift store shirt. he'd be perfect in greenwich village or wicker park and it makes absolutely no sense that he'd be writhing around so miserably for this kind of girl. she's too blond, too perfect. if they'd picked the usually gaunt, dark haired heroin-chic type i'd understand... sort of. but why america's favorite tri-delt?

if this is the best that the post-boy-band pop music era has to offer i think i'll stick with shakira.

what would shakira do?

transient infatuation with uber-trendy pop culture icons is a part of life- i understand this. but why is that suddenly i can't get enough shakira? not that i'm a raging feminist or anything, but i've always taken issue with her blatant self-institution as the world's most sensational sex symbol... and her weird warbly voice.
i guess that even though i reject all women who appear on the cover of maxim on principle, i'm also a big believer in jumping on media bandwagons. life is just easier if you like what's on the radio. for example, road trips aren't nearly is painful when you've learned to tolerate country music (or christian rock, but that's a whole other can of worms).
so after six weeks in st. lucia where "hips don't lie" (shakira featuring wyclef, for those of you who remain un-brainwashed) played like clockwork on the radio (sometimes twice in a row) and on tempo (caribbean MTV for those of you who just tuned in), i got completely sucked to dark and disturbing world of shakira obsession. the girl has got it all- she can sing, she can dance, and she's really hot. AND she gets to flaunt her hotness in a way that's neither subtle nor tasteful. not only is it not fair, but it's just plain raunchy.

and for some reason i love her for it.

priorities

my new work schedule has some built in sitting-around time in the morning... and free breakfast. so it seemed logical to form a little routine, where i finish my coffee, eat my turkey sausage, and peruse the headlines on the internet. it's been a few years since i read the paper regularly (thank you NPR for keeping me the loop all this time) and i'm having trouble adjusting to the internet format. it just seems aesthetically wrong. i'm also unwilling to register (even though it's free) to actually read the articles, so i jump from the new york times, the chicago trib, to cnn.com skimming headlines and looking at pictures.

lest i manage to absorb some real news, i made an amusing, though not very surprising discover today. we could all go on and on about the vapid articles in the paper and on TV, and about how none of us are interested in real current events. i often use that as justification for my non-news-watching and non-paper-reading. but i learned this morning that most of us gravitate away from real news, even when it's offered to us in easily accessible, point-and-click format.

here are the "top stories" as listed by CNN:

- Iran pledges $50 million to Palestinians
- Pentagon fights back over Rumsfeld
- Nepal protesters fired on, 1 dead
- Group: Iran may be expanding nuke plants
- Hussein trial resumes, adjourns again

and here are the "most popular":

- Two sex offenders slain; suspect kills self
- Jolie reportedly to have baby in Namibia
- Suspect blogged about cannibalism
- Crash tests: Toyota Prius, small cars and minivans
- An inside look at Opus Dei

i guess it's not so surprising that the average american is more interested in angelina jolie than they are in donald rumsfeld, but what is surprising is that "Rangers catch bear after deadly attack" didn't feature more prominently on either list.

back to reality...almost

coming home from my six week caribbean adventure was a bit of a jolt. i understand that nothing would really have made it easier, except perhaps some sort of insider tip that my crush-du-jour was waiting impatiently for my return. in reality, crush-du-jour (cdj?) may or may not know my name and has probably found some impossibly skinny, broody asian girl to date by now.
it didn't help that my return to the mainland marked the abrupt end of an extravagant, 3-week drinking binge which transitioned itself rather unpleasantly to a smoldering but miserable hangover on the plane.
it also didn't help to find my apartment still occupied by my now arch-nemesis house-sitter who drank all my liquor and killed all my plants... but that's a story for another day.

as one might have expected, i showed up to work the morning after my return pretty darned tired and cranky. that said, i think i came back with a sense of well-being and optimism that i most certainly did not possess in february. maybe it was the sunshine, or the rum, or the snorkeling... or maybe it's just the tan. my blogmate has been trying to tell me for years that a great tan makes everything better, and now i wholeheartedly agree. for one, it just screams, "ha ha, i went to the st. lucia while you were stuck here festering in the dregs of chicago winter," but it also exudes an ill-defined yet strangely powerful aura of fabulousness.

unfortunately, the new, glam, hi-lighted persona that i've confabulated doesn't integrate very well with the alter-ego i couldn't help but develop (over the last year, really) under the effect of nick hornby novels, the OC soundtracks, john cusack movies, "the time traveler's wife," steven frears movies, and now "sex, drugs and cocoa puffs." somewhere in there i think i failed to recognize that i don't get to be a cool hipster swing-chick, no matter how many movies and books i absorb about punk, sarcastic, witty, drinking, smoking hipsters.

i've almost got it together.

same? different? you decide

directions to madam popo's

head out of st. jude's via the back gate, following the main, paved road into augier

at the first intersection turn left

go straight past blue boy's pub on your left

stay on the left at the next intersection, richard's pub will be on your right

at the next intersection hang a hard left- round the bend pub is on that corner on the right

continue straight down the road, passing the "pigs for sale" sign on your right

continue past the unusually large pothole in the middle of the road

on your left you'll come to a heineken sign, and pass under two power lines that have orange aerial markers- just past that you'll come to a narrow alley

turn right into the alley and head down a ways- on your right you'll see the oven

if there's no one there, continue further down until you come a a house with a cement porch- if the plastic tarps are down you're out of luck. if not, the lady inside is madam popo

local meal

i could start a lot of funny stories with that title: the goat back or sheep back or "turkey" (which we think is actually goat) mystery parts (spinal cord and all), or the fact that every st. lucian stops us to inform us that we are truly eating a "local meal" said with more pride than we would assign to eating vertebrae...

but what i'm actually thinking of is the new delicacy of "st. lucian sandwich," which consists of my blogmate sandwiched between two dancing dreadlocked lucians last night at the gros islet jump-up. there we were, laughing at my silly guidebook that says you need a local guide to take you to this every-friday-night block party if you're a girl, munching our way through barbecue chicken and "bakes" (which are actually fried and delicious) -- we finally had enough piton to start dancing when we realized the actual problem with being a girl at the jump-up: not allowed to dance without someone else's pelvis heading your way. that being said, these pelvises (pelvi?) are fairly benign, as they were located inside the very high-watered pants of a steve-erkel-esque man with his tongue hanging half out of his mouth.

again, we congratulated ourselves on a job well done.

refugees run the seas 'cause we own our own boats

we'd like to think of ourselves as sophisticated travelers, who embrace local culture with sensitivity and insight, who tread lightly when exploring the country's delicate ecosystems, who drink in moderation, who savour the flavours of west indian cuisine...

but who are we kidding?

while we have managed to engage in the activities listed above, the modifiers are a little off.

since we landed in our suprisingly posh condo we've clocked hours and hours of time watching "tempo," the caribbean MTV equivalent. we're both riveted by the amazing displays of west-indian, jamaican, puerto-rican, and cuban bling. we've been dutifully writing down the names of all our favorite artists, only to discover that there's only one CD store on all of st. lucia, and that even after we'd fully terrified the teenage kid behind the counter, he didn't really have anything to sell us.

when the music gets too bad, even for us, or when it's time for the dreaded "downtown island" (sort of akin to "cribs") we flip to HBO or TNT to watch astoundingly bad movies that are only entertaining in their "place that semi-celebrity" capabilities. the came goes roughly like this:
me: "hey, isn't that ryan phillipe"
blogmate: "who?"
me: "you know, married to reese witherspoon?"
blogmate: "who?"
me: "he was in 'cruel intentions'!"
blogmate: "huh?"

we've also been engaged in a lengthy debate about whether leonardo dicaprio and matt damon, are in fact similar enough to be confused with one another.
blogmate: "this is just like that leonardo dicaprio movie"
me: "which one"
blogmate: "the one about the janitor who does math"
me: "you mean matt damon"
blogmate: "what's the difference?"

sometimes we break up the monotony by going on long, sweaty, un-graceful treks to beaches and mountains, that involve alot of tripping, falling and swearing.

then we get home, drink vast quantities of locally produced lime rum, and plan the next day's meals which are a delicate balance of creole fish with plantains and fritos.

our parents would be proud.

petit problem in gros islet

as my blogmate and i furrowed our collective brow at our flat tire (can a tire be very flat or are they all the same degree of deflatedness?) at the beach today we thought longingly back to our 36 hour blitz through coconut bay all-inclusive resort.

let us summarize: land cruise. beach chairs, pina coladas, waterslides, lime rum and diet cokes, lazy river, vieux fort special, lounge chairs, caribbean explosion, buffet lunch, dirty banana, dancing jerk pork carver at buffet dinner, lucian driver, worst most emotionless steel drum cover band EVER, worst white wine ever, lime rum and sprite, gin and tonic, more lime rum and sprite, more worst cover band ever, ten minutes at the gym, one more lime rum and sprite for the road, all-you-can-grilled-cheese, fountain diet coke (a rarity in this country), and best of all, a room to sleep in with ALL FOUR WALLS and much fewer mosquitoes and barking dogs than we thought possible.

our state of despair about the flat tire lasted the entirety of the 40 minutes that it took us to attempt to change to the spare, be assisted by a bored-looking taxi driver, find a "tyre" station, get the "tyre" fixed (for the standard st. lucian rate of $3.50), and find ourselves seated over pitons and spicy fish cakes at our new favorite beach dive.

from this we conclude that some things are just done more quickly in st lucia than in chicago. but this might be the only thing that's fast in st. lucia.

we weren't kidding

walk softly and carry a fake leg

though no one really told us before we came to st. jude's, it's customary for volunteers to bring some kind of donation to the hospital, usually medical supplies. my blogmate and i were lucky to trip into a big stash of medications before we left. we brought them with a fair amount of pomp and circumstance, and not a little bit of whiny complaining. "i can't believe we have to carry this crap," and refrains similar.
as it turns out, our meager contribution was pretty ho-hum... since some of our favorite elders showed up with a suitcase full of prosthetic feet, a coffee maker, and a circular saw.
i'm sure the guys at TSA had a field day.

there goes the neighborhood

on our daily morning walk, i was reminded that i like travelling with my blogmate for the number of times we are thinking the same thing, when she broke the no-coffee-yet silence with the exact words in my head: "does it smell especially chicken-ey today?"

so this afternoon while my blogmate is on call, i was a little sad to venture out for a walk on my own, thinking there would not be nearly so much to laugh about. but my fears were quickly cast aside: in addition to the legions of farm animals lining the roads and the man with machete and bag full of green coconuts laughing at me for how slowly i was climbing the hill, i passed a completely naked man politely wishing me good afternoon as he urinated alongside the road, and another man gesturing wildly at me with a zucchini. the ironic thing is that men in st. lucia don't really sound that offensive when they speak (other than being nude and waving with phallic vegetables). the one man who tried came up with "hello, how are you? you look good. you look like a woman should..." which just sounds too polite when uttered in a quasi-british-caribbean-calypso-music-in-background accent for me to be taken aback.

i'm going to miss this place.

an open letter to the creators of yahoo avatars

dear masterminds behind yahoo avatars,

we love your service, and spend more time than we should re-inventing our appearance and location. however, it has come to our attention that there are not nearly enough third-world backdrops and accessories to suit our current needs. The following are a list of suggestions for add-ins that would assist the volunteer/tourist's avatar needs:

1. enable more than one animal per avatar. who travels in the company of just one pig or chicken?
2. in place of accessories, can we add leering hissing men in pick-up trucks?
3. the only road choices are hiking trail or sidewalk or highway. we need more gravel roads and torn-up blacktop with large potholes marking significant geographical markers.
4. can we add shoes hanging over electric lines to indicate drug houses?
5. the skin color changes we can make are great. but can we add mosquito bites, sunburns, hatband acne, peeling sunburn, and scrapes from falling down on poorly constructed hiking trails?

thanks,
jo-na

honk if you love st. lucia

last weekend my blogmate and i rented a little jeep and drove up the western st. lucia coast. we had a number of tasks: drop off boss at fancy hotel, check out suspiciously cheap rental condo, acquire snorkeling gear... to our loyal readership back home this might not seem like an ambitious list for a saturday afternoon, but by the end of the day we were darned proud of ourselves. we were also mighty tired and each of us had one bright red arm, having let them dangle out of the car with reckless abandon.
there are many obstacles to driving in st. lucia, especially if you insist on cheap, under-the-table car rental. once behind the wheel of the car that came with no papers to speak of, a car that clearly belonged to someone, it finally dawned on me that i was sitting behind the wheel on what i consider to be the passenger side, and that i'd volunteered to drive up the narrow, windy, mountainy road without even considering how scary it might be. i was fortunate not to notice the horrible squeling sounds the little jeep was making in protest of being forced up the hills. also lucky for me, my blogmate was a good cheerleader (and map reader), and before i knew it i was cruising down the "highway," blasting terrible calypso music, and giving the little car horn toot required to alert oncoming traffic that might tearing around the bend.
in doing this, we became aware of the many things that can be said via honking. the various honks have subtle, nearly imperceptible differences, but the meaning varies widely.
there's my honk, the "please slow down as you make your sharp turn so that i you don't run me off the road.
the encouragement honk from the guy behind me that says, "come-on girl, you can do it, i know you can pass the bus in front of you that's going 8km an hour!"
there's, "hey you big stupid cow (or pig or horse), get out of the road!"
as a pedestrian i've learned a few more...
"hey nice girl."
"hey sexy mama!"
"'sup?"
the list goes on.

the official language of st. lucia may be english, but i still have so much to learn...

yoshimi battles the pink robots, part 2

i squished two more cockroaches yesterday.
this time they were actually living before i stepped on them.
feeling pretty strong... although the st. lucian nurse who heard me squeal for my blogmate's assistance might disagree.

in other news, to our friend nm who thinks mosquito nets are useful, i protest.
they do serve to make a romantic-looking hotel room for two, which was oh so useful for my blogmate and me. we looked really classy this weekend at the nice hotel room saying things like "ah yes, i do believe i'll have another round of pringles, brutus" with our non-fancy eats... but no actual avoiding of mosquitos.

jedi masters

my blogmate and i admittedly spend many hours of the day congratulating ourselves on negotiating six weeks in the tropical paradise that is st. lucia. i think we both kind of feel like we're getting away with something (because, well, we are). but even we occasionally stop feeling good about ourselves long enough to think more meaningful thoughts like, "wow, it's kind of weird that it's cold in chicago," or, on a really insightful day, "this is nothing like what we were thought it would be." truthfully, in preparation for our trip i don't think either one of us thought much beyond, "do these flip flops match this bikini?"

meet the parents:

one of the things we didn't really anticipate about life as a st. jude's volunteer was that there would be lots of other st jude's volunteers, all from different walks of life. we certainly didn't realize that there would be a whole community of such people who have been coming here in states of retirement and semi-retirement for years and years.

we call them the elders and we love them. they're smart and funny and have all done really interesting things with their lives. though there are plenty of retired doctors with school teacher wives, there are just as many doctor wives with retired contractor husbands. they kick our butts at trivial pursuit and, most importantly, they know where to get the good coconut buns. the thing about these people is that they know this island inside and out. they know where things are and how much they cost and which beach has the better snorkeling and which day they have lime cake at debbie's.

the elders have been doing this long enough to know that not everyone wants travel advice. as such, it takes a little (but not very much) work to get them talking. sidle up, get spanked at scrabble, and sooner or later the information starts to flow. come with beer and they start inviting you to stuff. we're still trying to coordinate some serious hiking with one of the couples who between them have at least one heart attack and one pace-maker.

i can only hope to be such a bad-ass one day.

yoshimi battles the pink robots, part 1

things that are unpleasant when returning alone from the hospital at 11pm to wash your face before bed include finding a large cockroach scuttling around the sink where you were about to put your face.

our new orleans readers, i understand that you're all laughing at my squeamishness, but in my defense, it was a very big cockroach, and its little horns or tentacles or whatever were about to be in my nose. also in my defense, i did not scream like a little girl. i jumped, thought about screaming like a little girl but decided that it would wake the hyperactive three-year-old downstairs and then i would never get to sleep, and then commenced a ridiculous chasing of the cockroach around the sink with a washcloth. i incorrectly assessed that it was unable to get out of the sink, and promptly scared it to a hiding place underneath the large shelf where my clothes and suitcase are stored. having decided that i could not move the shelf, i got ready for bed, turned out the lights, and tried to ignore the various bug noises coming from outside. but every time i heard a noise i was sure it was coming from inside my room, and i was sure that the cockroach was taunting me. yes, i understand that cockroaches don't taunt. but this morning when i woke up, there was the cockroach, sitting three inches from my backpack, directly facing me, wiggling its tentacles in mockery. i grabbed for my shoe but it ran back behind the shelf.

so needless to say i'm happy that i packed lots of sealable plastic bags. i'm ready to hermetically seal everything i brought. but i got the last laugh for this round; when i came back from a walk this morning i found it lying on its back in some kind of death throes. i whapped it with a shoe a few times to feel better about myself, like i was the one who had conquered. for all i know the dying cockroach was actually the old disabled grandfather of my nemesis, and my nemesis kicked the old man out of his home to show me who's in charge here. we shall see.

suds: a review

one of the many nice things that st jude's hospital offers is laundry service for its volunteers. one of the things that the hospital and voluntter organization does not offer is privacy in asking questions. the other morning at breakfast my blogmate asked one of the more seasoned volunteers if she thought there was a way in which she could drop off clothes to be washed but not dried. after being given a quizzical look, my good blogmate explained that she was worried about her clothes shrinking and fitting funny. the volunteer shrugged, and we assumed the conversation was over. leaving the breakfast table not ten minutes later, we ran into the manager of housekeeping for the entire hospital who asked in her beautiful soft accent, "which of you is the girl who wants her clothes washed but not dried? of course! you just have to ask, we would be more than happy to accomodate you." on returning to the dorm-type area to change into work clothes for the morning, some of the other volunteers shouted in their canadian accent, "hey! the housekeeping manager was just here. did one of you want your clothes washed but not dried?" and on getting to the laundry room a chorus of men broke from their conversation in patois with a loud "which of you is the girl who wants her clothes washed but not dried?"

so my blogmate is famous for her slight high-maintenance-ness. not that we're so vain about protecting our fabulous appearances. yesterday we each stumbled out of our rooms greeting each other with "hi. why does my forehead have pitting edema?" and "hi. how many red welts can i accumulate on my face and legs?"

so a fabulous glamorous start to our caribbean adventure may not be in the cards. but we console ourselves with another nice thing about st. jude's: you can buy beer directly from the hospital. when i first saw the back storage room where it is ordered, i thought for sure it was one of those side-job occupations that most people seem to have, like the surgical-tech-turned-mountain-guide, or the nurse-taxi-driver. but no, this is catholic-hospital-sanctioned beer. you proceed to the main business office and inform the admissions coordinator that you would like a case of piton (the local beer, brewed here in vieux fort). she opens the official business log and writes your name right along with people coming for lab work and outpatient appointments and surgeries, then hands you a slip which you take to the back storage shed in exchange for discount piton.

we're learning cultural and medical things here too, but first things first...

things that go bump in the night

there's a whole new set of sites and sounds that accompany life in the caribbean. nightly my blogmate finds herself on the brink of insanity as a lone mosquito persistently buzzes in her ear and eludes capture (read: horrible death by squashing). i lie in bed listening to the crickets until 5 AM when the 2 hour serial rooster awkakenings begin.
we get up around 6:30 and go "excercise," by which i mean go for a leisurely stroll down the road taking in the local sites. our path invariably becomes obstructed by various forms of livestock. the chorus of bleating and crowing continues as cows, chickens and goats meander on and off of the road.

in contrast, my favorite night-time sound is the tiny hiss of a bottle of piton mystic mountain brew being opened. :)

have blog will travel

as promised, here's installment #1 of filterless in the caribbean. to our loyal readership, we hope we're able to maintain the standard of blogging that you've all come to, um, appreciate. for those of you just joining us- welcome!
it started in a discombobulated fashion that has become par for the course for the women of filterless... 3:30 AM wake up call, 5:00 AM one of us has shoving match with elderly british man, 7:00 AM the other gets knocked out of the way by man-woman wielding suitcase.
of course it was all water under the bridge the minute we saw the palm trees and clear-blue water out of the (tiny) airplane windows. we were downright ecstatic to find a man holding up a jo-na sign for us. a filterless first.
more to come.

throwing in the towel

hot?

hotter?

you decide.

house of pain

all right, you people.
i'm told that the reason one of our loyal readership has not been commenting lately is because my post about the hustle up the hancock sounded too painful.

this raises a few questions:

1) the bikini wax story didn't sound more painful?
2) if nobody has anything to offer on posts that are too painful, the corporate readership ranks grandma's funeral as less painful? you are shallow, faithful readers.
3) this means i can't post about what it's like to go to the gym with a friend who is a physical therapist (but i don't want to hold my stretches for 15 seconds...")
4) and this definitely means i have nothing to say about what it's like to pack suitcases under the calm but ruthless knife of the same friend ("no. two bathing suits. not five. two.")
5) i would write about something fluffy and pleasant, but the first thing that comes to mind are bunnies, and i think n has ruined that for me already.

lemme get some action from the back section

mb and i successfully completed the hustle up the hancock this sunday. now that i have had a chance to review the stairwells of some of our city's great buildings, i have to tell n that his aon center's climb and stairwell are superior to the hancock's. for one thing, the hancock center has a metal stairwell instead of the aon's cement, and it echos when, say, nine-year-olds are pounding up the stairs, which makes it very loud. but very easy for the nine-year-old's climbing aunt to find him (just listen for the stampede). so glad i'm spending time reviewing the finer architectural details of chicago...

but what i really would like to applaud is not mb's stellar 14-minute performance, or my own more mediocre performance, but that of my little mp3 player and its remarkable ability on shuffle to pick out the perfect stair-climbing songs for me. how good is this list for a climb benefiting the american lung association?

dj shadow- organ donor
soul coughing- circles (so perfect in a very repetitive walking event)
hooverphonic- lung
beastie boys- body movin'
cibo matto- sci fi wasabi
mc solaar- umm, something in french
basement jaxx- do your thing

and then i reached the top. yes, i had to skip a few things. sufjan stevens, i like you, but casimir pulaski day does not get to accompany me on the stairs. you wrote about a prairie state, for crying out loud.

thank you, little rio carbon. i don't care if your company abandoned you to make room for more upscale electronics. apple can't make such a savant. now, if only you perform like that in st. lucia... (any suggestions on good island music, anyone, besides bob marley and jimmy buffett? 'cause that's a given.)

tough act to follow

how can i post after my blogmate's tragic-comic tale of a funeral in new orleans? with the much-awaited blog-nouncement of our upcoming travels. starting on thursday, filterless.blogspot.com becomes an annoyingly self-congratulatory travel-blog about our time on the island of st. lucia. during the previous sucky work months - and you have been reading through many - we have been marking time until the best thing our jobs have afforded us so far, which is an opportunity to volunteer our services in the rural southern part of the island, in exchange for direct access to rum, sunshine, and coconut water that we hear comes in the coconut sold at roadside. it's supposedly an excellent hangover cure. which i could use right about now (another story). and what better way to kick off our travelblog? with a culturally sensitive tale about personal hygiene.

my blogmate and i had a heart-to-heart talk in which we decided that truly, the right thing to do before our departure was not to learn about the culture of the country, but to get bikini waxes. this was a new world for me, and my blogmate's only prior experience left her traumatized enough to consider first a physician's appointment requesting a valium prescription for the event. however, her leaving for the funeral in new orleans and my work schedule didn't allow that kind of time, so we opted for the more low-brow and quickly available option: crystal light and vodka.

for anyone who thinks it's a good idea to work 8 miles south of downtown on an overnight shift, then shower at work and hop in a cab downtown to meet your partner-in-crime in time to slug some 9:30 am cocktails, you might be right... except that my day instead involved not being able to find a cab at any of the three taxi stands near work, finally chasing one down and settling into a surprisingly smooth ride until the exit i needed off lake shore drive was blocked, resulting in much doubling back before dropping me off on the wrong street, finally bursting into the salon 15 minutes late. the calm and accommodating staff reassured me that i would still be able to find someone to inflict the desired pain and humility, and ushered me into a waiting room. frazzled, tired, anxious, and loaded down with bags of work books and clothes, i stepped through frosted glass doors... into a surreal world filled with women in cream terry robes and little slippers, hair in pink towels, all calmly sipping cucumber water and each raising one single perfectly shaped eyebrow at my dissheveled and rather disruptive entrance (i think they were trying to look disdainful but were too calm to pull it off) before going back to their magazines.

fear not- a lovely sixty-year-old woman with soothing accent came to fetch me for my appointment: but where was my blogmate? and WHERE was the vodka? this wasn't what i'd expected. the rest of the event details i will breeze over except to say that when you are lying half-dressed on a table while a russian woman stirs hot wax and tells you you're beautiful but that your eyebrows are a little crooked, you can be convinced to buy just about anything she suggests.

waxing over, sober, and sobered, i headed back to the waiting room to find my blogmate sitting with a half-full nalgene bottle. wordlessly, i stuck my hand out for the bottle and promptly downed a pint of breakfast booze before wishing her good morning.

st. lucia, here we come.

the bottom of the barrel

you'd think i'd have better sense.

i mean really, it was three days in desolate, destroyed new orleans for my grandmother's funeral. you'd think i'd leave it alone and not try to extract blog material.

but really, when the rabbi flips open his cell phone to check his messages during "silent prayer" how can you not tell EVERYONE?

i'd be more irritated with the rabbi for this irreverent act if this tiny gesture of disrespect wasn't so completely eclipsed by:
1) my running out in the middle of evening service to go throw up (in my defense, not alcohol related)- i'm told you get no style points for vomiting on religious leaders
2) multiple grown-ups rolling their eyes, sniggering, and whispering at each other during evening service- for heaven's sakes people, just look at your feet!
3) cousin blowing off funeral due to hangover (but having the chutzpah to show up at the after-party)

and it didn't stop there. there was the CNN crew at the funeral, for reasons that remain unclear. there was the guy on the riding lawn mower in the cemetery next door, who when politely told that he was drowning out the eulogy switched over to the leaf blower instead (especially when you think about the absurdity of leaf-blowing under the hurricane ravaged circumstances).

griping aside, i really do enjoy my family.

there was my ever-trendy mom, who for once didn't quite have her finger on the pulse: "do you have the green day cd? they sound like REM, right?"

my father, whose blind faith in my abilities led to bitter disappointment, as he tried in vain, over and over, to get me to play piano duets with him, unwilling to believe that i could no longer read music, play the piano, or keep up. he seemed so shocked that it sounded so bad.

and for those of us who have made an art-form out of confabulating excuses to break up with people, there was my brother, who told me that he didn't ask a girl on a second date because, "she wasn't sure who rosa parks was."

the ranting may be tacky, but it sure feels good.

olympic fever

i can't help it- i just love the 0lympics... maybe to the point of dysfunction.

last saturday i called my good friend ck to join me for an afternoon of beer, olympics, and french fries at my now favorite saturday afternoon hangout: the village tap on roscoe. so while i do love beer, olympics, and french fries, i also love the regular saturday afternoon bartender at the village tap- hence the new favorite hangout. maybe in the end the lesson was that can have too much of a good thing, or at least over-combine good things such that you get all confused and can't direct your affections appropriately. so rather than engaging hot bartender with my cute and charming banter i just blurted out "why aren't the olympics on?" i'd like to think that the prompt channel changing was a good sign, but i'm sure he was thinking something like, "how can i get this girl away from me?"

now that i think about it my blogmate is perfectly within her rights for mocking me.

i am a financial giant.

in honor of tax season, here's a brief review of my most awesome financial strategy for 2006:

good financial idea: put money aside for retirement.
bad financial idea: vaguely intend to put money into mutual fund without actually understanding what a mutual fund is.

good financial idea: stop previous strategy of putting cash into safety deposit box in case of millenium or computer hackers a la certain movie with soundtrack that mb likes very much.
bad financial idea: continually forget to cash checks from insurance company despite their ongoing reminder letters.

good financial idea: decide to e-file taxes early so i can get my refund quickly.
bad financial idea: decide to use h&r block's long form online helper for $45 instead of the easy form helper for $5, resulting in more headaches and questions i didn't understand than i had when i did my taxes without any helper.

good financial idea: move money from savings account into retirement fund that involves some combination of indexes and bonds and things.
bad financial idea: try to move said money using the assistance of anyone at citibank on the south side of chicago, because that involves being shuttled from teller to semi-fancy desk bank person to somewhat fancier office desk bank person before being told that i need to make an appointment with some special person whose only office is in a citibank branch under a highway on-ramp populated by middle aged men trying to sell socks at red lights.

good financial idea: ignore advice of south side citibank and go to downtown citibank, where not only do the desk and office bank people not need to be involved, but the greeter bank person in the front by the atms goes and gets a little green stamper to fill out my forms. a premade stamp - no desks or appointments or road socks required.
bad financial idea: decide that since i am downtown anyway, the right thing to do since i have spent this time and bus fare is to go shoe shopping.

good financial idea: exercise restraint with shoe shopping, only making a bee-line for the shoes i saw on sale while in minneapolis this weekend, and walking away when told the sale shoes were sold out.
bad financial idea: on walking away, promptly fall in love with new, more expensive shoes on the table next door, and decide i must have them.

good financial idea: find out at the cash register that the new shoes are actually $20 less than listed, so it was like buying sale shoes even if i would have been willing to pay full price.

...and so, you can clearly see that since all of my financial moves balanced each other out until the shoes were conveniently on sale. now i am net one move ahead; therefore, i am a financial genius. i can only imagine suze orman is on her way to my apartment now dying to admire my stylish new kenneth coles and ask how do i do it.

leather club chairs and the people who buy them

the more i think about it, the more it seems that none of us are as edgy as we think we are. we make all sorts of lifestyle choices that we think separate us from the crowd, but really we're picking the same things as everyone around us, because, well, those things are better.

my blogmate and i first stumbled onto this postulate a few months ago as we goaded ourselves into a frenzy- i don't think that anyone we know actually said this, but we were annoyed about the theoretical statement "my style is pottery barn," as if that were a reflection of actual taste. we ranted on about brushed nickel kitchen fixtures and the people who buy them- arguably our friends are those people, and we will no doubt become those people given enough time and pay raise. and believe me, it's not that i claim to be above it. after all, i was right there with everyone else ordering gin and tonics like it was my idea... and i'm sure i was at the front of the line to buy the buena vista social club CD.

at the end of the day, i think it's just too much work to veer too far off the beaten path- it takes time and commitment, and a preference for things that can be a little painful to appreciate i.e. elvis costello or sea urchin. nonetheless, i often catch myself trying to paint a cooler version myself, as if it takes aesthetic effort to listen to death cab for cutie.

i believe the children are our future...

...but apparently i never want to care for that future myself.

my good blogmate was kind enough to throw a baby shower last weekend for a coworker and friend of ours. i was initially very excited about this, as it offered me the opportunity to help frost cupcakes (and eat the tasty reject cupcakes). it was great to see everyone, the party was well attended, my blogmate is a good hostess, food good, etc.

however, things have changed in our little group in the few years since i have been in chicago. now many people have babies, all of whom were also in attendance at said shower. i love kids, but felt a little awkward at adult conversation entirely revolving around the proper making of baby food, purchasing of baby carseats, and enforcement of baby naptime. i tried to save face by looking around politely and stuffing my face with food, pretending i couldn't contribute to the conversation because i was engrossed in the artichoke dip. but then i got full, which made me sleepy, which made it even harder to think up baby (or any other) conversation.

i'm not the only single girl attendant at this gathering who felt similarly awkward. as my blogmate put it, "this makes me want to drink. a lot. or do something unwholesome." with that in mind, off i am this weekend for a self-indulgent weekend of shopping and drinking. ironically, my weekend of indulgence will be held in minnesota, home of lutheran church basement potlucks and politely reserved walter mondale fans (visiting butterknife and p-hob). why can't my free time in chicago have such fun gluttony? this isn't a virtuous city: driving home tonight i passed a legion of active salt and plow trucks (there hasn't been snow on the ground in weeks -- you tell me those guys aren't being used as a buy-off).

when i came home from the shower, i told mb i was never having children, if this is what happens to my friends. mb said that wasn't the best time to think about it, which was true... but for now, my plan is to concentrate very hard on my new friends marshall fields and summit brewing.

the new face of fear

a few weeks ago my good friend djm came to visit and left me with the first season of lost on long term loan, thus solidifying his role in my life as tv-watching-guru- it's because of him, after all, that i got sucked into this whole buffy debaucle. he also left behind a giant bag of beef jerky and two tiny coffee pots from vietnam (when you've known people long enough you start to exchange really bizarre, yet highly sentimental gifts).

anyway, all this tv watching is driving home the point that i'm a big fraidy cat. between you and me, i'm often creeped out by the happenings in sunnydale, finding myself peeking out from under my couch blanket (that has started to acquire a funny smell) for fear that the vaguely scary vampires might actually do something bad- with 3 seasons to go you'd think i'd feel confident that none of the major characters are going to die (and that even if they do they'll be brought back to life either by magic or by some lay-persons amazing CPR skills)...

...so you can imagine what happens when i'm watching lost, which is legitimately scary what with big dinosaur thing and that creepy ethan guy. plus, it's a morbid show and i've never seen any of the episodes in real-time, so for all i know the main guys could actually die.

all this is only slightly more hair-raising than the things happening in real life, like the party i threw this weekend where i attempted to spoon feed two small children (with resultant artichoke dip in my hair and humus all over my shirt)- the party ended with everyone sitting around in a circle sharing strategies on how to make baby food. i was so rattled that i then felt obligated to get really drunk while watching the superbowl. and none of it is as scary as my blogmate's stuck in brand new knee high leather boots disaster that i'm not allowed to talk about.

poverty: a retrospective

i don't care how idealistic you might be: money is good.

mb and i spent the weekend back in madison visiting college friends, and over drinks were reminiscing about the things we did to get through several years spent living on skimpy financial aid checks. turns out i made it relatively unscathed - i didn't call it "poverty;" i called it "vegetarian." others didn't fare so well; mb's friend chad tells a funny story about months gone by without heat one winter because he had just bought an engagement ring and his roommate decided that a bmw xz-something was really worth $80,000. mb himself lists an impressive array of luxurious make-ends-meet jobs including chicken farmer, can factory worker, box factory worker (to this day he claims to be able to distinguish single from double-corrugated eyes closed), and opener of little milk cartons as elementary school assistant janitor (for children who, although young, clearly and demeaningly understood the class structure separating the milk drinkers from milk openers).

so now we find ourselves in our first jobs that make more money than our previous positions as supper club waitress and mattress maker. granted, it's not much by city standards, what with the beautiful people who wear nike cashmere tracksuits to take out the trash. but we're thrilled with the ability to go out for dinner besides to subway. so i found it odd when, in an attempt to be healthier during a busy work week, i made a pot of lentils and couscous for us to use for lunches, and mb returned two days later telling me his coworkers were all making fun of him for his depression-era meals. turns out they've noticed we eat like this a lot, and are concerned that mb must need a raise because we can't feed ourselves better than canned beans.

now, in my defense, clearly they haven't tried my lentils. i'm a pretty decent cook, and anything flavored with wine, bacon and tony chachere's cajun seasoning is a good thing. but where i sputteringly protest, "but this isn't poor-people food! come on, i can finally afford the couscous and bacon!", mb has decided to revel in his newfound pauper role. he requests more trappings of poverty so he can keep up his new work image.

is there such thing as "nouveau-poor"?
and can i help him pull this off without resorting to spam?

the lost art of b.s.

i live in ongoing awe of some of my more senior colleagues. these are people who can, in any situation, retain and recall all of the salient details and also command a sophisticated and insightful understanding of the big picture.

i will never be one of those people.

on some level my expectation must have been that without any particular effort i could passively become smart and good at stuff. having realized that such a transformation would actually take a tremendous amount of motivation and effort, and that - let's face it- i probably wouldn't succeed anyway, i've started looking for loopholes.

basically what i've found is that there's no upper limit to how much one can bluff. it all started with a couple a stalling devices that i picked up from some friends at work- things you can say when you're up against a wall that either so vague or so universally true that they're almost never the wrong answer. while i want to say that over the last few weeks my blogmate and i have been involved in a collaborative effort to expand the list to cover one's behind in a variety of situations, the truth is probably that while i've been busy confabulating bullshit answers, my blogmate has actuallly been getting smarter and more sophisticated in her understanding of things.

whether or not i'm acting alone, i'm escalating my ploys to make it look like i know what's going on. i've come up with two basic approaches:

#1) embellishment- if you have a reasonably good idea of what the key issues are, but have been unwilling or unable to back yourself up with hard data you can usually get around ever providing it. the truth is that most people don't want to listen to you drone on about the details anyway- all you really have to do is use big words to get across that you understand the concept and make it seem like you're doing people a favor by leaving out the minutiae.

#1a) dumbing it down- the opposite tactic, only for the most skilled participants, is to use inappropriately small, childish words to describe highly complex or worrisome phenomena- it makes it sound like you've arrived on a higher plane of understanding.

#2) plausibility- if you actually have no idea what's going on but you have enough free time to harvest some (but not necessarily all) of the details, you can usually arrange them to come out of your mouth in such a way that they make sense to everyone else. take it step higher by either drawing a conclusion that sounds pretty reasonable (and vague), or by finding a way to make your data back up a known reality.

every day i get one step closer to greatness.

whore #3 and the french fries that weren't

this low expectations thing is working out great!

after a grueling work week i finally started decompressing on saturday night, first over ass-kicking margaritas at caesars (one margarita, actually), then at the movies, after which i wondered if a small role in major motion picture would be worth running in the credits as "whore #3."

then came brunch with twinset on sunday morning followed by mid-day bourbon on the rocks with ck and my blogmate. we were all a little rough around the edges that day (even before we hit the bottle), such that our romp around lakeview consisted of a brief blitz through the gap and tj maxx- that is, of course, after ck gave me a good schooling on where one's tea kettle should live. "you put it AWAY?!?!" my blogmate proceeded to taunt me with the empty promise of french fries, leaving me alone on the couch to round off the night with pizza and buffy the vampire slayer.

all and all i was quite pleased with how the weekend went, and returned to work feeling vaguely refreshed. i also came away with the sense that when it comes to j-date i have a stay of execution. i just don't see how i can squeeze in 3 to 5 dates a week when i have so much drinking to do.

nowhere to go but down

every year i generate a long list of new year's resolutions. most of them are pretty mundane, and as most of them appear on the list year after year, i've realized that regular gym attendance, daily flossing, and abstinence from chocolate covered raisin binges just aren't attainable goals.

as such, i've decided to go minimalist, whittling the list down the list to one, simple concept: low standards.

while my blogmate was, for the most part, supportive of this strategy, she did give me her trademark meaningful eyebrow raise which i correctly took to mean: "i hope you'll make an exception for men, where higher standards might be a better approach."

in truth, i think i've been doing this low standards thing for a while, but it all gelled as my blogmate and i planned our new year's eve festivities.

a few weeks ago, we heard that our boss of all bosses was having a party at his fabulous frank lloyd wright mansion in hyde park. it seemed perfect- high quality food and booze, walking distance from my blogmate's house, absolutely no social pressure. no need to go shopping for sparkly new year's attire (that invariably squeezes in all the wrong places)- no one to impress at this party, no pretense of coolness. and, of course, we'd get to to see the house.

it seems we were the only people with this point of view, and due to a dismal rsvp rate, the party was cancelled. had we rsvp'd on time, someone might have bothered to tell us... but of course nobody told us, and even though the house seemed bizarrely quiet, we rang the doorbell and had our coats off and hung up in the closet before the very important man that we barely know asked us, "did you think there was a party tonight?" did i mention that his fly was open? in spite of our obviously interrupting christmas present-opening with his family and friends, said important guy broke out a very nice bottle of wine and he and his thankfully granola wife proceeded to give us a private, thorough, tour of their fantastic, and thankfully interesting house. i think i made it a little easier by knowing a little moore about frank lloyd wright than the average person, and by opening with the bit about another one of our colleagues (who'd had the sense to stay home) asking about the andrew lloyd weber house.

one traumatic hour later we were back out on the streets of hyde park, desperately searching for someplace to ring in the new year, which turned out to be my blogmate's living room, since the only bar in the neighborhood was closed. it wasn't bad really- my blogmate mixed us captain morgan and diet cherry cokes (more rum than coke, i think, but it was hard to tell), we wolfed down the yummy brownies that mb had made, and watched the univision equivalent of dick clark's new year's rockin' eve- feliz 2006 live from acapulco. these women take boob job to a whole new level.

too stupid to quit while i was ahead, i convinced ck (who originally wasn't going to go out at all) to keep the party going and actually talked mr. andrew lloyd weber off his couch, out the door, onto the el, and into a bar. so then there was alot of drinking and a subsequent lot of headache.

one could argue that spending new year's this way- barging in on my boss' intimate family gathering, getting drunk at a bar with people who didn't want to go out in the first place- is downright pathetic. but in low standards land it was fantastic.

henry "big mama" henry - or - why i want to marry a park ranger

even though my blogmate just outed my inability to tie together my vaguely amusing observations and experiences...

it seems that other people are managing to make the hurricane funny. like me, my uncle decided to drop everything and run to d.c. to visit my ailing grandmother, who, by then, was not so much circling the drain as she was slugging down egg nog and very much enjoying the company of her entire extended family... and i do mean ENTIRE family, including my ex-aunt, ex-uncle, and ex-step-cousins... holy dysfunction batman!

getting back to the story, my uncle showed up with a new orleans newspaper (and enough beer to inebriate an elephant) which had an entire section dedicated to funny (if not quite sad) pictures of objects displaced into bizarre configurations by the ferocious winds of katrina, complete with avant-guard captions like, "fridge on roof," and "door on telephone pole." my uncle seems to have made a sport of reading the "death notices" (apparently there's some technical reason why they can't be obituaries) and trying to read between the lines about how and when they actually died. henry "big mama" henry was actually viola "big mama" henry, but my uncle's slip of the tongue made me giggle for a good 20 minutes (probably had something to do with my helping him drink his case of yuengling).

after visiting my grandmother and boozing it up with my aunts and uncles, i hopped on a (tiny) plane and made my way to hot springs village arkansas (touted as the world's largest gated community... home to cheap rental condos) to booze it up with my parents.
when i was younger i couldn't understand my parents' need to hide away in BFE for the holidays, but now i really look forward to the annual antisocial fest. one of the highlights of my sojourn in the ouchita national forrest was the bald eagle watching boat trip out on lake ouchita, complete with loaner binoculars and charming (and quite knowledgeable) park ranger. i came to the conclusion that dating a national park ranger would be almost as useful as dating a computer geek- someone who could help convert me from wannabe out-doorsy to actually out-doorsy. plus, i'd finally have a suitable other half to go on double dates and weekend hiking trips with my blogmate and mb.

other highlights were visiting the bill clinton gift shop in little rock and eating beef jerky with my dad (at my vegetarian mother's complete revulsion). not only was the beef jerky quite tasty, but i made the rather exciting discover that one serving has only 80 calories but 13 grams of protein. less fun activities included slaving over the 1000 piece puzzle of an the palais de ville in paris (which we'd bought at my insistence at walmart, along with the beef jerky) and having to gulp down mediocre chicken fried stake at petit jean national park on christmas day.

it's a good thing my standards are low.

merry x-box

my always-astute blogmate mentioned today that one reason that it's sometimes hard to post on our blog is that she thinks of one funny thing that she wants to share, but wants to share it in some larger context instead of what it actually is, which is "this one tidbit of this one thing was funny." with that, let me share a few highlights of a very merry midwestern christmas devoid of any context...

-friday night fish fry with mb's family at "daytona north," a nascar-themed bar in which 2 pints of new glarus, one pint of various-alcohols-mixed drink, one miller and a soda cost $11
-my realization that jeans and a brown gap cable-knit sweater are not festive enough 12/23 wear, compared with mb's sister's hot pink cargo pants, sequined tank top, black velour hoodie and enough cubic zirconium to stop traffic
-mb's brother's excitement at receiving low-profile athletic socks: "wow! now i can have the look of miami in the weather of wisconsin!"
-six hours with butterknife and new-husband-of-butterknife (phob? p-hob? you really need an acronym) playing "apples to apples," a game involving matching the most appropriate (or least appropriate) noun cards to an adjective card, which sounds very nerdy, and is in fact very nerdy, but made more fun by p-hob's insistence on matching "sultry" with "anne frank" and "sensual" with "helen keller"
-the fact that 2000 years past its prime, my father still considers rome to be the center of the universe
-my dad's timeless aphorisms: "some things are like grandma and grandpa... you just leave them alone."

all in all, a very fun- and cookie-filled few days. now my blogmate and i are both back at work, both back on, again, a relatively soul-sucking project, made better by the fact that we're in it together. already we're competing for the "who was the biggest idiot today?" award. more to follow.

when life hands you lemons...

while my blogmate and i occasionally tell each other stuff over the blog, more often we engage in avid pre-blogging, either because we just can't wait for the other to find out just how witty we are (as if we don't both check the blog every 45 seconds), or because we're considering writing about something that seems a little too delicate to be blog-appropriate. over and over again, for example, we came to the conclusion that blogging about the hurricane was probably wrong.

with that, it's time to introduce you to our our good friend ck. my blogmate and i have both grown quite fond of ck this year. we openly envy her irish-ness, her extensive knowledge of north-side pubs, and the fact that she often has good work gossip. while there's abosultely nothing funny about the fact that ck just lost her aged grandmother, i did find it a little humurous that my blogmate and i clung to her every word as she described going back to ireland for the funeral, where her huge family rented out a b&b for the week and had a designated bar that served as a rendez-vous between family functions. "is it wrong to want to go to irish funeral?" i asked my blogmate.

now it's a couple of weeks later and my own aged grandmother as rapidly dwindling, throwing a major wrinkle into my holiday plans. again, nothing funny about it, except for the ridiculous packing dilemma that has ensued. ironically, it all seems to come back to the hurricane. this was supposed to be a fun week, with evenings spent at fire-place-containing wine bars (who knew there were so many?), and careful prepartion for my annual weekend in the boonies with my parents. with a suitcase full of fleece, wool socks, chocolate and bourbon i was supposed to head out to arkansas to meet my folks at an abandoned golf resort to join them in their yearly binge of anti-socialism (that the festivities were slated to take place in arkansas and not the usual northern alabama is actually also a hurricane by-product).

but now my grandmother has fallen quite ill, and i have to zip off to washington dc to see her. a lifelong new orleans resident, she's now resettled in maryland post-hurricane. hence the packing dilemma. i might be going to dc where i have to look respectable enough to talk to doctors at a nursing home. i might be going to arkansas to go hiking and have christmas dinner at the state park lodge. i might be going to a funeral in new orleans (packing challenge #1), in which case i might as well go to my high school reunion in new orleans (which justifiably would merit three weeks of wardrobe planning), and will be certainly be going to my favorite new orleans dive bars with all my friends who happen to be in town (and at high risk of running into several ex-boyfriends requiring a degree of cuteness that takes alot of effort for me). so not only the weather, but also the circumstance will be completley different in all of these potential locations. how's in the world does one pack for such a trip?

one of our research gurus at work once said, "don't ever be sad about your data- you can always find something to say about it." maybe the same thing is true about blogging. that or the filterlessness is getting out of hand.

like fine wine

i hope i get funnier with age. you'll all be rolling on your high-tech floors-of-the-future at my incredibly sharpened blog-wit, if only i age like the relatives mb and i saw this weekend.

we spent the weekend in sunny milwaukee being very good people by visiting our grandparents that we won't see over the holiday. i don't know which visit was more entertaining: mb's grandmother's tirade about how she can't stand playing cards with the others in her building anymore because they keep falling asleep mid-hand, coupled with a misguided attempt to change the cable-tv-music-station away from classic country in favor of something the kids were into nowadays (resulting in a very awkward five minutes of listening to megadeth with grandma)? or my grandfather's proud stories of getting the good gimbel's suits for $15 by befriending the german-immigrant buyer and, in a stylish holiday first, introducing mb into the family tradition of bestowing upon unwitting visitors the results of said bargain shopping? i especially loved the size-up mb got once grandpa realized there was another male to become a recipient of his stores and stores of tj maxx bargain hunting. "what size? no, i know. wait." slow pan up, slow down, then disappearing into the closet. if mb were female i think he could sue for harrassment for that ogling.

our older relatives all get to have their quirks, and we all smile and laugh about it. i can't wait. when i'm older, i want the following eccentricities:

1) long rambling pointless stories
2) a wordless single-eyebrow raise when i think people are full of it and am unable to suppress my sarcasm
3) undying love for the same sweater or pants over and over again regardless of how repetitive or how style-less
4) insistence on buying loads of cheap stuff at marshall's and tj maxx, then wondering why i have such a full closet and still nothing to wear

hmm. guess i don't have to wait for my aarp card, then.

consumer rambling

in the blissful hysteria that characterized my frenetic dash around lakeview this afternoon, having survived yet another marathon of standardized testing, i found another opportunity to basque in consumerism and draw meaning from the meaningless.

first stop: $1.99 dry cleaner where i dropped a pile of sweaters that were, let's just say it, disgusting.

then on to the bank where they seem to have gotten rid of drive-through tellers altogether, resulting in alot of fumbling with envelopes and such as i deposited off the annual hanukkah check from my parents (which, in theory, is to be spent on new laptop, but in fact, is getting spent on piecemeal on various other more impulsive purchases like mascara

mad dash through the housewares store in search only of cheese cloth (yes, i really do have use for such an item), nonetheless walking out with arms full of other kitchen items that i suddenly couldn't live without (am i really going to use a rolling pin?).

moving on to marshall's to get the socks that i abandoned this weekend when faced with the grim prospect of waiting in the pre-christmas saturday afternoon line. there i acquired a pair of sparkly j-lo brand sunglasses to replace my sadly defunct pink faux dolce & gabanna (purchased at the sadly defunct french market in new orleans) and engaged in a bizarre silent war in the purse isle with a fabulous little asian girl who seemed convinced that i was after the dooney and burke purse that she had her eye on. it was particularly silly since #1) dooney and burke purses are way out of my price range, even at marshall's, and #2) they're ugly and #3) scary girl didn't actually know which purse she wanted but was gripped by the overwhelming fear of my finding it first.

last stop: liquor store, to assemble the accoutrements needed for spiced wine (i told you i had a use for cheese cloth). i blame my blogmate (with whom i was chatting on the phone) for the frenzy of christmas beer buying that ensued- suddenly i had to find out if honey-apple beer is really yummy or really disgusting. $100 later, after shamelessly flirting with a nice looking guy in scrubs (who sadly turned out to be a med student- no surgeon for me), i walked out of binny's ready to go on a good old fashioned drinking binge.

back home, i unloaded the car and asked myself, "does lugging a big-ass box of booze up the stairs count as exercise?"

virtual blogmate

here's the other of us!

slim's nephews

i'm working my way through slim's table, a narrative written by a u of c sociologist in the '90s about time he spent with a group of men who congregated regularly at valois see-your-food cafeteria here on 53rd st. (good book, although it seems to be less about my favorite breakfast joint and more about interpersonal relationships between retired black men. really, is this author the first person to notice that black men care about each other's health and happiness, and have self-respect? also, i sincerely want to know how the middle of a college neighborhood can be repeatedly described as "the fringe of the ghetto.") anyway, recently my blogmate and i been trying to get some studying done, and remembering that we were never very good at sitting at home engrossed in book-learnin', have been trying out local coffee shops as places to read. i would like to invite the slim's table author to come study with us, because times have changed since the musty dusty 1990's.

first stop: borders hyde park at 53rd and lake park, right across the street from the infamous cafeteria, est. 2003, curious to former hyde parkers who remember the neighborhood as only jimmy's woodlawn tap and the co-op, now looking *gasp* yuppie? borders does a booming business in its coffee shop, and i got the only table left in the house. sadly, not much studying got done, as i was sandwiched between a throng of black men in their daily rotation around a chess board and a patchouli-scented circle talking about police brutality and drawing analogies between the self-actualization of black men and sperm swimming to meet the, umm, embryo. (a for effort, but i didn't have it in me to correct the birds and bees...) it was honestly like being in slim's table 2, but the repeat themes of daily gathering place as identity formation and (surprise!) self-development was even funnier in a typically white-bread location.

feeling like perhaps hyde park had gotten too cool for me to study here, i spent the weekend up in lakeview alternating book-learning with christmas shopping (and naturally demanding that my blogmate do the same). slim might have enjoyed meeting his fat white star-trek-watching brothers all gathered at the borders in lakeview engrossed in a loud conversation about their escapades with women in college... except that here the themes were bad flannel as identity formation, and apparent lack of self-respect, because the "escapades" described clearly all involved women who refused to sleep with these guys. (who tells that as bragging rights???)

we learned a lot about our neighbors this weekend. at the belmont library nobody knows how to use inside voices ("i'm LOOKing for a BOOK on alTERnative CHInese GARdening??? no, GARdening??? GGGGGAAARRdening?"), at the coffee shop someone thinks we're law students and wants us to petition for something or another, at duke of perth someone thinks we're accounting students.

i draw the following conclusions:
1) if i want a neighborhood within ten years to overflow with new luxury condo developments featuring granite countertop and hardwood flooring, i should hire someone to write about how ghetto the neighborhood is.
2) we must look young and cute if strangers think we're law or accounting students, which would make us several years younger than we actually are.
3) if i were a sociologist, it would be much easier to get work done.

yet another way to waste time...

just what i need. a website linked to my email that lets me make little pictures of a skinny, fabulous me with hip clothes and trendy backdrops.

looks can be deceiving

my blogmate convinced me to blow off my responsibilities this morning in favor of serving as moral support for the pick-up of her injured car from the body shop. in exchange, i used the trip to the north side and time off work to get a much-needed haircut.

wandering down broadway perusing my options (quickly avoiding anything with "salon" or "coiffeur" and mulling over "cost-cuttery" and "supercuts") i stepped into the cheapest one i could find with the largest array of product in the window (supercuts). as i waited my turn, i assessed that my choices of hairstylist would be either the pierced tattooed guy with the man-pixie 'do, or the cute woman with the head full of beautiful curls. since i have, well, less beautiful curls than that, i quietly kept my fingers crossed for the curly-haired woman to be ready when it was my turn.

fifteen minutes later, i was sitting happily in the chair of the man-pixie having my layers fixed amid a discussion of which was a worse drunken college activity: drunk-dialing your ex, making a mix tape of all the versions of bizarre love triangle you could get your hands on, or drunk-dialing your ex in order to play for them a mix tape of all the versions of bizarre love triangle you could get your hands on. our conversation hit a natural pause, and only then did i notice another customer, clearly in awkward agony, sitting in the chair of the beautiful curly-haired woman as she expounded upon the various ways in which her virus had caused her to have warts in her private area, and how she could have had it for years, and how it could affect her cervix. as i desperately tried to come up with a new conversation subject to not overhear any more about genital warts, the man-pixie muttered to me, "this is getting old. i've heard this topic several times already."

i win.

at least i have netflix

ok, it's not that i mean to talk about boys all the time, but as long as these things keep happening i feel obliged to report them.

the other night i assembled a small army of wingmen and women and headed off to another night of south asian theater destined to elude me. you might wonder why i'd choose to drop an entire evening struggling to keep my eyes open through a staged reading of indian political drama. my purpose: stalking my newest crush- yet a another theater guy (this one, at least, is an actor, and a darn good one at that). arguably if i had known that we'd be ambushed into staying for the post-reading discussion i would have dedided that no boy was worth it. additionally, had i known that survival would only earn me ten of the most painfully awkward minutes of my life i would have realized that this particular boy was definitely not worth it.

from this rather painful experience i conclude:

that i'm 100% in agreement with my blogmate: the only function of post-theater/film discussions is for the snotty participants to basque in the sound of their own voices,

and

that i can't shoulder the burden of awkwardness when cute bengali actor actually concludes an already uncomfortable conversation with, "hey, a bunch of people are going across the street for, um, libations... but i'm not going... i'm going home."

seriously. three hours i could have spent watching buffy the vampire slayer.

it's a small world after all

yet another reason to hate blind dates.
i came home the other day to a rather surprising message on my answering machine. a colleague/friend had called to tell me that a friend of a friend was a single, jewish, sociology grad-student at u of c. if you calculate the odds, i'll bet there's more than one single, jewish, sociology grad-student at u of c, but i had a hunch that this might be the same single, jewish sociology grad-student at u of c to whom my blogmate introduced me a couple of years ago. and i was right.
the last time i check there were 9 million people living in chicagoland. how did this happen?

multicultural high-brow

we seem to have stumbled onto a good theme here.

during that same evening of drinking with my co-workers that precipitated this whole train of thought, i asked the jameson-snubber (js?) if he had really sent me a message the other day in portuguese. i hadn't thought about it much at the time, since we were busy and i figured out what he was talking about, but three days later was wondering why he'd picked portuguese to thank me for my help. so we discussed his various travels a little, established that his portuguese came from three weeks visiting friends in portugal plus its similarity to other romance languages, etc.

i mentioned that if js had a need to communicate with his co-workers in portuguese, i'd be happy to be the recipient but he might also try my friend dwtacc. his surprise at her brazilian heritage was entertaining in that everyone thinks she's every ethnicity but her own, but funnier was his doubt that they'd communicate well, what with the whole portugal/brazil thing. i know he just meant that different countries have different dialects and all that, but it really sounded like js thought his three weeks in portugal would be too pure for her life of understanding the language. i let him dig himself a little hole before telling him i was sure her undergraduate portuguese major would surely iron out those differences.

i don't intend to disparage the poor jameson-snubber who just didn't know dwtacc to know what he was saying (although i'm secretly hoping that dwtacc will somehow use this information to her advantage and then tell me about it). i only use it as an example of my growing theory that prizing individuality and unique experiences has its limits. we all get through education and interviewing for jobs by talking ourselves up, trying to convince everyone to hire us because we have something special that they can't get anywhere else, packaging our eclectic experiences like they grant us a unique position to understand the world. but does it hold up? i think a set of experiences gets you into a certain job, social circle, academic standing, whatever, and after that initial acceptance those experiences are pretty much a version of what everyone else has done. is it special that js speaks some portuguese? yes, if he worked in a gas station in northern wisconsin and was trying to get out. and yes, in that i don't speak portuguese. but does it make him better at his job, or funnier over a beer, or quicker getting someone to sleep with him?

i kind of wish i'd spent some time in college working the cash register at fleet farm instead of all the resume-padders, so i could be less of a hypocrite while i rant.

ps: blogmate, mb just found the jason mraz cd i bought before moving to chicago.

the 3 p's of high-browing

sadly, i think my blogmate is right. those who use the word proletariat seldom are the proletariat. that was probably even true in the age of emile zola.

nevertheless, i give full credit for use of the word, and would like to add a few more to the list. i think you'll find that proletariat is the only one allusive to gloriousness.

my second favorite (after some debate and some time spent on dictionary.com) is plebeian. my former roommate (also known as the bride) introduced me to the word during the long debate about what we were going to name our (now tragically deceased) kitten. i was voting for miko, but tb decided that he was just to plebeian for such a sophisticated name. we ended up settling on emile, which (in retrospect) is only relieved of snotty connotations by its reference to the aforementioned writer.

finally there's pedestrian, as in "your taste in literature is so pedestrian." this ridiculous statement was made by one barista to another (i overheard it when i, myself, was employed as a coffee girl), who apparently failed to realize how absurd it sounded. baristas, admittedly are a bizarre breed of service industry types. really they're lower on the totem pole than waiters, cocktail waitresses and bartenders, but tend to be more artsy and well-read, thus feeling entitled to call other peoples' taste pedestrian.

i don't know what else to say. power to the people?

down with the ship: take 2

in the ongoing saga of work being especially soul-sucking these days, my immediate team and i decided to re-invent a long-standing work tradition. it is customary that at the end of a long month, teams celebrate by going out to dinner together. it may only be november 16th, but we decided that this month has gone on far long enough, and decided to pre-empt the end-of-month civilized dinner with a mid-month beer binge. lovely.

the highlight of the evening?

one of the guys was expounding on the virtues of grey goose, and how he doesn't think jameson is good enough (and my faithful readers already know what an affront this is to me) compared with single-malt something-or-other, and his eighteen languages that he speaks, and his mastery of technology, etc... suddenly one of the women, just as educated as this guy - but two beers apparently goes a longer way for her - starts shouting...

"you have to learn to live with the PEOPLE! join the proletariat! i am the proletariat! look, i use little words! you're all, 'look at me, i'm slumming it! i ate duck pate instead of goose! tee hee!'"

now, as i argued, the true proletariat doesn't know the word proletariat, but regardless, i think plans were made to drink schlitz together, which works out well for me.

going down with the ship

while 99.9% of our loyal readers already know what it is that my blogmate and i do for a living, and while the few that don't probably don't care that much (or have already figured it out because, let's face it, we're pretty transparent)i think that i can preserve our (flimsy) cloak of anonymity and still dedicate some time and internet space to ranting about our profession and its current state of suckiness. again, as 99.9% of you are close personal friends of ours, you've probably already noticed that we're in foul moods these days, and if you've got any sense you're steering way clear of us... unless, of course, you are mb and can't really avoid the cranky or you are one of our colleagues and are just as miserable as we are.
at the end of the day, i suspect that things are seeming extra bad because our long, grueling hours of work all seem to for naught. it's bad enough that we're never seeing our beds or bed partners (or, in my case, failing to acquire bed partners), but our efforts are seeming increasingly futile. as my boss put it today, "we're basically rearranging deck chairs on the titanic." my blogmate describes it as soul sucking, my other boss just keeps saying, "my flight for fiji leaves in 20 minutes," and i keep scribbling the words "giant martini" on bits of paper and passing the notes to my coworkers.
however you want to describe it, it just ain't good.

the devil is in the details

i know it's been a long time since we've posted. work has become something i can only describe as soul-sucking for the last few weeks, and also, i'm lazy. but here is a brief amusing tale:

mb is well known for being a very numbers-oriented guy. doesn't understand the point of competition in music or art or really anything that can't be quantified. life has gotten very good for mb with the advent of google earth, now allowing him to measure every run, bike ride, and swim in lake michigan, so never again would he have to (gasp) *estimate* the distance of his workouts.

enter the upcoming hustle up the hancock race. mb decided to register himself. and me, for that matter, which is going to be a separate funny story. currently i can't hustle much of anywhere. i can sort of saunter to my coffee, meander to my beer, wander to the tv... are those races? anyway, mb was distraught to realize he didn't know exactly how far in miles the hustle-up-the-hancock is. when he asked me, i suggested that it would be impossible to calculate without knowing the pitch of the steps, width, etc.

undaunted, the next day mb showed up with detailed diagrams of staircases and an estimate for his upcoming hustle. where, you might ask, did he get this information?

"i happened to run across an office building stairwell standards manual."

he *happened* to run across a *what*?

i laughed for two solid minutes.

mb, i mock because i love.

skin deep change

my blogmate and i are always talking about how we should probably update our filterless profile a little bit in order to better reflect our cultural evolution. i, for one, am dragging my feet, largely due to laziness, but also because deep down i know that these changes are mostly cosmetic. while i've softened my position on camisoles and pointy shoes (to the extent that i actually wear them from time to time) i don't think things have changed that much. another fall in hyde park- when over pumpkin lattes we (okay i) gaze at the fleece-vest-wearing shaggy-haired boys- no doubt the future urban planners and comp lit professors of america. yet again i'm a slave to post-season baseball in spite of my lack of regular season commitment. i've acquired a few cds, some of them good, developing my love of "bubble-popping" (thanks blogmate) euro-trash music, and am only occasionally able to distinguish between the good 80s music that i was too unsophisticated to appreciate the first time around and the new stuff that sounds just like it. and though i still haven't managed to go to the map room or get back to cleo's i'm adding the bungalow lounge to my to-do list of bars, at least while they're serving pumpkin martinis. i guess the problem with cataloging my progress is having to face my lack thereof.

screening for creepies

when i was just getting to know my good blogmate (she'd correctly surmised that i had no idea how to drive in a snow storm and was riding home with me) she told me about a benign but weird guy from work who'd apparently misinterpreted her friendliness as romantic interest and started calling her at home. "i've never been good at screening for creepies," she said, in explanation for how she'd allowed such a thing to happen.

given my heinous run of bad dates you'd think that i'd be better at screening for creepies, but it seems that i've allowed the infiltration of a similarly benign, though decidedly weirder creepy.

by the time his e-mail came i was getting pretty used to hearing from random, long-lost friends. it was in the weeks following katrina and the "oh my god is your family OK?" shout-out was getting pretty routine.

the back story is that jb is a friend of a friend who i dated for something like 3 weeks my freshman year of college (yes, 10 years ago). by "dated," i mean got drunk and kissed at a series of parties before figuring out that he was a weirdo at which point i stopped returning his phone calls. he was very nice, pretty cute, and i think very smart (physics major, which at the time impressed me) but something about him was really off.

so 10 years later he sends a random, "hey i hope you don't think this is weird but blah blah hurricane, blah blah saw our mutual friend at the high school reunion and i just thought i'd see what you were up to" email. a quick background check (i.e. called our mutual friend) confirmed that he was just as weird as ever, so after appropriate delay (3 or 4 days) i wrote back a cordial, "hey, family is fine, i live in chicago, how are you?" sort of thing. he then came back with a much longer email in which he revealed that 1) he really is a weirdo an 2) he's still an undergrad. with that, i put an end to the interaction (mentally), deleted the email, and left it at that.

a week later it came- ANOTHER email. this one a "hey, just wanted to make sure you weren't not answering because i sounded weird- sometimes i come off weird in emails, by the way i'm coming to chicago soon do you want to get together?" had he been more specific about when he was coming i might have found the energy to fabricate a specific excuse, but under the circumstances it seemed meaner to throw a blanket, "gee, sorry, i'm really busy," than to yet again ignore the email and hope that he'd go away.

fortunatley he doesn't seem to have picked any serious creepy, stalker-ish attributes and i suspect that this little episode has come to a close... but it's left me asking myself a couple of questions:
#1) how did i let this happen?
#2) how can anyone be so awkward over email?

for the former, i have to be honest with myself and admit that 1) i was flattered (initially) and 2) i was secretly hoping that he'd shed his creepy tendencies in college and become a nice, cute, smart guy.

the latter is more troubling. i have contended, both on this blog and in my frequent and adamant refusals to go online for dating purposes, that ANYONE can project a cool persona over email. i myself often suggest online that i am witty, calm, and collected when, in fact, i possess none of these attributes. that this guy not only fails to supress his weirdness, but suggests that his emails exaggerate it is pretty concerning. sometimes honesty just isn't the best policy.

ten things i hate about france

i suspect that it's misuse of the blog (disrespectful maybe) for me to dump out two weeks worth of accumulated observations and rants, mostly for the purpose of distracting myself from the unsavory thing that seems to be happening to my computer. as much of an internet junkie as i've become since my acquisition of DSL, i'm fairly uptight when it comes to downloading stuff, and am at a loss to explain why i've suddenly been invaded by some kind of nasty virus that in one feld swoop deleted half of my pictures (moments after i'd completed the laborious task of reorganizing them). i've been sitting here for the last two hours, agonizingly watching norton do his thing, and need to think about something else.

without further ado:

#1) bats
#2) stinky cheese
#3) public bathrooms
#4) the way that train platforms, underground walkways, and even secluded historical monuments all smell like public bathrooms
#5) lack of water pressure
#6) bunking with my grandmother (never in my life have i ever heard anyone snore so loud)

actually- i can't even come up with ten things. i'm a hopeless francophile and might as well admit it.

how to succeed in business (without really trying)

today over lunch at work, a group of co-workers and i couldn't help but shift our conversation to the new student worker, and her apparent lack of disregard for basic rules when trying to make a good first impression. in the last two weeks we've seen her ignore her main responsibilities, lie about completing assigned basic tasks ("did you look up that report?" "umm, i don't know." "can you go look it up and get back to us?" "ok [disappears for five minutes]." "well, do you have the report?" "what?" etc.), leave important meetings and march back in twenty minutes later with a mouth full of very crunchy food...

i take the position that it is not difficult to at least look like you care at work. i took the liberty at lunch of starting a brief list of ways to feign interest and competence:

1) head control: nod slowly and meaningfully at key points during meetings. avoid eye contact with the speaker, squinting a little to indicate concentration, until a key point has been finished and you are sure you will not be asked to answer a question or take on a new project. seek out eye contact and look like you've just understood something very clearly when a superior's pet teaching principles are made; then speed your meaningful nod just a teeny bit.
2) if you are falling asleep and you're being watched, start dutifully writing down a list... of something. groceries, errands, anything. take frequent breaks like you're taking notes on the conversation. you can, of course, take notes on your actual job, but it's not necessary.
3) if having trouble maintaining a look of interest, maintain eye contact with your co-workers' more stylish shoes, and make mental notes of who might have new footwear you can complement them on later. if your co-workers' shoes are boring, consider buying new shoes yourself and admiring your own feet.
4) if, god forbid, you are asked to report on a project's status, take a deep breath and then do not slow down. say everything you can in one breath as fast as you can, leaving no breaks for someone to correct you, ask you a question or assign you more work. if you have no idea how to explain something, look your boss in the eye and say "i think we all expected this;" if you don't have hard data conclude "the trends are stable;" if you didn't finish an assigned task, tell them "i need to follow up on this to be absolutely sure."

what else? everyone's job is unique, but i think most rules apply to all jobs. can anyone help my poor student? add to the filterless school of fake?

the honorable mention for best effort goes to...

next year i'm skipping marathon season and heading straight for the wild scallion urban adventure race. i think my training is well started.

my day started out innocently enough, with a plan to head to little italy to cheer on my good friend dwtacc at mile 18 of the chicago marathon. i was all armed with mp3 player, water bottle, asics, and a pancake breakfast so i could run her in the last 8 miles. i made it successfully to downtown via metra and out to taylor on the blue line, and found out from the starbucks-sponsored pacing info station that she had just passed the halfway mark. knowing i had plenty of time to catch her, i relaxed and watched such notable passers-by as kermit the frog, a few elvises, a farmer chasing his cow... but by the time i'd heard dj buono play his third round of the same motivational italian techno (blogmate, he totally has the same cd you just bought me!), and i still hadn't seen dwtacc, i headed back to starbucks to find out where she was... and they said she'd passed me an hour ago.

feeling deflated since i'd been planning for months to run her in, i trudged back to the el, and called mb and another friend to commiserate. they assured me that i could get the blue line back in time to catch her big finish. just as i stepped onto the train, though, my friend called me back to announce that according to the starbucks(tm) pacing system, dwtacc's pace had dropped off and i could catch her in the south loop if i ran. so i got off the train at halsted and started hauling through the industrial southwest downtown as fast as my legs could carry me, dodging buses, tired marathoners wrapped in foil, loiterers at the greyhound station, all while switching phone calls between mb and my friend who were glued to the pacing screens on their computers. just as i got to the finish line, mb called to tell me that the computer said she wasn't past 24.8 yet, so i could get her for the last mile. feeling inspired once again, i took off down south michigan weaving around police barriers to try and find her... until mb called me two minutes later with "yeah, never mind... she finished five minutes ago." doh.

from this attempt i conclude the following:

1) does the wild scallion include a segment of jumping curbs and police barriers while talking on a cell phone? 'cause someone should want me on their team. i ruled.
2) if starbucks is the new sponsor of the race pacing system, i think this is another reason to prefer caribou.

happy birthday, dwtacc. sorry, girl. it wasn't for lack of trying.

blog-iversary: a year in review

so i honestly thought when i proposed starting a blog to my good friend, that there was NO WAY it would last more than three posts, or that anyone but us would read it, or that there would be things funny enough to warrant review. and it might not actually be that funny. but in honor of the one-year birthday of filterless, a few memorable lines (to us, anyway...)

1) only people with socially stigmatizing diseases get to live fun lives.

2) i had no idea you could have an awkward silence all by yourself.

3) lesson#3: kick self for not liking the guy who tried to make the 3rd date a weekend in napa

4) i have mixed feelings on a one-street ghetto. how can something both be an oxymoron but also true?

5) i've spent the last 2 days laid up in bed, dying a slow painful death of what i can only imagine is tuberculosis.

6) whatever the reason that rcfog didn't immediately (or in the face of my amazing persistence) succumb to my adorable charm, i'm sure that i might be in more favorable standing had i not hit the bottle quite so hard. it's hard to know when alcohol switches from social lubricant to enough rope to hang yourself.

7) i feel like there's a lesson in here somewhere, but i think i'm just too hungover to see it.

8) the journey of a thousand miles begins with one plastic penis

9) i am anxiously waiting to accompany my blogmate to unitarian service, because i heard the classical music is good, and because i have a theory that unitarians are skinnier than average but have more-frequent-than-average receding hairlines and evanston-professor's-wife-ness, and i feel it's my job to scope the place for men for my blogmate while she gets her religion on.

10) in the spitty, foggy haze that characterized my drive to work this morning, double non-fat latte in hand as a monday morning self-indulgence, i got cut off by "mac dog 1," as designated by the license plate of the big-ass black sedan, driven by what i can only presume was a big ass.

11) how many adjectives do you take in your coffee? the issue at hand: whether schmoofy lattes are rendered socially acceptable when they are seasonal. is it somehow OK to order a nonfat decaf pumpkin spice latte because of its association with autumn and halloween? clearly, ordering a soy halfcaf sugar free vanilla double latte is just annoying.

une fille et son blog

as we near the one year mark, we're pushing our blog to the limit, this time with a live, transatlantic broadcast. once again, i've decided to spend my precious weeks of vacation kickin' it with my french peeps. if you're constructing an image of me as a chique parisian sipping espresso in a cafe, thoughtfully jotting down poetic musings about life along side of the seine, think again. my blogmate and i have done the math, and in the end, the best we can figure is that life in rural france is not unlike life in rural wisconsin, complete with monster truck rallies (even if no one would come with me last year) and above-ground swimming pools. i'm fairly certain that the french even have party-barge equivalents, although theirs tend to cruise down canals of more historic importance, complete with dilapidated (but fully operational) locks. while the annual family stroll down one of said canals, marvelling not only at their 300 year old stone work, but also at the elite party-barge occupants isn't on my short list of favorite french countryside pastimes, here are a few that make the cut:
#1: sheep shearing as a spectator sport - i'm SOL this year as it's too cold for scheduled de-wooling
#2: calf/lamb birthing, also as spectator sport
#3: assorted berry-picking
#4: sleeping until noon and blaming it on jet-lag
#5: inept tennis playing on the court that doubles as the school playground and site of the annual town bonfire
#6: tearing through town (population 200) with the windows down with the music thumping, drawing the locals from their houses so they can stare at me in slack-jawed amazement
#7: capitalizing on french etiquette - drop by to see anyone and you're guaranteed a cup of coffee
#8: political sparring with my uncles who hold me personally responsible for george bush's existence - i come from a long ine of registered socialists
#9: remastering the french keyboard
#10: pre-dinner apperitif with strange, yummy liquors and tasty snacks

you're getting exhausted just reading about it aren't you. i'd complain but instead i just say c'est la vie...