sour grapes

go figure: there's a downside to shoddy construction.

since i've been in chicago i've lived in the same 1960's 4+1 in lakeview. well located? yes. off-street parking? yes. thick walls and ceilings? no. and even though my beautiful hard-wood floors had to be covered up with wall-to-wall carpets lest i disturb the "very good tenant" who lived downstairs, no such courtesy was bestowed upon me and i've had to endure a series of loud, inconsiderate, elephant-like upstairs neighbors.

the thing about loud neighbors is that they are often enshrouded in mystery. my building is so big and anonymous that i'm not sure i've even seen these people. given the episodic quiet periods i'm assuming that the turnover for the apartment in question has been pretty high, and i've never really been able to conjure up a good mental image to go with my rage and indignation.

sometimes the offenses are quite obvious in their origin, although that doesn't usually make them less irritating - i mean really, who vacuums at midnight? more often than not, i have absolutely no idea what these people could possibly be doing to generate such a disruptive racket. the booms and clangs and thuds just don't seem to correlate with any routine human activity that i can readily identify.

until i get woken up at 2:30 AM on wednesday to a particularly offensive brand of rhythmic banging that can only be the result of one thing.

for a moment there's confusion. what time is it? why am i awake? dear god, what is that noise? what could they possibly be... oh... eeeew! i find lying in bed alone when you'd like to be sleeping having to listen to strangers have sex a mere eight feet from me to be a pretty distasteful experience. but i fall back asleep, briefly, before being awoken AGAIN, this time to a chorus of such stereotypical moans and "OHMYGOD"s, so ridiculous that i have to ask myself, "who on earth has such raucous circus sex at 2:30 AM on wednesday?" i was tempted to get out the broom and wack it on the ceiling to see if i could at least break the concentration required to fake such a melodramatic orgasm, but was afraid of effecting encourgagement, rather than the mortification and buzz-kill i intended.

as i barrel towards my 30th birthday with alarming speed, i have to ask myself if i've become such a curmudgeon as to actually resent people who have drunken, late-night, weekday sex, or if i'm enough of a prude to be shocked by such behavior... but seriously, have you seen the people who live in my building? i have, and believe me, they just don't look like they have it in them. and besides, given how empty the parking lot is during the day i know they all have day jobs. i just don't believe that anyone who can afford the lakeview rent mark-up and tolerate living in a neighborhood so lacking in edge has any inclincation to be awake at that hour.

so instead of going out and finding my own ways to shock and offend my neighbors with a life of sin and debauchery, i daydream about the job i could have taken in north carolina where the same rent check would get me a house with its very own roof and ceiling, and about the snide notes i'd like to slide under the door of my new arch-nemeses... something along the lines of, "if i wanted porn i'd rent some."

i'm open to suggestions.

warm fuzzy holiday greetings

not all of us celebrate spring holidays with baskets of pastel eggs and chocolate bunnies. in an effort to integrate the holiday season, and having recently attended both an amazing yummy seder at my blogmate's place and a quirky easter get-together with 98-year-old grandpa, i would like to present the following reasons why it doesn't really matter which holiday you celebrate this season:

seder: matzo ball soup - chicken stock with mysteriously delicious balls of flavored dough.
easter: italian holiday soup - turkey stock with mysteriously delicious balls of flavored beef.

seder: extra table setting and cup of wine for elijah's coming.
easter: extra 1/2 hour of conversation about my father, and why he isn't coming.

seder: while sitting around the table, learn the story of exodus, wait to find out who starts snickering first at the word "bondage."
easter: while sitting around the table, learn that uncle and partner recently attended the international men of leather festival in chicago.

seder: reminisce about last seder's grilled turkey, which tasted suspiciously (deliciously but sacrilegiously?) like the sausage that had been recently cooked on the same grill.
easter: delight to discover that grandpa now makes turkey by stuffing the whole thing with bacon.

seder: drink 4 glasses of wine, become unable to see straight to drive home.
easter: drink 4 cups of coffee, become unable to sit still to drive home.

seder: friend comes in with surprise gift of manischewitz-flavored chocolates for our gracious hostess.
easter: grandpa starts telling stories about friends back in the old country coming to him with surprise gift of 40 chickens.

seder: learn fun facts about your friends, like their new condos and love of existential literature.
easter: learn that grandma's relatives used to be in the mafia. (sorry, but what parallel can you draw for that one?)

seder: wake the next morning a little hungover, vow not to drink so much for a little while.
easter: immediately afterward, buy several 6-packs of beer and vow to not open them at least until getting home.

p.s.

my good blogmate has already told you about our adventures in new york. now that we're back in what suddenly feels like quaint little chicago, i just wanted to reassure our readership that we did more than just drink and shop. we learned things about one of this nation's great cities...

1. in bars on wall street, the line to the mens' room is longer than the womens' - but ladies' night somehow seems creepier in that context.
2. tequila in hot chocolate is delicious.
3. if you do not speak english as your native language, it is apparently acceptable to sing along to bryan adams in the airport.
4. if you are a do-gooder vegan undergraduate at columbia, it is totally acceptable to go on in long strident tones over ethiopian food with your girlfriend and your tragically-new-jersey-accented aunt about what a do-gooder you are, and how much your expensive columbia education will go to bat for you in the lucrative and competitive field of designing programs for disabled adults.
5. if you are the tragically-new-jersey-accented aunt at said ethiopian restaurant, yes, we want to hear you speaking so loudly, and of course we are interested in that time in the 70s when you went on some macrobiotic diet without actually knowing what that meant.
6. if you are riding the m60 bus from la guardia to harlem, not only is it standard for the bus driver to holler at you over the loudspeaker, but it is required that you shout back, in kind of a warped tent revival fashion: "is there room in the back?" "NO!!!" "i SAID, can you give me some roomintheback, people?" "NO!" there might have been dancing and speaking in tongues but it seemed dangerous given the amount of slamming on the brakes.
7. if you are a featured artist at moma, you need to wear high-watered bad pants. incidentally, you know that usual museum commentary on the wall about how the artist develops his work by "listening" to what the inanimate subjects are telling him? not so mystical and artistic, once you know that said artist is schizophrenic.

so a special set of thank-yous to our gracious hosts who showed us around new york!

-sm, for uncomplainingly ushering us around the city, even on a sunday morning after her saturday evening of mainlining wine.
-js, for getting us successfully from point a to point b every time, and for boiling down complicated concepts like arbitrage to little words that us non-business types can understand (when she described someone's business plan as a "bank of a bank of a bank," we knew we'd found the right friend.)
-sm's roommate k, for showing off her new alcoholic popsicles, and insisting that it's really ok to want fries and ice cream right after breakfast. also for agreeing that no, falafel cannot be involved in arbitrage, because it's a low-risk commodity.
-mk, for navigating us through dim sum: "you just sit there until you're full, or until you're peckish, and then you eat some more!" for finding us lots of yummy food and drink, and appreciating my long rambling stories about people she's never met.

and of course, to my blogmate, for one-liners like "sometimes we pass zantac wordlessly back and forth like a bong," for completely forgetting that it was my idea to embark on the crazy let's-give-up-our-plane-seats-for-$400 adventure in the first place and not holding it against me, and for being willing to laugh about this and still tolerate my presence after it's over.

bloggers in the big apple, reprise

there's something really nice about spending a whole weekend in an unknown city without ever getting out a map or asking for directions. i'm not sure what we did to deserve such red carpet treatment, but with the aid of our gracious hosts we were able to accomplish exactly what we set out to do: gawk shamelessly at high-brow new yorkers, eat a lot, and haggle over knockoff hermes burkin bags in chinatown.

it was awesome.

except for the end. which sucked. but i'll get to that later.

the good parts included beer, mexican food, wine, tequila, bourbon, coffee, dim sum, gelato, coffee, ethiopian food, wine, falafel, coffee, bloody marys, cuban food, pizza, diet coke, hot dogs, bourbon, and new england clam chowder. in that order. there was also sm, her roommate (k), mk, js, kl, dh, ea, kn, ak, his bf (j), lh. and there were also purses, sunglasses, pashminas, and shoes.

we wrapped up our weekend at the MoMA where my blogmate repeatedly made me blow the cover of my feigned hipster persona by whispering her names for the avant-garde photgraphs we were inspecting, each time making me laugh so hard that if i had been drinking something it would have come out of my nose. each one had some kind of abstract name followed by the year that followed, such that the picture of the guys standing outside with all their papers blowing all over the place became, "god damn it, 1972." meanwhile i wondered exactly what kind of privileged up-bringing i must have had if my visceral reaction to the galleries upon galleries of impressionist masterpieces was some kind of "geez, not another picasso" eye rolling. occasionally i managed to stop being blase long enough to wonder why i'd missed the memo that one is only allowed at the MoMA if one is a 28 year old 5ft 5 inch tall male who carries a messenger bag, wears converse and frowns alot.

it's a good thing we had fun. the residual fuzzy feeling of hangover plus self-congratulation made our long and rather miserable return to chicago a bit easier to take. for the record, it isn't worth the $400 of airplane voucher to give up your seat on the 2-hour shuttle from laguardia to midway if it means sitting in the airport for another hour to catch an inevitably delayed flight to boston, even if it means a fabulous room at the hyatt overlooking whatever big body of water it is that boston has while you gaze at your blogmate over a manhattan... because of course you'll have to get up at 4:30 to catch the 6AM flight back to chicago which of course is cancelled, resulting in a nearly wordless standoff with the very unhelpful delta agent, resulting in a move to united airlines for a flight back to the right city but the wrong airport. having made peace with that debaucle of course you'd get pulled out of the security line for some kind of special, thorough searching. but at least you'd finally get back to your car, in an economy parking lot whose office smells so much like urine and feet that you'd wish you were back with the angry delta people. but happy to be home.

chewable jesus, action moses, and the love of my life

i didn't realize that religious icons made such excellent snacks.

i didn't think much of it when shopping for a baby shower gift for some friends recently, and stumbled onto a cute easter book section featuring an eight-page chewable bible. i was mostly impressed that they could condense the word of god into such a brief and delicious format.

but over the weekend i heard a story from bike-m. and his wife that put the whole chewable-religion into a new perspective: bike-m. was looking for an appropriate but sarcastic thank-you gift for a mentor at work who happens to be a self-described right-wing religious crazy surrounded by a workplace of leftist communist hippies (something like that- can all those things go together?). bike-m. ordered online an action-figure moses for said mentor's desk, and it arrived by mail. unfortunately (or fortunately), little-bike-m. found action-figure moses before her father was able to deliver the gift, and she managed to unwrap moses and shove the toy into her mouth. bike-m. was, i think, disappointed that his well-thought-out gift was being eaten, but guessed that perhaps his work mentor would just as much appreciate a photo of his daughter eating a plastic action-figure moses.

now, i have a bad habit of writing vaguely sacrilegious blog posts during lent (though it's been 2 years since writing about my fear of a zit-cross on ash wednesday). but are chewable religious objects such a bad thing? mrs. bike-m, who told me the story about action-figure moses, also tells me that when she and her daughter were the only white people shopping at the biglots in harvey over the weekend (a little bit of a long story about why that happened), she thought that perhaps her daughter's mouthing of action-figure moses might have actually been looked on with approval by the local on-lookers -- making mrs. bike-m. look a little more pious than her actual humanist-agnostic-unitarian-wife-of-mennonite reality. to paraphrase, "i can look religious in harvey, or ironic in wicker park, whichever suits my purposes."

i think that sentiment points out the real issue - i'm sure the babies in this story would have been equally happy to chew on a fabric bible or "our bodies, ourselves," action-figure moses or tickle-me elmo. (as mb and i proceed with wedding planning, i'm now kind of wishing our entire wedding ceremony would be attended by toddlers, because it would make the whole communion issue easier. forget the whole catholic/lutheran thing: little-bike-m., affectionately called "the hoover" by her parents, would eat the communion host right off the ground with no internal debate at all.) this is about our perceptions. anything we think about chewable bibles, pose-able prophets, or breaking bread with people of a vaguely different religious background reflects our own cynicism, one way or the other.

this does not mean that the minister will be officiating our wedding with a chew-bible. but to the bike-m. family, action-figure moses will be formally invited.

what would you do?

on my usual route home from work there are a few spots where generally i pass men or women in the street asking for spare change or peddling various goods. i've never really found a use for men's tube socks, bears superbowl champion t-shirts (doh), or water bottles, although i appreciate the attempts. i keep a little container of change near the driver's seat in the car that i use for meters, the sunday sun-times on occasion, and sometimes the people on these corners. i don't have any particular well-defined rule on who gets spare change (soft spot for women and children).

so last week i was paused at an off ramp, and a gentleman with a trach was asking for change. i imagined it wasn't super easy to manage the cup and the sign with the bag of possessions plus having to put his finger on his neck any time he wanted to vocalize, so rolled down my window to offer him some change, and he thanked me without any difficulty whatsoever. i didn't recognize that anything was weird until i was driving away, when it occurred to me that there was no scar, no skin opening, no cap over the trach, no little buzz to his voice ---

who on earth begs for change by using a fake trach?!? i've seen dolls wrapped in slings as fake babies, legs pinned behind to look like they're amputated, but never this one. points for creativity, my friend, but that's just obscure.

bouncing around the room

i went to a fundraiser on saturday night where a bizarre confluence of events left me staring out into a pool of rather attractive men without the expected contingent of thin, pretty women flanking them. while i choose to remain stymied by my inability to work this situation to my advantage, i actually know exactly what went wrong. for one thing, if i hadn't been so absorbed in making the pseudo-anthropologic obseravations that follow i might have faired a little better. sometimes there's honestly nothing better to do than to assess a situation from a blogger's perspective, entertaining oneself with bitter and witty condescension... but other times the right thing to do is probably to forget about the blog, have another drink, and go flirt with the boy in the northface fleece. if only i knew the difference...

on the other hand, it's really hard to catch someone's eye when everyone's eyes are closed. such is the case when every man in the joint is ensconced in soul-searching, meditative bliss under the mysterious power of the north mississippi allstars.

i have a long standing gripe with phish heads. not that i have any particularly beef with phish or widespread panic or any of the other granola jam bands, but i've always been a bit annoyed at the way the throngs of trust-fund hippies freak out and follow them around in the country in their jeeps, as if it's actually some kind of respectable endeavor. don't get me wrong, i'm sure it's exhausting to obtain and smoke that much weed, but i just don't get it. what is entirely clear however, is that in the absence of phish or widespread panic the jam band cohort will cling for dear life to the next closest thing. suddenly the concerts of your favorite new orleans funk band or the quintessentially preppy dave matthews band are bursting at the seams with the entire under 30 population of colorodo.

as it turns out, this is an aging population, and now these people have jobs and mortgages and are smoking less pot and drinking more blue moon. they ALL wear that black fleece northface jacket with the padded elbows (i should be careful here since i also wear that jacket), but they just don't have the time or energy to be full time fanatics. instead, they show up to see the north mississippi allstars the park west where yet again they become hard-core followers. they know all the words, recognize all the songs by the 2nd chord (you know they do when you see the one fist shoot up into the air as an act of recognition), and they dance, dance, dance, remembering their glory days. the result of this is my finding myself surround on all sides but a group of awfully cute, well-to-do guys, and bopping their heads in unison, way too captivated by the music to notice me.

oh how the mighty have fallen.

zzzzzzzzzzzen

while my good blogmate is living the jet-set lifestyle of drunken debauchery in new orleans followed by more-respectable work-sponsored-conference drunken debauchery in florida, i am leading the slow life back here in chicago, trying to recover from a rather busy work week with a peaceful weekend at home. mb and i have been feeling a little stretched lately, and so planned a relaxing and healthy weekend.

i am learning, though, that a healthy lifestyle has its limits in a type-a-personality household. forget our breakfast-making on saturday - food pyramid was somewhat marred by mb's declaration "you know, i really feel that we are food artistes, and butter is our paintbrush" - or our evening argument about how many extra chocolate chips really need to be added to the top of the tollhouse pre-made chocolate chip cookie dough. it's more that, well, i tend to miss the point of relaxing activities. this morning at yoga class, i kept trying to get mb's attention to mock our mutual lack of ability to balance on one foot after the hip-workout of yesterday's snowshoeing. and when it came time to lie meditatively on the floor in between sitting poses, i was frustrated that mb's mat was just a little too far away for me to kick him so he could see me mouth the words "i'm bored. when's breakfast?" (it wasn't just my boredom... i saw him eyeing the clock every two minutes.) and later, while heading into old st pat's for mass, not only did i spend the hour engaged in the celebrated catholic tradition of spending the entire kneeling time scoping the rest of the room for potential dates for my blogmate (this is such non-novel territory i'll skip), but i picked up every possible piece of reading material at the back of the church. you know, to make every non-prayer second informative... this afternoon i am back at home trying to study a little, all curled up with tea and candle and cookies (ah yes, and book), and i'm checking my phone for messages every ten minutes.

i'm sure there's a place for centering one's mind in the present. i'm sure it would make me more effective and efficient and calm and such. but... wait, what was my concluding point again? i got distracted thinking about cookies.

remorse is for sissies

the i-love-new-orleans rant that follows is probably wildly inappropriate, in light of the fact that i'm allegedly here to "be with my family" and "honor the one-year anniversary of my grandmother's death..." but to be fair, i'm doing most of the drunken parade watching and frantic po-boy eating flanked by willing-accomplice parents (thus fulfilling the "spending time with my family" requirement), and the ceremony tomorrow will not be presided over by a rabbi or anything remotely resembling a rabbi, so much as by 6 to 10 denim-clad, vaguely solemn family members who are too busy grumbling about the bone chilling 40 degree temperature and supressing their smoldering resentment about various things to think, much less say anything meaningful about my recently departed grandmother. and i definitely pick eating, drinking, and hollering over playing tech guru for my parents. for one thing i don't really know enough about computers to be anyone's guru, and for another, even i can tell that their computer is jacked.

it's been an interesting mardi gras. post-katrina new orleans is more of a shrine to itself than it has ever been, well set up for a suddenly nostalgic ex-pat to the midwest like me. local microbrew is cheaper in any restaurant than a bottle of miller lite is at the avereage chi-town bar, and my parents have been eager to parade me through the various new eating and shopping establishments, where i've had my fill of fried oysters and post-storm satirical t-shirts (i.e. "new orleans, it's not beautiful being easy"...). speaking of parades, within an hour of my arrival i was headed to muses, the all-woman parade, armed with a squeeze bottle full of southern comfort (i misinterpreted my mother's disdainful looks as "why is my daughter an alcoholic?" when in fact she meant, "why can't you just fill your backpack with beer like a normal person?"). there we found my good friend lining up with the other pussyfooters, a crew of 30+ year-old marching dancers, flanked by their, ahem, pussyhandlers, all pissed off and excited because their rival crew, the cameltoe steppers had stolen their trademark colors (i swear i'm not making this up). the beauty of girl parades is that everyone catches lots of stuff without much self-degradation... not the case the next night at hermes, a more standard parade, where my father watched, fascinated, as i successfully sauntered up to the floats, again and again returning with armloads of light-up loot (the quality of mardi gras takings has improved markedly in the last few years - it's not even worth taking if it doesn't blink or have lip gloss or isn't a beer coozy). i'd feel bad about getting so blatantly tanked in front of my dad if he hadn't taken a shot of whiskey before we left the house.

as i was driving around, frantically in search of the krewe of o.a.k.s drunken meandering through uptown (picture a big elaborate pub crawl) so that i could once again march with the pussyfooters, remembering my former tradition of once a year debaucherous hook up (after said pub crawl) with my old middle school crush, it dawned on me that the most interesting aspect of all this year's mardi gras love fest has been recollection of a distinctly different era in my life - a time that was thinner, drunker, and, um, sluttier. i'd be more ashamed if it didn't make for such an impressively nostalgic romp around the city with my old friends, to the tune of, "omg did i ever tell you what i did after that party?"

new orleans: you could feel guilty, but why?

the freak show continues

when it comes to gym geeks, we've blogged, mocked, complained, pointed and laughed quite extensively over the past few months... and while we may never tire of this most amusing subject, perhaps the rest of you have. so i would like to present a variation on the theme, now that i've discovered that the opposite extreme also exists at the ratner center. in case you were wondering, yes, it's possible to be too hip for our gym.

yesterday i discovered a girl who a appeared to have gotten lost on her way shooting a jay-z video. i say that because only a hip hop (or maybe raggaeton) back up dancer would show her face anywhere in quite such a ridiculous getup, especially with that much pomp and circumstance. i apologize for those of you who don't enjoy fashion play-by-plays...

1) ass tight, ultra-low-rise, black capri-pants with a hot pink stripe down the side.
2) white knee socks, 70's style with the colored stripes at the top
3) black retro saucony running shoes
4) short, tight camouflage baby tee with the bottom and sleeves cut off
5) GIANT faux-tiffany (or perhaps real-tiffany) silver necklace with heart-shaped pendant
6) hair down, perfectly manicured with super blond highlights (brown underneath)
7) gobs of eye make up
8) weight-lifting gloves

as if she wasn't calling enough attention to herself, it seems that between sets she would come back into the locker room where she would pace back and forth in front of the mirror, staring at herself, no doubt perfecting the VERY scary expression on her face.

i was frankly terrified.

priorities

mb and i drove up to wisconsin this weekend for various wedding-planning-related items, the most awesome of which involved a trip to fox valley cheesecake company, located in the booming metropolis of omro. i'll summarize by saying that it pays to get married in the middle of nowhere- holy cheap cheesecake! so yummy. but even better was the excellent customer service - rodney (the owner, who we are sure is younger than we are) assured us that we could come and taste AS MANY TIMES AS WE NEED to make sure we're sure about the details, and was very willing to answer all of our questions. so far:

me: "we can taste as many times as we need?" *drool*
mb: "tell me about that 1950s mannequin in the corner of the room. does she make you uncomfortable?"

so we have signed a cake contract. and we have learned that yes, sometimes the store's decorative mannequin sometimes makes rodney uncomfortable, but that it was worse when she used to live in the back room and scare rodney into thinking she was a real person when the lights were off. this brings our actually-completed wedding tasks to cake, bobblehead animations of wedding party on website, and bridesmaid dresses for $78 apiece from nordstroms. note the conspicuous lack of actual contract for location or date. whatever. it's coming. the important part is that even if the wedding falls through, mb and i have agreed that before departing for the caribbean we will collect our 150 little cheesecake tarts and show up on a friend's doorstep to stuff ourselves silly with raspberry white chocolate and turtle goodness.

good evening, sports fans

maybe it's not just the undergrad nerds? mb and i went to check out a new neighborhood gym last night, and after a quick warm-up on the treadmills (during which mb decided he had to lap me on *stationary treadmills* - honestly, who is that competitive???) we headed over to the weights. there was the usual throng of big guys admiring their own arms and preening in the mirrors, which i know is standard. but who was the guy grunting and shouting under the strain of the AB BALL??? now that's just not that hard core. i don't like doing ab workouts, but that's just silly.

on a sports-related note, to some of our favorite male blog readership: what is up with getting the ncaa tickets? jo-na would like to attend with you. especially as one of us lives within walking-ish distance to the united center.

hidden treasures

some people might say that it's silly to fly half way around the country to a new city and not leave the hotel. but those people probably wouldn't have a bottle of southern comfort and a giant mardi gras king cake in their room. they might remind me that there must be things do in nashville , and there's definitely nothing going on at the sheraton music city that doesn't happen in any hotel anywhere. those people have not, however, found themselves hanging out at the hotel bar drinking jack daniels (they make it here), discovering that there's a talent scounting conference going on in this very hotel. if they knew that, they'd also know that our seat from the bar afforded us an excellent view of the parade tired, emotionally spent amateur models (or even better their mothersr) sneaking out for a drink and cigarette. they also wouldn't have found that they could just follow one of these people back into the ballroom, where they would just be able to sit inconspicuously in the back, frankly intoxicated watching the runway walk of at least 100 anorexic 15 year olds sauntering around stage, trying desperately to get that bitchy turn on the catwalk down (we practiced in our room later - it's not that hard).

if you'll excuse me, i need to get back to the room so i can eat some king cake, drink some so-co, and figure where in this town one can eat BBQ and watch new orleans spank chicago. geaux saints!

ode to the undergrads taking up the gym equipment last wednesday afternoon

oh, little undergrad, with your scrawny self and your shiny tracksuit and your grunting and flailing and clanging the weights together with your efforts. how you wanted to look big and tough; i saw you struggle mightily with those 60 pounds, not stopping to consider that your poor form might limit your weight training prowess.

and oh, even scrawnier undergrad, with your moppy uncut hair and your sleepy drool on the left elbow of the chest press as your slack jaw rests on the machine rather than actually lifting anything. i hope you had peaceful dreams of nietzche and schrodinger.

oh, high-topped black basketball shoes and the black socks that accompany you... how happy i am that finally you have found a home where your fashion statement is not stigmatized, but rather is celebrated by the pasty white calves that love them so. the peasant dresses and military jackets with whom you associate are waiting patiently in the locker room for your return.

who needs magazines on the stationary bike? i mock because i love, my friends.

bar hopping for bottom-feeders

it was a long-anticipated weekend... and now i don't think n. will ever be seen with me in public ever again. ever.

it's not that i had high expectations for the bars on southport. in fact, when offering up our watering hole options i did, in fact, describe them as "small non-descript irish bar" and "big non-desccript irish bar." killing time in a smoky, crowded, aging frat boy bar woulnd't be so bad if the aging frat boys weren't still so obviously younger than us... and the musical mantra of this kind of establishment wasn't the non-descript folky irsh late 90s cover band. when it comes to lofty music taste i am, obviously, all talk. i may appreciate indie rock, but i'm not exactly a believer. and i just don't that sad bastard music is ever the right answer (for that you can listen to the fray or coldplay or U2- not nearly as painful). so it was frankly awful, but at least it was funny and we could sing along - or at least m and i thought so. n. was too busy trying to teleport himself back to wicker park, and the clientele was just to young to find any nostalgic value in "closer to fine."

then it was on to the buffy sing-a-long. in the back of my head, i always knew it would be a geek infested circus, and had the presence of mind to buy tickets ahead - a move without which i wouldn't even have been able to stand in the line that wrapped all the way around the block. i'd envisioned a small throng of goth kids, some sci fi dweebs, and handful of out-of-place stragglers like us - not the hoards of people, who honestly looked pretty normal... until we got inside. standing outside with their coats and confirmation numbers i really thought these people looked like garden-variety yuppies, but once we were all settled inside and the show started i realized that they were exactly the kind of vampire-obsessed weirdos i'd dreaded, masquerading as normal people.

i spent saturday recovering from my late-night outing. later i went to an unusually crowded avenue tavern to watch the saints win their first ever playoff game, and then found myself back on southport, at a medium-sized nondescript irish bar (its black facade with gold lettering not being at all helpful in distinguishing it from every other bar on the block). there were, of course, aging frat boys, and there was, of course, a non-descript folky irish late 90s cover band. and that's where i drew the line - let 'em bastardize dave matthews, i don't care, but "don't you forget about me" is off limits.

bender

a few months ago we ran a piece on hangover movies which, in my humble estimation, went over really well. less well received (but much more entertaining) have been my blogmate's witty and sardonic digs at indie rockers and the people who love them.

my relationship with indie rock (and with hangovers) is complicated. i feel i should resist, but i can't. ultimately it's unavoidable; if you have a vague aspirations of coolness, but really don't want to work that hard it's the way to go. i'll leave it at that, since i just convinced n to join me at the buffy sing-along and i don't want to piss him off (how much would it suck to go to the midnight showing of "once more with feeling" alone?).

so i offer my nominations for reigning best hangover music and open the floor to discussion:

franz ferdinand
modest mouse
the killers

aud lang syne

perhaps new year's resolutions are not the product of insightful reflection, so much as they result from the new year's day hangover and the self-loathing that accompanies it. ugly, tired, nauseated- of course we feel compelled to change our lives.

at 8AM i found myself wide awake and feeling suspiciously fine - i seized the moment, hopped out of bed, cleaned up and did the (many, many) dishes (that's what i get for deciding i was classy enough to serve drinks out of real glassware). i finished just as the insidious feeling of impending misery was setting in, and had myself curled up under a blanket on the couch with club soda, leftover spinach and artichoke dip, and the PBS brittish mystery drama marathon just in time. hours later i woke up to that all-too-familiar searing pain behind my right eye. let's be honest- there was no way i was getting away with five dirty gin martinis without feeling this way.

given how muddled i felt, i'm surprised i managed to draw any meaningful conclusions about anything today, but i did finally understand that day-after bloody marys aren't actually a hangover remedy, so much as they are a gesture of resilience. as good as i mixed them this year, it's not about how they taste- it's about how cool they make us feel.

i also found time (and consciousness) to find more fault with yahoo avatars. there are no dark circles under the eyes, no trashed apartments, no disheveled hair and rumpled clothes. i understand that it's weird that my avatar is always crying - i'm not really that despondent of a person. but it's the closest i can get to the way i'm actually feeling, which is just plain wretched.

new years' resolutions?

got any?

since meeting my college roommate, i have always adopted her yearly new years' resolution: have more fun. it's nice - i never have to feel bad about resolutions like exercise more, eat healthier, be nicer, and so on. but i can think of a few that should go on the list this year:

1. stop calling blogmate every five minutes to tell her "i hate everything."

this is hard, because we've had a stressful few work weeks, but for 2007 i will try to substitute with some other more benign cliche. "it's the right thing to do" in particular works well and can be employed in events where i am asked to do something i don't like (in place of "i hate everything") as well as at the end of hard days such as yesterday when my blogmate asks me, "so can we drink tonight?" much more versatile. i can work on this.

2. get out of board game rut.

in college mb would bring a cribbage board on vacations, and set up in front of various non-midwestern scenery (eiffel tower, castles, etc.) he shared this love with ck, my blogmate and me in st. lucia last spring, and since then we enjoy bringing our somewhat-obscure little card game out to bars. when my blogmate and i play, we kind of hope to attract the attention of some young male bartender. unfortunately, every time we've tried this we've only attracted the wrong bartender, like the one with four kids or the short one with bad teeth *sigh*. so i'm thinking of expanding our bar-game base. i was secretly hoping for dominos for christmas, but no such luck. oh well, an excuse to go shopping for myself once the checking account recovers.

i did receive games over the holidays, which is awesome! but mb, butterknife, b's husband and i demonstrated recently that just the receipt of more gifts is not enough to break the cycle. we have spent the last several holidays together playing "apples to apples" for hours on end, and the game is fun but so addictive that we're all a bit burned out from last year. i had purchased for butterknife a much-desired trivial pursuit 80s edition, and we tried mightily to stop playing apples to apples in favor of the new game - which lasted for about 20 minutes until we realized that although we are children of the 80s, we have no idea which former reagan aide said which memorable thing. so we switched to my new present from ck, a more promising game called "quickword," which is a series of word puzzles kind of like boggle. anyone who knows butterknife's husband and me knows that our vocabularies are substantial, and we were quite excited about getting to stop feeling so lame about the 80s and start kicking ass with the word games. but no such luck - total word block. mb, who spends a great deal of effort pretending he only knows little words, was all over this one, with entries like "surreptitiously," while the rest of us could only produce "so." after another 20 minutes we guiltily looked around the table and went right back to apples to apples, which we promptly played until midnight when there were no cards left and we were all falling asleep at the table. doh. maybe the new games need more booze? i'm willing to work on this.

3a. Finish new awesome website.
3b. Stop working on new awesome website (it's for our wedding) and start working on actual wedding.

i won't post the actual link here, but email me if you want to see pictures of our wedding party and parents as bobbleheads. mb and i not having cable or bunny ears for the tv has resulted in some extra free time which we have used to learn more about photoshop and making animated gifs. but don't go looking at the "wedding info" section, because it's the only blank part. perhaps for 2007 we'll do something about that, hopefully before we decide to learn how to make flash movies.

accepting additions to the resolution list now - either for yourself or for me. come on - it's the right thing to do. :)

hippie holidays

i hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season, that nobody is struggling to fill last-minute holiday requests like "please, honey, would you mind picking up some butane for my kitchen torch so that i don't have to lie to my grandmother when she asks me how i'm enjoying my creme brulee set from last year?", and that everyone's home decorating is done to your satisfaction.

me?
i have picked up the butane.
but the holiday decorating is getting out of hand.

it started out simply enough, with a plan to host an appetizer party a few weeks ago, and with the realization that our apartment doesn't really have enough space to hold guests, appetizers, and a tree, we decided to scrap the tree and decorate our free-standing bike rack for a very merry bike-mas. it actually turned out great - faux pine garland and white lights strung in triangle fashion with a few ornaments here and there, presents at the bottom of the bikes. the bike-mas tree was a hit of the party, second only to mb's re-creation of his mother's famous beef smokie chubbies (for the uneducated, that's mini-hot dogs wrapped in crescent rolls).

add to the bike-mas festivities mb's beloved "zwarte piet" dolls, which means "black pete" in dutch; they are the friendly but politically-incorrect-in-america traditional christmas elves in holland. i'll summarize their presence: mb loves them. i love hiding them. so ensues the now-annual holiday tradition of each of us taking turns hiding the zwarte piet dolls in each others' stuff.

all fine so far. but now add ck's much-loved holiday gift to mb: wind-up hopping lederhosen. mb loves them, and i also love them. we gave them a prominent home on the dresser right next to the small lego "little jo-na" that mb gave me a few years ago (it really looks like a teeny lego replica of me; weird.) but last night i headed for bed to find the lederhosen sitting on my pillow next to mb. this gives me the feeling that the holiday festivities are taking over just a little.

i can't help but feel like my life is becoming a little bit too animated. mb and i are generally good-natured and happy people, but we realize that there are limits. for example, this weekend we watched a video on the life of ram dass (some guy who was a harvard professor with timothy leary who got booted from harvard after they started running experiments where they tried to create a placebo-controlled trial of hallucinogens to stimulate religious experience). when they did the segment where ram dass brings all the hippies back to his father's farm near boston while they all skip around in a big circle and bathe naked in the stream, we decided that we are not *that* good-natured. and last night, when we were reading the travel-blog of mb's hippie college friends who left their jobs to take a two-month stint camping around the country with no particular plans or destinations, hearing about their enthusiastic descriptions of the "energy" of the desert and the good vibes of parking lots despite entering said parking lots forgetting that their bikes were on top of the car (oops - ouch), we coined a new term:

some people are so good-natured that you just want to mock them.

so my hippie-mocking cynicism balances the take-over of the lederhosen a little, i think.

right?

glass half full

i won't lie. since thanksgiving i've definitely done my share of sulking. for one thing, self-loathing is a fairly distasteful experience, and since i attempted the turkey trot knowing full well that i was on the brink of serious injury, i can only blame myself for the searing pain and the limping and the crutches. so i hate the hobbling, and i hate myself for doing it.

that said...

there's something to be said for having a stress fracture.

that i appear to have done this to myself while running, or even better, while attempting a 10 mile bike/sprint suggests some sort of dedicated and accomplished athleticism. i'd even go so far as to say "hard core." no one has to know that said bike/sprint was completely out of my league.

and i'm told by kl and dh that i look cute when i'm so vulnerable and pathetic.

so i get to be badass and adorable?! i can't lose!

still woozy under the effects of all the attention, sympathy, and looks of admiration, i decided to take it one step further and go on my first ever helicopter transport of tiny sick baby. nevermind that i almost shrieked in terror while in the MRI machine, being fearless is fun, and flight doc just sounds cool.

i probably don't have to tell you that the helicopter experience was somewhat hair-raising, what with my overwhelming sense that we were about to fall right out of the sky. i also probably don't need to inform any of you that no amount of badass injury or life-saving can will save you when what you need is interpersonal know-how.

it figured that the other doc on the flight was someone i've known peripherally for a couple of years, and that i've had to be a little icy with him several times in the past, as he constantly feels the need to make veiled references to a brief romantic stint that once transpired between me and a friend of his (more adventures in self-loathing, but that's a story for another day).

it came out in small talk while in flight (over the headsets, mind-you) that he'd recently broken up with his rather serious and live-in ex-girlfriend, and of course i got roped into admitting that no, i wasn't seeing anyone either. flight doc made some "oh, so should we catch a movie later?" crack that was just weird enough to make me a little uneasy (since i was already practically sitting on his lap in the tiny helicopter cabin). not knowing what else to do, i gave a a really weak, "oh, you don't want me, i'm damaged goods," and started talking about my stress fracture.

i almost got away with it, but as we were landing the PILOT called me out on this not so slick maneuver, again over the radio for everyone to hear. "jo-na, am i imagining things or did he just ask you out and you said something about your leg?" again i failed to be quick-witted at the moment it really counted, and muttered something about the two of us going way back, and was left limping along behind to the stretcher, feeling like a complete tool.

i would be mortified by this experience, except that it offers the chance to work my stress fracture, my helicopter baby rescue, and the fact that i once dated a 5'4" nicaraguan man all into one, convenient, self-promoting story.

it's like my boss always says: never be sad about your data