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...

"thank god we can choose our friends"

as most of you know (or have easily extrapolated), my blogmate and i are pretty good friends. to the extent that i'm a fairly well-adjusted person, i can often credit my emotional well-being to her willingness to listen to the details of my life as told in play-by-play form, and from her i get all sorts of validation... or at least distraction. it's not really her style to talk me off yet another ledge by telling me that i'm a good person- her brand of friend-therapy is usually to derail me from my self-destructive rants by taking me shopping, or by finding my trademark self-deprecation so funny that i, in turn, at least feel good about my budding sense of humor.
and while she was pretty apologetic in giving me athletic socks and fudge for my birthday this year, i actually thought that this was a wonderful constellation of gifts and was yet again thankful to have such a considerate blogmate... especially when there was a second round of birthday present a few weeks later involving a reversible strawberry purse.
it was thus with great delight that i presented her with her birthday gifts this afternoon. on the surface it was standard stuff: a book and a CD. for the record i think that book + CD is not only a good present, but kind of a classy one, and i have used the synergistic power of these items to impress a few (now ex-) boyfriends over the years. but as you also know, thoughtful and classy aren't really my strong suits... instead, my blogmate is now the proud owner of an out-of-print (but available on amazon) sociology book (somebody's dissertation) that showcases the goings on at our very own valois (that's "vuh loise") "see your food" cafeteria on 53rd street AND "italian dance anthems + euro hits," which i had unwrapped, listened to, and burned before i gave it to her.

among other things, i think we might be getting to the bottom of our collective musical bankruptcy.

blogger in the big apple

here i am in brooklyn heights, once again wishing that i was as cool as everyone around me. i'm now convinced that no matter who you and where you're from, you always feel like a dork when you're in new york (i really wish that didn't rhyme that way). people in this town just look better, wear better clothes, hang out in better bars, have a better assortment of deep fried foods at their neighborhood festivals.
transiently, at least, i've felt like i was getting the hang of it (or that it was just rubbing off). after a satisfying day of wandering around the city, my friend mbk and i met my brother at an unbelievably cute bar in the village (exposed brick, good music, waitress that was so pretty and stylish that i couldn't stop staring at her- although that may have been because she'd apparently forgotten to wear pants). even my brother has become trendy- i'm not clear on how he's making his hair do that or how he's pulling off such a vintage-y look when i know that he only shops the clearance rack at old navy. we had dinner at a vietnamese restaurant in chinatown (somehow i've randomly ended at the same vietnamese restaurant in chinatown three times) and, with weird fried sesame rice dough balls stuffed with red bean paste in hand, dove headfirst into the mayhem that was the 78th annual san genarro festival in little italy. the streets were lined with all sorts of interesting vendors- rosaries, fried oreos, pope figurines, fried twinkies, faux-lv purses, sweet breads. we were very disappointed by the much-anticipated "shoot the freak" game, which turned out to be a stationary guy in a protective suit getting paint-balled by little kids. equally dissappointing were the world's smallest woman and the world's smallest horse.
i'm leaving new york with one of those uber-stylish necklaces bought from a street vendor in times square (that's remarkably similar to something my grandmother wears) and a $16 shiseido eyelash curler (bought at the shiseido outlet in chinatown- it should have been $25). that i'm making these kinds of purchases suggests to me that i've crossed some sort of line into fashion-land. the lessons i've learned are these: 1) it's all about accessories and 2) i shouldn't be allowed to buy anything within 2 weeks of meticulously pouring through the harper's bazaar fall fashion double-issue.

i want to be a non-conformist, just like everybody else

south park last night had stan joining the goth kids following his break-up with wendy. ("dude, if you want to be a non-conformist you have to drink coffee like us...") today, in the midst of a long-overdue but typically ridiculous adventure involving my blogmate and i driving in circles in the north suburbs trying to find suitably low-brow lunch in an office park, we reviewed our own phases of music identity, and mostly why they'd failed. highlights?

1) consensus that we'd both tried to do the phish/widespread panic jam band scene, but while we liked the music on cd, didn't like the live scene enough, mostly because we weren't high enough, and that it takes too much pot for a newbie to be high enough to enjoy phish solos.
2) consensus that we'd both tried the raver look, but while we both enjoyed the baggy jeans and little dr. seuss t-shirts, that i was vaguely surprised to discover that the look seemed to come with bad techno music, and that my blogmate was unwilling to drop acid and lose hours of brain control just in order to wear cute t-shirts.
3) me reassuring my blogmate that i never really was a goth, but that i had lots of friends who were goths, and that my college roommate and i spent lots of saturdays making fun of them as sport.
4) both of us going through a surprisingly angst-less nine inch nails phase.

fast forward to current musical tastes:
5) my blogmate's desire to be a better music critic, but unwillingness to spend time learning about new bands, and resultant embarrassment when around our much more music-cool friends m and n.
6) my desire to like indie rock, but as i eloquently stated, "my problem with indie rock is that i don't like it..." and "i kind of just want to listen to happy music like jack johnson without the embarrassment of actually liking jack johnson."

so our tastes seem to be informed by our sloth.
enter butters, also from last night's episode: "i'd rather be a crying little pussy than a faggy goth kid."

but while we may be lazy on the discovery forefront, there's no end to how much energy we can spend hating mainstream trends. i was pleased to discover:

7) i don't love coldplay x&y. it sounds like old u2 but more boring. i do, however, love the vh1 i-love-the-whatever-decade episode where two guys hypothesize that everything looks more dramatic when you play coldplay in the background, and promptly re-enact a) touching each other, and b) touching each other to coldplay in a slow-mo gay-love-scene demonstration. as my blogmate said, "coldplay makes great homoerotic background music."

so. since i think our readership has more energy and taste than we do, we hereby invite suggestions for new phases of music and artists we should like. criteria? a) we are cynical but not angry. b) no broken-down-and-self-important (i.e. counting crows). c) we accept "barbecue" as a valid genre.

thank you for your support.

you had to be there?

while i find the intricacies of my love life (or lack thereof) endlessly fascinating, i've had to accept that this topic probably isn't nearly as interesting to our loyal blog readership, and i'm trying to cut back. in making this decision i've discovered that once i've talked about boys, shopping, and beer, i'm pretty much tapped out. having exhausted my repertoire but remaining steadfast in my refusal to let the blog die, i'm taking on a new approach: blogging about events i didn't witness and know almost nothing about:

as a good number of you already know, my blogmate's brother got hitched to butterknife last weekend. as a preamble, i'll tell you that i only met my blogmate's brother (whom i have no choice but to dub mbmb until i remember what other name we use for him) once over icecream (at the sadly out-of-business ice dreams) a couple of years ago, and have never met butterknife. nonetheless, i've been hanging over my blogmate's every word for months as the wedding plans have unfolded. come to think of it, i seem to recall being kept pretty current on the ring-buying and proposal as well. anyway, as my blogmate is out on yet another outdoor adventure weekend (it seems i have wedding planning and outdoor envy) i decided to take on the rendering of the wedding story.

my personal favorite anecdote involves one "great uncle father bob" who made a last minute announcement that he'd be joining the priest up on altar during the ceremony, resulting in butterknife's rather flamboyant entry into the church which involved what i can only guess is more profanity than is customary in a place of worship.

apparently butterknife was able to settle down a little after "chillin' in the bride get ready room" and proceeded to have a very nice wedding in spite of the throng at the altar and the occasional outburst from the audience. i'm told that the bride and groom landed on a somewhat whimsical priest who takes the fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants approach to wedding ceremonies (i.e. rehearsals are for sissies) and managed to grossly miscalculate the handling of communion.

from my blogmate's recounting i can also tell you that there was a posse of rowdy engineers from mbmb's days as a rowdy engineer, the expected number of terse, funny comments from my blogmate's terse, funny dad, and the rather interesting cultural interaction that results from hard-core italian meets hard-core wisconsin dutch. for those of you who are neither one of those (present company included), rest assured that we're all included, even if we are lumped into great-uncle father bob's culturally-sensitive wedding-prayer category of "whatever."

i'm very proud of several of the wedding guests, most notably m for showing up with her sassy new haircut and managing to get good and drunk, n for managing to work bon jovi lyrics into his best man speech, and my good blogmate, who managed not to fall flat on her face in her uber-stylish but cripplingly high-heeled custom-made, sparkly steve maddens.

neither rain nor sleet nor hail

on the way home from work today i passed a postal police car and amused myself most of the way home trying to imagine what sort of postal emergency would warrant the use of such a vehicle. i understand that there are all sorts of legitimate postal crimes and that mail fraud is a very serious offense but it's hard for me to picture the elaborate and highly dangerous mail heist that would involve the use of lights and sirens and high-speed chases.

i sniggered all the way down lakeshore drive until i passed soldier field which is currently being used as the staging grounds for the american idol trials. not being of the artisitc persuasion myself, maybe i don't understand what it is to be an aspiring vocalist in search of glamour, fame, and oodles of money- but as i passed the throng of american idol potentials wrapped all the way around a football stadium (i think to the tune of 50,000) it occurred to me that maybe i'm the odd one out.

to wrap up my thursday afternoon ponderings i have to ask myself: wasn't one nauseating reese witherspoon romantic comedy that shared the name of an overplayed pop song enough?

don't buy me some peanuts or cracker jacks, because they'll get stuck in my teeth

my apologies to all real baseball fans out there. but last night my blogmate and i scored free tickets along with two co-workers to watch the cubs play the cincinnati reds at wrigley field in what will be the most amazing seats i will ever see in my lifetime: 6th row behind home plate. and how did we celebrate the occasion? old style in plastic cups and the most intelligent baseball discourse i'm sure home plate has ever heard:

"sooo... three strikes and you're out... and then three outs until the next team is up... and then when both teams are done, that's an inning, right?"
"wait, which one's derrek lee?"
"aaawwww.... oh, wait, that was a good thing! yay!"
"hold on; i'm trying to see if derrek lee is cute. i can't see his face..."
"no, it's not his face that's cute..."
"does anyone think it's weird that they all wear white uniforms when they slide in the dirt?"
"does anyone think their uniforms look like pajamas?"
"does anyone know if the uniforms are a shirt and pants or all one piece?"
"hey, you said you didn't care about baseball! you're totally watching."
"how can i tell if it's a ball or a strike?"
"how can i tell who's winning?"
"i'm glad we're behind the net. i'm afraid of fly balls."
"did you know garciaparra is married to mia hamm?"
"girl, i know that part!"
"twinset saw them together at bijam...."
"do you think mia hamm is here?"
"quick! has anyone seen any celebrities? it's my dream to watch baseball next to john cusack."

all you can tolerate

mb and i spent labor day weekend in the upper peninsula of michigan, enjoying a fun few days of mountain biking, hiking and swimming in a very wavy lake superior. i'm sure i could find something in me about nature or getting away from the city or something, but instead let me focus briefly on one of the best things the northwoods has to offer: the all-you-can-eat buffet.

coming in at number three for funniest all-you-can-eat: friday night fish fry. while quite welcome after twenty miles of biking dirt roads along cliffs, there's something funny about a whole table with nothing but piles of unmarked battered [presumably] fish. i didn't care really what it was after being outside all day, but it's still a little disturbing.

number two goes to the restaurant next door's breakfast buffet, which advertised a selection of hot foods plus a "fruit bar." excellent, we thought. it would be nice to eat something fresh. but "fruit bar" turned out not to hold actual fruit, but four different colors of fruit whip (you know, that cream stuff with colored pieces of some kind?), lemon pudding, and grapes.

but solidly above the pack was the new lunch buffet near my parents' place, which i attended on returning to their house to prepare for my brother's wedding. $5.45 buys you a ticket to a chinese-japanese-mongolian-barbecue-dim-sum-sushi-american-italian smorgasbord. you know you're dining in style when a glittering lite-brite-esque picture of an eagle on a mountain hovers over ham-and-pickle sushi next to 8 options of greasy chicken pieces next to tater tots next to egg rolls in which nobody told the chef you can't substitute sauerkraut for regular cabbage, all topped off with a soft-serve ice cream machine.

mb said it best: the reason we got higher educations and left our small hometowns was so we could come back and look down our noses at them for sport... but we don't really want to lose token-hick-in-the-city status either. so i think we have to employ selective memory (if the first buffet wasn't very good, why did we think the next two would be better?) and a love of the ridiculous. if we keep putting ourselves in all-you-can-eat country, we can enjoy our assumed superiority with statements like "really, mother, you must know about pedicures" and "what do you mean, there's no starbucks or jamba juice for the next 100 miles???" and when we come back to the city we can claim disgust over the unhealthy food we just ate over some butt-firming pseudo-yoga (thanks, blogmate!) before deciding we're better than the yuppie frills of the city and going in search of a city fish fry and cheap beer. good thing we don't mind contradictions.

memories of portia

my college roommate had a hedgehog named portia, who was adorable but angry and dumb, a bad combination. she used to run away from us to the corners of the room, where she promptly got confused under the radiator, rolled up in a little ball, but then was too big to get out from under the radiator. she stayed there one time for hours until she figured out that if she would relax she could escape. kind of a live chinese finger trap, i guess. anyway, in honor of portia, here's a blogpet for us. he even gets stuck in the corner of the screen:

adopt your own virtual pet!

hair of the up-dog

i've allowed the accumulation of an unfortunate amount of blog backlog, so i'm putting a couple of blog projects on hiatus.
one is my thus far unproductive attempt to put some sort of humorous spin on the hurricane aftermath. not there's anything funny about it really, but as a new orleans native i was able to make some fairly amusing observations about my parents as they settled into their newfound refugee status.

yet unblogged is the account of my adventurous, pre-hurricane weekend in atlanta. in and of itself, it was the uneventful visiting of friends, punctuated by the expected amount of drinking and silliness, and the unexpected morning of frantic parent-finding, as we realized that all of our families were in mid-evacuation by the time we dragged our hungover selves out of bed.
more surprsing was my realization that i do so many things with only marginal proficiency. one of my atlanta friends kicked off the weekend by taking me to her saturday morning power yoga class, an experience that turned out to be quite humbling. having only been exposed to butt-firming pseudo-yoga, i was totally unprepared for the pain and misery that accompanies doing actual yoga in a 90 degree room. i think the instructor (guru?) had a hard time keeping a straight face.
that night we moved on to another trendy activity... and i got my ass handed to me once again, this time by salsa dancing. let's be clear that i never pretended to be particularly skilled when it came to yoga or salsa, but i knew enough lingo to have convinced not only my friends, but apparently myself that i could at least fake it for a couple of hours.
i stand corrected.

a small, balding cultural phenomenon?

every girl attracts their own brand of weirdo. for example, dwtacc draws every dark-haired medium-skinned guy with an accent in the chicagoland area, because they all think she's their particular brand of ethnic. i am much less exotic - i am a magnet for vaguely nerdy short men with receding hairlines. not that they're trying to ask me out - they all want to tell me about their dreams for a fancy car.

this started back in college when i drew the short stick at work and had to go to the copy room with the weird guy to make new brochures or something. he kicked things off with a very disturbing beavis-and-butthead cornholio impression (i'd like to see you keep your composure when you've never seen beavis and butthead before and suddenly a small man yanks his shirt above his head and starts screeching about his bunghole), and then, seeing my discomfort, proceeded to convince me of his classiness by telling me all about the money he planned to make, the fancy car he would drive, and the fine home he would own, once he became a rich lawyer. since i was in the middle of a bunch of rural sociology classes run by hippies that taught things like sustainable agriculture and cooperative business practices, this didn't get him very far. later, when i moved to chicago, i was at dinner with a friend when he started, again, telling me about the car he would buy after his promotion. when i didn't look impressed enough, he asked me "wouldn't you rather date someone with a nice car?" i tried to explain that i was uncomfortable with the idea of spending so much money on a luxury item and was much happier taking the bus out for burgers, he just looked confused. more recently, at work one of my co-workers parked himself next to my desk and started telling me how much he hated minivans, and hoped to buy either an suv or little sports car. unprompted, he told me "i feel like someone's car should be sexy and support their lifestyle."

this is becoming a disturbing trend. i'm not surprised that short balding men want compensatory cars, or that any men hope electronics ownership can bring them sex... i just want to know why they all want to tell me about it. it can't be because of my deep appreciation for cars; my own colorful auto history has consisted of a 1979 chevy impala wagon with am radio and no heat, and my current 96 plymouth whose check-engine light warns me regularly that i am about to have unscheduled stops in random places throughout the midwest. it can't be because they want to date me, or i would hope they wouldn't share their whole m.o. can someone help me think of a way to remove the "please, share your thinly veiled desperation" sticker from my forehead?

the symco society pages (aka i never met a latte i didn't like)

has anyone ever read those reeeeally small-town newspapers? or columns about some neighboring village with no real news to report except blurbs like "mr. and mrs. fred jones were at the home of violet and jack fisher last evening for a game of bridge"? it occurs to me that our blog reads a little like that... with that guiding principle in mind, a tale of two girls trying to run errands on a thursday afternoon:

my good friend twinset and i had both finished work early on thursday, and since i'd been on long work shifts recently and had some amount of errands to do for my brother's upcoming wedding, she kindly agreed to be my chauffeur around the city doing what girls love best (buying things). it seemed like a fun idea...

in retrospect, twinset and i firmly believe that the whole thing went bad the minute she tried to drive down 53rd street toward martin luther king dr. to take locals to little italy instead of lake shore drive. lesson #1: don't EVER drive down 53rd st in hyde park. it's a commercial strip where, for some reason, NOBODY is in a hurry and EVERYONE double-parks or just stops in intersections to wave to their friends.

ten minutes later, we had made it ten blocks and were on our way. we arrived finally in little italy for the successful procurement of candied almonds for wedding favors, plus cannoli and chocolate treats for twinset and me. perfect, we thought. now just some lattes for the road and we'll be on our way. lesson #2: although you might think a local italian bakery is a better place to buy lattes than starbucks, you would be wrong. twinset and i are not coffee snobs, and have both been known to drink whatever swill comes our way. but this was foul. my dad taught me that no self-respecting italian drinks cappuccino after 10 am, so either this was passive-aggressive vengeance for us ordering the wrong drink at the wrong time, or the milk had been sitting out since 10am cappuccino hour.

latte-less but still determined to have a good afternoon, we promptly got stuck in traffic a few more times, punctuated by twinset telling me things like "i just know this leads to armitage" only to find ourselves in industrial parks, and eventually found our way to the last stop - trader joe's. lesson #3: don't tell the driver of the car anything like "see, [twinset], i'm so glad i'm with you! all of these things might have been frustrating, but as long as we don't let it get to us it's fine..." because that statement might precipitate, say, running said car alongside a cement pole and getting big scratches in the nice clean paint job. doh.

but a good time was still had by all. i got my errands done, twinset determined that her husband would never see the car scratches before she got to the body shop, and we laughed over her stories of finding herself at the gym on a treadmill next to one of chicago's national celebrities. anyone who can describe said unnamed celebrity as "my GOD, he smells DELICIOUS even after he's done running!" can't be too mad at me for the inconvenience of the afternoon. i hope.

the bottom of the barrel

i came home from work the other day feeling particularly defeated and decided to curl up on the couch in my favorite pink pajama bottoms to drown my sorrows in three-buck-chuck and spend some quality time with the gilmore girls. i eyed the half-empty bottle of wine on the counter and weighed my options. sure i could do the civilized thing and use a glass, but i'd finally finished washing a giant pile of dishes. for a second it seemed reasonable- nobody would have to know that i'd sunk so low. i'm not sure how long i stood there in the kitchen having an internal debate about whether i was ready to give in and become a completely barbaric pig, but i somehow managed to come to my senses and decided that if i was going to drink alone on the couch at 6:30 on a weekday the least i could do was to use stemwear.

the magnets that hold everything together

my fridge used to be a testament to my young hip life. it chronicled all the fun i was having with my young hip friends and consisted mostly of pictures of us in varying states of intoxication, interspersed with racy commercial art and postcards from the exotic places we were all traveling. but times change, and now my fridge has become a shrine to those same friends' babies. not that they aren't the extraordinarily cute offspring of people who are very important to me... but it's getting a little ridiculous, given that i still function at the level of "ohmigod, billy asked me to the dance(!)" or, at best, "monsoon has $5 lychee martinis on wednesdays!"
i take a little solace in the apparent fact that my silly antics serve as a constant source of amusement to my blogmate, dwtacc, and twinset, who are willing to not only listen to me carry on about said topics, but often act as accomplices. for one thing, it makes me a feel a little better about my failure to evolve into adulthood... and "hey [n#4], a bunch of us are going out for beers tonight," requires me to fabricate entourage on short notice.