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bleeding from the
the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay
american tabloid the odds white jazz la confidential ears
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7.31.2001
well, i fucked up again. i try to help and make things better and it just results in disaster. as usual. as always. (getting screamed at by your father online is at once comical and just as awful as when it is happening in person.)
tv tv tv tv. i took a long walk before y got home since i'd been cooped up in the apartment for days on end. walked down a bunch of side streets i hadn't visited before. it turns out there's a mental health clinic a few blocks away. and on a street called hospital ave (it's houses), i saw a wife pulling her husband in a wheelchair towards the house. he had bandages on his knee. he'd just had his leg amputated. what a strange time in your life, to have a limb one day and not have it the next. voluntarily, to a degree. makes me think of owen meany. but not exactly.
okay, this being in pjs thing is getting a little ridiculous, since we're coming up on 48 hours. i called the bowling alley again and talked to dave spragg the manager again and he again told me that he was waiting on "vermont" and that he had just spoken with "colchester" and they should be able to tell him who he's hiring by tomorrow. er, what? no interviews? just straight hire off the paper app? killer. shower. dress. chelby's? 7.30.2001
finally finished. guess it averages out to like $50/hr, which i guess i can't complain about, i guess. still, severe brain blownage happening. on the plus side, i can point you to this and this, both of which renew my faith that the nba was, is and always will be FANtastic. and mr fab's buddy matt forgot my name within an hour, yet says i should call his editor to talk about freelancing for hour or sports detroit. i haven't decided whether this is pro or con.
nba trivia sucks a big fat one. as does procrastination. sigh.
7.29.2001
oh why the christ do i feel so vomitous. back in nh. so, yeah. gabe came home yesterday, which was rad, and we went to the tigers game, which was also rad in that katie banks and turner and matt went too but not rad in that the tigs taunted us with a possible minirally late in the game and then bagged it. but copa was fun, and suckage of katie banks ditching out early to go to work was mitigated by post-game coneys and cokes at laffy. (yes. more coneys. i'm going to cholesterol hell for sure.) mr fabulous also ditched out on the game because he decided to get his wisdom teeth out friday and then glasses on yesterday, and i considered going out to meet him in a2 for dinner but i was too ragged. gabe and i hung out at joshva's for a bit instead. and i think i fixed dad's fucking shittyass computer. poorly seated ram? i think so. before gabe came home i went with brian's mom to see the moeds, my old next door neighbors who moved to the ghetto side of the woods a year or so ago. it was perfect. i heart the moeds. this morning gabe took me to the airport and on the way we stopped at a breakfast place at orchard and 13 and waited the requisite half an hour for our party of four to be completed and eventually it was by mr fabulous, who i called chippy the entire time because of his post-wisdom teeth chipmunk cheeks, and his fabulous friend matt who is accessibly cute and works for hour detroit magazine, which is too lame to have a website and has a business card that, for what it is, would make bateman proud. so, a good morning. i won't see mr fab before he moves to la, but i've informed him that he must have a couch in his la la land pad with anderson by november, because i'm planning to crash with them for a week or so nov/dec territory. woof. plane was late. flight was bumpy. the old man next to me seemed fairly aware that i was fucking freaking out and twitchy with every bump but didn't do anything about it, and the guy on the other side of me was named wendell (i saw his ticket, but your talents lie elsewhere) and snored the whole time except for a while when he turned on his computer and simultaneously i heard destiny's child/bootylicious and i thought it was coming from his speakers but it turned out it was coming from the teenybopper across the aisle's headphones which makes sense since the snorer was in construction as far as i could tell. wendell. and the old man on the other side had a nytimes magazine and he thumbed through it and put it aside and started taking pictures out the window and i could tell he was a flight-rube hick and when the flight ended the magazine was still in the seat pocket so i asked him "is that nytimes magazine yours?" and he was like "i don't know what that is.. it's a.. 'the new magazine'" (the cover image was blocking out the rest of the title and OH MY GOD WHAT A TURDBRAIN AMERICAN LEGION MESH HAT-WEARING GEEZER) and then he, i shit you not, turned around to i guess his buddy in the seat behind him and said "do you want this?" and passed the magazine back. like i was just asking about it for my health. (the buddy took it and shoved it in his seat pocket, of course, and since he was behind me there was no way i could grab it before disembarking. gah.) y picked me up, we went to see this shakespeare in the park thing in nashua where they were doing macbeth and i guess some guy from deka was in it but it was about as audible as the shtim nuptials and we decided to bag it after half an hour or so. last night i dreamed of teasing jana in seventh grade and then she was getting married and i was forced to write about all the horrible things i did to her then in a journal that was to be given to her on her wedding day and she had a sister named northern. i don't know why i have such latent guilt about things that are so far in the past. or why i can remember the exact makeup of our table in mrs brooks' seventh grade language arts/pat class of a double period, and how i am connected to everybody, and why i have these dreams so often when i so do not want to. lobster chowder, too watery. stomach, too nauseated. yeah, so. 7.28.2001
wedding. foo. took like an hour and a half to drive there on surface streets. josh and amy chauffered. couldn't hear the ceremony at all - it was outside, and although the weather was gorgeous, it was impossible to make out what was going on, except for brian's odd posturing while he read some best man poem. so now shtim is united in both law and mind, until death or divorce do them part. creepy. but acceptable. the wedding party was nice in that we were all together - for the last time, really, in like three years, since andrew has joined the peace corps and is going to the ukraine (?!) - and there was open bar all night, albeit weak. seth slow danced with me. bizarre. does not make him any less slimy/political. foo. wedding. 7.27.2001
as usual, dad left me a little project to do while he is out of town. and by little, i mean big and evil and annoying and make-me-sweat problem. he bought this new clone computer that keeps crashing. it's my job to figure out why. i'm so not in the mood. so i tried installing photoshop on it and it kept spontaneously rebooting, and then i wiped all the partitions and recreated them and win98 setup won't work, so i'm doing some down'n'dirty shit to this beast motherfucker right now. i've got about an hour and a half before i have to go shower and get ready for the wedding. blarg. currently the 12gig primary drive is formatting and it's going to take slightly longer than it would for a german shephard to fuck a chihuahua. waiting is such sweet sorrow. 7.26.2001
josh, amy and juliya are on their way over. we're having an antirehearsal dinner since we weren't invited to the real rehearsal dinner. actually, i'm probably the only one calling it an antirehearsal dinner. i'm not bitter about missing the real one - our food and drink (and company) will likely be vastly superior - i just think the antirehearsal dinner has a nice ring to it. like we're a bunch of subversives on the underground. i saw hedwig and the angry inch today at the star southfield. i haven't been there in forever, possibly since i moved away but i think less long ago than that, but certainly not within that last few trips back home or so. it's funny how theatres can feel so much like home, even corporate chain ones. i walked in, ticket taker didn't know where the screening was (a sure sign it was on the other side) so i asked at the customer service desk and the little woman who is shorter than me and has reddish blonde curly hair recognized me right away and pointed across the lobby and said it was in room 17 and that felt good. that corporate lackeys remember me. that i spent that much time in that theatre for so many years. the movie was enjoyable. not much to say other than that. oh, except that michael pitt, the poor man's leo last seen wooing jen on dawson's creek before heading for football academy, played a billy pumpkin-like xian-turned-goth rocker who steals hedwig's songs, and in a flashback he has an excellent mullet. afterwards, terry and i went to lunch at.. hellenic. we tried going to johnny rocket's in the theatre but it was packed with little kids and he was in a vague rush so i just took him to hellenic. i am so very, very nutritionally naughty. caught each other up on what was going on in our lives, as much as we could. he tried to quit again, they threw more money at him, he stayed and is a sellout, same old terry. i wish i had his job. things would be different. after he dropped me back at my car i drove out to wb to fix grandma's computer. and i talked on the phone with dad. they both asked me if terry had any "advice" for me on my "career" which just pisses me off to no end because a) when the time is right terry will help me as much as he can and b) i don't hang out with him to use him. i hang out with him because he's my friend, and i like him. so all told i drove about 50 miles this afternoon and made it through three-plus spins of revolver. god, i miss driving on a regular basis. so very very much. 7.25.2001
slurpee bliss. coke slurpee bliss. kosher coke slurpee bliss. (7-11 in oak park cracks my shit up: hasids and arabs and blacks and whites and godknowswhats all buying icy goodness at the same place. and a poster in the window that proclaims the pareveness of slurpees for all to see.) also i dropped off a tape of sd for brian's mom. then i realized that she's like bff with exstepmom, which could result in some nastiness. oh well. too late now. and mr fabulous just called! but he is a ratfink bastard because he is ditching out on the tigers game saturday, pretending to have his wisdom teeth out the day before and getting glasses the day of. he claims we will hang out on my side of town saturday night. i'm dubious, yet hopeful. sigh. all work and no play makes jack a dull calvin.
punishment for having a productive afternoon getting coneys at hellenic and absorbing nba trivia at the library: email from noah at ew saying to call him about the internet lede i'm writing. call noah? what about cable? cable is taking the timeinc buyout offer and heading for the hills. so much for that source of work and the pipe dream of my glorious return to 1675 broadway. this sucks. majorly. bad. eh. "and when they cut out your lung
idgie puked. i slept 12 hours and bummed around a few more and was all set to shower and dress and kickstart the day, and i walked through the kitchen to get to the basement and i smelled.. something that was not good, not good at all. hmm. followed my nose back to the kitchen by the door and there it was: a small pile of idgiepuke, as well as completely undigested, regurgitated grass. like, a lot of grass. like the dog was trying to eat the entire lawn in one fell swoop with her tiny little miniature schnauzer jaws. sometimes my dog is smart, and sometimes she is very stupid. so i cleaned up the puke, which sucked, and took it out to the trash so it can stink up the garage instead of the kitchen, and then i gave the dog a bath. now my hands smell of johnson&johnson baby shampoo. and underneath that, wet dog. rest of the day: attempt to find address to send rent check; southfield library to do some nba research; hellnic coney island. not necessarily in that order. 7.24.2001
there is no tv here at dad's house unless i get off my ass and reconnect the cable box to the tv or vcr, since his tivo died. i basically sat here all day catching up on all the news etc i missed over the past few days. still haven't recovered enough sleep so i'm going to bed at 11p I SWEAR. so shannon didn't know about tim's pr0n habits and was fairly upset at my little note masterpiece. poo on her. i refuse to feel bad about it. i feel bad that she feels bad, but i don't feel bad for revealing the big shouldn't-have-been-a secret. so nyah. toronto was gobs of fun. we had an amazing, expensive, long dinner at a place called monsoon that was gorgeous inside (as well as inside my stomach). then we hit a bar and played pool and the boys danced and i hid downstairs playing pool because if there's one thing i can't stomach it's seeing seth slime his way over members of the opposite sex while doing his approximation of rhythmic movement. then to some place for some chow, then to some after-hours club that wouldn't let us in because we are still nerds, then loitered around toronto for a few hours before our 750a train. we saw some really large raccoons. and we walked an offensive amount, i would guess around 8 miles. we didn't take motorized transport the entire time. walked from train station to entertainment district to cn tower to entertainment district to chinatown to some place that wasn't even on our little tourist map to utoronto area to entertainment district to train station. by 5a my knees were refusing to bend and i just kind of sloughed my way around. and we saw some people fucking in a park on a picnic table. and we didn't go to a strip club. and everyone was pretty well-behaved. except nobody would go get dim sum after we got off the train in our stankwear after the all-nighter we pulled. weaklings. andrew dropped me back at my house and i broke in via the garage since i'd forgotten keys. i peeled off my clothes, jumped in the shower, was all ready to get into bed and sleep the rest of the afternoon until get-together at brian's house when shelly rang the doorbell, bearing toothpaste since the day before i had discovered i had zero. now that is niceness. shelly rules. especially since after the toothpaste she waited for me to redress and we went to jimmy johns for lunch since i was famished after no dim sum. finally got about two hours sleep when she brought me back home. get-together was typical, except that andrew's mom brought a video with his 9, 10, 11 birthday parties. hysterical, watching all the boys i grew up with in prepubescent sweat pants: tim, fetz, stocker, wishnow, seth, mike rogers who moved to texas in sixth grade, karstofsky, brian carlson, sean evans. squeaky sweet. then the boys all came back to my house and we played pool and i raided gabe's liquor stash and dad caught me leaving his room with it and was "very disappointed" but not enough to actually take the booze away because i guess he knows he can't so i spent the rest of the evening feeling horrible about betraying gabe and everyone else drank and wrestled and farted, because that's what boys do. (at one point andrew shut off all the lights and went around marauding in the dark, attacking everyone and scaring the shit out of everyone and then the rest of us got into it and we are all so 12 years old that i never wanted the lights to go back on.) i think the other wwj anchor's name was george kendall. and i've convinced myself that it was. On Tue, 24 Jul 2001, erin podolsky wrote: you totally shouldn't feel bad about this. She can't have a cow, because it's like looking at playboy and what guy hasn't done that. maybe if you referred to his addiction of going to strip clubs that would be a different story.
my feet are now exceedingly beautiful. went for a manicure and pedicure with my grandmother at saks. yes, i, tomboy extraordinaire, have nail polish on my nails. fear. majorly. (it was fun.) i need a nap. as usual. but this time, i'm going to indulge. also i think mrscott is off his meds. he's been more nutball than usual since friday, edging back into mountain lion territory. and what the fuck is code orange?
ugh. feel crappy. must stop drinking beer, even just one, or one and a half, which is what i had with dinner tonight with josh and jess at the berkley front. not sure why i'm feeling ill now, but probably residual blah from the weekend. and my neck hurts. and i'm just going to WHINE WHINE WHINE. and i have to get up early tomorrow to feed/water the dog. so zzz. from the oooooookay weird spam files: 7.23.2001
slept about nine hours, got up and dressed, noticed that there was no food in the house, mixture or otherwise, and shelly picked me up so i could take her car to drive sarah and myself to moulin rouge, which i had submitted an invitation for several weeks ago. sarah just got back from camp yesterday. she was psyched. i was psyched. there was psychedness all around. best of all is how much the ticket cost. i get more pleasure out of that than sneaking in for free. seriously. mmm. moulin rouge. sarah loved it. as i thought she would. and we talked about middle school teachers, especially crenshaw. shared history owns me. or maybe i'm just a seventh grader at heart. both, most likely. 7.22.2001
7.21.2001
trip in was pretty okay except for a half second drop during the flight that made my heart actually beat its way out of my chest, it was pounding so hard. and that i was in the middle seat and the two men on either side were rude with their elbows encroaching on my space. but it was exit row, which is good. in the exit row i can stretch my legs all the way out and they barely touch the seat in front of me. it's amazing how a mere five seconds of wwj can remind me just how much i loathe earle dickinson. in high school when i couldn't sleep, i'd listen to wwj all night and earle's voice would make me crawl walls. it's partly his voice, his diction and his pauses, and also his stupid ridiculous inane asshole fuckhead cumbucket dickmunch soliloquys and wannabe rapport with the other overnighters, like the traffic chick. arg! jerk. there was also another overnight anchor i hated, but he retired and now i can't remember his name. i'll investigate. i can feel the torment bubbling in my gut like a case of indigestion. who the fuck was that. oh, and djhomosexual is keef. right now, keef is fired for not realizing exactly how insane i can get over things. ngah. 7.20.2001
jill soubel and i have decided that it's okay for me to detail tim's porno usage with charts and graphs for the bachelorette party. i'm saving all of our emails so that in the event that things backfire (like say, as jeremie suggested, shannon decides to preemptively divorce tim, which will mean that i not only brought them together but drove them apart) i can just blame maid-of-honor jill for saying it was okay. shower, dress, eat, pack. the effectiveness of the drugs seems to be waning. that's a problem. i'm up here for two more months. that's two more months before i can see the doctor. >> p.s. Yeah, I'll be the one in the green monstrosity. > green? hahaha. i'll be the one in basic black, trying to find a man who is FILTHY RICH and likes nsync. Good luck finding a man who is Filthy Rich and likes NSYNC at Shannon's wedding. You might have better luck finding a Pollack with a mullet.
the chocolate chip cake turned out quite well. i also made steak with onions and mushrooms for dinner. i am a cooker. and! tricia from the video store called. apparently she has no idea just how psychotic i am, because she offered me the job and wants me to come in for training on monday. i'm going to tell her i'm out of town all next week (true) and not returning until a week from wednesday (false) so that i have time to hopefully get a job at the bowling alley. because i'd rather work there. but we'll see. after all, in the back room, where i took the psi, there was a ton of pr0n, including a dvd called freaks of nature that featured a picture of a guy with two cocks ejaculating all over this bitch. on second thought, that was grody. now the real question of the hour is in the card i'm writing to shannon for her bachelorette party, do i reveal tim's massive pr0n habit during our time living at 315 packard? hmm. not sure if that's appropriate or not, even in the context of a bachelorette party. perhaps i'll email jill soubel to get her opinion, since i have no sense of these things.
7.19.2001
sometimes, you just go what the fuck. normally i would probably be able to figure out who this is, but lately (evidence below!) my brain is very defective and unreliable. so if you're out there reading this blog, dj homosexual, please tell me so i can get some sleep. thanks.
i am a good housewife today. i cleaned up random room detritus and threw it out, except for y's socks which mysteriously multiply as the days go on. and now i have chocolate chip cake in the oven and i did dishes and i tried to unclog the shower drain but failed at that. blah. blah blah. finally talked to kevin grigg over at the pistons about getting joe d on the phone. no dice - too busy with free agent workouts and salary cap issues and summer league and blah blah, so kevin gave me some canned quotes from a press conference. but i can email in a few more questions if i want and he'll try to get joe to answer them over email, so i think i'll do that. gotta get a word on the short shorts issue. gotta dance, gotta dance. and now i will read while things bake.
mopete stuffings are done. they are boring and mostly stat-related, but done. yay, another $150 for me. now i'm throwing down a mixed berry yogurt and lamenting the no-longer-freeness of inside. so much for linking it on my daily read. the other thing i wanted to mention last night in my brain edema haze: the 2001 results are in for the bulwer-lytton fiction contest. personally, i think i prefer the runner-up to the winner. let the hein0r reign0r. signs you should stop listening to nsync 24/7: dreams about the band doing a special performance at greenfield village just for you. oops. (i did it again.)
i was in bed listening to coast to coast when i remembered the other instance of in the air tonight. yup, it was last night, in front of a coast to coast segment. ufo's in the air tonight? erin's lack of brain cycles in the air tonight? i think so! oh lord. (and let us not forget its namechecked presence in stan. i am stalked by phil collins. oh lord.)
more exciting linkage: a recounting of writing a bio of claire by jen ambrose, who actually contacted me to be interviewed for the book (i privately said no, and publicly just forgot to email her back, heh); something that I CAN'T REMEMBER BECAUSE MY BRAIN IS BROKEN. BRAIN DYING. BRAIN DEATH. BRAIN DEAD. i have been totally unable to spell or remember things for days upon days upon days and things are piling up. in my dream last night i was chauffering a lincoln town car, black, and my cousin was in the front seat with me and i was taking him to get his dorm at nyu and there were two sides to the dorm and huge long lines at either side to get room keys. and there was another part where people were chasing me into elevators. and i couldn't get them to work. and i had to move the car and it was hard because it was too big for me and it was pouring rain and i had to keep circling around union square except it was covered with scaffolding and ironworks. maybe i'll remember everything in the morning. if i'm lucky. or if i'm not. it's a joe van deventer evening!
things i forgot to mention: while filling out the are-you-depressed-and-are-you-going-to-shoot-up-the-store part of the personality test, in the air tonight came on. this song has been stalking me ever since it was on in the car on the way to boston and y refused to turn it off and then started shouting "JESUS!" in an ironic-yet-not manner every time phil grunted "oh lord!" it was on another time but now i can't remember when, because my mind is blown completely these days for conversations and events and names and dates. shit. why can't i remember the other time it was on? more aggravation. and still more: can't connect to audio stream of coast to coast am to listen to while i work on mopete (status report: nine stuffings and counting, three to go). art bell is my new secret addiction. and ian punnett. oops. not so secret anymore. 7.18.2001
oh yeah, the rest of the day: the psi was ridiculous. it was just a standard personality/personnel test adminstered by retail stores. it managed to rephrase the question "do you like to talk to strangers?" five different ways, and ask another five times if you'd ever stolen anything from an employer, and whether somebody who smokes pot should be arrested. there were also several questions about whether you consider yourself more or less unhappy than other people, or get embarrassed more or less, or daydream more or less, or anything more or less. i did a lot of lying. my bike ride to and from was good. i kept my bike on the same gear both ways, on uphills and downhills. and wasn't exhaused. more like exhilarated, on a small scale. as i was leaving the minimall parking lot, this little geo metro packed with people pulled into my path, blocking me, and i went around it but it was tricky, and the fat kids in the back shouted "nice shoes!" i'm not sure if they meant it. although i do like my shoes. must exercise more. and now i have to find 12 factoids on mopete for inside stuff. as keef would say, NGAH NGAH NGAH.
here's the story on tonight's dinner, which aggravates me just to type, because it was SO FUCKING AGGRAVATING. y decides we are having chinese, which i agree to tentatively because i am so very very sketched out by non-chinatown chinese food. we go to this place on the west side of town, dat hing. they have a sign that says dim sum, so maybe not so bad. right? wrong. wrong wrong wrong. we are the only people in there except for this lesbian couple with a daughter who are getting take-out. y orders cashew chicken. i order beef lo mein, because it is cheap and innocuous. the woman who is sort of running the place, the only employee we can see, looks like she has cancer or something horrible going on and doesn't speak any english at all. as she is turning to go i ask to change my lo mein to szechuan beef. our food comes like ten minutes later, during which the following drama took place: one of the take-out chicks is using her credit card to buy their food, but it is rejected. she goes out to the car to call the company to see what's going on, and they say it should work fine. she comes back. it is rejected again and again. she is frustrated. the lady is still not speaking english. finally the chick gets so annoyed that she turns and leaves, muttering "we'll go somewhere they can operate a fucking credit card machine" and her wife/gf/whatever follows her with the kid and they leave. five minutes later, their food is sitting on the counter. apparently restaurant lady didn't put it together that this time they were leaving for good. so our food comes, and mine is szechuan alright and totally overpowered by shittyass spiciness and onion and it is full of not beef but pork, shrimp and chicken. and bad noodles. and worse white rice. and i had to ask for chopsticks. ugh. now, i would have been fine with this; i was expecting this. until we went up to the counter to pay the bill, and i saw there was a special meny with a bunch of "real" chinese dishes (as opposed to the american chinese food menu we were given) and i ask the lady if it was just for lunch or something and she says "no, it is for all the time, it is for chinese!" and i run outside and start screaming and screaming because i could have had something that might have been edible and i'd just been discriminated against twice over because i'm an alabaster gringo. fuck all. so we drive back over to the east side of the river and i convince y that we should get pie at the diner. our favorite waitress is not there and in her place is a morose mopey dishwater blonde who looks very sad and when y says to her "long day?" she replies "bad day." and she is sad and mopey and rattles off the various pies of the evening with pain and unenthusiasm and there is butterscotch but i decide against it and we both get lemon pie and it's.. spicy. wtf? (well, y thought it was spicier than i did, but still.) and then the other waitress who we've seen before and is nice is telling this other customer about the butterscotch pie and says it's great and has caramel and i run outside and start screaming again because i could have had butterscotch caramel pie and instead i had spicy lemon. so we miss our turn to go home up on hanover street and y decides we need gas and plus we can erase this bad day with slurpees at the combination citgo/7-11. hooray. we get gas. i go inside to get a slurpee. and what stares me back from the slurpee machine? every fucking flavor of the rainbow EXCEPT coke. i cannot win. i cannot win. i cannot win. a few links to brighten the day: there's no future in fucking politicians; a new use for propane; a really cool md app that i'm going to try. "a honda! a honda!" 7.17.2001
dean kamen's house is ginormous. it's like out of the movies. it's up on a hill, and it has an indoor pool and a helipad and acreage and a a tennis court-slash-basketball court and a well-groomed baseball field with a green fence backstop and dirt foul lines so you don't have to drop the white chalky powder and real bases and rakes to comb the beautiful brown dirt when the ballplaying is done. i went because y plays on deka's softball team, and deka's softball team was playing some snotty law firm. as the game was finishing, dean's helicopter swooped over the field and then started circling the estate, as if he was refusing to land before everybody left. dean has a helicopter. he flies it himself. he lands it on his helipad. dean is FILTHY RICH. (dean is single.) i am going to take y to a batting cage and teach her how to bat properly. apparently nobody has. when i was five ben axelrad who was a couple of years older than me and lived across the street in a house that always seemed to orangey-red taught me how to play baseball, how to hold a bat and wear a mitt and catch and throw a ball. and my life changed. i became a sports player. i became a sports fan. i never had the body of an athlete, but i always had the heart. ben had a younger brother greg who always made me think of jokey smurf. they sounded the same when they spoke. and they kind of looked alike, except greg looked goofier. and grouchier. like goofily grouchy. after the game we came home and i went to chelby's pizza to get us a pie. i have nothing but good things to say about chelby's. the pizza was good, affordable, and now we have coupons and a menu. also, chelby's has a lounge in the back with a bunch of tvs and a full bar that serves bud on tap and a host of regulars, all middle aged males, so i'm not sure how i'd fit in. but i sat in the lounge while i waited for the pizza to be ready and listened to these new englanders banter and it was quite amusing. i'd like to go back. maybe i'll see if i can work there. it seemed pretty low-key. (dean is also too old. must find younger multimillionaire. must become younger multimillionaire.) "that's good old reliable nathan
last night i got billy bob thornton's album, private radio, and now i'm listening to it. it is so unbelievably hein0r yet hilarious, i am pooping my pants. you'd think he couldn't top lyrics about waffle house or this little couplet: "this cigarette burns like the pain in my soul / when the fire gets too hot the ash turns to coal". but then you get to the second track, and he starts singing about - wait for it - WEARING HER PINK UNDERWEAR, and then you get to the third track and it's called - wait for it - angelina. (later, he has this bizarro spoken word intro to a song in which he talks about jim varney's great-grandmother. and the next track's intro is about JOHN FUCKING KENNEDY and the song is, of course, dylan's he was a friend of mine. oh my god. this is just too evil genius for words. too bad he didn't also cover dylan's angelina and decided to write his own.) some of the songs aren't too awful, but nothing on here is good. nothing about orange food, though. oh well. i think i'll write this bitch up for ironminds because information wants to be free. i went to andy's place, the diner across the street, for lunch because it has finally reopened after being closed for two weeks. had chicken fingers and fries. both were not what i was expecting. like, they weren't bad, they were just wrong for me. i'll give it another shot but i think i like the red arrow better. (i would have gone there but it's a gray day and i didn't feel like risking getting rained on.) "they all said we'd never make it
finally got the sidebar functional. a note on the wallet - don't do whatever it is you're thinking of doing. do not buy me presents. no, i'm serious. it's there because it's "the thing" to do now, and the reason i have a wishlist is so that when i stumble across a good amazon coupon, i can easily remember what i want to buy. and now i can just click on it. so it's a purely selfish selfish move. not just a selfish move. or at least wait until my birthday. damn, all this productivity is making me thirsty. i wish i could go to the diner and reward myself with pie. or a bacon cheeseburger. or pie and a bacon cheeseburger. mmm. diner. 7.16.2001
a me day: seafood chowder at bob shaw's, read in the park for a couple of hours, watched some tv on my computer. in the park there was a guy sitting with entire loaves of bread feeding winged rats. i wanted to stab him. also a mounted police man clip-clopped up on horseback. he couldn't go five feet without being beset by people who wanted to pet the horse. throwback. also there's a woman who apparently spends most of her time on various benches in the park and everybody else who spends all their time in and around the park calls her 'mom'. perhaps i will go do that again tomorrow and see what's the what. i have to go to the video store wednesday for my "psi", the personality test i have to take if i want to work there. sadly, tricia the manager will not be available. it will be adminstered by either norm or candace. yes, if i am hired, i will be working in an all-jewish environment. not. perhaps i'll wear some horns. wonder what that'll say about my personality.
consciousness regained, although i have a killer stomachache and i don't know why. somebody doesn't want me to eat clam chowder, clearly. perhaps the diner instead. peeing my pants this early in the day should be illegal, sort of like walken as mexican illegal should be illegal.
well, genius, or an approximation thereof, has been served. opinions on such may vary. sent. "dear stan, i meant to write you sooner 7.15.2001
popped a handful of ibu, got a good night's sleep, my 24 hour headache is gone, my neck feels a little funky, and i emailed terry to advise of my arrival in d-town next week. i wonder if he'll acknowledge my existence. time to slaughter what i started. although i do need some nourishment. hmm. ps new nsync is gonna own. despite the fact that the best lite song of the clips i've heard is nutrasweetly titled the two of us and sung, and despite the fact that it sounds like another janet rip-off (love will never do meets escapade), i continue to have no shame in my enjoyment of their particular brand of boypop. it's all about having appreciation for all types. damn dirty pop. "'cause i'm thinking about you day and night 7.14.2001
y and i went to boston yesterday by way of worcester and scott. met up with ken at mit and then drove to the coolidge corner theatre, where conor oberst was playing with simon joyner. conor was, as ever, great, and it was neat to see him without the band backing him up. you watch him strum in that chair and screech with that voice and you know: he's got it. joyner, on the other hand, while i appreciate him purely for his influence on conor's style, for lack of a better phrase, sucked buttermilk. he went on first, his set was interminable, his songs were awful, and the entire crowd was asleep. seriously. we heard snores. but then there was conor again, and all was right with the world, and he played waste of paint, and he played the big picture, and i recorded it on my md but it recorded so low because i wasn't near a speaker, so we'll see how it sounds when i attempt to transfer it to mp3. i finally caught my brother on the phone tonight, that cheeky monkey. apparently noah levinson took a 30 foot fall in arches national park and had to be airlifted to colorado with a broken leg, broken foot, and two broken vertebrae. holy jeez. he was on the western trip. naturally i will use this near-tragedy (he's okay, just broken) to unearth all the blocked-out memories about the nightmare year that was anno erini 14, how i was an idiot not to decide to be more injured than i was or thought i was on my western trip when i rolled my bike on a mountain in aspen. i was wearing a helmet, luckily, but i was still knocked out, and when i came to the emergency vehicle that follows bikers down was pulling up and the gravel was crunching and i was trying to roll over but it hurt and everything was on fire and my stomach caved in and i didn't cry. i thought about it, and then i said to myself, "you're not going to cry, because they'll find out and that will give them satisfaction" and so i didn't. and i limped to the station wagon and they drove me down the mountain and they asked me if i wanted to go to the hospital and i said "no no i'm fine i'm fine" and sitting on the vinyl backseat was an exercise in zen mind over matter in regards to the flaming wreckage that was the skin on my legs, because since i rolled i managed to burn my legs inside and out. for hours and days afterward i would find a new rough patch periodically: a swatch of road rash on my shoulder, the complete lack of skin on my elbows and forearms and thighs and shins and knees and the awful awful iodine salves the counselors made me wear that stained me orange and stuck to my sleeping bag and made me look even more the basketcase than i was. when i think about the weeks of meanness and nastiness and hideousness and stomachaches i could have saved myself if i'd just said "it hurts too much, let me go home," it pisses me off that i have to always pretend to be okay. and how it's so strange that for all the scabbing and the aching for the rest of the trip, how at times i was just a wall of scab that would crack when i moved too quickly, how for months when i finally did get back home i couldn't go around even a soft curve in the road in a car without freaking out and thinking that the car was going to flip over and roll just like my bike, that instead of the network of nerveless flesh webbing i expected when i looked down at my legs and saw stiff brown parchment where skin should have been, a map in relief of the asphalt i'd known so intimately, all i have to show for it is a tiny scar. on the outside, anyway. putting them back in the psych drawer marked "do not disturb" now. will not play with for a while now. trying to live in the now now. "so i'd prefer to be remembered as a smiling face 7.13.2001
sometimes we put pictures of ourselves online purely for the sake of humor, and not because we look as hot as we normally do.
up at a reasonable hour, feeling weird. work work work so i can play play play later. much as i hate to drive more traffic to a site, isdickcheneydeadyet.com is just that fucking funny. (but sometimes, morrow is fucking funnier.) clever. but i'm a cheney man! can't sleep, heart rate about 140, this is not good. someone should start isjamesmorrowsleepingyet.com. 12:39 AM 12:25 AM 12:12 AM
my day was totally boring except that the ice cream man came and i went down to get an ice cream sandwich and the truck turned out to be piloted by a hick with a goatee and a punk kid with bleached hair and a lot of tattoos and a chainstud necklace. and the weird hoodlum girl from across the street was out too and she was dancing in the street to the ice cream truck music and she started yelling at them when they changed it from camptown races to the entertainer. and they kept switching it on her, just to make her mad, which it did, and then they'd change it back, and she'd go back to dancing. people here are weird. people everywhere are weird. we went to the diner and i got a bacon cheeseburger and it was so goddamn good, but we missed the country music concert in veterans park. apparently joe diffie was there, as well as a shania twain impersonator, shania twin. i'm kind of bummed we missed shania twin, because a) her name is great b) i bet she's a he. also the diner lady now knows my name is erin, and i like my bacon crispy, and i hang out with a boy named tuck. "i'm the masta rappa and i'm here to say 7.11.2001
i would like the world to know that in 1992, my friend he-man keef won the iowa state spelling bee and got to go to the big bee in dc and be on espn and tv and be famous and spell stuff. and he spanked it to a hustler he found under the couch and his mom was in the other room, which is so desultory and sordid and wonderful that i am mind-bendingly jealous. and now i know one of the spelling bee kids. keef is way cool. perhaps some of it will rub off.
y is telling this story too but it is my story because i saw her first and she can't have her. so we're walking from the car to the building and y is all obsessed with the sunset and how lovely it is and i see this girl walk out of the building to her car wearing an airbrushed tanktop and too-light colored jeans and this captain insano makeup that looks like it belongs at an icp concert, like sorority girl taken to the next level and then again. like she'd gotten down and dirty with the airbrush gun and painted her shirt and then decided to do her cheeks too. like nuclear fluorescent orange. i want to share this view, which is clearly way better than the sunset (although, strangely, the sunset is nearly the same color on her cheeks), with y, who is still staring at the sky, and we're still walking towards the building, and the girl is within earshot, so really, really low, i mutter "check out the makeup" and y goes "WHAT?" like i had stuck an electric cattle prod up her ass and pulled the trigger. i am a bit confused by this reaction, because while i thought the airbrush girl was funny, she wasn't that funny, and this sounded like perhaps a kissed-this-guy misinterpretation in the making. and it was. apparently y thought i said "do you want to make out?" and when that information was shared i collapsed to the ground and commenced near-pants-peeing laugh-out. but i'm okay now. and my version is better. but not really. y and i were out and about because we went to her coworker dennis' cottage apt in the nice section of manchester, which i was unaware existed. as always, i am living in the ghetto. but the ghetto here doesn't seem to be quite that bad, just like the ghetto in nyc. the nice part of manchy manch, though, is really nice. nice side of huntington woods nice, in places. some beautiful houses, beautiful land. after we turned down dennis' free twin bed on the grounds that it would be too much of a pain to deal with and, truthfully, neither of us really mind sleeping on the floor like we do, we left and drove around the area for a short while. then we went to CREMELAND for ice cream. i got oreo. it had entire oreos in it. CREMELAND>*(manchester). also i have yet to detail the mystery of apt 4k. 4k is next door to us. 4k's door is almost always propped open about four inches, so that you can somewhat see inside, and sometimes you can hear voices or the television. so far i have deduced that 4k is home to some homebound elderly folk, although this seems a strange building for them to be in because it is vaguely hipster. (not that i have seen other hipsters here. not that i am a hipster, either.) i keep wanting to sneak up on 4k and listen for a while and get a periscope so i can peer around the corner and look in, but the carpeting in the hall has been ripped up since before we moved in so even walking in the softest way possible - and i am a good soft walker - makes an echoing footfall. i can almost do it silently in my tevas, but not quite. not enough. so the mystery of apt 4k lives on. hopefully the carpet will arrive soon and then i can be mad miss marple all up in this bitch. at CREMELAND this boy who looked about 10 cut in front of us in line and y did nothing about it and i was already at the other window and the boy was wearing a camo shirt and camo shorts and had an overgrown buzz cut and was eight cents short of the ice cream he wanted and he got the money from his mom and when we were walking away i saw him get in his mom's car and his mom had a femullet. sometimes the world makes perfect sense.
the key to getting things done is to not sit around in your pajamas, the great unwashed and uncounted, all day. when i get up, lounge for a bit, eat a sandwich and then shower and dress, i'm much more functional on a higher level and apt to accomplish at least a little somethin somethin. which is what i have done so far today. called on both my job apps (no news on either; i think tomorrow i'll ride down to city hall, wherever it is, and apply for the library job); wrote up the pistons colors story so that i can just plug'n'play a quote in when i get it, since it's pretty much a no-brainer what that quote will say ("we're very excited about returning to colors that served us so well in the past," says dumars, etc) with a genius-cheese hed; called cable, left message; emailed matty matt dobek at the pistons to get five minutes with joe d on the horn. i am wearing my green-not-gray cutoffs, my festival of new works shirt, and tevas. i suspect my ass looks about as big as sunday SUNDAY sunday at the silverdome, because we have no mirror in the apt other than the one in the bathroom. but i went out in public anyway. it's a gorgeous gorgeous day out, so after all my accomplishments (it's the little things) i hopped on my bike and skidded down to CREMELAND. lobster roll: b+, would do again. rode back home and stopped at the corner store to get a bottle of orange crush. there's something special about crush, the clear-eyedness of the bottle, the lack of pretension about the soda itself. sugary goodness that i can feel hitting my bloodstream two swallows in. however, if orange crush were not orange, it would be gross. i've had flattish pepsi that has tasted similar. and it was gross. crush-as-cola is unacceptable. crush-as-crush is supreme. so what if it's just a color issue. taste ain't nothin' but a color, i guess. a gift for the stalkers: erin and her fish shirt take maine by storm last weekend. shit. sugarcrash. zzz. "i wrote for you a sugar tune
i had another plane crash dream sometime early in the morning between jingling wake-up calls. i don't remember much of the details now, except in this one somebody got sucked out one of the exit row exits. but it wasn't a big deal. it was just kind of slow, and the door was covered with like a rubber flap with a slit down the middle and the guy just kind of got sucked out through it, slowly, calmly. and the plane bottomed out on the ground. it wasn't violent. and then i went to the movies, and there was an elevator to the mezzanine of the theatre even though it was in a big theatre complex. but that might have been another dream because i woke up a million and one times last night. i'm obsessed with thinking about people dying who haven't yet, and how that will affect me, and how it won't change me because i feel like it's already happened, i've decided it's already happened, all the ways it can and will happen, and i'm ready. except i'm not, not really. but i think about it anyway, and i wish i didn't. sometimes i look around in my head at all the people i know and just see corpses leering. this notsleeping is ass. i've had a headache every day. i don't think tonight will work even in the silence because i already feel antsy and slick with stress sweat, like maybe the jingling will come back. the way i can wake myself every hour if i want to, if i think about it a little and hide the thought somewhere between the rapid eye movements. it turns out the tigers are in town on july 28 and i of course rashly purchased tix to see psb that day and spent way too much money on them because it's that festival with a bunch of other acts and now i don't even want to go because i won't enjoy it anyway. i just delude myself into thinking that concerts are enjoyable unless they are ben lee or conor oberst. concerts are the one experience that i cannot remove from that horrible place i used to live in my head where everything was already over before it happened, where the anticipation was better than the moment awaited and when the moment came i couldn't enjoy it because i was already thinking about how bad it was going to be when it was over. moron. moron. moron. that was a long time ago and i've done a good job of pretending i don't live there anymore. i miss people. i miss people and they're not even gone. i will pop some ibu and pretend it's something that will help and then i will try to sleep but not have much success because now i've thought too much about it too much. i'm thinking about a lot of things too much. tomorrow i will think about more pressingly immediate matters: pistons uniforms, a boy named tall, and sgt slaughter. also it's not really jingling. that's far too jolly a word. it's jangling. jangling nerves and frayed wires and quivering synapses and stupid boring prose. "i wait in 4/4 time 7.10.2001
the maintenance guy came. he walked right in while i was brushing my hair. he did not knock. it's a good thing he didn't come ten minutes earlier or i would have been naked as a jaybird. he eventually fixed the problem after i repeatedly told him it was in the vent in my room and he kept insisting it was in the central a/c unit and took it apart TWICE, and i'm really too aggravated by the whole thing because i'm tired and i keep hearing the noise even though it's gone i'm just hallucinating it and some little kid on a bike is having a temper tantrum down in the street so here is what i wrote to y about the fiasco.
after we solved that problem, i pedaled to the strip mall and had my job interview at home vision. it lasted all of five minutes, four of which consisted of the manager telling me what the job responsibilities of a customer associate entailed (not even off the top of her head - she read it off a corporate-lackey sheet) and one minute of me nodding and saying "great!" i get to go back for a personality test, which is how she determines if somebody will fit in with her team. oh man. after that i rode down the strip to radio shack to get a mic/headset (sadly, cute cashier was nowhere to be found, else i would have given him my number) and then the liquor store and bought a bottle of peach schnapps so i can teach y to drink and a minibar bottle of knob creek whiskey so i can continue my romantic alcoholism (just kidding, that was a joke, i've had like one beer since i've gotten up here) with the fuel of all good writers and drunks. and now i am attempting to drink it, but i am so fucking ghetto because we have no glasses and it's impossible to drink straight out of the bottle if you want more than two drops at a time so i am drinking it from a pyrex custard cup acquired the other night in the yard sale spree. and it is vile. i do not like whiskey. i will never be a real writer, in part because of this. but not completely because of this. 7.9.2001
we went to the grocery store and i went to radio shack and bought a y-adapter for my laptop's line out and a 1/8"-1/8" 1 foot cable to go from the y-adapter to my minidisc player and we'll see if i can record phone conversations using dialpad without them sounding too horrible. need a tapping solution without a landline and that's the best one i've come up with, plus it doesn't use up minutes on my cell. there were two boys at ratshack who looked like they were maybe seniors in high school and they were both cute and nsync was on the telly and the one behind the register was way cuter and when he asked for my address like they always do at ratshack for the computer when they sell you something i should have given him my number. all through the grocery store shopping i was thinking up phone number scenarios, like he'd ask for my address and i'd give it. and then: me: "do you need my phone number?" him: "no, just your address." a) me: "are you sure you don't need my phone number?" b) "too bad." c) "yes you do." my job interview at the video store got reskedded to tomorrow afternoon by the manager. ratshack is in the same strip, so i could theoretically go back and execute this plan by purchasing another something small. but i won't. i called my grandmother tonight to say hi because she im'd me and we hadn't talked on the phone for a while, just im, and i told her i wanted to get a pedicure and could we get one together at the same time and then she accused me of wanting to get a pedicure with her only so i could write about it. which i hadn't even thought of, although i'm sure it would have occurred to me eventually. and she was somewhat joking. but somewhat not. i'm not sure if i should be troubled by this.
OH MY GOD MY BROTHER IS HAVING RELATIONS WITH A 22 YEAR OLD AUSTRALIAN FEMALE. THROWING UP. VOMITING. EXPELLING FOODSTUFFS VIA ESOPHAGUS. (not fair.)
goddamn this is a good turkey sandwich. i've dived back into my old turkey sandwich lunch habit. simple, direct, easy: white bread, turkey, hellman's mayonnaise. i venture to say this is the best one yet, likely as a result of last night's knife acquisition. previously i'd been spreading mayo with my swiss army knife, because we had zero knives. it's not easy with a swiss. (the other night with the veal piccata was prime hilarity: both y and i crouching over our meat with full-size forks and tiny swiss army knives.) shit, it's late. this calls for daft punk. and work. "last night i had a dream about you
the vent in my room jingles when air flows through it. i've tried banging on the wall to jiggle the jingle out of it, but that only works temporarily if at all. the jingle is a patterned noise, and it's keeping me up, and i wake up drenched in sweat with patterned jingling in my ears, and this has been going on for several days so it must be stopped. i wonder if we'll get kicked out if i notify the landlord. but i'm willing to chance it. good article by kuczynski in today's nyt about me-zines. the ubiquitous salon boys are quoted for the umpteenth story that even briefly mentions salon's profitability (up to the plate this time: david talbot. was scott rosenberg on vacation?). which makes me wonder: does anybody in the upper management echelons of salon know any words other than "we're not dead yet"? survey says NO. 7.8.2001
when we came back from yard saleing this morning (purchases: a kettle AND HOLY SHIT MORE FIREWORKS!!!, two board games (stratego, pente), and graham greene/the heart of the matter; total cost: $1.75) i espied a flyer in the apartment building entryway announcing that the kindhearted soul living in #3b was selling his sony 32" trinitron tv and entertainment system (no dvd player) and center for $600, along with "some kitchen stuff". so we grabbed a tab and called and went down there and came away with: a complete set of knives/knife block, a complete set of pyrex glass cookware, a very nice bedside lamp, and a nice, easily collapsable shelving unit. total cost: $40. i can't wait to get this stuff back to my apt in nyc after this is all over with. fucking jackp-o-t. the best yard sale wasn't even in our own backyard - it was in our building. and then there was pie.
i was going to mumble something about maine last night, but po commandeered blogger and i was too tired anyway after a game of hearts. i'd gotten up on the early side so we could get our shit together to go to nashua and fetch y's friends julie and po. po is a good name and makes me think of stuffed animals, for reasons i do not know, but po himself does not. this is not altogether a bad thing. so we picked them up and ate at a diner and i had two cups of coffee (and then a beer with dinner, so that was all i drank all day until we got back to the apt) and then we drove to maine. maine is not that far. maine is quite pretty, even when you are not at the ocean, but especially when you are. we stopped at rye beach which is in nh and then continued on to maine, which made me think of stephen king getting run over. after some outlet shopping at kittery (nothing ever fits, blah) we went to york, which has beach, and went to said beach. it was a strange beach. the sand doesn't really seem like sand. it is not quite dirt-colored, more an elegant elephant gray, and it was all wet and kind of shimmered out when you walked on it because of the tides going in and out. and there were lots of rocks. i was hungry and walked off in search of lobster roll. it was a long walk, and the walk turned out to be better tasting than the food. after acquiring target i ate it and realized that it was tres mediocre and a waste of money and the fact that the preparers of the target had nebulously foreign accents i should have stayed away, or kept walking. but it was constructive in that i did some good thinking about ytwt and insomnia. i walked back along the beach instead of the sidewalk, and children's propensity for digging holes leaves me wondering why. what is so special, so impossibly alluring about digging to china? they all end up looking like watery graves. i wonder how many children are buried on that beach, washed out by the pull of the moon. by the time i got back to where y and julie and po were on the beach, it was time to leave. went up the lighthouse on the point and had lobster at a nearby restaurant, then drove the scenic route home. our apartment is very boring, and when we have people here it makes me feel boring in an awkward way. but at least there were more fireworks. that's like six days in a row with fireworks visible from the living room. i like fireworks from the window, but i like them more when they thump in your chest. po was hungry and made spaghetti. we have no pot, so he boiled the spaghetti in our frying pan. then he added pasta sauce. the sauce jar lid had little mold goblins growing in it, which he pointed out, and then proceeded to rinse it off and use the pasta sauce. po is clearly 100% boy. ps apparently the bank lady's name is cynthia puchacz. i have no idea where i got the name boyce. 7.6.2001
the way you see yourself in little ways, tiny ways, where you don't want to, but you have to, that is where it hurts. that is when my throat feels like it is going to explode. and other body parts. but not my head. and you wonder if maybe you should give what he says a try, to fix yourself before it is too late. that it's not too late. we saw crazy/beautiful tonight and did not pay. we saw a.i. wednesday night and did not pay. we are CRIMINALS. they were both excellent sneak-ins, because the first one happened as a result of wondering if the movie had started because we thought we were late but we were just in time, and tonight we avoided a line of like 200 little alabaster bangers fronting themselves into baby boy and just walked right in. it feels good to go back to my old ways. the good ways. the right ways. (the tiny ways, the little ways.)
i have been so productive today that there oughta be a law. i got up and finished reading cruddy. i have created a book list so that everybody can see what i am reading and how reading-productive i am being. (there will not be a writing list, because only i am allowed to know how writing-productive i am being. or not being. or being. or not being. mwahaha, you will never know.) then i showered and dressed and waited for y and coworker al to arrive with our new/used table. it is wood and it is nice. they dropped it off and i tightened the legs and put it upright and now i am typing on my laptop that is on the nice wooden table. this is a good thing. we also got a couple of eh chairs, but they have four legs, like the nice wooden table, so they are okay by me. then i rode my bike downtown. i looked for the citizens bank on wilson street but i couldn't find it. i think it's hidden in a shopping center, so i continued downtown and went to the library. returned my book and got out two more, inquired about job opportunities and was told they needed a page for the summer but you had to get the application at city hall. i'll do that next week, maybe. i lied and said i knew where city hall was - it just seemed easier - but i don't, so i didn't go there. i did, however, go to the big citizens bank branch on elm street. walked right up to the information center and opened a bank account with the very kind cynthia boyce, who gave me zero hassle and signed me up for the citizens circle acct that has fees if you don't have a $5k balance but they are running a promo where that is waived for three months so i took it since i'll be closing the acct in three months. perfect. no fees for anything, unlimited checking (even replacement checks), etc etc. the other woman at the info desk with cynthia was named candace, and she had a scary scary perky phone voice, and she went to umich and when i told her i graduated in 2000 she said "oh, you're young!" and i asked when she graduated and she said 97 but i think she was lying because she looked older than that. she also asked if i was broke, and i said no, and she said "oh you must not have been out of state" and i said yeah and she is from yonkers and followed her man here. then i told her i really was broke because i live in nyc. and cynthia said i should go to wmur and ask them for work. i don't know exactly how i'd go about doing that, though, so i probably won't. (also funny that she'd direct me towards them when all i said was i worked as a freelance magazine writer.. but then again, she saw a tvguide paycheck. yeah, that's probably why.) banking stuff should arrive in 7-10 days if cynthia boyce is to be believed. from the bank i went to get a fountain coke and was suckered by my eyes into getting french fries as well. never again. they were good, but extraneous. i need to not eat extraneous things. i need to bike and not eat extraneous things. so after the extraneous consumption of bad food i biked southeast to the bowling alley. on my way out of downtown some shiftfaced rat-tailed 12-year-old softly called out "nerd" as i rode by, which i know i did not hallucinate and was directed at the fact i was wearing a helmet. it is so sad when words still sting when you are 22. at the bowling alley i filled out a job application. the manager was very nice and said he'd probably call in about a week. then i went home (on the ride home i passed a walgreens drugstore and it had a sign that said 'NADS $24.95 AFTER REBATE' and i started wondering why they sell genitals at walgreens and does the president know), glugged a red bull, fixed my bike seat (i didn't tighten the screws enough and it slid down and made riding very difficult) and rode in scary traffic to the strip mall containing the video store and handed in my application. the manager looked it over and then asked me to come in for an interview monday evening because she was about to go home. hooray. i suspect i shall be gainfully employed soon. (she did, however, laugh heartily and then say in a low voice, like a secret, "you don't really think you'll be starting at $10/hr, do you?" because i had put that as my expected salary because i had to put something. i said no. of course not. like it was a secret back. and now i am home, and tired, because i burned calories today. tonight i am making veal piccata for dinner. hopefully it will be edible. the 4th floor hallway smells like somebody ate a bunch of birdseed and then expelled birdseed-scented diarrhea. (this is not a good thing.) 7.5.2001
my butt hurts. today i was supposed to get up at 830a to wait for the cable guy, but he showed up before 8a. the doorbell woke me up, but y answered it. apparently nobody responded on the other end, or she just doesn't know how to operate the whole talk/listen/door button parade on the intercom (bets, anybody?), but she pressed the door button anyway and about five minutes later pokey slow att asshole monkey showed up at our door sans banana. y went to work and i brushed my teeth and observed the caged animal at work in my pjs. he pretended not to notice. we were up and running an hour later, with only a mild scare about getting into the utility closet (they have a key to it, somebody else had it out, he couldn't get in, i called the rental office and left a message, he managed to jimmy the utility closet lock) threatening to further delay the death march of bits and bytes. then he left, and i caught up, and then i got ready and went to get some lunch and go to the bank and the library before returning at 2p to wait the ups monkey. it started raining on my ride downtown, a sort of big fat spatter rain, and i pulled over and watched it for a while from a bus shelter i spotted. then the rain slackened and i continued on and decided upon the red arrow for lunch and locked my bike to a parking meter which took quite a while because my lock is crazy crazy crazy and you have to use all these weird angles and keep the key in the keyhole to get it to lock and unlock correctly and i can tell it's going to be a major pita for the rest of my days. ugh, security. i finally mastered the evil u-lock and entered the red arrow and got a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich and a slice of raspberry creme pie. both were outstanding, and i stretched the pie ooooout because it started raining again only this time it wasn't big fat spatter rain it was sideways stab you in the eye rain. so i waited it out. it finished up at 145p, i asked the counter waitress for a plastic bag to put over my bike seat, and i rode home. got home at 2p. and then the real waiting began. ups monkey finally terrorized my apt building around, oh, 530p. evil evil. all delivery monkeys are evil today and i do not like them but the waiting is finally over and tomorrow i will go to the library and the bank and maybe the video store or the grocery store. and a diner. always a diner. ps i am evil genius with the local network proxy, after two failed products (wingate, which gave me bad windows protection errors, and nat32, which is the holy satan of all proxy servers) got sygate home networking functioning right out of the box. yes, i am excellent. as a reward y will go bowling with me. and dad yelled at me again for renewing my lease and then letting my legal right of refusal period lapse. and then we had more of The Discussion. and then we talked about computers, to change the subject. like always. and my butt hurts. it's from riding my bike. yesterday was the first time i rode it, y and i went to the excellent establishment known as cremeland. it has a big neon sign that says cremeland, and on the building it says cremeland drive-in. but there might not be a hyphen. i am not sure. cremeland is not a sex shop, unfortunately. cremeland has homemade ice cream, and lots of fried seafood, and a lobster roll i think i might try tomorrow. i got a huge helping of coffee ice cream in a cake cone. up here they do not know what cake cones are. they call them plain cones. but i call them cake cones. the coffee ice cream was perfect. dad would have approved. my butt hurts from riding my bike yesterday, and tomorrow it will hurt from riding my bike today. and the same thing will happen the day after that. but in a while - in a week, maybe, or in two - it will not hurt at all. it will be a good, big, strong butt. this is called progress. this is called conditioning. this is called adapting. this is called growing. this is called learning. and i'm wearing adidas ankle socks. and cut-offs i cut off myself the other day that are green. not gray.
connectivity! in my apartment! on my laptop! yes! oh, god. email overload. this could take a day or five to catch up on. 7.3.2001
i'm at the manchester public library right now, the main manchester city branch. ten minutes ago i got my library card (sadly, only a temp) and after making use of the west manchester city branch first floor bathroom, i signed up to use a computer. so workstation #2 is mine for the next hour or so. manchester city library public internet policy rule #3h states that the children's room internet stations are for children's use only. the reason i am here at the library, on a computer that is way too slow for what i suspect lives inside the case (perhaps their security method here is just to make everything sux0r), is because, surprise surprise, the cable modem was not installed yesterday. (and also because y and i decided not to get a land line, since we both have cells and the signal in the apt is absolutely fabulous - i guess i should count my blessings. har har.) i should have expected - i should have known - that my endless stream of bad luck would be more than happy to follow me across state lines into federal crime territory. and it did. my appt was for 9-11a yesterday morning. ben and i sat and waited until 11a, at which point my paranoia kicked into high gear (i had been worried as early as 10a) and i called att broadband to find out what the fuck was going on. this was easier said than done, because att broadband's phone number - which, miraculously, i managed to memorize from calling it last week, although i didn't trust myself and had sheri recheck it for me (thanks darling) - is busy nine times out of ten. after i got through, the first idiot i talked to said the guy was just running late and if he didn't show up in an hour, call back. naturally, he did not show up in an hour, and i called back. the second idiot i talked to said she would call dispatch (first she automagically offered me a $20 credit on my acct, which doesn't even cover half a month's service but beggars can't be choosers) and find out what was going on and call me back. she then proceeded to not call me back, and in another hour i called again and got the third idiot, who told me he couldn't give me a credit on my acct and if i wanted "compensation for my time," as i termed it to him, i would have to talk to billing. and oh by the way, apparently the cable guy had shown up and decided we weren't home sometime between 9a and 11a, which is totally bogus because a) he didn't ring the doorbell, which we know for a fact is functional and b) claimed he called my cell phone many times and nobody answered nor was their an answering machine, which is bull because my phone was on the whole time, i received other calls, and i have reliable voxmail that i've never had a problem with. and the worst of it is that while ben and i sat on the curb, enjoying the weather, and ate our breakfast of hostess fruit pies (cherry) and glass bottled orange crush (orange), we saw an att broadband van, driven by what i presume was our guy, zoom by the building. so fucking f him. GAH. i sat on hold/was transferred three times for half an hour before i finally got to billing, where they gave me another $20 credit, which still means i haven't chalked up a measly month's worth of free service. to top it all off, the next available install appt isn't until thursday morning. we'll see if he shows up. maybe i'll just take my cell and my md and sit out in the parking lot for two hours, waiting. i think that might be the best game plan. GAH. and my body, as ever, betrays me when i least want it to. i still don't know what i've done to deserve this. but goddammit, things are going to change. i can feel it. or i can hope it. All Internet users should question the validity of information originating from the Internet, as they should with any information source, because not all the information is accurate, authoritative, or timely. 7.1.2001
sheri just electrocuted herself. her name is now ELECTROPOTAMUS. and she's talking about god punishing her for molesting the socket. so maybe she electrocuted her brain, too. (deadly lightning?)
ben and i are at jeremie and sheri's new house in connecticut. it's actually just half a house. but it is awesome. thunderstorms are coming, with "deadly lightning" - or so says the forecast. i wonder what the real-world difference is between deadly lightning and non-deadly lightning. i mean, isn't all lightning theoretically deadly? maybe i'll call my local doppler forecasting center and ask.
leaving! morrow showed up about an hour ago, and ben a half hour ago, and we took my stuff to the car, did a final sweep, and now it's time to go. morrow is babysitting phil for me this summer, although he won't be functional until a new ir blaster is acquired since the one that he came with is now glued to my cable box. morrow also very kindly drank the last coors in my fridge. what a good samaritan he is (not to mention he's doing the key handoff with subletguy still). so, it's time to go. i should be back online by monday afternoon thanks to the wonders of the cable modem. it's time to go. |
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