Friday, January 19, 2007

BREAKING NEWS

I love Emiliana Torrini. Watch her be amazing in this semi-creepy yet still entrancing music video. Also, listen to the song "Serenade" and complete your life.

Good news: It's the weekend.
Bad news: I just bombed a math midterm.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

No Love For Love!

"
The Poetry Center of Chicago presents
No Love for Love
The Anti-Valentine's Day Show
February 12, 2007
Monday at 8pm
Tickets: $50 for VIP seating/$20 all others
All proceeds benefit The Poetry Center of Chicago.


This American Life creator Ira Glass headlines a bill featuring some of the hippest, most cutting-edge prose, poetry and spoken word writers in Chicago in “No Love for Love: The Poetry Center of Chicago’s Anti-Valentine’s Day Show”

The event will feature Glass, along with writers Joel Chmara, Joe Meno, Jonathan Messenger, Christopher Piatt, Diana Slickman, Megan Stielstra and Scott Woldman discussing love or their lack of it. The event will be hosted by slam poet extraordinaire Mary Fons. Twisted torch songs will be provided by pianist Justin Hayford.

“We’re tired of all the hearts and flowers,” says Poetry Center Executive Director Lisa Buscani. “We’re sick of greeting card love. We want to hear from the other end of the love spectrum.”

The Poetry Center will also sponsor a silent auction featuring items that “celebrate singleness.” Items include dinner and the movies for one, internet dating consulting, customized love poems that bidders can send to themselves.“It promises to be an evening of bitterness, bile and fun,” Buscani says."

I really want to go to this. I really, really want to go to this. I think I will go to this.

big noise from winnetka

Insidious Facebook! You ensnare me.

irony poisoning (12:01:31 AM): and you should write more blog entries
feet of a queen (12:00:09 AM): in my boredom?
irony poisoning (12:01:52 AM): yes.

I am bored, and bored, and bored. Sure, you say, I could read that extra article for hum. But that requires a working printer and ink... and don't think I'm about to exert effort. And I'm hardly about to read it sideways on my screen as a pdf. I could also study Chinese, but after reading Durkheim all day, I'd really rather not.

I could go to bed, I guess.. but at midnight? That's like throwing in the towel. So here's some random blather:

1) Sometimes... I wonder about porn stars. Do they feel empty inside? How do they deal with such blatant, public exploitation of their bodies? Do their sex lives lack the excitement of other people's? I'd like to read a study into their psyche. Maybe, to a porn star, the most amazingly fantastic sex is loving, sweet, gentle, even traditional. Maybe.
2) Sometimes I think about how cool it would be to walk on the ceiling, minus the blood rushing to my head. I would especially like how walking into each room would require you to crawl over that short doorway wall. And sliding down the staircase walls.
3) I have no conception of not making myself at home. I sit down on public floors, sit sideways in public chairs, breathe on public windows and write things in the fog. (Upekha is my kin on this one, we discovered yesterday.)
4) Like chocolate-covered cherries? Come and take them from me. I have a box-full, and I don't want them.
5) I bet I'll never finish One Hundred Years of Solitude.
6) I was a girl scout for two weeks, once. I hated it.

Monday, January 15, 2007

icebound stream

Deeply meditative walk from the #6 bus stop back to my dorm. Staying on a street too long, a typically frightening area deserted, watching 1:27AM appear on the bus scroll next to 60th Street and feeling both awake and at peace. The bus was almost empty. The January rain was nice, too; not too insistent. Somehow unassuming, gentle but steady. The lights staining everything orange. The concrete active as raindrops spark the ground. My impenetrable boots, out of place scarf, hat, and mittens. Music in my head. Looking through windows and seeing bookshelves and posters. Someone in the house across the courtyard is watching TV in the Salisbury lounge. It's quiet here, and dark in my room, and I am content.

(But not completely content. The seasonal inappropriateness is painful - I feel like we're all embarking on some new period in our history. Like we've finally gained the power to ruin the world, and for the first time are actually feeling the effects. And instead of seeing it as alarming, a beginning of an end, people are embracing it because warm weather is comfortable. It seems so... disturbingly American. Fast food and drive-through church and the joy of that silly "global warming". Maybe when New York City is underwater, it'll warrant some action.

Admittedly strange, depressing segue. I watched Jesus Camp last night and so feel very unnerved. I'm a little afraid that people's faith in God will destroy everyone. Not so absurd a fear if you watch the movie. Please, Evangelical-in-tongue-speakers: Return to sanity. Preserve the rest of humanity. Now back to non-doom-filled topics.)

I spent the earlier part of the night with Upekha and Kay in the latter's apartment on MI Avenue. We made (debatable) cookies, from a bag (adding an egg and butter - domestic divas that we are) and proceeded to have a very girly night. Which is necessary every so often. No nail polish or hair-braiding, but plenty girls-only otherwise.

I really enjoy weekends lately. Actually, I've been rapidly losing interest in the weeks (bad). But I can't sleep past 10ish in the morning.

(Grammatical note: I am plagued with confusion about what to do regarding parenthetical statements and periods. I believe the period belongs within the PS, but if there's only one word, just an aside, I don't right doing it. Sad grammar issue.)

My fixation right now is the music of Laura Veirs. It's not exactly a new one, but I've fallen into it as a solo musical obsession a few times this school year. "Cast A Hook in Me" (which is available for listening on her myspace) is one of my favorites. As well as Spelunking, and Galaxies (oddly mesmerizing video here).

Mmn. 2:58AM.

Monday, January 08, 2007

snowshoes and hunters

Pretty.

There's something very lovely about how stripped-down this is.. it makes it feel real.

does your heart

..ever do this thing where it physically aches and you feel just about insane, and you start worrying it'll be one of those nights that don't let you sleep? It's happened to me a few times.. I remember specifically one time in 9th grade, and mostly recently, just about a month ago, the night before my Chinese exam.

I'm not sure whether it's emotion deprivation that leads me to overdose on emotion, or just surrender. But it's easy to feel boxed-in and without choice once I start to let it in. I mean, I'm still in touch with rationality, but what is it that makes me feel like being so irrational? It's like.. if I don't do something crazy, I will go crazy.

I don't think anybody knows how infrequently I do crazy things. In fact, I can't think of one truly crazy thing I've ever done. Nothing even remotely wild, in my recent memory.

Nobody can be this out of touch without paying some price for it.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

gone away from me

Allow me this quick moment of self-indulgence.

I am sitting on my bed, huddling with my laptop, eating peanut butter (which tastes like glue), obsessively checking my email, falling into the vacuum-like vortex that is anyone's myspace page, friendless in a small Midwestern town.

I leave tomorrow, back to Chicago, my city, my school, where there is life, hummus, and the TV is off. I am going vegetarian for a while, with my sister. True, I've tried it several times before. But why not try again?

Anyway, the point is:

I. am. achingly. lonely. This world is big, and there are a lot of people in it. At 19, I shouldn't be feeling like I'm doomed to catladyhood, to be the sort of person that jumps when touched. But frankly, at this rate, I'm not going to find love, or love isn't going to come and find me, until I'm 89 years old, with brittle teeth and grey, stringy hair. And who's going to want to kiss me good morning then? MY CAT, that's who.

...I need a good winter snowstorm. All of this "warm winter" crap is plunging me into despair. (Always blame S.A.D., I say.)