There's Nothing Worth Running For

I'm going to explode.

Is it too late to want back on the party cabin bandwagon? I'm desperate for something to look forward to and to get out of here, and what I really really want is to curl up in a ball on Stacey's futon in her room in high school and know that everyone is coming over to hang out and later we will get up to some No Good.

Failing that, however, I would really like to hang out with normal people who I like and miss all the time. If you're all going to be in one place for a few days I think I need that more than anything.

EDIT: Here is an illustration of what I am nostalgic for

Stop Now Before It's Too Late

Dear Entire past week,

Fuck you. I hate you so bad.

xoxoxo

You Can Normalize! Don't It Make You Feel Alive?

We bought JD a new macbook the other day. Waaah. I know I am supposed to be loving and mature and shit, but I am violently jealous. It can perform magic and stuff that mine can't do.

Speaking of, we attended the midnight showing of the new HP5 movie earlier this week. Sweet god, I love this series. Sweet god, I want to squinch Hermione's cheeks all the time. My new theory, about book 7, is that Dumbledore himself was one of Voldemort's horcruxes. That's why Snape had to kill him. Oooooh, right? yeah I'm a genius.

Last Saturday we went to see the Decemberists with the LA philharmonic. I can now officially die any time and be totally content with the amount of living I have done. That was the best thing ever. They played the Tain, which is a 20-minute, four-part opus something akin to "freebird" that some rapscallion always cheers for at decemberists concerts, much to the delight/chagrin of the hardcore fanbase who chuckle dismissively at this idea. They, however, played it at this show, marking the first time I had heard it performed live, and they played it with a full orchestral backing. Sweet christ almighty. best. thing. ever. Also playing this show were Band of Horses and Andrew Bird. Both fucking spectacular. I made little videos of much of the decemberists' performance but haven't posted them on youtube yet or anything. if anyone's interested i might.

jenny and mike left boston this morning! Oh, adventure. I hope they have some good comp cds in the car to tide them over. Else that will be a loooooooong drive.

My officemate, who is ridiculously hard-working, the golden child of the whole department and especially our advisor, and my very patient, hand-holding grad student mentor and informal advisor for the past few years has a great job at a real university being a real professor and she is slowly moving her shit out of the office. Yesterday I moved some of my shit from a bookcase across the room to the more conveniently located, now-empty one over here, and I almost had a panic attack. I don't want to be the oldest student and I don't want to help the littler ones and I don't want everyone looking at me to see how to teach/do research/successfully land a job/be professional in any context/work hard. Ugh. I don't want to pioneer this shit for the next couple years. I want someone sitting right next to me who won't fall over laughing when I ask a really, really stupid question about something I ought to know already.

Compounding my existential waffling is a bunch of work I am finding it impossible to focus on. I am giving a guest lekshur for said officemate in the class of hers i am taing this session in a week, yet i can't write the stupid lekshur. ok, but this class is 3 hours long. i am pretty sure i need to at some point, put SOMETHING on a slide and think about what words should accompany it. Jesus. If only I could decide on a stupid career path I would be so motivated, right? Blugh.

Last night, though, JD and I were both working dilligently at 2am on talks we have to give soon, on our yuppie-pants apple laptops. That was really amusing to me. What kind of people are we to both be prepping powerpoint presentations for our careers? It just seems so fucking adult and weird. At least one of us is motivated and will end up being successful. I am talking about him, you guys. Duh.

Ok, fine. I am going to get some shit done before a meeting later with a person who is ten years older than me, a former engineer who decided he wanted his soul back and has converted to research, who is much more focused and driven than i am but i am in charge of him and that makes me feel icky. great.

What the fuckery is this? Stupid fucking feelings of inadequacy. Go away! Why is this career so fucking rife with ambiguity?! SO ANNOYING.

For Those Of You Who Still Think We're From England...We're Not. No.

Here's some photos Ashleigh took. There's more on her snapfish account (obviously, they didn't jsut come out here, take three photos of us, and leave) but I don't know if I am allowed to link to her photos. I guess she needs to update her blog to share those things with you guys.





JD and I went cd shopping at this excellent used cd store the other night. Ohhhh sweet god. We each bought like ten cds and they are fucking rad. I am thinking, a real genuine awesome comp cd is finally about to come of this. It has been SO long since I bought a cd, instead of stealing music. Now I am grown and my skool seems to be cracking down on stealing, so I will buy used music. It's way better, you guys. I put all my new music on my iPod and the gym has never been so much fun. I'm really into LCD Soundsystem right now (that's the new background song), also got the new arcade fire FINALLY, the new Andrew Bird, a mewithoutyou cd, jose gonzalez, the rosebuds, new modest mouse, blonde redhead, pelican, tomahawk, a talking heads best-of collection (USED!), a tortoise + bonnie prince billy cd, a rare black heart procession UK import I have never seen before, herbert, the battles. Ahhhhhhhhhh. It is going to be a great day for a compthology sometime soon. I like to think that if I provide you all with nothing else, I can supply you with music artfully arranged in a pleasing song order. Jenny tells me that she usually ends up liking only one or two songs on every cd I make, but she REALLY likes those, so it's cool. Hmmmm. I understand comp cd burnout, you guys. So even if I just sent you one, hit me up. This might have to be a three-parter again. Oh, summer. What do you do to me? I fucking forgot how great life is when you have excellent music following you around everywhere, too. No one can be glum when faced with this! Ahhhhhh.







So for the 4th we went goodwilling. I spent $80 and got like sixteen items of ridiculously awesome clothing. I found a twee little tote bag with a reared-up unicorn quilted onto the front of it, but decided not to buy it because, honestly, it doesn't scream, "professional." Maybe it will still be there when you come visit and we can get it next time. Goodwill is awesome. Also, to be patriotic we went to see Sicko. Ugh. I am going to reserve final judgment until the next election, but if things go south I am applying to jobs in other countries for SURE. And I am going to start encouraging my mother to move to scotland. Because if she didn't have to worry about her health insurance premiums, I think her life would be a hell of a lot easier. Mine too. Yours too. yak. Then we did laundry. That's right. Life is so glamorous and exotic at all times.

I'm Coming Up Only To Hold You Under

No Time For Proper Detail, We Are In Need Of A Listing Device:

Ashleigh and Jim were here for a week. That was fabulous.

Ash and Jim and me and JD and our friends here went out to dinner on our anniversary (the 21st) and it was fantastic. The waitress was incredible and, after discerning that we were celebrating our anniv., she brought two free bottles of champagne for the table and wouldn't stop exclaiming over how cool it was that we got married in a castle in scotland. Oh, I love the restaurant that we went to, it's Cuban and they have the best...everything. Ah, god, that was awesome. It was super nice to have friends around and go celebrate with people we love etc etc

Then my armpits had been hurting (??) mysteriously for a couple days, and I woke up with a migraine that lasted the next three days. I thought I was going to die.

Went to Hollywood, toured the Kodak Theater (we went on the actual stage where they do the oskirs), went to Grumann's Chinese Theater, watched live performance of America's Next Pop Tartlet-Skank in progress America's Next Pop Star, spent three man-free hours of bliss in Sephora with Ashleigh, went to Ripley's B'lieve it or Not museum, saw walk of fame, got harrassed for "donations" by low-rent looking Chewbacca knockoff after "character" forced way into group photo.

Drove to Pasadena, where my suggestion for an eating place turned out to be the worst idea in human history. My food had a living grub or maggot of some kind luxuriating on the spinach leaf placed atop the pasta and when I sent it back a series of escalating, progressively sassier misunderstandings with our english-as-a-second-language waitress led to our eventually leaving without eating and I don't really want to talk about it because my blood pressure is rising even now. I had to keep sending her back to her "manager" to see if they could comp all the food. Am I crazy for thinking that should have been the initial appeasement? I thought that was more or less standard practice. Instead she encouraged us to save room for lots of dessert because that would be on the house. I dug deep, you guys, and got totally fucking shitty with her. Ugh. We drove back to the oc and swung by In 'N Out burger (yes, we can eat it, they have a "veggie burger" that is just tomato and lettuce and grilled onions on a bun with ketchup and mustard and it is fucking heaven) and the only positive thing to come from that is that we didn't blow a ton of cash on an overpriced italian meal. Jeeze.

We discovered a new, super-great beach that we had never gone to before which will now be the only beach I care to hang out at (Ash and Jim spent most of a whole day there when JD and I both had to work one day)

Went to watch a taping of the late late show with craig ferguson (he's scottish). Interesting. When you show up, they basically rank-order you into categories based on your physical attractiveness (I am not kidding) and how nicely you're dressed. Duder looked us up and down and stuck us in group 1 even though we were very close to arriving late. A quick look around the waiting area revealed the method to their classification: young, reasonably attractive people who were not dressed like idiots in group 1. middle- and older-aged people, really conservative or boring-looking young people, and people who were dressed trashily in group 2. Group 3 was entirely composed of freak teenagers who were clearly (I thought) trying to dress/look as weird as possible so that if they were on tv it would be hilarious to them. Oh and I noticed that a good number of minorities were seated in group 3. This classification highly disturbed me. Until we ended up in the most amazing possible seats, in the second row on the side of the studio without any of the stupid camera equipment blocking our view of anything. Then I said a little thank-you to the baby jesus for making us reasonably attractive because it was pretty cool to be 10 feet from celebs. janeane garofolo was there. SHE IS TINY! also wolfgang puck was there to film the july 4th cooking segment, and he seems really really sweet and cute. he's also tiny. he made a flag cake that they fed us after the taping was over. It was all filmed out of order and we were basically forbidden to do anything but cheer and yell enthusiastically. The warm-up guy, a fat sad drunk man who relentlessly hit on the Sassy Southern Girl seated right in front of us, said that at no point were we allowed to do what in the comedy world is called a "step-back," where you go "oh no he didn't!" or some such. Fatty McWarmUp then joked, "this isn't Conan, you guys" to which the whole crowd reacted with a loud stepback.

anyway. it was cool, if surreal and disenchanting a little bit. Craig ferguson is fucking hilarious in person, though. Jim won a mug. JD won a Big & Rich cd. Oh yes. I think we left that in ashleigh and jim's rental car *cough*

After the taping we went to another restaurant I suggested, this one all macrobiotic so mostly vegan but with some things having fish in them, and that was actually good, thank god. I would have stroked out if anything had gone wrong with that place. Macrobiotic cake is a little disappointing, but otherwise it was fabulous.

Then we dicked around in Santa Monica, a niceish hipster shopping area. sort of. I can't describe things very well. Oh earlier that day we had gone to Venice Beach, which is where there's a boardwalk and muscle beach and people rollerblade with their dogs and sell fake watches and stuff. Yarp.

So there's only a week and some change before the 5th HP movie. I am going to pee my pants every day until the midnight showing of that movie

Also, JD and I just discovered that the Decemberists are playing the Hollywood Bowl next weekend with the LA Philharmonic in their first-ever full orchestra concert! AND AND AND Band of Horses and Andrew Bird are both playing too!!!!!! I am so excited already I can barely think straight. We got tickets yesterday, and they are really rad seats (they better be, they cost an arm and a leg) and you are allowed to bring picnic things like wine and candles and shit with you. We are sitting in a little 4-seat box with a great view. If two of you guys wanna come out we'll share our picnic and wine with you. Heeee. God, a fantastic concert with my current three favorite bands, and we get to bring wine. God BLESS IT.

When Ash & Jim were here I had this fanatical idea that we needed new pillows for our bed because JD and I constantly wake up with sore necks. We ended up going to linens 'n things and buying a new comforter and sheets and now every time I see the bed I get so happy I cry a little bit. Maybe I'll photograph that for you guys. So since then I have been on a big nesting kick. We spent an entire afternoon looking for a particular size cushion to replace the one on the bench we have in the living room that's a thousand years old. I went on a crazy three-target spree to find the perfect toilet contour rug. etc. It's strange how different this place looks with those little changes- the shower curtain we got to replace the extremely ugly one we had previously alone really classes up the place. I am kind of a princess.

Melissa, you are welcome to come visit any time at all! and you don't need to bring emergency water because we are going to donate allllllllll those cans of disaster preparedness food to either a food bank or a shelter of some kind, so it would probably be gone by the time you got here. But anytime is good. Unless I'm, like, not here or something. So maybe call first, but then anytime is fine :)