Posts (page 2)
What's your favorite way to keep in touch? Phone, snail mail, email, text message, Vox, _____ ?
#1 with a bullet for me is the phone.
#2 is email.
After that, all things are equal, although I don't IM anymore. I may again soon, but I never really got comfortable with IM. The phone I love. And unlike everyone else in the known universe, my land line is about 300% more efficient to get me than my cell phone. I never hear my cell, and I use it almost exclusively for outgoing calls when I'm out of the house and need to connect. Which is code for "I often forget to keep it properly charged."
Dear Guy in my Dining Room:
Please hurry the eff up. Seriously, you told me you worked for five years for a place that did nothing but assemble furniture for people - and this cabinet you're working on is cinchy - I read the directions. It's not even from Ikea, I mean, the instructions are in English, the screws are phillips head , all the parts are there, hell, I laid them out in order for you before you arrived.
Five and a half hours later, you're only 75% done. You arrived here at noon, and having told me it would take around an hour, I skipped lunch, but now it's almost 5:30 and I'm genuinely hungry, and I want you gone, my cabinet in place, and to get a start on my pasta sauce. Oh no, I'm not going to eat the sauce today, your dilly dallying has seen to it I can't get into the kitchen from here and any half decent sauce needs to simmer half a day, but I did chop all those tomatoes so I'll be damed if I'm not at least making the sauce today.
As for what I'll have for my breakfast lunch dinner combo meal, I think we know where that's headed: take out. I'll probably toodle up to for take out to the Athenian, and get the big ass Greek salad I love so much, but it'll be hard to pass over the grilled lamb if you take much longer. I have made it a point to only ask once an hour "Is everything okay?" but aside from drinking half my Diet Coke, you've said everything was cool. It looks like you're being careful and all, and I'm sure it will be worth the wait. I'll forget this inconvenience as soon as tomorrow I'd wager, once I store my stuff and reclaim the floor space it's taking up waiting for you to construct its home. But right this minute, I am overcome with an unpleasant desire to either kick you out before you're done or stick a pencil in your neck. I will do neither, but it keeps crossing my mind like the news zipper on the Time Warner building.
Luckily, I will do neither, but please, hurry up and get out of here. I'm not paying you hourly, so I"m wholly baffled as to your lackadaisical undertaking of this project. Who wants to spend six hours to earn 35 bucks?
What is your favorite cover song?
Question submitted by Ray.I'm enough of a nerd that I can't really point to a single song and say yes, that one is it. There are the covers that are better than the originals - like Real Wild Child by Iggy Pop (which is cover of a 1958 Johnny and the Deejays song) or the Clash's I fought the Law or Metallica's cover the Budgies Bread Fan.
Then the covers you think are the originals - like Santana's Black Magic Woman, which was actually a cover of a two year old Fleetwood Mac song. Same with Dolly Parton's most recent hit Shine which is a Collective Soul song. She did things for the song they couldn't. Or two of my favorites - which are both Springsteen Covers - Greg Kihn doing I Came For You in a real heart ripping style that brings a lot more passion than the original, in the same way the Beat Farmer's version of Reason to Believe highlights the real gruesome nature of the lyrics while managing to be a great dance tune.
Which brings me to the sentimental favorite - Under Pressure by Crooked Fingers with Bachmann vocals - Bachmann who is so my imaginary boyfriend of all time, and you get a song that goes from, in the Bowie/Queen version giving the feeling of genuinely being under pressure - like a deadline, a speed asked for, a perfomance anxiety; while the remake gives you the pressure of a heavy heart, forgiveness at risk and examining the road not taken in way that actually makes me a little misty after over 1000 listens. Pure effing art. The whole album of covers from 2002's "Bring on the Snakes" from whence this song hails is lovely for those who feel like they want more after listening.
Damn, I didn't even get to the fIREHOSE and K. McCarthy covers of Daniel Johnston's Walking the Cow. It's never over.
I know, I know, it's a cliche by now, but I love when someone takes a simple idea, obesses over it and turns it into something weird and great. I've watched this maybe 20 times and I love the level of obsession it took to plan this and what's more - to do it in a single take. Although I hate to see this much diet coke go to waste, so I pretend it's diet pepsi. Is that so wrong?
I've done Vegas. I mean that in the ugliest - gone with groups of girls /mixed groups/ dates way. Liberace museum, wedding chapels, Tom Jones, Wayne Newton, even Sigfried and Roy. I don't do Cirque things. But still - I end up back again for one reason or another. So Monday to Wednesday I'll be in Vegas - this time at the Palms where I've never stayed (the Venetian was booked) and if you've got any suggestions about things I might have missed - I'd love to hear your ideas. Other than a three hour meeting, a dinner at UNLV and a half spa day, I've got a decent amount of time to kill.
At Target today, there was a moppet, apx. age four. I was selecting sponges, the kind you clean with, from a bin containing many colors and one size. She saunters over and asks me what I'm doing.
"Picking out sponges," I say.
"What for?" she asks.
"Cleaning up messes," I say.
"I make messes sometimes," she confesses.
"Me too!" I say with conspiratorial glee. I offer her my palm to slap five and she does. "What color do you think I should get"?" I ask, pointing to the bin of candy colored cellulose pads.
"Pink. Also green!" She is very excited now. I reach in and remove a pink and green sponge, toss them into my cart.
"Great choice!" I say, "Thank you for helping me." I wave bye and turn my cart down the aisle.
I hear her little feet shuffling back to her cart where her mother has returned her attention having selected her dish liquid. The girl excitedly stammers "Mommy! I picked out some sponge colors and the lady bought them. She's messy too!" I turn back to wave, a courtesy to the mom, when speaking to children I don't know, I always try to acknowlege the parents as if to say "I respect you" or "I was the person your child was speaking to," or whatever. As soon as I turn, I see the mom is snatching the girl up, and is looking at me in terror. (the mom, the girl just looks confused.) The mother says, "Watch out for ladies like her!"
So I wonder if like me means blonde, friendly, harmless, messy, high fivers, or sponge purchasers?
Maybe I shouldn't speak to kids anymore? It's a shame, because up until the mom part, it was the best surprise of my day.
She steals my heart every time I see her, the highlight of my NYC trip. That and a good haircut. I have simple needs.
The oldest thing I own is actually part of a necklace - I have a Ming Pottery shard that was cobbled into a necklace by a silversmith ho put a frame around it o showcase the original design, which shows a blackbird. I kind of love it a lot, but the story is less momentous. I liked it, I bought it, I wear it, the end, Que sera sera. It's from the 8-11th century by date. Take that Ming, that's what I'm doing with your dynasty! I just have a shard, but I'm taking it to rock shows and family barbecues, I hope you don't mind.
The most surprising thing about my bloodline is that I'm actually 1/16th Cherokee. For someone as pasty white as me, it doesn't even seem possible, the last traces fo swarthiness reside in my mother, and then, solely in the form of sandy colored hair and a slightly longer tolerance for direct sunlight.
The rest is far less surprising. The rest of me is all American Appalachian, from the hills of Eastern Kentucky. I come from a shame addled bloodline (crime and alcohol), and my great grandparents eventually left Appalachia during Andrew Carnegie's heavy recruiting of the south so my great grandfather - Paw Shira could work on the Lancaster - Pennsylvania Railroad, where he was killed, like so many others breaking their backs during its construction. My great grandmother, whom he married at 16, and their cow, Estelle, a wedding present for the happy couple moved north and never looked back, in an effort to shake off what was at the time an even less savory reputation than Appalachian people currently enjoy. My Mee maw - Great Great Grandmother, remined in Kentucky with the rest of her 12 children and the family split in half - hard drinking gun toting felons, and snake handline religious zealots. They lived next door to one another all their lives, so visits were always a study in contrasts.
My Mee Maw was alive until I was 4, my great grandmother lived until I was 20. Having your babies early makes for an extended family that has a chance to meet.
The men from the ketucky side of the family are a colorful lot, none of whom I have remained in touch with, and whose stories I tell very selectively, but the names all sound straight out of the social register, or from the rolls of an animal house frat, because given names in Appalachian culture are based on last names, and nicknames are usually based on unfortunate mishaps. So there's a Twoey and a Jackie (short for jackson) and a Butler, and host of Logans, but there's also a Fret, Bucky and Seesaw. The history mirrors the history of labor and justice in America - the Brookside strike, the Harlan mines, the rise and fall of the company store, and I used to be a little embarassed about it until I was old enough to understand that distance isn't always measured in miles and hours, and just how subjective and arbitrary opportunity can be.
Oh and the last name? It's German, but I have no biological relation to anyone with that name. My last name came from my grandmother's third husband. Technically, I'm a Ballanger by bloodline. Wish we could have kept that name, but alas, not to be.
