It was fun for awhile

As promised, after a conversation at High Dive last night.

I heard this song in the grocery store last week and was like, what, I know this song, but who is this, what's going on? I looked it up when I got home and was reminded that a) 10,000 Maniacs released albums without Natalie Merchant and b) their first (and only?) single was a cover of Roxy Music. Seeing the video unlocked it all!

Back in the days of eight now, making a tape now

8-Blog-Posts-In-1!

Girl Talk. About 1/3 of this guy's songs are FCKING BRILLIANT. The other 2/3 sometimes give me an aneurysm. But what I love about the ones that work, is that he takes the mash-up concept to this whole other three-dimensional and viable level. About 2% of mash-ups are really great, but the large majority of them I find great for the first 30 seconds.....then I get exhausted and bored by them. His tracks takes this 30 second golden window to the nth degree. Several Girl Talk songs are on my summer jam rotation.

My Officemate. Today, she asked me about "provisos" and whether it was a general grammar term or a legal one, and then I was googling it and we were talking about plain language/new english, etc., as well as words losing meaning from misuse, and I talked about my biggest pet peeve, which is the word "factoid" and how it was misused so much that now its an acceptable definition, and then she said, "yeah, its like fat and phat - f-a-t and p-h-a-t." Um, no, actually its nothing like that. And I said as much. And I said, I have no problem with slang, with creation of words, with language evolving, because it always has and always will, and her response was, "did you ever hear that Tim McGraw song about Back in the Good Old days when a hoe was a garden tool? I liked that song." See, just when we were starting to bond over something, she has to remind me that she's a high-strung nervous suburban republican white lady. I stood up and went to get coffee. And promptly made myself giggle because I kept hearing Gladys Knight's voice saying "you know everybody's talkin' about the good old days, the good old days....well, let's talk about the good old days."

Therapy. Why does it always have to go back to my abandonment issues? I hate being cliche. I'm a special and unique snowflake. Right? Right?? Well, that and my skills at emotion stuffing. I'm getting better about it though. And by better, I mean worse, since perhaps its not a skillset that is so desirable. So my therapist claims.

Clothes. I need to accept that all my dress pants are probably going to have permanent grease stains on the cuffs after this summer of biking to work every day that it's not raining.

Herbal smokes. Last night I tried out some dream herbs, that pretty much tasted like smoking ginger and was a bit harsh on the lungs. These particular ones were relatives of tumeric, and supposedly were supposed to help bridge the psychic gateway. I fell asleep quickly therafter and had a long night of dreams, some that were kinda cool and two that involved snow or the arctic. This was probably because it was the first night of sleeping with the a/c on and the door shut. I did dream that dommeyourass was not going to work because of a snow day, that she was calling in sick, and then a few hours later she e-mailed to inform me that she's taking a sick day tomorrow. Scary! Or not. I mean, we have lots of psychic things like that in our hosuehold all the time, so its really hard to know if the root herbs did anything. However, I enjoyed the pre-bedtime ritual of it. I love a good ritual.

Over the weekend, when taking a break from cleaning the house, I tried out this: which is exactly what I wanted in a hand-rolled cigarette that made my mouth feel a little tingly and didn't hurt my lungs and made me feel relaxed afterwards without putting me too sleep. It was basically the inverse of tobacco, which is what I wanted. However, it is EXPENSIVE. $20 for a pouch that is only half the size of Bali Shag! Granted, I'm not smoking it everyday, but still. That will definitely fall into the "special occasion" category. Which, I think said special occasion will be my writing residency in two weeks.

Ragdale. My writing residency is in two weeks!! I leave on the 31st and come back on August 13th. I will primarily be incommunicado, mostly by choice. I'll have my cell phone with me, but I'll probably have it off except for maybe an hour a day to check messages. I'll have my laptop with me and there's some wireless access, but its not guaranteed and I hope actually I can't get it in my room. Again, I might check in periodically and make some scrabulous moves, but if I'm up in lj making posts and starting word twist games with you, please tell me politely to go the fck away. I actually don't think it will be a huge problem. I have a problem with compuslively checking these things when I'm in my house or at work, but when I'm away and in a different environment, I welcome the opportunity to not be plugged in. Also, I found out there are community bikes in the house where I'm staying!! I was going to try and figure out bringing my own, because I'm rather attached to it these days, but that didn't fit into my plan of packing light.

Damon. He's in town next weekend! July 26-28. I want to take him to Feed. And Smoque. And we're doing karaoke on Sunday night at Sidekicks when it won't be crowded so we can sing as many songs as we want and still leave by midnight. So even though its a school night, please consider coming.