You better run for your life.

[raybear]

My unofficial birthday weekend was quite lovely. On Friday, cocolola invited me to see a bad movie with her, which I jumped on. She treated me to candy, soda, and The Happening, which god help me, was really bad, but in that non-painful way where I totally enjoy myself the entire time. Its like Shyamalan has these good story ideas, and he has some technical prowess, but he lacks a good vision on the best way to implement it, they are so heavy-handed and obvious. I swear I'm probably going to end up seeing everything he makes though, they are entertaining failures to me.

After work, I met up with blondestallion and we headed up to Sidekicks for some karaoke-ing. It was a packed house already, with some birthday and work events, even before the singing started. I opened with Phil Collins "Don't Lose My Number" which I'd never done before and was feeling pretty good about it. So much so that when two songs later, someone from the birthday party was singing "On My Own" but they had not Michael Mcdonald on stage, so I went up to the front and when I started singing along, she waved me on stage. I can't even count the number of times (or people) I've sung "On My Own", but I'm not sure I'll ever get tired of it. We were instantly bff's. But then that bond was broken when my next song choice came on -- "Thong Song". I had a feeling that the crowd wouldn't be into it, they seemed way to sort of button-down and slightly conservative. Like, they went crazy for "I Will Survive", but they weren't so sure about my lascivious choice. Well, a couple people seemed excited, but they totally got shushed by their friends, so I kinda felt a bit like an ass up on stage singing a song that made people cranky. But I got over it and sang "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" with Chip's friend E, who has this aMAZing voice which was totally intimidating. Especially since she sang the Barbra part, which is normally what I do better anyway. But it was still fun. The wait between songs was long, I hung out with the darts players for awhile, I chatted with loosethread and femmepony, fuzzilla, other non-lj people, then finally I ended the night with Kenny Loggins "This Is It". blondestallion went out on "All Night Long" which was very well received by the crowd. We left, and it was way past our usual bedtime, but we ended up going to catch the end of Smoothtastic dance party, one of the parties to emerge from the yacht rock movement. I got home at 2:30 am and ate a slice of razzleberry pie (which I bought for myself on my birthday), along with chocolate ice cream before bed.


On Saturday I slept in slightly, went to pick up the produce box with unscrambled, then spent most of the early part of the day eating salad, putzing, contemplating the dyke march, but ultimately watching DVDs. At 3:30, I got up, showered, hopped on my bike and went to vfc, where we had sushi for her birthday dinner. We went back to her house for weird tv watching, snacks, and a rousing game of Encore.
Its supposed to be a team game, but I can't imagine anyone else in my life (in Chicago) besides vfc who could play it with me, so we just play the two of us and bend the rules and give each other 2, sometimes 3 minutes, which makes for a much more enjoyable gaming experience. Afterwards, she finally showed me the movie Dreamcatcher [Note to Liza: Wikipedia is seeking to expand on their article for this film, if you'd like to add your expertise], which she has subjected most of her friends to watching. I biked home afterwards, got home around 1:30 am, and when I opened the back door to the building, Sophie was there and jumping on me. She apparently had figured out that if she pushed on the screen door in the back (I left the main door open so air could circulate), she could escape onto the porch. Unfortunately, its a bit harder for a dog to pull the same door open, so I have no idea how long she'd been hanging out on the back staircase, probably being a nuisance to the neighbors. (Not that they'd ever say anything, or probably really care.) For some reason I stayed up even longer, probably eating more pie and more ice cream.

But on Sunday, I still got up at 8 am and made it to breakfast at Lula's relatively on time with unscrambled. We walked a bit afterwards, and then I went home and quasi-napped briefly, before gearing up to bike over to the pride parade. I text a bunch of random people, actually probably most every chicago queer in my cell phone address book, to see who, if anyone, was at the parade and where they were stationed, thinking that instead of finding a spot to plant myself and watch the parade, I would bike around to different areas and visit with people. The majority of people who I texted were NOT at the parade, nor with any plans of attending, which didn't surprise me, but I was amused at how many of them were careful to be suitably apologetic and reassure me that they were indeed still very proud. broqued was on her way to the toy store, so I hung out and rode with her briefly on my way to lakeview.

I got to the parade around 2:30, but it seemed to have only just started moving (it was supposed to start at 12) and so I caught half of the floats riding past on my bike in the zone before the parade (where its significantly less crowded), then I circled around to the intersection of Clark/Diversey which is near the end of the route. I found a couple random side streets that were so silent, just a block away from the chaos. I made my way up to Broadway, saw the beginning of the parade, so I sat on the curb and drank some water and took in the floats. But after an hour, it began to rain, a sudden cold summer shower, that I knew probably wouldn't last too long, but was too hard to just sit in. I biked down to the corner and found this giant mansion of a lincoln park house, where I stood under the awning on the side and watched it pour down around me. The same thing happened the day before -- a few blocks before I got to Liza's, a quick storm cloud passed over and I found refuge under a giant tree. Both of those moments were some of my favorites of the weekend, really. I've been acutely interested in attuning to weather lately. So the rain finally let up, and I was going to ride back home and maybe change clothes and wait to hear from blondestallion, but I decided to just see where the parade was at -- sure enough, I recognized a float I'd seen before, and about 10 minutes later, the Power of Cheer came around the corner. I biked behind them for the last few blocks. After leaving lakeview and cleaning up, for dinner there was ahi tuna club sandwiches (the best thing in the entire world to me right now -- a BLT with slices of tuna sashimi added!!) and then we went to see Wall-E and I ate my entire specially prepared snack bag of M&Ms. I was driven home and was in bed around midnight, as there was no more pie for me to eat and keep me up an extra hour.

It was really great to have a weekend to myself. I had a few tiny moments of missing DYA, but they weren't long-lasting. Today I've been exhausted and wanting to nap all day and thought maybe I was sick, maybe I was slipping into a larger funk, but then realized, well, maybe, I was just busy all weekend and my body needs some more rest. Today is the last day of June, and tomorrow I start on my plans for July, which include a bit of detoxing, so maybe I needed one more day of lots of lounging before I pulled it together. Detoxing is not the exact right word, but all my 'bad habits' have been piling up on me lately, so it works for me to sort of line up all my good habits at once and get myself re-oriented and ideally out of the 'danger! depression zone'. I will say, I have been eating fairly well (hello, farm share and fresh vegetables) and biking every where for transportation (including work today) and good about having quality friend time. I think these last two have been sort of what's been saving me lately, from completely sort of slipping under. But I'm ready to kickstart myself out of it now, sort of like I did in April. Back into a gym routine, a writing routine, a meditating routine, a reading routine. I'm starting my writing residency on July 31st, so I guess I'm sort of thinking of this as mental training, to get myself into an organized place, both with my novel that I'm working on, and in my own brain. I've been re-reading William Styron's "Darkness Visible". I connect to so much of how he talks about his depression, even if I am on a different place on the spectrum of his own manifestations, but its not too far off. The last time I read it, I think I was in a similiar state -- in the midst of a minor phase of depression, the kind where it is sort of possible to keep things afloat and function fairly close to normal, but there's always this sort of awareness of the lens that's there. I'm getting a lot better in this sorting: which feelings are reactions to what's happening in my life, which ones are reactions to the lens. Separating the categories out too, which is a feeling, which is a mood. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they oppose, but that doesn't make it a contradiction. I think this is why I've been so intense in how I watch the sky, the weather. Seeing the patterns of movement and change, within the larger, longer shifts of seasons, its analagous to how I'm watching myself. And figuring out that often I can choose a route so the wind is mostly at my back, but other times, I ride directly into it and there's an exhileration to that as well. Some days I'm too heavy to try, but other days, I can get it to leave me long enough to let me fly a little.

Comments

Re: coincidence?!

[riverafire.livejournal.com]

well I am definitely putting on our to-do list for the next time you come to L.A.