obfuscated girl

i think we need more post-coital and less post-rock

"Kids, you can do anything you want to, unless Jay Leno wants to do it, too."--Conan O'Brien

I took a day off yesterday to see this band, and it made me realize how much I miss seeing music on weeknights and staying up too late and getting rides home from people who I have not seen in two years and going OOOOOOOHoooooh, OOOHooohoohooh" the whole ride home and not thinking about how very tired or how very old or how very sore and slightly lonely you are and just, in general, for lack of a better way to put it, feeling untouchable. I forgot how music does that. It sort of struck me dumb, remembering.

This week has been a random, much needed day off from work and another on Monday, lots of reading about Conan O'Brien and feeling bad because I care a lot about a dude who is getting an $80 million buyout in his contract and I have not donated any money to The Red Cross for Haiti, and is that my dad's genetics, that I don't donate things, and Wii Fit scores that range between 42 and 34, and just

waiting.

Waiting for the winter to be over, waiting for the next show I want to go to, waiting for something, I don't even know what.
It's kind of fun.

i wish i had a river so long it would teach my feet to fly, oh, i wish i had a river i could skate away on

(Evidence: "River" is the perfect Christmas song.)

I don't think that I am ever going to be really okay with this time of year again. Milwaukee has so far swung back and forth between two days of the type of cold that takes your breath away and sleeping in two sweaters and a sweatshirt doesn't make you feel any warmer, and this weird half-state of gray and above freezing weather. I never thought I would say it, but I miss snow.

I miss my mother. I miss going to a home that felt like a home and not a place where no evidence that you ever even existed can be found, where after you leave you make fun of the ridiculous non-conversations and shock-value shit that your (half-siblings? step-siblings? if you refuse to call her your stepmother what do you call them?) pass for conversation with strangers. I miss WANTING to go home. I miss caring anything at all about this time of year and not seeing it as a giant inconvenience to my carefully cultivated self-imposed exile.

I miss everything.

why put the body where the body don't want to go?

Here is a not-at-all comprehensive list of what I have been up to for the past...six? months? sorted by positives and negatives.

had a physical for the first time in six years
-was stuck 450 times by an extremely incompetent nurse when trying to draw blood for labs
the labs were "perfect" (Me: "So I'm perfect?" Coworker doctor guy who I asked to interpet the labs: "I did not say that. Your LABS were perfect. YOU are deeply flawed.")
-I think being in the doctor's waiting room made me get sick for the first time in over a year
lost 15 pounds since December, despite what the scale at the doctor's office said
got to the point where I LIKE going to the gym instead of going because I feel obligated/am fat/will die alone surrounded by 65 cats and bags of Cheetos and terrible romance novels
saw The Mountain Goats for the fifth (!) time in Madison
met Perry of Conversations With Redacted fame for the first time while seeing the Mountain Goats for the fifth time in Madison
finally moved beyond my obsession with YA fiction, sort of
-learned that every time I use my stove in my new apartment the fire alarm goes off and instead of fixing the stove the maintenance guy has given me a stick with which to turn off the fire alarm
went on a lot of dates
-they were all first dates, never to be heard from again
realized with new comprehension that was really, really not me when I never heard from them again
-lost my camera
-got a new shitty camera from eBay because it was cheap
replaced that camera with a really sweet camera because it was cheap and Nicole told me about it
-have not learned to fully utilize the really sweet camera to take remotely decent pictures
rediscovered my love of Veronica Mars
and Beans and Barley takeout
and everything John Darnielle has ever touched
can play "Viva La Vida"on the cello
-not very well, but I can play it
after six months or whatever have finally remembered how to log in to this site

WATCH THIS SPACE, OR MAYBE NOT, I HAVE BEEN BUSY

neglected positive

My laptop has recently recovered from THE WORST VIRUS EVER KNOWN TO MANKIND and apparently it still has some kind of low-grade residual computer swine flu because I was in the middle of writing this huge long entry here complete with actual thoughts on things and the least amount of taciturn..ity? and succinctness than has been exhibited here in a while, and it shut down in the middle and I do not have the energy to retrace what I wrote or try to recreate it. It went something like this:

Someone (I am trying to be lenient because I think they may still be in high school and also there was a reference to Mao Zedong) wrote a rap song about cruising on East Washington Avenue in my hometown and put it on Youtube and my friend Aaron sent me the link and it is pretty terrible, also a lot of it is filmed in the parking lot of my high school, I like the weather when it is above 60 degrees, I am seeing my sister and her husband and my brother in a little over a month and also the last time I vacationed in Colorado I got fired, I am moving in twenty days and holy shit I will have a real kitchen, I like Okkervil River a lot more than I used to mostly on account of listening to For Real fourteen times a day, I like Southland because asshole rodeo and Ryan Atwood, RYAN ATWOOD!, I have been eating a lot of hummus and Triscuits latesly, I have also been reading young adult fiction almost exclusively and I really love that author, there was probably more but it is lost to the winds of internet now because I HATE MY STUPID LAPTOP.

the end

and i am the rain king

Yesterday it was 83 degrees, today it is 44 and thunderstorming and has been all day and I do not want to leave this here coffeehouse that I walked to because I could not stand breathing in any more of the chemicals that I spent all morning breathing in while cleaning the shit out of (this could be disgustingly literal as well as random emphatical swearing!) my bathroom. A lot of things have happened over the past three months, and yet not really much of anything has happened at all. I have:

1. signed a lease and dropped more money than I maybe have on anything ever on a new one-bedroom apartment, my first one-bedroom ever, and i move in June 1
1a. no seriously, this is important. I am moving out of the place that I have moved in for the past six years that I had not up until this point left because I had no money to move. I am moving AWAY FROM BRADY STREET. AWAY FROM THE PEOPLE ACROSS THE STREET WHO ENJOY SCREAMING AT EACH OTHER ABOUT HOW AWESOME THE BAR WAS THAT THEY JUST CAME HOME FROM AT THREE IN THE MORNING. AWAY FROM THE HIPSTER DOUCHEBAGS WHO HAD A HIPSTER DOUCHEBAG PARTY UNTIL 4 IN THE MORNING LAST NIGHT. AWAY FROM THE UNCEASING STRAINS OF DAVE MATTHEWS BAND. AWAY FROM THE KITCHEN IN WHICH I CANNOT COOK BECAUSE THERE IS NO COUNTER SPACE AND I CANNOT TURN AROUND. THIS IS HUGE GUYS.
2. bought my first iPod and become one of Those Guys
3. become enamored with Explosions In The Sky
4. cut my hair (2009: The Year Of Haircut Documentation And The Renaissance of the Myspace Closeup)
5. played more Wii than is strictly adviseable
6. become maybe the first person in history to get a concussion from a jar of peanut butter
7. gotten my first significant work raise and bonus, as well as being at my job for a year as of February
8. realized that just because I enjoy my coworkers I do not have to hang out with them every month
8a. realized that I am way less fucked up than a lot of people I know, and that is kind of a refreshing change
9. etc.

All in all, I think things are pretty okay, except for the part where I am apparently never leaving this coffeehouse because of the dying from rain and cold. It was a good run.

This weekend: was filled with abnormally large quantities of food. And red wine. And Wii. This month: has been filled with below-freezing temperatures, sometimes to the point of 40 windchills, which is part of the reason why I have not written anything here in a long long time. The snow is melting and I am happy like a bunny. I fucking abhor Valentine's Day but I might actually have a Valentine this year. DEVELOPING, except probably I will never tell you about it again. What? I didn't say anything.
I had occasion today to upload a song that I sang on (I SANG ON) with the infamous Redacted of the infamous Conversations With Redacted series and the band that he is in and is very talented, Redacted Extremely Long Band Name. It was recorded all Postal Service style in either the summer of 2005 or 2006, I forget which, back when I had inappropriate crushes on boys who lived inside the internet and also way the fuck across the country and had no friends that did not live inside the internet and I was so sad, all the time, that I could barely talk. And so like: If you want to listen to it, click here.

beetlejuice beetlejuice beetlejuice

I am in a rut.
I joined a gym last month, which has been nice especially in light of the fact that the only non-walking-around-at-work outside physical activity I have done has been walking from my ride home's car door to the work entrance/from the work entrance to the car door/from the car door to the apartment door, and I have all of the dry skin problems that are coming with winter, and the only date I have been on in the past six months was this week and gave me the heebie-jeebies and I am like the Teen Girl Squad in reverse, and all I want to do is go to sleep until April. This isn't depression; this is winter in Wisconsin. (Although apparently we have a tobbogan run now.) I am sort of excited about the inauguration but in another sense it is just another thing to watch on TV.

To counteract the general whininess of the above paragraph, here is a band that was a very late entry in the "oh hey, someone put out something pretty good in 2008" sweepstakes: Frightened Rabbit. In particular, go listen to 'Keep Yourself Warm.' The only way that I can describe what they sound like is "very, very big." Also "possibly Scottish."

That's it.

2009: the year of "hey lookit this funny thing on youtube" posts

I laughed at my laptop screen for about five minutes at this:

In other news, there is apparently a remake of Ten Things I Hate About You in the works (!) for ABC Family (!!!) starring Gregory Peck's grandson (!!!!!!!!)and I would like to meet the first person who thought "hey, this seems like a pretty good idea" so I can PUNCH THEM IN THE FACE.

viva la vida

So the top ten list that I wrote for the website that I only sort of write for anymore is over here. Note: my list has absolutely nothing to do with the musical releases of 2008. It is awesome. The fact that music is not discussed in my list had les to do with me not being excited about some music this year; I was just more excited about TV.
I have very little to say. Christmas was okay. We avoided family explosions this year. I got some gift cards and the greatest blanket I have ever seen or touched; I am halfway tempted to carry it around like Linus. I could use some good book recommendations, as one of the gift cards I got was from Borders and I have not actually bought a book in months and months. New Year's Eve may or may not be spent asleep, as I was so tired yesterday that I went to bed at 9 pm and was consequently up at 6 a.m.

I am an old, old lady.

this exists.

I found this while I was searching for The Ten on Netflix. What.
The Ten Commandments: The Musical
"Singing and dancing the role of Moses, Val Kilmer transforms a classic biblical tale into a full-blown musical experience with the help of pop artist Patrick Leonard, Emmy-winning lyricist Maribeth Derry and director Robert Iscove (From Justin to Kelly). Filmed live at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre, the show tells the story of a Hebrew boy raised as the brother of an Egyptian prince (Kevin Earley) who later blossoms into a leader to save his people."

There are so many things wrong in that paragraph. SEE IF YOU CAN FIND THEM ALL!