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the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
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NO THEMATIC COHERENCE My favorite weather site is Weather Underground. But what's so underground about it? Is it THE WEATHER THE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T WANT YOU TO SEE? Or does it refer to the weather down in mine shafts or under the topsoil? ("And now, the weather for earthworms. Continued cool and clammy today with a chance of tunneling and hermaphroditic reproduction.") I like how the first thing that comes up on the Weather Underground site is this map of the United States with the temperature ranges all depicted in different colors, so when I check it all sleepy in the morning the first thing I think is "oh, it's pale green today."
Would you like a randomly generated diaryland entry? Although Goo is definitely not my favorite album of theirs, Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots" is a damn sexy song and having it on the headphones as I ride the El in the morning makes me go all syrupy-spined in the seat and slowly cross my legs in their black tights, just to enjoy the fabric friction. It's something about the snare drum and Thurston Moore's dadaistic insinuations and the buildup to the guitar spaz-out. The feeling of driving down Lake Shore Drive on a late late summernight and leaning out the window, face up, to see the horizontal stars slide by. Looking up at the windows of the high-rises to see who else is awake. Wiggle eyes wiggle eyes I need wiggle eyes. I am going to buy many packs of wiggle eyes and some superglue and then there will soon be wiggle eyes all over town. Wireless Chicago. YESTERDAY'S BUS JOURNEY 1. The man who was missing key teeth and asked me, "Is that some kind of instrument?" It's a violin. "Those are really expensive, right?" They can be. "Can I see it?" No. 2. When will strange men get it through their heads that women do not appreciate it when you tell them to smile? He sits down next to me on the bus and implores, "You should smile!" In the interest of politeness I choke down my first response ("You should bite me!") and instead give him the scariest psychotic toothy smile/grimace I can muster. 3. Call me uncool, call me unhip, elect me The Mayor of Squaresville, but I had never heard of this group ("group." Don't I sound just like your mom?), and the poster totally cracked me up from the window of the bus. "Killa Beez"? Are they serious? Also, has anyone ever explored the connection between metal misspelling (like Def Leppard) and hip-hop misspelling? 4. Another funny/strange sign on the corner of Irving and Kimball: a liquor store whose awning read FOOD � POP � CIGARRETTES - & (KEGS). Dig that painfully midwestern "pop" thing there. And the fact that they sell kegs is apparently an afterthought or a secret. METAFICTONAL 1. I've been suddenly reading lots of fiction again after spending a week or so mired in theory/philosophy. If I read a lot of novels in quick succession it really affects my thinking: I start to have this weird narrative self-consciousness about everyday life. If I get really deep into a novel I start THINKING like that, in complete sentences, in "scenes," as if life is a novel being constantly written with me as a main character. Thus instead of just making tea in the morning I become "a girl, in a purple bathrobe, making tea, in the violently lonely fluorescent light of the kitchen" etc and every gesture involved in the tea-making is lovingly and instantaneously described in my brain. I had this same problem big-time when I was about six or seven years old---my mom used to yell at me because I was always whispering or mouthing words to myself. What I was doing was telling the story of me, updated up to the second with my activities and thoughts, making a real-time oral documentary of what I was doing. In the third person, of course. At around the same age I was strangely opposed to first-person narrative. I wouldn't read anything written from that point of view and I have vivid memories of browsing at the library and immediately reshelving anything that had capital "I" all over the page. 2. I received a query via e-mail from someone wondering how long it takes me to write an entry. About fifty percent of the time I just open up a new Word document and blast away, and it takes about 15-20 minutes. Other days I will have a Word document open all day at work, as a sort of scratch paper for thoughts and observations, and something longer will grow out of that. I also always have a small notebook (this kind, because (a) I am a sucker for their snobby marketing and (b) it actually is a sturdy little notebook w/nice thick unlined paper) in my bag and scraps of paper with scribbled notes in my bathrobe pockets. Sometimes I pull out the notebook or the scraps when I sit down to write an entry, sometimes I forget about them entirely. The only "rule" I have regarding these online Things is that I must write them fairly quickly and not edit. Sure, I could sit here all day (well not ALL day) and carefully craft and polish and make the writing better but that would be so missing the point, if you want my opinion, and even if you don't I am giving it to you anyway. The advantages of this medium---free, interconnected, immediate---are lost if I agonize over just the right word or revise and revise. If you do an online Thing and want to blather about your process, go ahead and e-mail me, or just write about it and send me the link. I'm interested in this sort of thing, in part because the way I write these entries differs a lot from how I write other stuff, and I think the fact that they are for public consumption is somehow tangled up in that. YESTERDAY My violin lesson went pretty well. I don't think Paul noticed that I really had not practiced much, but even if he had, I had already decided that I wasnot going to beat myself up over it. Violin lessons these days are about my money, my time, my little musical hobby, and you canot verbally humiliate me into feeling like a failure the way violin teachers could (and often did) when I was twelve years old. We had one really amusing difference of musical opinion yesterday. We're doing the Brahms Hungarian Dance #5, because it's good for practicing sautille bowing, and there's one slow bit where he wants me to sound the shift and sort of be a little sloppy with it. He's floundering around for an explanation: "It will make it sound...uh..." "Schmaltzy?" I suggested helpfully, and got a semi-dirty look for my troubles. "Romantic. Gypsyish. Itzhak Perlman-style." (Like I said. Schmaltzy.) ---mimi smartypants is neither acid nor base. back/forward |
