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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


2003-02-07 ... 11:36 a.m.

THINGS I HAVE LEARNED BETWEEN FEBRUARY 7, 2002 AND TODAY

1. The song "Tiny Dancer," staple of many a dive-bar jukebox, is sung by Elton John and not by Journey or Air Supply or Cheap Trick or another one of those 1970s wail-along bands that are on the very fringes of my musical consciousness.

2. I have an erogenous zone between the middle and ring fingers of my right hand.

3. How a battery works. (Why didn't I know this before? Damn public schools.)

4. National is the one that is close to downtown DC, not Dulles.

5. The plastic-wrap method for making pie crust.

6. Sharks have two penises.

7. LT sure can cook.

8. My favorite earrings and I are meant to be together, since three times this year I have lost and then found my bat earrings, my razorblade earrings, and my skull-and-crossbones earrings, respectively.

9. If Jessica ever offers out of the goodness of her heart to make you mix CDs, you should accept with alacrity because she has exquisite taste in music, sonic mood creation, and packaging. I will thank her properly but the public shout-out needed to happen.

10. I really can handle multiple projects at once without going (completely) insane.

Wednesday night I went out with the future co-host of my cable access talk show (stay tuned! and step off, hipster kids, this one's all ours!) for dinner and drinks, and he had other plans afterwards so we shared a cab up to his next bar destination, whilst (whilst!) I continued home. After we dropped him off, the cabbie, in his thick and wonderfully formal Nigerian accent said:

"You are not accompanying your friend?"

"No," I said. "He is going to another bar...I am through drinking tonight. Time to go home."

Nodding gravely, the cab driver said, "Tomorrow your friend will wake up as a man of hangovers. A hangover of drink, and a hangover of regret that he did not have you with him."

I didn't know whether to thank the cabdriver for his strange indirect compliment or jump out of the cab and warn my drink/chitchat partner about his impending double hangover. So I settled for doing what I always do; I wrote it down.

PROTEIN FOR BREAKFAST, DOCTOR'S ORDERS

It takes me forever to make a sandwich. If I say to you, "Would you like me to make you a sandwich?" (which I would probably never do, because a sandwich is a pretty individual thing and needs to be fashioned to the exact specifications of the eventual sandwich-consumer), you might want to settle down with a book or the DVD version of The Sorrow and the Pity because it's going to be a while. I am not a meat-eating girl, so the only sandwiches I ever make are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (note: a grilled cheese is not a sandwich in my opinion: it is hot and thus achieves the status of "dinner"). It takes me forever to make a sandwich. Seriously. I want to get that sentence put on a t-shirt. Before I even start making the sandwich, I have to obtain a beverage first, because: DRINKING BEFORE EATING, and that would be another good phrase to translate into Latin and put on a t-shirt, sort of like DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR. (Whose motto is that? It seems rather extreme. Sort of like New Hampshire's LIVE FREE OR DIE---whoa, calm down, New Hampshire.)

Beverage obtained, there is then the gathering of the sandwich components---bread, peanut butter, jelly---and then a digression as I think about the two shapes of store-bought bread slices, the completely square and the one that is shaped to look more like a homemade loaf, a bit poofed out into rounded projections up top. The sort of bread-shape that you would draw if someone asked you to draw a slice of bread. The shape is meant to imply that it was baked in a bread pan, and rose past the sides of the pan, but I would be very surprised if mass commercial bread-making operations really baked each loaf in a loaf pan like that. Thus it is all a big bit of CORPORATE BREAD-BAKING TRICKERY, a deceptive signifier meant to evoke nostalgic feelings that none of us even deserve to have (because since when was bread-baking an everyday activity and not a hobby for the majority of us? even our grandmothers mostly ate store-bought, mass-produced bread).

Then I have to spend some more minutes spreading the peanut butter on both slices of bread. Symmetry. Is. Important. Jelly, too, cannot just be globbed in the center without care or attention but should be distributed to all corners of the peanut-butter-sandwich universe. When it comes time to join the two halves of the sandwich together (by the power invested in me, I now pronounce you: A Sandwich!), it is also important that the pieces line up correctly. Cut into four triangles, even though four is an unlucky number, because it is easier to eat that way.

I consumed this long-in-the-making peanut butter sandwich this morning while reading Borges and being slightly weirded out that my cat has a new habit of sitting on the dining room chair directly opposite of me and watching me eat, and my mother raised me with excellent manners so I sometimes even feel a little weird about reading while there is someone else at the table, but I guess the cat is not the best conversationalist so it's okay.

TIME OUT FOR CULTURE

As Slow As Possible.

Terminal Identity is such a fun book. I was obsessed with it the summer of 1995 (the very extremely hot summer of 1995, when all those old people kicked it ["it" being "the bucket" in this case and not in the hip-hop sense of "hanging out" or "dating"], because of no air conditioners and a fragmented society, sure---but also because of POOR URBAN PLANNING, since the majority of the deaths were not in lively ethnic lower-class neighborhoods but in pockets of high-crime urban blight with tons of shuttered storefronts, abandoned buildings, and crappy bus service. So not only are old people afraid to go out, THEY HAVE NOTHING TO GO OUT FOR. Thus your elderly flesh cooks in your apartment, and you die. There is a whole book out about this heat disaster thing and the social ecology of its causes. It's good. And oh yeah, are you ready? HOW HOT WAS IT? Well, it was so hot that one day I went to the movie theater and paid matinee money to see whatever was showing next, which turned out to be the movie Species, just to get out of the non-air-conditioned apartment. This alone should speak volumes, if you know me at all.)

Anyway, Terminal Identity. Although it suffers a bit from academic po-mo speak, you will like it. I am surprised that I never explicitly connected it at the time with my "what makes a self" obsession, since duh, that is what it's all about, the radical shift in this sort of thinking that has been generated by technology's intimate and endless feedback loop (see: endlessly self-referential message boards where we all sprain an arm patting each other on the back; first-person video games; personal tell-all? or tell-most? online diaries; etc.) Tra la la.

Today is about a gigantic drifting cloud in the sky, pretty much just one giant cloud all like RRRAARRR CHICAGO! CLOUDINESS IS ALL! And about listening to Pretty Girls Make Graves, where I find the vocals kind of grating but I love the drumming, and Sebadoh, where almost the exact opposite is true, and Bartok quartets, where neither vocals nor drumming is an issue.

Tonight will be about pajamas and beer. Yes, although I am looking mysteriously good today (at least for me)----(hair cooperating with my "lay flat, please" injunctions, skin not quite as green as usual, dark undereye circles at their lowest ebb in recent memory, wearing clothes that do not smell of spilled beer and cigarette smoke covered up by Febreeze)---I think I am going to do the hermitty economical thing and drink at home. Chicago, you are going to have to do without me tonight. Sorry.

---mimi smartypants is as excited as Bill Clinton judging a thong contest.

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