| twenty-five (three days later) |
[14 Dec 2009|02:02am] |
it was entirely too short-lived (like freaks and geeks, if you'll allow the comparison) and came to a very abrupt end, but the leisureville blog has been deleted, due to my dislike of the complicated world of google. it was going to end soon anyway, whatwith alaska looming in my near future. i may be gone a while, but there is no doubt in my mind that i'll be back, whether to live or just visit, who knows, but i will be back because i have to go to bok tower and to weeki wachee to see the mermaids. oh florida, my florida . . .
we had a (presumably) jamaican priest say mass tonite. it was lovely and inspiring, and refreshing to be engaged in the mass, and made me actually want to go to confession to be the better person the jamaican priest urged us all to be. i had a hard time placing his accent at first, but heard something of a british accent and then a drawl-y cadence that i guessed could be west indian. then abby synthesized all of my linguistic dissecting and said it sounded jamaican.
the ugly sweater party was fun and it was really great and heartwarming to see all the old spinal tech peeps. college is such a strange time, so carefree and character-building, that when you start to get older, even if you're still in college, you know you're changing, your friends are changing, things are getting scarier, more complicated, less sure of how much fun you're having, more aware of growing up. friends are getting married, friends are dating friends that you sometimes thought about dating, friends are living in far-off places. and you stay friends, and you sometimes get together and try to recapture the magic, but the magic is different, older, wiser, in some cases more cynical and snarky. at a quarter of a century, i'm just trying to keep my head above, and out of, the existential rabbit hole. i just turned twenty-five; keeping the list of things that make me jittery to a minimum is pretty much top priority.
on a lighter note, stomp was amazing. i thought it was pretty brilliant, a completely modern vaudeville show, a step show that makes you think about rhythm and how to tell a story with not much more than that. highly recommended.
last on the agenda, christmas lights bike ride 2k9 is official and almost upon us. get those tires inflated and roll up your right pant leg because those are things you need to do if you are riding a bike with pants on. december 19th! be there (at an as of yet undecided location) or be square!
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| country is the new indie and cooking is the new indie profession/pastime! it's christmas 2k9! |
[07 Dec 2009|05:01pm] |
as my sinuses began exerting severe pressure yesterday, the only thing that doesn't seem to make me grumpy or extremely irritable is the sound of a pedal steel or a dobro, preferably both in the same song, hence a lot of the byrds lately, and the hiders and old wilco.
i turn twenty-five on friday and only just now have i thought, fizzuck, i'll be twenty-five. gross. i guess the good thing about it is that i still get mistaken for a middle-schooler. i'm having an ugly sweater birthday party friday night at my sister's apartment in gainesville, so ya'll should get your hineys to that as it will only be more fun if you're there.
going to see stomp on saturday night. really jazzed about that. i haven't been to the theater in ages!
i've also been cooking a lot, making some exemplary dishes, like pan-seared steak, maple-vanilla glazed carrots and sauteed spinach with pine nuts and raisins, seared salmon with mustard-dill-caper butter and tonight: pork chops with onion compote, mashed potatoes and green beans with caramelized shallots. i love shallots! a year ago i didn't even know what they were! the sauteed spinach didn't turn out as well as it usually does, because i didn't have the actual recipe, so i had to make it from memory and left out the garlic and the chicken broth. the salmon turned out beautifully but for the fact that the salmon was probably bad as both my mom and i had stomach-aches later that night and the next day.
i hope all of you are having a lovely winter and holiday season so far and for anyone who will be in the greater jacksonville area, including clay and st. johns counties, for the holidays, we should go on a christmas light-seeing bike tour. holler at me if you're interested!
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| hello december! |
[01 Dec 2009|04:43pm] |
i was so all set to get my florida tat on my birthday, but i hate to break it to all of ya'll that were really rooting for it (adam, especially!) that i am broke as a joke right now, trying to pay off my credit card and pay back my parents on the unemployment i'm about to run out of, so the tat will have to wait. maybe forever. we'll see.
in other (real) news, this salahi lady is really making me look bad. i'm not sure how you pronounce her name, but all i know is that she spells it just like me, with an "e" at the end, and crashing a state dinner is not how i imagined we m-i-c-h-a-e-l-es of the world would, or should, ever behave. we are so better than this. like, to whom would this ever make any sense, or be the right thing to do? "well, we didn't get that invitation from those stuck-up obamas, but i say let's go anyway. i mean, really, who's going to notice?" only the world, lady!!!
on the other side of the country, three middle-schoolers were detained after they were involved in a south park-inspired "kick a ginger day." oh, to be twelve and not yet understand satire . . . where are these kids' parents?! this incident made me reflect back to when i was in sixth grade and south park had just started. i thought about how all us kids talked about was the anal probe episode. maybe i was just in a smarter class or a smarter school, or maybe it happened and i just didn't hear about it, but call it a hunch, i don't think anybody i knew was experimenting with anal probes.
and last but not least, it looks like comcast might be buying NBC. while there are a lot of far-reaching, really intelligent and sophisticated implications involved in this deal as far as the state of the media in general is concerned, all i kept thinking when i was reading the article was, i wonder what jokes they're going to make about this on 30 rock?, a sentiment that that mediocre "newspaper" the new york times failed to even mention. and you call yourself a news source!
i was also going to recommend a new podcast (new to me) here, too, (the moth, for those that want to know), but instead i'm just going to state that i have now found, decided, whatever, right this very moment, that my greatest career ambition is to read many, many stories of my own making on npr. just in case ya'll all thought i was some kind of ambition-less altruistic free-spirit. i really, really like reading out loud! can that be my career?
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| alabammy! |
[28 Nov 2009|09:04pm] |
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music |
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college football |
] |
yesterday, i shot a .38 special, a 20-gauge shotgun and a .22 rifle. sick! i have always been terrified by and of guns, and shooting the .38 special and the shotgun really solidified that fear. though at one point, while shooting the .22, i found myself saying to adam, "this is fun!" turns out the .22 is a practice rifle, with no kick whatsoever. i really liked the methodical nature of loading and cocking the rifle and could actually see myself owning one, just to scare people, because i'm almost 99 percent sure i could never actually shoot anyone, though i'd have absolutely no qualms about firing it near an intruder, y'know, just so they know i'm serious.
adam's granny's farm is crazy! 13 acres with a lake-like pond, a pond-sized pond, 3 tractors, a barn, a bushogger and a paddle-boat. when we went out to shoot yesterday, i had to ride shotgun, literally, standing up on the tractor, holding the guns, while adam drove. it was pretty redneck. but being a redneck is fun! target shooting is like being at the driving range, but with guns. i liked it. tonite, we also went to the riversdie casino in wetumpka and adam won $135. he turned to me and said, "i think i won a lot of money" and i looked at the screen and said "yeah, you won $125!" because he had $10 already in the machine. again, being a redneck is fun!
tomorrow we leave the farm at 0dark:30 to beat the traffic on I-10. i get to drive the sweet 'rolla rental car that adam's parents will be paying me back later for, back in jax on monday, two weeks til my BIRTHDAY! then christmas!
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| when tv infiltrates your diction |
[12 Nov 2009|11:13pm] |
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music |
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WMNF 88.5FM wmnf.org |
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yesterday, i used "dealbreaker!" in a conversation, after completely forgetting i ever heard it on 30 rock, and only tonite realized that Lesbian Sourfruit is all up in my subconscious lexicon! tina fey's writing skillz do, totally, overshadow any "acting" she's supposedly doing.
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| "message of love" |
[12 Nov 2009|12:54pm] |
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music |
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the pretenders |
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now the reason we're here
as man and woman
is to love each other
take care of each other
when love walks in the room
everybody stand up
oh it's good, good, good
like brigitte bardot!
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| i and love and you, an album |
[10 Nov 2009|10:38am] |
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music |
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the avett brothers |
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it's probably completely fate, or god, or whatever force you believe guides you to do things, but i've had the new avett brothers album sitting around for about two weeks and i only just last nite got around to listening to it. it is, at once, the saddest and happiest thing i have ever heard. it reminds me of picking oranges at sunset in cross creek, and chris and erica, those crazy lovebirds. it took a while for them to get it right, but between them, all they have is love. my aunt went to alaska at my age, maybe a bit younger, and when i asked her why she didn't stay, "alaska is so beautiful!" i said by way of question, she said my uncle wanted her to come home. maybe i'll have a reason to come home.
i feel like i didn't know what i had, that as much as a person isn't perfect, if all they do is love you, and you know it, that's enough. i've known some people who've died lately and it's put a lot of things in perspective. there isn't really any point in not telling people the way you feel about them. as much as i don't want to be the person waiting for someone to figure out if they'd like to see me with gray hair, i think it might be what i'm going to end up doing. and whatever choice that person makes, however long it takes them, i'll live with. i just don't want to love anybody else.
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| moving & shaking |
[08 Nov 2009|08:46pm] |
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music |
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saves the day |
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carl said, "there's a lot of awkward going around. you crazy kids'll figure it out."
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| grandmotherly advice |
[05 Nov 2009|08:28pm] |
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music |
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alkaline trio | radio |
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twice in the past three weeks, grandma judy warned me not to go up to alaska and find an alaskan man to fall in love with. when i went the first time, she warned me not to get a job, so she hardly wanted to put the former sentiment into words for fear it might also come true. also, we all know that what michaele is told not to do, michaele likes to do. living up to the unexpectedness of my crazy name. i laugh when she gives me these warnings only because all of the frustration and conjecture is making me feel more callous by the day. spurned is never a nice feeling. especially when it's just a lack of words that makes you feel that way. this is the part of being fourteen that i don't miss.
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| for some reason, at UF, the gerontology dept. was in the same building as the english dept. |
[30 Oct 2009|11:25am] |
when your hometown makes the onion's headlines.
in other geriatric news, my grandma has had ankylosine spondulitis, otherwise known as arthritis of the spine, for most of her life. essentially, as she got older her spine fused together, prohibiting her from bending above the waist or turning her head very much. her back doesn't hurt all the time, but sometimes she takes pain pills. over the summer i had to come over and drive her and grandpa ed around because her back hurt and she was on the pain pills. since it's always funny when you see people who don't normally use drugs use drugs, i commented to grandpa ed that grandma was high as a kite. grandpa ed passed away two weeks ago and today grandma took the first of her anti-depressant pills, lorazepam, a generic for ativan. she goes to her church on fridays to help fold bulletins and her neighbor takes her and brings her back. this morning, when her neighbor dropped her off at home she told me that grandma had taken one of the pills and that at bulletins her speech was slurred and she just sat there in a daze. she only took one pill, but i think that since my grandma only weighs 95 pounds the one pill was a lot stronger than it is on most people. when i worked at FALR i used to read cases all the time about nurses who had their licenses suspended or revoked because they were abusing or stealing lorazepam. twenty minutes ago, i walked past the computer room and there she was, computer on, grandma in the office chair, head tilted back, sound asleep. obviously not doing the banking she said she was going to do. if it weren't for the fact that grandma had to take the lorazepam because grandpa ed's not around, this would be hilarious.
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| feeling twelve |
[28 Oct 2009|12:40pm] |
my horoscope for today said something like, "love will consume your thoughts, actions and words today. pursuit is more than half the fun." this has to be a joke.
when i was fourteen all i wanted was for this one boy to email me or call me. every waking second i thought about him and how nice it would be for someone else to take some initiative and i don't know, maybe reciprocate in the way of communication, somehow convey whatever feelings he felt, instead of leaving me out on an effing wire, having exposed all of my feelings in what i later felt was a really foolish and sixth-grade girl way.
i never thought that at twenty-four i would feel that way again. a different boy now, of course, and i guess i wished for it, but still, aren't we a little old for this? wouldn't it just be the decent thing to do to give a girl some idea of how you feel about her liking you?
i hope you read this. it is, after all, about you.
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| maybe i resisted them because of the name . . . |
[25 Oct 2009|06:48pm] |
finally got around to listening to The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart and all i can say is that i really should have listened to corey all those months ago when she was all about them. i have this thing where if somebody loves something (a book, a movie, an album or band) and wants me to love it, too, i am reluctant to get in line behind them. i have to discover, or want to discover it, on my own, so sometimes it takes a while, or sometimes it doesn't happen at all (sorry, nora, still haven't read all over but the shoutin'). so, i owe cor one because upon close listening and subsequent itunes album purchase, TPOBPAH are the 80s band i've always dreamed about, the one that i could call my own, except that it was never possible because when all my favorite 80s/early 90s bands were hitting their stride, i was still watching sesame street. but now TPOBPAH is here. for me. and all of us. like the cure and the smiths and the reivers and the jesus and mary chain and cool r.e.m. all rolled into one cool new hip 80s-sounding band, for us. in another word, awesome. highly recommended.
saw where the wild things are and due to the incorrectness of the seating at the imax screen i saw it on, it did not blow my mind the way i thought it would, but i loved it none the less. it blew my mind in the way that it will be staying with me for a while, which, these days, is about all i can hope for. true movie mind-blowing is really rare and apparently only possible from pixar (see: wall-e, up).
lastly, my parents are having a party this coming friday, to which i invite every far-flung one of you, and i'm really hoping reggie from the black kids shows up, too, as my mom invited all our neighbors on our street, and he's one of 'em. i'll let ya'll know how that turns out. also, while we're at it, since the party is the day before the florida-georgia game, let's give it up for the crappiness of the florida offense and the saving grace that is the florida defense. aren't blockers and tackles supposed to keep guys from getting to the quarterback? isn't the offense supposed to be moving the ball down the field, instead of diving for a measly inch or losing yardage? what the crap is happening!!! this is not how you win championships! gators for the return of dan mullen!
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| music notes, old and new |
[21 Oct 2009|11:16am] |
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monsters of folk is jim james from my morning jacket, conor oberst and mike mogis (bright eyes) and m. ward. the very best is some dj peeps from GB kickin' out the (legitimately) African jams, expounding, if you will, on what vampire weekend stole from paul simon. hook it up! also, two songs from aimee mann that i'm sure i've written about before because they will never cease to amaze and inspire me, that are currently again amazing and inspiring me, "amateur" and "you could make a killing." and lastly, "try a little tenderness" was written by harry woods, jimmy campbell and reg. connelly in 1932, for all you music history aficionados out there.
i was hoping that you'd know better than that . . .
i was hoping, but you're an amateur . . .
i was hoping that you'd know better
but i've
been wrong
before . . .
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| on finally leaving the nest |
[15 Oct 2009|01:40am] |
when i was little, the night before a field trip, or my birthday, or christmas, i could never fall asleep immediately at bedtime. i always got really wired with excitement and would lay in bed for hours, my mind racing with all the thoughts of all of the possible variations of all of the kinds of fun i was going to have the next day. i imagine it's going to be like that until i leave, so a long three months it could turn out to be. i've never been exactly sure what feeling the phrase "shit a brick" is supposed to describe, but that's usually what i think of when i think about going to alaska. that and throwing up. i think i might have some undiagnosed anxiety issues that i only realized i might possess when i read an article about a longitudinal anxiety study in the new york times magazine a few weeks ago. i also learned today, while listening to my on the media podcast, that studies have shown that endorphines are released when people check their email, which explains all the heart-racing every time i open my inbox, although lately, it might be for other reasons that have yet to write me back.(!)
i'm reading the brief wondrous life of oscar wao right now, and i told my mom today that it reminded me a lot of the fortress of solitude. then i happened to salvage the tuesday arts page of the nyt from my mother's bedroom, also known as the place where reading materials go to die, and i found the review of johnathan lethem's new book chronic city. man, michiko kakutani is brutal. but i trust her because it sounded like she loved fos as much as i did, so her calling lethem's new book lame and tedious isn't exactly out of line, just honest.
hopefully, i'll be going to see where the wild things are soon, on imax, which will totally blow my mind. spike jonze is crazy, and crazy cool, and i think this may be his best and, unbelievably, most accessible work yet.
i am making a list of all of the clothes i will need for winter in alaska. a lot of clothes i have never owned before. long johns. flannel-lined jeans (why are they all natural-waist, tapered-leg atrocities? the only pair that looked slightly okay were the dickies. c'mon gap, or levi's! get in on this! especially levi's, with your roots in the cold of the gold rush!). a parka. boots. i'm really freaking out about the boots. unreasonably so, i know. i have three months to accumulate and pack and unpack and re-pack, more than enough time for me to stop worrying about some dang boots. by then hopefully, probably, i will have processed that i'm leaving my family for the first time really, because moving to another part of the state easily accessible by car is not really leaving, especially when they pay your bills for you. i won't have any strings attached to mom and dad except for the cell phone bill they pay and the money i owe them from last year. all up and on my own. i feel like wide-eyed and smiling marlo thomas in the opening credits of that girl, except everybody else moved to new york.
not me.
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| act II, set change |
[09 Oct 2009|10:35pm] |
say that a girl with saltwater in her veins and humidity clouding her brain, goes to alaska. while she's in alaska, she thinks, as she always does, about whether or not she could live there, in the place she is only visiting. she worries that not enough nationally touring musicians come through there, and this is, ridiculously, the only reason she dislikes the city. because everything else is beautiful. even in the rain and far-off fog, from a park bench on the edge of downtown, looking across the mudflats and the inlet, it is beautiful. even through a mild anxiety attack twenty feet from the top of a three thousand-foot mountain, it is all so, so beautiful. before she even returns to florida she is already kissing the palm trees, sand and suburban sprawl away.
i'm moving to alaska, kids. americorps job says i'm in anchorage for a full year starting 15 january 2010. i always hoped i'd do something crazy like this.
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| renegades of funk, or, this is what happens when your dad knows that a daughter's best wingman is himself |
[05 Oct 2009|01:33am] |
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music |
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wilco | you and i |
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i miss my daddy. those three weeks in alaska were the longest i have ever spent with him alone. i'm not gonna lie, midway i freaked out, but somewhere in the alaskan wilderness i stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb, as it were. i was about to write that i'm sad that i only just learned that my dad is one of the most awesome people on the planet, my hero, but i know it happened at the right time. i think it's because i'm more or less an adult now. he doesn't treat me like a kid anymore, just his daughter. a lot of people said it was awesome that we have such a good relationship, almost like we're friends. a lot of people told me how awesome my dad is. i really miss him a lot. we had some of the best times of my life up there. next summer, hopefully portland.
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| alaska, always |
[30 Sep 2009|11:53pm] |
trees held us in on all four sides, so thick we could not see
i could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me
your shape and form is dim but plain, there on our mountain bed
i see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head . . .
"remember the mountain bed"
words, woody guthrie
music, wilco
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| state to state |
[26 Sep 2009|04:26pm] |
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music |
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florida kicking wildcat ass |
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alaska is quickly supplanting whatever state i thought was my second favorite state, for my second favorite state. getting to know the local color, seeing the local colors, it's all unreal. the yellow of the birches against the green of the spruces, the delightfully smoke-free bars, the mystery of the weather and the awesomeness of alaskan white beer (try it!) are few among many plusses. we have a family friend here and her friend asked if i thought i could live here, and it might have been the pibbers talking, but i like to think not, so i said yeah! i would totally live here! just being here gets me a little closer to that feeling i felt when i read into the wild. this state is truly about as wild and untouched as it gets. let's put it into some perspective.
alaska has 683,478 people, half of which live in anchorage alone, making alaska the least densely populated state in the country.
florida has 18,328,340 people and is the fourth most populous state in the union.
alaska comes from "alyeska," an aleut word meaning "great land," and has more coastline than all other u.s. states combined.
"florida" is the oldest surviving european place name, coming from the spanish for the easter season, and has some of the greatest beaches in the country.
alaska joined the union in 1958.
florida became a state in 1845.
alaska's mt. mckinley aka denali is 20,320 feet above sea level.
florida's highest point is britton hill, at 345 feet above sea level, the lowest high point of any u.s. state.
alaska is divided by boroughs rather than counties, and the Unorganized Borough contains 57.71% of alaska's area, with only 13.05% of the population.
the largest metropolitan area in florida as well as the entire southeastern u.s. is the miami-ft. lauderdale-pompano beach metropolitan statistical area, with over five million people.
i think in my case, opposites are attracting. i go from the flattest, most humid state to the grandest, least densely populated state. from the soft sand to the snow-capped mountains, and it's only september! i think i may be realizing that i love land more than people.
by way of citations, i'm a bit lazy today, thanks to sec football and blue moon, so just look up alaska and florida on wikipedia.
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| always in threes |
[11 Sep 2009|12:18pm] |
i know a lot of famous people died in the last couple of months, but a few days ago i realized that three of the most high-profile deaths came with superlatives attached: the king of pop, the most trusted man in america and the lion of the senate.
alaska so far
sleeping lady from point woronzof
sleeping lady and the mud flats from resolution point
balto!
to denali on sunday.
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