I'm a little concerned...

Central Park

I've been watching a lot of Woody Allen movies lately. One can only write/work for so many hours a day, and then one watches Manhattan or Celebrity or Manhattan Murder Mystery and is comforted by the fact that there is someone more neurotic in the world.

All these movies have reminded me of my two visits to New York City: August 2001 and November 2001. The first one was a graduation trip with my then best friend and boyfriend. We drove up in her car. I bought a cigar at the gas station in the wal-mart parking lot. That was retarded. I used the nastiest bathroom I had ever seen in New Jersey. I was stoned and driving through the Brooklyn tunnel and I thought I was accidentally going to veer off the road and lead us all to our death. This was the height of my heroin phase. Don't get the wrong idea; I've never even seen heroin, much less done it. Rather, I was listening to the Velvet Underground all the time and reading lots of books about junkies. It was the beginning of a nasty downturn in my life that crescendoed (or de-crescendoed) in November.

Tickets were really cheap in November, and I was thinking about taking an Americorps job there. My dad suggested I pay the $60 and go check it out again and see if I could make it work. I stayed in a hostel, ate broccoli pizza, and mainly just walked around. One amazing night included a phenomenally bad rendition of "Crazy" by Patsy Cline in one room at a bar, and in the other a streak of blind luck at pool that allowed me to hold a table and keep playing game after game with a bunch of dudes. I wore only bright colors then: a hot pink tank top, a green scarf, rainbow socks, and powder blue mary jane sneakers, and always always a string of indian glass beads I had bought in Amsterdam.



I was profoundly sad like I had never been and never have been since. I had a broken heart and I was very lonely. One bright moment of the trip was a simple, shy, sweet boy sitting across from me on the subway who I saw reading the title of the Ladybug Transistor cd I had in my hand. I blushed, and said something about the peanut shells on the floor. He got off and looked back at me, and it made me happy for weeks.

Yesterday, my boyfriend and I were talking about New York and I dug out a journal entry from that trip. I was sad, walking around, and I just decided I'd sit in Central Park for the day. I sat there watching these kids play soccer, and I couldn't understand why they were just happy.

11/17/01

I'm going to try to organize these thoughts that I've been thinking for a long time. I don't think I'm a good enough writer yet to convey what I mean, but I'm going to try. When things get really bad, I often have the same epiphanal realization that the way we think about life is just all entertainment. When nothing gives you pleasure, and you're searching so desperately for something to make you happy, it is easy and logical to think that sports, reading, school, even humanitarian work isn't motivated by your fate in life, but rather something to distract you from a recurring and overarching wish to die. Maybe this is true. Maybe life is like going to a shitty matinee. You would rather get up and leave, but you've already paid the money so you might as well stay. I know this is a shitty metaphor, but it seems like so many people enjoy the matinee. Is life only worth living because it is better than death? Because we're too lazy to just count our losses and skip town?

But, of course, it is far more complicated than that. It seems like so many people don't leave. And a lot of intelligent people really enjoy life. Perhaps if I had proper chemicals, I would too. I suppose I'm stuck on the question: what if it isn't all for entertainment? Not that there is necessarily a god, but what if there is some good reason to live and live well that I, in my small 21 years, have yet to realize? Is there such a thing as real love? Do children really change everything? Perhaps I was created simply to make the world a better place for others to live in. If so, then what can I do to realize this? I'm also aware that kids don't want to die. They just live and enjoy themselves and cry when they hurt.

I wish I could find peace with some way of thinking of the world. I know this: that there is something about love--humanitarian love--and Jesus, etc. were real nice guys. I know that restrictions do not make your life better, but more complicated, and I know that most people, nay, all people are doing the best they can. Most people just exist. And they're trying to do what will make them happy. I wish I felt more of a connection with humanity. I want my life to be dedicated to others, and not just a few people, but a lot of people who need me to be who I am. Maybe this is already the case and I don't realize it, but it's not the way I could hope it to be.

Does it get better than little girls playing soccer? What about the smell of Aveda pomade? I like how Biff Brount is in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Decides to drink a glass of water and does it.

[heart]
Susanna



P.S. I moved to SF and everything changed. I've been, basically, happy ever since.

Names I Have Given My Cat

My cat's name is Theo. That was the name they gave him at the Alameda SPCA, where I first met him. Actually, we met online. I saw his photo, and it was love at first sight. I went to meet him the next day, and he charmed me by hissing at the lady whom I also didn't like. He head-butted my shin, and the rest, they say, is history.

It felt wrong to change his name, but I filled it out. Theo's official name is:

Theodore Underpants Randolph Wonderful

You can write it "Theodore U. R. Wonderful"

Here's a somewhat chronological progression:

Thebes
Theebies
Handsome
Taco
Sweetheart
Theodorable
Old Deuteronomy (thanks to my brother's friend, Norm)
Dr. Cuddles
Puddle O'Cuddles
Doogie Meowser Kitt Dee

I'll add more when I remember them.

Update: April 14th.

I forgot about:

Fluffle-up-a-gus
Cuddle Me Timbers

Yes!

see more pwn and owned pictures

I call it

You call it coffee.

I call it writing juice.

Sing to me O Muse!

Writing gods, accompany me. I am entering the beyond. Let me not appear too simplistic or too full-of-shit. May my research prove relevant. May my argument amuse and hold together. May I finish on time and not be fatigued. May my computer last through the month. May I not be redundant or too clever. May textual proof emerge and may scholarly justification exist and be something I have already read. May my readers love my work and yet give me good feedback. May my body stay healthy, my sleep be undisturbed, and my bank account remain positive. May I be proud even if only two people will ever read it!

I must learn this again and again:

Nothing is more important than a clear thesis and paragraphs that progress logically with clear topic sentences.

Recipes for Mama--#1

My Mama has had a hell of a time these past two years. My mama married my father when she was 18. He died when she was 56. This has to be the hardest time in her life. Her life and her self have been torn apart, broken, split, shattered, what have you, and she has a major wound that she has to heal from. We all do, but I think she has it the worst. I know when she reads this, she's going to think that I'm announcing to the world that she is having a hard time. Actually, that's not quite true. Considering the degree of trauma that she had to endure, she has been able to get up in the morning, walk out the door, and walk through the world pretty damn well. I want to be clear, though, that returning back to life as normal after a traumatic event has nothing to do with personal strength and isn't really something to applaud. Sometimes it's wiser to stay in bed and cry. Americans forget this. Anyway, all I'm saying is that my Mom has had a hard go of it, as anyone would, and I'm not making any judgement good or bad as to how she has dealt with my father's nightmarish death.


Let's go to another topic: Am I really Southern anymore? The end of January commemorated my seven year San Frantastic anniversary. My accent resembles that of a news anchor more than a person on the street I grew up on. I actually leave the house regularly without drying my hair, and I only wear lipstick sometimes. I drink unsweetened hot herbal tea way more often than sweet iced tea, and my favorite fried food is a jalapeno. And yes, sometimes, when people are really friendly to me and I don't know them well I think they want something. But I still have long hair, use moisturizer religiously, smile at strangers on the sidewalk, park a linen chest at the foot of my bed, call my Mama "Mama," and--the one really matters--if someone is upset, sad, tired, happy, or at my house, I comfort them with food.

But out here in California, at least among the folks I know, food that comforts is also good for you. At home, comfort food is chicken n' dumplins, country fried steak, honey-baked ham, grandma's green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy, macaroni and cheese casserole, sweet potatoes glazed with brown sugar, black olives from the can, cornbread, biscuits and apple butter, pecan pie, and deviled eggs. (Actually, they're "aggravated eggs" because grandma, as a good Baptist, didn't like to even say the name of the evil one.) These are foods that I grew up eating, not every night, but regularly. And they are crazy (!) delicious, but if you are sick or sad, these foods aren't going to make you feel better, and they are going to hurt you in the long run.

I want to comfort my Mama with good food that makes her feel good and helps her body heal and be strong so she can walk around and do what she needs to do. Since I've lived in California, I have, over time, drastically changed my eating habits. Now I think of comfort food as food that's simple to digest, cooling or warming, satisfies your appetite and makes you feel good all day or evening. It's soup: veggie-heavy broth-based soup (noodles optional), miso soup with tiny cubes of tofu that you drink out of the bowl, pineapple-broth vietnamese soup with snapper. It's cold salads with gentle dressings like garbanzo bean salad with cilantro, corn, and egg and sweet miso dressing. It's sushi: cucumber sticks in the middle of rice rolled in salty, crisp seaweed. It's yogurt, fruit, and granola: the holy trinity of breakfast that tastes awesome, quells hunger, and makes you feel cold and good until lunch.

I know you're thinking I've got all "uppity" and gone fancy, but with the exception of the pineapple-broth vietnamese soup, these foods are easier to make than almost all of the Southern food I mentioned above.

Mama, I can't be there to cook for you, so, as I promised, here are some recipes that taste good, are easy to make with ingredients that you can get in Georgia, and are good for you. All I ask is that you put it in your mouth and chew.

Bean salad:
(I eat this all the time)

1 can S&W garbanzo beans (remember S & W because that's my initials; they are the best.)
1 can S&W kidney beans
3 stalks celery sliced (you can buy celery at any market. Make sure it's turgid, not limp, it's not super-dark green [that'll taste leathery], and that the ends aren't brown)
1 carrot, grated (Organic carrots taste better, and they're only slightly more expensive. It takes 2 seconds to grate a carrot, 1 second to wash the grater.)

Add some fresh cilantro (the cheapest, awesomest fresh herb) if available

Stock up on slivered almonds, currants (more delicious than raisins, not too expensive), and pumpkin seeds (way better than sunflower) at a health-food store with bulk bins (Whole Foods, I mean Whole Paycheck). Keep them in the freezer. You can add these three things to any salad and it's wayyyy better.

A chopped apple (fuji or pink lady, the rest are often mealy or too sour) is a nice touch.

That's probably good, but if you want to take it to the next delicious level, add a SALTED avocado and a SALTED hard-boiled egg. Please don't overcook the egg so that it gets that depressing gray ring around the yolk. If it's still orange-y clear in the middle, you are so lucky, salt it and eat half of it right then. It will flip you out with its crazy delicious power.

Dressing:
Don't do oil and vinegar, or any vinaigrette, it will pucker your mouth and ruin the sweet wonderful thing you have going.

You can find a SWEET miso dressing, or mix honey with one you get at the store
If you can find Girard's brand, they make a good "Champagne" dressing (there's no booze in it, though, sorry)
Or you can take that egg, that avocado, some plain GOOD yogurt (buy the fancy stuff on this one), some soy sauce, and honey and mix it up and that will work too. I mix SriRacha, or rooster sauce, a hot chili garlic sauce in there too, but I know you don't like spicy things.

Toss the hell out of it before you spoon it into your bowl. Leftovers are perfect for breakfast (try eating salad for breakfast and see how your day goes), but will keep for 24-48 hours.

You will love me for this one. I will become your favorite child.

"Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food" --Hippocrates

A weekend is four days

This weekend my car got towed from a mall parking lot because I left it overnight. It cost me $457 dollars to get it back. I left the same car in another mall parking lot overnight four days later because I am proud and have a sense of justice. It was still there today and things are made whole again.

This year I have been waking up a few minutes earlier every day in order to have my brain be all spit-shiny fresh for longer in the day (I work better in the morning). I'm at 7:15 am now, but this weekend I woke up at 5:40 am one day, 1:00 pm another, 12;00 the next day, and 11:00 another.

I've been working at least two hours a day since January 6th on my masters thesis, but in the last five days I have read only one essay. I forgot about two quizzes I was supposed to take for Spanish class.

This weekend I kept forgetting to put my make up on. I let my hair air dry and I wore my boyfriend's ripped up t-shirt. A Smithsonian photographer spotted us behind the counter at the Henry Miller library and made me read to Eric for an hour while she photographed us.

I am not making enough money and I need more work but this weekend I went out to eat and it was on me.

This weekend I'm not afraid of what I'm supposed to do, write, or pay. I'm in love. I have been for awhile.

This weekend was perfect.

I can't help it, really.

I'm just kind of in love with Jimmy Carter. I heard him today on the radio, touting his new book We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land and he was also on the Daily Show. He's so just Georgia. He reminds me of my grandfather (Papa). He's lovely. Really.

Our grandoldgrossfather

So I am writing my graduate thesis now. My MA program is only two years long, and this is the beginning of the final semester. I have finished my coursework, and the only thing I have left to do is write a 60-100 page paper. Last semester I had to write three 20-page papers (plus a 15 page thesis prospectus) in about a month and a half, so three months to whip out 60-100 pages seems definitely doable.

I'm writing on the connection between James Joyce's Ulysses and Derek Walcott's Omeros. Everyone, with the exception of my professors and one other graduate student, hasn't known who Walcott is. He won the Nobel Prize in 1992 for this achingly, drippingly beautiful pseudo-Homeric epic Omeros.
(Walcott painted the watercolor on the front). He's a Caribbean poet from the small island St. Lucia. I like writing about islands because more often than not their cultural and national boundaries are determined by their geography. Culture seems neatly divided into little dots on a blue background. Plus, the authors are surrounded by the ocean, and isolated from whatever is "out there." Alienation bred in paradise? Sign me up please. I love it.

Reading Omeros makes you ache. You're washing a dish and poetry just falls out of your mouth. Here are a few lines, chosen randomly. Read them more than once:

. . .The river stops talking,
the way silence suddenly turns off a market.

The wind squatted low in the grass. A man kept walking
steadily towards him, and he knew by the walk it
was himself in his father, the white teeth, the widening hands.

***

And Istanbul's spires, each dome a burnoosed Turk,
swathed like a Saracen, with the curved scimitar
of a crescent moon over it, or the floating muck

of a lowering Venice probed by a gondolier,
rippling lines repeating some pilgrim's journals,
the weight of cities that I found so hard to bear;

in them was the terror of Time, that I would march
with columns at twilight, only to disappear
into a past whose history echoes the arch

of bridges sighing over their ancient canals
for a place that was not mine, since what I preferred
was not statues but the bird in the statue's hair.

***

Ahhhh, Walcott. He makes you sigh and ache at the same time. I think it's love.

BUT I am also writing about Ulysses. I was stoked to be able to reread this amazing book. I took a week off at the beginning of January to rest up my p(r)etty little brain and then I began reading a chapter every day. There are 18 chapters, but one of them is 180 pages long (I divided it into two days). A few weeks ago I actually wrote a carefully thought-out blog post about the experience of reading Ulysses, which I intended to type up this morning, but for some reason I have lost it. It involved ballerinas! How sad. Something about transcendence too.

I have hit the other side of that transcendence. For the past two days I have been locked in the drunken, absinthe-induced trip to the brothel that reads like a nightmare. It's absolutely filthy (probably why Ulysses was banned in so many countries for so long; interestingly, Ireland was the last country to lift the ban in the 1960s) and bizarre, and goddamn it that is exactly the kind of thing that I like. For some reason though, it drove me absolutely insane and I am seriously glad that it's over.

I read first thing in the morning, and by 11 o'clock the first day I was craving a beer. No, I am not an alcoholic and I don't just booze it up willy nilly before noon. At one point, Bloom, one of the protagonists, loses himself in a reverie induced by the red triangle on a Bass bottle which comes to represent the tongue of a panther, a ruby on the belly of a stripper, and his wife's dally hoo-hoo. Let me give you an idea of what it is like to read this by transcribing some of my reading notes:

p539 Bloom's middle name is Paula
p540 Bloom is a woman and a cow
Bloom likes anal sex
p544 "We'll manure you Mr. Flower"
(realization of sexual desires culminates in shit. Leads to thoughts of death)
p551 Nymph has no asshole
p553 Nymph splits apart
p569 Stephen talks about his "grandoldgrossfather" who made the metal cage for
Pasiphae ["to indulge her lust for the bull"]
p571 "dreams go by contraries"
fulfills dreams
p589 Stephen must kill the priest and the king
p590 King sucks jujube
p591 "you die for your country...let my country die for me"
p597 Bloom tells Cissy Caffrey she's the "sacred lifegiver"

I really like "p551 Nymph has no asshole. . .p553 Nymph splits apart." I didn't notice that on a first reading. Joyce is funny. Earlier on Bloom goes to the national museum to look at the marble statues of the goddesses ("aids to digestion"); he wants to find out if they have an anus. But Joyce writes it like, "I wonder if they have a." The period at the end of the sentence represents the anus. Tee hee hee.



I'm glad I'm out of the brothel, though. It was too much. But it looks like I'll be going back soon; I'm going to write about male characters in drag. Yay! Wish me luck!

Work Makes Life Sweet

One thing, among many, many others I have learned this semester:

If you work really really hard all day writing, things become beautiful: the writing on the back of a menu, the gray ordinary cloud, the way the ceiling intersects with the wall.

"Work makes life sweet" That's what bell hooks's grandma said.

Poor California Boys

Today I was sitting in a coffee shop working on my papers and this guy comes in in shorts, a trench coat and sunglasses with white rims. He kept whistling and shaking his leg while he was sitting at the table. After reading for five minutes, he tells the guy behind the counter, "Richard. I always forget what 'ontological' means. Do you know?"

One eyed Ulysses

Consider these photos:





I got them from this webpage: http://eyepatchstore.com/_wsn/page4.html, which sells eyepatches "for medical and cosmetic reasons." Eye patches are sexy. They're like one-eyed sunglasses. I love the peek-a-boo mystery, we know that there may be something, er, "unsightly" under the patch, yet it's covered by this lovely debonair opaque monocle. You get part of the "I'm blind and therefore wise" on one side and full ocular action on the other. It's like a headband with a flap. I love them. I want one. I highly encourage you to check out this webpage's gallery of eyepatch-wearers throughout history. He's my favorite:



I spent my last $10 on fake glasses in 1998 when I lived at BYU:



And my coworkers at Barnes and Noble made fun of me when they found out. How did they know? I wouldn't let them try them on.

Maybe I could rock an eyepatch for "cosmetic" purposes, as the website says. I think that I might make people worry though; I'd have to explain it all the time (the most annoying thing about my lip piercing: "did that hurt?"). I could only wear the patch around people I didn't know, like when I went grocery shopping. Or on the bus.

One time my friend's Dad almost lost his eye. She went to visit him in the hospital, and when she was in the parking lot she looked down and saw an eye patch someone had crafted with a fake eyelash glued to it. She took it as a good sign (her Dad did not lose his eye). What was the most bizarre thing about this story is that a few years before that, when I went to visit my grandfather in the hospital on the other side of the country, I went to get into my car and on the cement there was a purple velvet eyepatch with a fake eyelash glued to it.

When in Rome, ignore the locals and do as you damn well please

Does anybody else hear the idiom "When in Rome do as the Romans do" like EVERY SINGLE fucking DAY? Sometimes from your own mouth?

Seriously. Is it that true? I wish we'd start saying "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" more often. Or "little pitchers have big ears." Or "You always kill the one you love." Really people!

P.S. They even say the Rome idiom in Korea and Japan.

Me Night Nurse Never Want to Plant De Corn

So Andy Samberg of Saturday Night Live recently made a music video parodying young white college boys who appropriate Rastafari culture. It's absolutely hilarious, but even more, if you go to this blog to see it you can read the lyrics, and even more importantly, read the comments from the readers who helped the blogger figure out what exactly Andy Samberg was making fun of.

I'm taking a Caribbean poetry class this Fall and for our unit on dub poetry I've done a bit of research on Rastafari. What is most interesting to me is the grammar, using "I" as a plural pronoun. Check out this wikipedia page.

What I think is so amazing about this video is the number of allusions in it that only a person very familiar with Rastafari and reggae culture would get. However, it makes people want to figure them out (look at all the different comments on the guy's blog), thus it becomes a kind of educational tool. So even though it is making fun of innocent/ignorant white folks, it is simultaneously educating them/us. It makes us question the validity of appropriating other cultures' customs without true knowledge of them, but, instead of demonizing the people who do this, it just makes them just look ignorant and therefore laughable. This is really powerful. When you realize that this video is primarily intended to make people laugh, it makes you think about what tools are really effective for social change. Satire works.

Besides, there's no way I would have even know that the word "bumbleclot" is an insult in Rastafari culture that means dirty menstrual cloth if it weren't for this video. (Thanks to my brother's blog to telling me about this video.)

A cool fact , a prediction, and a hope.

Cool Fact:

Long before they were known to English speakers as avocados, they were called alligator pears.

Prediction:

In fifteen years rebel kids will co-opt Swiper from Dora the Explorer.

Hope:

Hip Hop will co-opt the Rebel flag.

One Handed Questionnaire

So sometimes I cook myself a nice dinner and then I sit down at the table. I wish I were the kind of person who could just taste each delicious mouthful she has cooked and ponder how to describe the taste of shallots, but the truth is that I only do that kind of shit when I can talk about it with other people. Eating each bite mindfully when I'm alone makes me feel like an anorexic on death row. I want to ENJOY my meal, not deliberate on every morsel. So, as a compromise, I often read about food while I eat. Those crazy Italians say "The man who eats alone dies alone." I like to think that I'm just having a one-sided conversation with M.F.K. Fisher or A.J. Liebling or the authors of the The Joy of Cooking.

It doesn't make any damn sense to read about Parmesan Black Pepper muffins while you're eating fried rice, but I do it all the time. Problem is that I end up sitting there a few hours later still reading about creamed cauliflower or currants, and my should-be leftovers are congealing on the stove.

So that's what I did tonight, with my Thursday-is-the-new-Saturday grad student schedule. This time though I sat at the computer, and a few glasses of wine and a few extra scoops of fried rice later, I found this website: Eat Drink One Woman She has different folks fill out a food-related questionnaire each week. Reading them in succession helps distract you from your pretty unsuccessful fried rice.

I thought it would be fun to answer the questionnaire myself. I heartily encourage you doing the same in the comments. Maybe you could do it one-handedly while you are eating? If y'all all do, I'll make a new post just for them!

***
Name: Susanna Williams

Occupation: Grad student/ English tutor

Borough: In CA we call them neighborhoods, and mine is actually a small town called Moss Beach.

Relationship status: That has nothing whatsoever to do with food and is none of your damn business.

What did you eat today?

Half carrot/half orange juice on campus
Frozen banana, vanilla soy milk, almond butter smoothie
Veggie-melt sandwich from the local pizzeria I have never eaten at
Half a chocolate bar when I woke up from my nap (I had a bit of a hangover)
Fried rice I made at home

What do you never eat?

Restaurant Chinese food, mustard, relish, chicken breast, chicken nuggets, milk, chocolate and mint together

Complete this sentence: In my refrigerator, you can always find:

vanilla soy milk, carrots, celery, butter, frozen bananas (for smoothies), Hellman's mayonaise (y'all call it "Best Foods" in the west)

What is your favorite kitchen item?

My square wooden spoon. It's a spoon and spatula. And has notches in it from when it was once used as a drum stick.

Where do you eat out most frequently?

The food on campus at SF State is surprisingly healthy, cheap, and delicious. I eat the falafel plate on campus a lot or get a weird healthy burrito (I'm a sucker for bourgeois burritos).

I also eat burritos at the taqueria in Half Moon Bay that doubles as a fried chicken joint. It's SO HANDS DOWN the best taqueria on the coast. And I will fight you if you disagree.

And I guess I eat out in Big Sur a lot at the bakery for breakfast.

World ends tomorrow. What would you like for your last meal?

It depends on who is with me. If it's my love, then I would eat sexy food that makes me close my eyes and chew. Blue cheese, lamb, fatty raw tuna, artichokes, chocolate truffles from Recchiuti (it's in the Ferry building). If it's my family, then squash casserole, grandma's green beans she grew in her garden and canned, mama's mac and cheese casserole and chicken n' dumplins, my pecan pie, sweet tea, and Aunt Sherry's peach ice cream. There should be a bread, but I swear that nobody in my family (including me) can make a decent bread, be it cornbread, biscuits, or pie crust. I'd probably be happiest with canned biscuits (and apple butter). If I were alone, it's be Strauss whole milk yogurt and some maple syrup, a nectarine, a salad with kidney beans and garbanzo beans, pumpkin seeds and slivered almond, radishes and grated carrot and celery with sweet miso dressing. And a tuna salad sandwich with a lot of tarragon and mayo. And I'd bring back the artichoke and dip it in Hellman's with white wine and gigantic black olives that taste like soil.

Oh PLEASE tell me yours! PLEASE.

My Dreams (Are) Red, Gold, and Green

Um, okay...sit back and relax. We're going to a time when even hot young people danced like nervous 12 year old boys shuffling back and forth from one foot to the other. And a pop singer could reflect the depth of emotion in his song by merely opening and closing his palm dramatically. My favorite part is the harmonica solo.

Why do they dance like old people? WHY DO THEY DANCE LIKE SENIOR CITIZENS? I'm sure their hips are still full of cartilege!

Kava Kava

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far way, this sailor-talking semi-whore was a sweet Mormon girl who wasn't entirely sure where the clitoris was located. This isn't a story about how she found that out; this is a different story. The place was Provo, Utah, and she and her friends had been invited to a "Kava Kava" party. All she knew was that Kava Kava was some sort of special tea from Samoa and that they were all going to sit on the floor and drink it out of the same cup. Now Susanna knew that Mormons weren't supposed to drink tea, but Kava Kava was herbal tea so it was alright and besides, the guys hosting the party were Mormon too.

It was a very small party. It was just her and her friends and the guys from Samoa. One guy mixed up a big wooden bowl of kava and he'd ladle some into a wooden cup and they would clap and go "Kava Kava" and then pass the cup around and everyone would drink it. And they drank cup after cup after cup after cup. And then everyone was brushing each other's hair and giving each other back rubs and they were all so close and comfortable and nice and it was all strange because they had all just met each other.

And the next morning, when Susanna woke up and was confused about why she let a guy she barely knew brush her hair and another guy give her a back rub, she found out that Kava Kava is a sedative with mild psychoactive properties and drinking 10 cups of it is akin to a large dose of Valium.

So now she buys it on purpose and drinks it at night while she is studying.

Opening Pandora's Box

Mac, this post might make you cry.

This is in response to my brother's post, "Missing My Damn Pater Familias" about the online radio-ish station Pandora, which uses some sort of magic voodoo to accomplish its purposes. You can type in any artist and they will make a radio station that plays music similar to that artist. My brother wrote in his blog that he found himself wanting to email our Dad and tell him about it, and then realized that he couldn't. He thinks that Dad's favorite radio station would have been the Jimi Hendrix station.

When my Dad died, I got his iPod, and, after listening to the songs on it for a few weeks, I finally had to just move on and put my own songs on it. But I couldn't do it without cataloging every single song on his iPod, including his 25 most played. These were the top ten:

1. "Ruby Tuesday" Rolling Stones
2. "Me and Bobby McGee" Janis Joplin
3. "We've Only Just Begun" The Carpenters
4. "Don't You Want Somebody to Love" Jefferson Airplane
5. "One Way or the Other" Blondie
6. "Hurt So Bad" The Letterman
7. "Purple Haze" Jimi Hendrix
8. "Bad Moon Rising" Credence Clearwater Revival
9. "Southern Cross" Stephen Stills
10. "These Eyes" The Guess Who

Before I go any further, I need to explain to those of you who are just joining us that my Dad died last October 30th. He had a very rare brain disease whose first major symptom is psychosis. So my Dad quite suddenly went crazy, but we didn't know he was going crazy. My Dad presumably stopped listening to this iPod in early August right before he became bat shit crazy. I draw your attention to this fact because it makes absolutely no sense that my Dad would like Blondie. And I do not understand why Janis Joplin is #2 on his list. I never heard him listen to her.

Below is a list of every single track on the iPod in alphabetical order. The numbers before the tracks are the rankings in his top 25 most played. Jimi Hendrix didn't rank as high as we would have expected. I read this like a diary or a poem, especially the end, and it hurts:

Abba-Dancing Queen
Abba—Take A Chance On Me
Addicted to Love
Al Green—Lean on Me
Al Green and Annie Lennox—Scrooge Soundtrack—Put a Little Love In Your Heart
17.All Along the Watchtower
Allison Kraus—When You Say Nothing At All
Allman Brothers—Ramblin’ Man
B52—Roam
16. Back in the USSR
8. Bad Moon Rising
Beach Boys—Fun, Fun, Fun
Beach Boys—Good Vibrations
Beatles—Hey Jude
14. Beatles—Let it Be
Beatles—Michelle
Beatles—Revolution
Bette Midler—Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy
5. Blondie—One Way or Another
Box Tops—Cry Like a Baby
California Girls
Carly Simon—You’re So Vain
Christopher Cross—Sailing
4. Don’t You Want Somebody to Love—Jefferson Airplane
24. Drifters—There Goes my Baby
Elton John—Crocodile Rock
Elton John-Daniel
Elton John—Pinball Wizard
Fifth Dimension—Let the Sunshine In
18. Free Bird
20.I’ve Been Waiting for a Girl Like You—Foreigner—Foreigner 4
12. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
21.In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
Jimi Hendrix—Are You Experienced
Jimi Hendrix—Foxey Lady
7. Jimi-Hendrix—Purple Haze
19.Kinks—All Day and All Of The Night
Kokomo
22. Leaving on a Jet Plane
Led Zeppelin---Stairway to Heaven (Rare Acoustic)
Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd—Whole Lotta Love
6. The Lettermen –Hurt So Bad
13.Magic Carpet Ride
Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terell—It Takes Two
11. Maybe I’m Amazed—Paul McCartney—Wings Over America
2. Me and Bobby McGee—Janis Joplin
23.Pink Houses—John Cougar—Scarecrow
15. Platters—Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Political Grapevine: 7/25/07—Brit Hume’s Grapevine
Political Grapevine: 7/27/07—Brit Hume’s Grapevine
Political Grapevine: 8/1/07—Brit Hume’s Grapevine
The Radio Factor—7/25/07—The Radio Factor
The Radio Factor—7/27/07—The Radio Factor
The Radio Factor—8/2/07—The Radio Factor
The Radio Factor—8/3/07—The Radio Factor
Rocket Man
Roy Orbison—Crying
Roy Orbison—Only the Lonely
Roy Orbison—Pretty Woman
1. Ruby Tuesday—The Rolling Stone—Flowers
Sloop John B
9. Southern Cross
10. These eyes
3. We’ve Only Just Begun
25. Yesterday
409
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