Wow, this was a week, huh? So much has happened that I have to break it up into parts or I'll never finish writing it. People who follow me on Facebook or Twitter have been getting the preview of this, but here's the full story. (And if you want to know what's going on with me, and aren't my FB friend--why not?)
The last couple of weeks in Austin were non-stop: working by day, packing in odd moments, then rushing to social engagements so that I could see as many people as I could before I left. By the time I boarded my flight for Vegas, I already needed a rest. An illustrated description of the first part of my adventure follows in the extended entry...
Continue reading "Vegas, part I: Goodbye Austin, Hello Spissh!"
I've entered into a phase of sucking down new music (among other new experiences) like it's oxygen, and right now I just want to listen to stuff all the time that makes me feel how this makes me feel:
Check me out on Last.fm if you want to know what adventures in music I am having.
This is the lesson of yesterday: when planning a surprise party, HAVE A PRETEXT. Your main goal is to get the person to the place by the time, so the people can jump out and shout, "SURPRISE!" It doesn't work so well when the person, in their obliviousness, seems dead set on thwarting you.
The setup was, we were all meeting at the restaurant at 6:30 for Larry's birfday. I had to go over to the condo to drop off some stuff (I moved yesterday, remember), so I was around when the following went down.
At around 6, Larry started getting the idea of grilling some chicken that needed eating up. He started calling all the exact same people who were supposed to be meeting us for dinner, and even the fact that they all said, "Sorry, can't hang out until about 8 o'clock" didn't make him suspicious. I overheard this conversation in the kitchen (paraphrased):
Iskra: I thought we were going to go to Indian Palace.
Larry: Well, now we have all this chicken that needs eating.
Iskra: But don't you want to go out for your birthday?
Larry: Let's just grill this and save some money...what's up baby?
Iskra: I just really wanted you to go to the restaurant.
Meanwhile, Heath and I were casting anxious glances at each other, wondering how we were going to convince him to go to his own party. I was exhausted and brain dead from moving, otherwise I think I'd have come up with something. Anyway, I didn't, and the comedy continued.
When he failed to get any nibbles on the grilling plan, Larry decided the only thing that would satisfy him was to bake some raisin bread. We were trying to talk him out of this when there was a knock on the door.
(Unbeknownst to Larry, one of the guests had got the wrong time, and showed up at the restaurant early. When he called Iskra to find out what the deal was, she invited him over.)
Larry was thrilled to get this unexpected visit from his friend Tony, and immediately decided that he needed to be shown the scenes from Brimstone Orphans, which the condo peeps shot a few weeks ago and just finished tinkering with. Iskra cast a furrowed-eyebrow look in my direction, but we both shrugged and decided we'd just drag him out of the house when the scenes were done.
The scenes (awesome, by the way!) come and go...and a timer goes off in the kitchen.
OK, Lars, time to go! Surely that was your bread being ready?
No?
Oh, that timer was for the bread dough to rise...now you want to stay and bake it?
What does it take to get this guy to his own birthday party? At this point, I would have been giving up on the surprise concept, but Iskra soldiered on.
Heath and I went ahead to the restaurant to warn everyone. Fortunately, there was plenty of beer, and mango lassi, and we were kept amused by text updates from Iskra saying such things as, "10 more minutes on the freaking bread!"
Finally, at about 7:30, we saw them walking across the parking lot.
"Oh shit!" said Heath. "They're here!"
"Quick, hide!" I hissed.
Someone grabbed a napkin and put it over their head. Within seconds, all 8 of us at the table right next to the door had napkins over our heads, and we peeked out from under them as Lars 'n' Iskra entered the restaurant...and talked to the greeter...and turned in the opposite direction. Somehow, Larry had totally missed the table of 8 people--8 of his friends--all with napkins over their heads and attempting to stifle giggles. We were all laughing far too hard to shout, "SURPRISE!"
I just can't get enough of moving. Due to various circumstances, by the time I settle in my new home and new office, I will have had, in 2009, 6 residences and 3 offices.
Right now, I'm staying with my friend Charles, who is moving to Scotland to live with Athena, and his lease is up on Monday. However, I am not ready to leave Austin (partly because the company took donkey's years to write my offer letter, and I only just got it last Wednesday) and will have to stay in town a couple of extra weeks. This means that I'm packing stuff up and moving it to ANOTHER friend's house while I pack my other stuff up and move it into storage.
Athena and Charles are getting married on June the 27th in Las Vegas (the suite where they're having their reception is VERY FLASH), so I've booked a flight there on the 25th, will attend their wedding, fly on to Seattle on the 28th, and start work in my new office on the 29th.
Meanwhile, I'll be living in temporary housing while I try and find some groovy Seattle roommates, then once I get somewhere to live, I'll have my stuff picked up from the storage unit and have it shipped up to me.
On top of all that, I have worked overtime for the past couple of weeks, completely overhauling our processes at work, delivering the moon on a stick at short notice, and generally kicking arse.
tl;dr version: I'm moving a lot, will be without most of my stuff for a month, and am getting to see Vegas for the first time. If you are in Austin and want to see me before I go, you know where to find me!
It was starting to become a thing, that I would talk about getting a tattoo, but never got around to getting one. The first time I seriously thought about it was probably in 1999 or 2000, when I was living in Plymouth. I actually went to consult a tattoo artist about what I wanted--which was going to be symbolic of the Manics in some way--but the guy was strange and offputting. You know when you're getting something permanently marked on your skin, how you want the person doing that to be not strange and offputting? Yeah.
So it was some years after that before I seriously thought about it again. By that time, I'd moved on to thinking it would be a giraffe, maybe something stylised. I was thinking small and delicate, nothing too intense, to see if I liked tattoos, and then maybe I'd get more. Still, I couldn't really settle on a design. That's really the crucial part: picking something you know you will want to have on your skin for the rest of your life. I told myself that if I could stick with one idea for at least a year, I'd get it done.
Well, I had that idea. It's something I've wanted for several years now, but in true Jess style it's so over the top elaborate that it will cost a significant amount of money and take many installments to do. This is obviously a little daunting for someone whose only prior tattoo parlour experience is talking to one strange and offputting guy for about 5 minutes. I started wondering if it was my way of letting myself off the hook. Perhaps I should start smaller, with something really personally meaningful.
But then. Then, it came to me. Reading Phonogram, of course, it came to me. There is this one wordless panel that sums up the joy and the intensity of music. David Kohl walks into a nightclub. It's changed in the past decade but he can almost see through the veil of years to what it used to be. He plays a song on his walkman, one that will conjour the memory kingdom, and he dances with complete abandon.
On May 18th, the Manics released a new album. They've been doing this for the last ten years without my paying much attention, so what was different this time?
It seemed to me that their intervening stuff was a deliberate move away from Richey's influence, in a "not-ready-to-deal-with-it" kind of way. His family refused to have him declared dead, even though they could have done so after seven years, until last autumn, nearly fourteen years after his disappearance. Perhaps the band had talked it over with the family, or perhaps something had changed, but I knew from the first moment I saw the artwork--the cover painting by Jenny Saville, the familiar typeface with the backwards Rs--that the remaining Manics were using this album to exorcise their Richey demons in some way.
Just the cover art alone made caused a visceral reaction in me; it felt like a gut-punch. But I had to know. I lapped up the promotional press, and learned that the songs had lyrics taken directly from a binder that Richey had given to the other band members before his disappearance, in what looks from the perspective of hindsight to be a parting gift.
I was nervous that the treatment would fail to do justice to the lyrics (let's face it, James's vocal style has mellowed over the years, and even Nicky-penned lines like "If you tolerate this, then your children will be next" sound pretty hollow when sung in a wistful rather than viciously angry way), or, worse, that examining Richey's pre-disappearance mindset in 1995 would be ghoulishly archaeological and distant, more like the contents of a canopic jar than a still-beating heart just ripped from its protesting owner's chest (which, to be clear, is a good thing, musically speaking). But overall, I was hopeful, and all the promotional press seemed to indicate good things.
So, the album.
The reason I spent a couple of hours fighting through my crap-al tunnel issues to bring you that epic post last night (and the one about the new album might end up being longer) is because it appears that I haven't really gone into detail about my Manics love in the 7 years I've been blogging! There have been a couple of posts that assume some background knowledge, which was OK back when the vast majority of my stalkers came from the Buffyguide, where I was known to ramble about the Manics for days, have Richey as my profile pic, and put angsty Manics lyrics in my signature.
These days, though, there are a lot more people reading who probably don't have the first idea about the Manics either as a band or as a totem of Jess. I never try and spread the Manics love to my friends, because--unlike practically any other band I like--it would be too painful if they didn't like them. It would feel like a personal rejection. And, let's face it; not everyone is going to love a band whose most chart-friendly hit from their first three albums has a verse that starts, "Life lies a slow suicide, orthodox dreams and symbolic myths." So when people ask what music I like, my answer is..."Oh, you know, stuff that is cinematic and dark and beautiful, and probably a bit indie. I love Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds...the Pixies, the Cure, Rasputina, Radiohead...and *ahem* manicstreetpreachers...oh, look, is that Bigfoot?" *runs away*.
It's been a slow road toward learning, not intellectually but viscerally, that people don't have to love what I love in order to love me. I have no problem with it the other way around, but I suppose it helps that there's very little music I absolutely refuse to listen to. I think that my teenage experiences of being rejected 'for my music'--and let's face it, that was really just something that the people who weren't going to like me anyway were USING AS AN EXCUSE, just like they didn't really hate me because my hair was frizzy--have left scars.
So it's time for me to stand up and say I fucking love the Manic Street Preachers. I didn't 'used to like them' as a teenager. They weren't a phase I went through. I own every single they released between 1991 and 1998, even after selling all my other CD singles. I have 10" picture discs and bootlegs. One of my favourite Manics songs is a b-side that was never released except on vinyl. I collected press clippings about Richey in a binder.
That comic I keep going on about, Phonogram, the reason I love it so much is not just because it speaks to my 17-year-old Britpop loving self, but because it knows, really knows, what was good about the Manics, and its most cathartic story thread is about them, about the strange and fragile psyches of people who really used to love the Manics a whole lot. Finally, the main character, in order to unlock the Britpop 'memory kingdom', dresses up like his former self, in full Richey Manic garb--tight jeans; eyeliner; a shirt spraypainted with the words "USE/LESS"--and dances with complete abandon.
It's so joyous and vivid that I want my first tattoo to be of that panel. And when people ask me about it, I'll tell them that it's because I love the Manic Street Preachers.
This is not a review. Certainly not anything purporting to be an objective review for people who are deciding whether or not to buy an album. There are music journalists for that, and they are paid money, and they are not picking their most painful scabs to bring you their opinions.
This is, rather, a story about my relationship with the Manic Street Preachers. It has a happy ending, insofar as it has an ending at all.
So I decided to try out an online dating site, because, you know, I'll be moving to a new city in a while and wouldn't mind meeting some people for dates or just hanging out. Besides, I've never done it before, and when I first had the notion, it kinda frightened me--which I usually take as an indication that I should try something, at least once. I'm funny like that.
Mostly my experience has been neutral or positive, and randomly finding an acquaintance's profile on there led to our becoming closer friends, so that's a plus, but I would like to hold up some people for public humiliation. I mean, they're anonymous, so it's not hurting anyone, but some of these idiots really deserve to be thrown to the internet wolves. Please, eviscerate them with your teeth.
Now, first problem is, despite my being fairly clear in my profile that I'm looking more for women than for men, 95% of the messages I get are from guys who have clearly either read what I wrote and decided they are the exception, or just failed to read that part and only saw the bit where I say I read comic books and therefore we must be kindred spirits.
Secondly, some people's idea of an introduction is just not right. Didn't their mommas teach them any manners? Let's have a look, shall we?
Will you join me at my apartment for some movies or games? Let me know. [Name]
That's it. No 'hello'. No preamble. No consideration for the fact that I MAY NOT WANT TO GO TO SOME INTERNET DUDE'S HOUSE ALONE THE FIRST TIME WE COMMUNICATE WITH EACH OTHER. Clueless. Next!
I'm [name], and i think we might have reason to chat.
OK, that's not the whole message, but "we might have reason to chat" creeps me out for some reason. Like, "We need to talk," it has overtones of the ominous.
im sure you have been asked this at least once, but im always curious as to why one moves to the states from a western european country.
Again, that's the entire message. Abrupt much? And personal, and demanding, and totally not a two-way communication/personal revelation street. Also, most likely, full of assumptions and preconceived ideas about what it is like to live in a Western European country. If there's anything I hate nearly as much as USian isolationism, it's irrational USian fetishisation of the British and the European. Particularly when that is combined with ignorance of the European, which I'm not saying this guy has, but let's just say it's a very unexamined viewpoint. Moving on.
There were a couple of innocuous-seeming messages from guys whose profiles were disturbing to me for one reason or another. For instance, the one dude with a chronic case of nice guy syndrome who had all this passive-aggressive bullshit about how he had given up on dating sites and didn't expect anything any more, and yet he still kept sending messages, and the women who didn't respond were somehow bitches because they owed him something. Well, it's good to have someone's major psychological malfunction up front so you don't waste your time on them, I guess?
Finally, and I've saved the best for last because I love deferred gratification that way, I received this masterpiece just yesterday:
just noticed a possible grammatic error. normally i'm not anal and don't really care, but i guess today is different. i'm sure since you are a writer you know the difference between immigrated and emigrated. but you said you were a brit living in texas for the past 7 years. i guess basically for my own gratification, did you move to texas from the uk, or england, or brittain, or whatever the fuck the politically correct term is? or did you move here from somewhere within the u.s.?
Hoo boy. So many things wrong with this I hardly know where to start. First, the factual, because that's easiest to pin down. The only place I use any permutation of the word 'migrate' in my profile is in the following:
The six things I could never do without: You know, when you've emigrated with nothing but the contents of a few suitcases, you start to think of the answer to this question in more abstract terms.
So (and I know that my dear readers know me well enough that this was never in question, but it seems I still have something to prove), I OF COURSE used the word correctly. Regardless of the points of departure and arrival during that particular trip, it goes without saying that at some point I emigrated--ie. moved from the country of my birth. Perhaps (and I don't wish to read too much into it...oh, hell, who am I kidding? I love pulling apart conservative dog-whistle bullshit) this gentleman has been so indoctrinated by the discourse on 'immigration' that he thinks of people who have moved to the US only in terms of their arrival here, and the impact that has on the social and economic makeup of the US, and never in terms of the fact that there is another country out there that they once called home.
Also, and this seems almost curmudgeonly to draw attention to, but the silly sod has fallen victim to one of the oldest truisms of the internet: call not attention to the perceived usage errors of others, lest thine missive be filled with errors more egregious and laughable. "Grammatic errors" (double whammy with the grammatical error in his adjective formation and his lumping my word choice in with grammar)? "Brittain"? *sigh*.
Finally, and, let's face it, most importantly, what an aggressive and obnoxious way to say hello to a stranger. What do they teach them at these schools?
One of the big things for me lately has been learning to be alone a lot of the time. As everyone knows, I'm a social butterfly and I feed off the creative and social energy of other people. Maybe that should have read 'social vampire', but I like to think I give back at least as much as I take. To me, the number of people who live in a house is four. Four in my immediate family growing up, four in the house I lived in at university, four in the condo. That way, even if one of them feels like hiding away in a cave, there is always someone to talk to, to bounce ideas off, to have amiable arguments with, to cook with, to tease and to have tease me. I cook big meals. I have long, sprawling conversations that pick up with "and another thing..." when I haven't spoken to that person for hours. My best creative projects are collaborations.
The last (and only) time I spent any amount of time alone, I was just getting the hang of it--starting to like it, even--when Heath came back from his film set and revealed that his alone time had led him to question everything in our relationship, thus kicking off the Great Upheaval of Ought-Seven. The ensuing heartache put paid to any further exploration right then, though it didn't undo the progress that I had made, and this time I think I'm in a better place to understand what Being Me is like, without all those other people to distract myself from it.
That's why, when Athena offered to let me sub-let her apartment until her lease ran out, I jumped at the chance. That's why I took the office all the way at the other end of the building from where the people are, and since Staci quit, I have been revelling in my solitude. Oh, sure, I've had a lot of time to watch Coupling (watched all three seasons while sewing costumes for the play) and Twin Peaks (just three more episodes to go until I am exactly as in the dark as everyone else about What It All Means!), but I've also had time to ask myself questions, to think about stuff, to write a little.
Also, did you know that sometimes talking to a therapist can be really enlightening? The other day, she asked me why I have a certain reaction, and when I couldn't answer, gave a couple of possible explanations. At the third one, I said, "YES! That!" I had no idea until that very moment.
Of course, in the process of looking forward, I have unearthed all kinds of things from the past. Moving forward is a cyclical process for me. You know, without getting into all that NOSTALGIA LIES bullshit. But I find it necessary to examine what has gone before and to understand, otherwise you run the risk of either burning away things that work as well as things that don't, or of repeating the same mistakes over and over. Which is why I've spent the last couple of days wallowing in Manic Street Preacherness. Or maybe that's because Phonogram keeps picking my scabs and Crystal tagged me in a bunch of old pics on Facebook. Who knows?
Well, it's been quite a while since I wrote anything in this blog. People who follow me on Twitter or Facebook probably know the gist of this, but here's the official update:
When I got back from the UK, I was feeling in pretty bad shape. Thanks to two weeks of chips, Indian takeaway, and very little physical exertion I had come to feel a bit flabby and greasy--and my trousers weren't fitting so good. Even worse, despite using the computer for a max of about 30-60 minutes a day (about 5-10% of my usual), the nerves in my arms were flaring up really badly. I hadn't been doing the exercises my physical therapist taught me, hadn't been keeping up with any pilates, and my posture was terrible. Bad posture leads straight to tingly nervesville for me.
So, on my return, I made a resolution. I kept pretty quiet about it due to the uncomfortable proximity to New Year, and the pressure associated with that. But I had to get in shape.
Things became even more pressing when Athena cast me as the court jester, and now I have to do all my own stunts.
Heath felt similarly, and after seeing Flon and Helen playing Wii Fit, we knew what we had to do. You see, for a lifelong nerd such as I, who still associates exercise with people tripping me in PE class, the only way to make it appealing is to turn it into a video game. Yeah, there's some element of competition (mainly with myself, trying to beat my own scores, but I can't deny that it's cool to be top of the scoreboard), but the whole thing just ties into my "just one more level"/"I need to unlock this achievement" impulse so perfectly.
Since I started working out regularly (I'm aiming for every day, but I'm also in crunch mode at work and rehearsing a play, so...), I've felt amazing. I wake up early every morning, full of energy. I've been eating better, and I seem to need less of it because it's not the sugary/starchy stuff that causes the insulin rollercoaster. I've also been doing the physical therapy exercises with the resistance band, and thanks to the combination of workouts I have hardly had any strange sensation at all in nearly three weeks. Seriously, all it took was for me to do it two or three days in a row and--BAM!--my arms feel almost normal again.
Now we're into rehearsals, and it turns out that I have to climb rope ladders, do pratfalls and somersaults (yeah, that will need working on) and spend most of a scene wrestling someone. Did you know that spending two hours squatting will make your ass cheeks really hurt the next day? Yeah. Larry tried to console me that at least I will have an ass of steel by the end of the run. I can honestly say that's the first time in my life I've ever thought that possible.
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