white winter hymnal

someone in my building named sarah hauge left her itunes on sharing so i'm listening to her library. i'm listening to skinny love by bon iver. i told people that i would go to the bars with them tonight but i felt hungry during workshop so my friend and i snuck out of the building after class and went home. now i'm in my apartment by myself waiting for jackson to finish shaving his face. he is taking a very long time. i ate a cookie and i've finished most of a beer (yeungling, leftover by dj berndt from the reading at my apartment last week.)

i got the results of my 'annual check-up' today. 'we are pleased to report your recent pap smear is normal. this means no abnormal cells were identified.'

last night i did this test to assess my facial beauty.

i did pretty well on it.

thanksgiving feast

yesterday on thanksgiving i woke up with a hangover.

on wednesday night, i went to a friend's house and drank vodka and then went out in towson, md and had a surprisingly pleasant time via being buzzed already. i grew up around towson and went to high school in towson and so every year when i come back to towson for thanksgiving and christmas i see an assortment of folks i knew from ages 5-11, 11-14, 14-18, or some combination of the above. it can be real disheartening, but i just happened to run into pretty much only friendly/attentive folks on wednesday night that ended up getting me real drunk. cut to not quite sure how i got here but i've got a finger down my throat or something and i'm doing a vomit into the grass in front of my friend's jeep outside a mcdonalds.

i took photos of two of my friends occupying the same coat

oh right, i remember. this was after the friend i came with went home with a boy she goes home with after each of these events and i decided i would drive myself home to skype with my boyfriend. things i did to sober up: 1) threw up because i felt 'too nauseous to drive' 2) asked my friend to get me a big container of fries from mcdonalds and then ate them all on the ride to my car to avoid more nausea 3) drank a big glass of water at my friend's house (where my car was) and 4) decided 'it's now or never!' and charged out of her house with all of the things i'd brought with me to spend the night (e.g. pillow, spare clothes, toothbrush) without looking back.

the drive home was a little difficult because of new 'rumble strips' the county has installed on the double yellow lines that divide the roads in half and me feeling determined to ride on them. at home, my mother greeted me at the door (it was at least 3 am) and i asked for a plate of salad and some water and ate them real fast and then told her to wake me before noon (?) and went upstairs to skype. on skype my boyfriend told me i was still drunk, which really surprised me.

on thanksgiving i woke up, gulped down a couple advils, and went about my day successfully making the 'vegetable side' of peas (which were a hit), peeling 7-8 potatoes, helping mom with vege gravy for myself and generally adding to the festive mood of the day. some relatives came over for dinner and then i surprised myself and them by putting most of the food into storage containers and then taking over for my dad after he got tired doing the dishes and finishing them all up before dessert. dessert is the same every year, a pumpkin pie and and apple pie for which i've done the crust (plus the apple filling this year, with help from dad) and my mom's done the filling. i am a pie crust expert and i achieved this level of expertise at age 7. i did experiments with the crust recipes until it did what i wanted and now i do the exact same thing for it every year and it always turns out magnificently. everyone always exclaims how wonderfully the pies turned out but in my opinion they always taste the same, so i wonder if they get bored. my aunt used to make a pecan pie but i think my mom discouraged her from it or something. she can be bossy. i remember it being really tasty. maybe i'll try to do one of those for next year.

after dinner i was supposed to go to my friend's house but the relatives stayed late so i read all of shoplifting from american apparel instead and was disappointed by how unsuccessful sam's shoplifting experiences were. and disappointed by the book in general. did a goodreads review of it that said 'felt cheap' and gave it 2/5 stars. tried to skype my boyfriend but fell asleep (oops). happy thanksgiving everybody.

a lot of singing

today i drove to my parents' home in maryland for thanksgiving break. i probably won't be doing shoe/book posts from here because most of my shoes and books are at my apartment in dc. not that i've been doing them every day anyway hehe. last week i was getting ready for susie anderson to visit and then she was here and we were ustreaming :)

i had tons of fun this weekend with so many lit friends visiting! dj berndt, jess dutschmann, megan boyle, zachary german, michael michael motorpsychle, shaun gannon, will bechtold and jae dyche came down for the reading, along with some new-to-ustream mfa friends of mine (readers included allison wyss, katie herman and anna rowser.) beach sloth blogged about it (<3). the reading was a success. i want to make it into a bi-monthly series, and will be working very hard to get a reading together for late january, because i won't be back from new zealand until jan. 18.

last night, i watched inland empire with jax for our monday/tuesday night date night. this has been our third david lynch in a row and it was the least accessible so far to me. my first introduction to inland empire came from my good friend derek lessard during a hollywood horror film class we both took in 2008. for a presentation in class, derek played the clip where nikki first gets her instructions for looking through the silk (i wish i had the video clip to put here, idk if i'm describing this part well.) reality, film, being a character and dreaming all seemed fluid in this movie. seems like i had quite a few deja vu moments during the film. didn't help that the film seemed to be bleeding into real life as jax and i couldn't get our films to synch up. we'd set our dvd's to the same time and they'd be on different images; we'd synch up the images but then check back in a minute and be out of synch again; one minute, jax would be ahead in his version, then i would be; jax would say 'did you see x' and i wouldn't have seen it; sometimes i saw it later, sometimes the image never came (i never saw any clown.) we took a break and when we came back, i said 'it would be nice to be invisible i think' and jax said if you were invisible, it would be nice to also be able to be silent because otherwise people would still hear you doing loud things. immediately after starting the film back up, one character was not able to see another but could still hear her. very weird things happening during and around this one. if i had to put the three in order: 1) eraserhead, 2) mulholland dr., 3) inland empire. that is also the order we've watched them in. i wonder if this is correlated? next week is blue velvet.

today i got real bored during my drive to my parents' home. to cope, i recorded a series of music videos from songs on the radio, starting with linkin park and ending with nine inch nails. here they are, throughout.

nobody wants to hear about it

i feel real prep school in any boat shoes, especially these fucking boat shoes.

(j.d. salinger's catcher in the rye + sperry top-sider authentic original 2 eye in pink canvas)

yea holden is seriously inspirational, okay.

today i went to a three tents reading and met megan boyle and 'reconnected' with adam robinson and re-met mark cugini (the creator of the reading series) and listened to my friend natalie corbin read and listened to and met edward mullany, who just published a book with publishing genius. today was a real good day.

did you ever try to dress like a character from a book?

gonna do a series of books with shoes that remind me of those books. a lot of what i wear or how i try to dress is intuitively inspired by things i've read. here's where i'll try to pair them together.

james joyce's dubliners + urban outfitters' cooperative suede oxford wedge.

clomp clomp i'm a dubliner.

some books already have shoes on them, but that's just cheating.

doin a blog, ok?

i'm gonna blog also. are you surprised?

i used to do it a lot last spring, and even at the beginning of the summer. then i got 'busy'. but really, it's like watering a plant or masturbating or fitness. you have to just keep going at it. um yea.

reasons a future surge in blog posts here might be lame:

-it doesn't have a fun theme

-i have no real goals

-i might talk about things like feelings

-i might talk about things that happen to me during the day

photo i took on my roofdeck today:

this past sunday, my oldest friend (meaning i've been pretty consistently friends with her for 18 years, and not that she's the oldest person i know because she's not, she's 22) spent the night at my apartment primarily because she was going to the supreme court on monday morning and i live in washington, dc. my friend is in law school. i like to think she also spent the night to do things like 'catch up' and 'cuddle'. 

an assortment of things my friend said to me while she was here:

-when we went to the coffee shop i always go to and the cashier cursed at another employee she said 'i can see why you like it here'

-in reaction to me fixing my hair, she said 'if i had a nickle for every time you've fixed your hair today' and she told me i wouldn't have to keep fixing it if i didn't 'wear it like an 80s person'

-i told her i fell down on the sidewalk the other day from tripping on cobblestones. when we got to the spot where i fell, i said 'that's where i fell' and pointed at the ground. she said 'where are the cobblestones?'

-after the ravens scored their winning touchdown she waved my purple hair dryer in the air really excitedly while also making 'proud fan' noises (i guess that's not really talking)

-compared joanna newsom's voice to a 'fly buzzing around the room'

an assortment of the topics we discussed while she was here:

-death

-accidental death

-freak death (e.g. decapitation, trash chutes)

-homicide

-homicide court cases

-people we know who've died

an assortment of songs i listened to while doing work at the coffee shop:

-wuthering heights, kate bush

-the majority of We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves by john maus, highlights include cop killer and matter of fact

-peach plum pear, joanna newsom

i guess that's it.

today a poem i wrote this summer was published on metazen :)