Saturday, December 09, 2006

there was an article in friday's ny times listing this year's grammy nominees, and the love of my life, mr. john mayer, received five, including album of the year for "continuum." i have no beef with this, it was a fantastic album, but it was SAD. what happened to you, john mayer?

"room for squares" was youthful, optimistic and full of happy love songs. even in "love song for no one," lyrics about lacking love are placed against such happy music that it could be used as an intro for a family-oriented 80s sitcom. despite the upbeat electric guitar used on "heavier things," some of the songs started to get more introspective and sad. new deep? come back to bed? split screen sadness? dude, all you did was break up with jennifer love hewitt. worse things have happened, chill out. and daughters? thanks for the PSA, john. all of this turned out to be a downhill slide into complete depression. continuum is the saddest fucking album ever. i'll be lying in bed and alicia will turn on "slow dancing in a burning room," and immediately i feel like i want to slit my wrists. holy crap. john, are you okay? do we need to have an intervention? before this, i thought the saddest music that could come out of alicia's room was joni mitchell. now, she's a sap. somehow john mayer has topped her.

maybe whatever caused this depression is also what caused him to think it was a good idea to date jessica simpson. yikes!

Thursday, December 07, 2006

i don't contend to have much sports knowledge. i mean, i can get through a conversation all right, but when it comes down to it i know just as many things as i overhear in conversations at the bar or read in the sports section of the post-gazette at work. however, i still like to weigh in and blindly pick all my hometown teams to win their respective championships.

my family does a grab bag for christmas. at thanksgiving, everyone writes down a list of things they desire to receive, and then the lists are mixed all up in a hat and whomever you choose you are required to spend $50 on. everyone's lists are always forced, so you end up with 2 sets of red fiestaware or some plaid victoria's secret pajamas you didn't really want. as far as purchasing goes, you could get someone easy, which might merely require a trip to bath and body works for some smelly stuff, or you might get uncle doug, in which case you will most likely end up at advance auto parts buying obscure car care products. ANYWAY, after only three years of participating, last year i started writing down things that couldn't be purchased, just to be an asshole. i was bored. i asked for world peace, eternal youth, etc. my last request was a steelers super bowl victory. at this time last year they were barely squeaking into the playoffs -- actually, at this point, they might have been "out of it." but, not only did aunt kathy pull through on two sets of sweet crimson fiestaware, she also managed to get the steelers one for the thumb (probably found it on sale at kaufmann's before it turned into macy's). i didn't even realize i asked for and got this wonderful gift until a week or so before this thanksgiving when i was creating my 2006 grab bag list. believing i now have some uncanny ability to get my teams national championships via this list, on this year's i put down "pitt men's basketball national championship." i think this will work.

the thing is, they actually have a pretty sweet shot at doing this. obviously i am going to believe they will get there, whether or not they are actually that good. i have put some thought in it, and here are some pitt v ...other teams that i would like to see to maximize entertainment value of the tournament:

1. pitt v. ucla -- dixon v. howland. student v. master. the master teaches the student everything he knows, then the student beats the master at his own game. isn't this the plot of the karate kid?
2. pitt v. unc -- i think unc is constantly overrated. they will probably lose five or six games and somehow by the grace of god still end up with a one seed. i sorta hate them. however, if pitt played unc, jim and i would probably not talk for a week or two. he loves them. i will hope for any match up that leads to a high probability that jim and i will end up in a fistfight.
3. pitt v. lsu -- i still love big baby glen davis. i love his yellow feather boa, his victory dances, his resemblance to shaq. i don't think the world has seen enough of this goon.


i'm just saying, you WANT pitt to be in the national championship game, if not only for the reason that maybe the pictures laura wagner put on the facebook of levon kendall singing karaoke at garage door saloon might make it onto sportscenter.
whoever said facebook is bad was so, so wrong.

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

today, i have plans to do the following: on my lunch break, purchase the new dave eggers book. it got four stars in some publication, however, it may have been the pittsburgh tribune-review, so i suppose i have to take that with a grain of salt. also, tonight i will be stuffing my middle ear with hydrogen peroxide-soaked cotton balls. after some mysterious event on sunday, i can barely hear anything. the world sounds as if i am underwater. its one of those ailments that isn't any kind of emergency, but is just excruciatingly annoying. all day i am missing conversations, accidently ignoring people, and tonight i will not be able to sing karaoke b/c i am having a hard time hearing myself talk. other people are annoyed by hearing me respond "what?" 750 times a day.

yesterday, i got to leave work early to drive one of our attorneys up to montefiore hospital. at first i didn't want to do this, because the lady is the most untalkative person ever. i've worked here two months. she just learned my name yesterday. with this hearing affliction, the last thing i wanted to do was make awkward conversation with someone i just met. however, leaving work at three with the only responsibilty of babysitting someone's car while reading chuck klosterman and avoiding a busride home is worth the sacrifice. ironically, she is also the most softspoken person in this firm. of all the things she said, i maybe caught one or two sentences. (also, i hope thats real irony, not alanis-morrisette irony, because if it isn't i don't think i know what the definition of irony is.)

sitting in the car, i realized two things. if someone says what they are doing WON'T take an hour, it almost always takes that much time or longer. if they say it will take an hour, it will take five minutes. also, if you stay with the car, you can park wherever the hell you want. my sole purpose for accompanying this lawyer was to park her car and then return it to her after her meeting, so she could avoid paying for parking/the hassle of parking an oakland sidestreet. fine. after i dropped her off, i noticed several cars parked alongside the driveway curb. i pulled up behind one of them, planning to stay until i looked to suspicious. no one bothered me. no one within a hundred yard radius even resembled a parking official. i was sitting five feet from one of those no parking signs. however, if i had left, i almost certainly would have been ticketed/towed within ten minutes. somehow, the driver's presence in the car makes it entirely acceptable to park that car illegaly. had i left this car at a parking meter outside eat n park with fifteen-minutes too few, i would have immediately got a ticket. somehow, i can park MORE illegally and as long as i hang out, i'm cool. it boggles my mind.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

some thoughts on my music collection.

when traveling on foot, i enjoy listening to tunes on my ipod. yesterday i was attempting to avoid listening to sad songs because i wanted to be in a good mood (FYI: listening to coldplay magnifies any sadness you have by 1000). so, utilizing the shuffle feature as i typically do, i skipped all songs that were slow or otherwise depressing. this is what i found:
a. the majority of my music collection is old sad bastard music.
b. the remainder consists of mostly late 90s popular rap.

i listened to some big pimpin, a little deja vu -- uptown baby (i actually LOVE this song, i contest that as a popular rap outfit, lord tariq and peter gunz are vastly underrated), a little of that big pun song about not being a player (oh, its called STILL NOT A PLAYER. i seriously couldn't think of it).

i don't even feel that bad about this. my ride home yesterday was quite enjoyable.

Friday, October 27, 2006

some thoughts on nickelback

I hate nickelback. they are terrible. once i told some kid at gds to play nickelback on the jukebox, and i don't think he realized i was joking. i was. however, the funny thing is, even though i hate them and their songs are not by definition original, interesting or even slightly good, i find myself intrigued. if one comes on the radio, i'm not switching the channel. i figured out why: nickelback songs make you nostalgic for things that never happened to you. everytime i hear "far away," i become reminiscent of an ex-lover i've betrayed but wish i could win back. this person does not exist. "photograph" makes me miss the good old times back in my hometown with my tight-knit group of friends who used to hang out in the woods and drink, smoke and generally rebel-rouse to a harmless degree. this never happened either! i was a loser in highschool. my 4 friends and i went to eat n park on saturday nights. we didn't drink. yet, these songs come on the radio and i wish i could pick up the phone to chat about old times. this, i deduced, is the only reason anyone likes nickelback. they are making millions of dollars selling you fake memories.

fucking canadians.

also, chad kroeger is the ugliest man ever.

Monday, October 23, 2006

some thoughts on 316 s bouquet

sometimes you'll be lying in bed and a calm will creep over the apartment, i'd imagine much like it would feel if you lived in a shanty house on chickenlegs near a beach while there is a tsunami looming offshore, not close enough to see yet but there nonetheless.
then, slicing the calm will be the dulcet tones of darryl hall as "rich girl" tears into the air at maximum decibel levels. the last time it happened i literally jumped.

needless to say, we have a good time.

Monday, October 16, 2006

so i was reading the city paper today, and its tool bag editor chris potter had some words about the sienna miller incident. basically, in additon to saying that she should be ashamed of what she said, he said that the people of pittsburgh acted immature in their response. he basically accuses pittsburgh of being way too defensive when attacked by the media/b-list celebrities. the outpouring of hatred towards her, as he cites in headlines taking cheap shots at her "semi-fame" and other reactions from the last few weeks. i have some thoughts on this:

get a life. fuck if i want to be from a city that lies back and takes obnoxious, uncalled for criticism without reaction. sienna miller is a bitch. she is pissed because she's getting paid nothing to do low-budget movies in cities that aren't london, nyc or la. boo hoo. first of all, a headline calling sienna a "semi-famous" actress isn't an insult, it's a statement of fact. she's done rather obscure movies, other than alfie (which bombed). she is more or less famous for her crash-and-burn relationship with jude law. she's not julia roberts; she's not making $20 million a picture. sorry, "semi-famous" is pretty accurate.

regardless, even if it was an insult, she deserves it. she is working in a city and thought it appropriate to trash talk that city to a national publication, and not even intelligently. a coworker of mine had a friend who happened to run into sienna up on mt. washington after a day of filming at the lemont -- apparently, all she did was feel bad for herself because she's all alone in this city, has nothing to do and is regretting taking a job in such a small-time movie. GET OVER YOURSELF. you're not hot shit, and apparently you aren't even a nice person, either. before she trashed pittsburgh, there were 250,000 or so people here who would have opened their arms to her. i don't doubt that for a minute.

pittsburgh may not have the size or glitz of NYC, but one thing we do have is a population that is fiercely loyal (unless your name is kordell stewart). no matter what happens here, or where they go, pittsburghers will always love pittsburgh. who can say they wouldn't step up and defend themselves when attacked? potter's article cited pittsburgh's constant concern with its national image as a reason for its defensiveness. we should be concerned with our image -- its shit. unless you're from here, chances are you are either a. not a fan of the city or b. unconcerned. in a city that has a floundering economy and is searching for an identity to replace the one given by the steel industry, of course our national image is important. pittsburghers will give anyone a chance; any person from here will lend you bus money, chat you up at the bar or demonstrate their friendliness in any other way possible.

i expect nothing less than defensiveness from a city that gets so much criticism. a few weeks back i spent an hour in kopy's on the south side listening to some jackass from philly talk shit on steelers fans and eventually the city of pittsburgh in general. he was mad because the fans gave him so much shit for being from philly (this coming from a guy from a city whose fans booed santa claus, threw batteries and made fun of TO for his suicide attempt. classy.) i tried to reason with him, and tell him that yeah, philly is a wonderful city but pittsburgh has much to offer, too. he refused to understand. okay dude, then don't live here if you hate it. go to temple.

basically, i think any reaction we give sienna is warranted and frankly, i hope she feels terrible about it. anyone with such a low level of class doesn't deserve our respect unless its earned back. waving your actress flag to a bouncer at a bar when you forgot your ID won't do it.

basically, chris potter, who are you to criticize your city's response? a semi-famous editor of a mediocre newspaper? yeah i thought so.

man, i'm so mad. go pittsburgh.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

i'm promising myself i'm going to write more frequently. it's october now; it's been since early august. that's sad. october is my favorite month of the year. perfect weather -- days that are chilly, not needing a jacket to be outside quite yet, but past the days of sweat-soaked clothes and constant sunlight. i prefer when it's overcast. i hate sun. call me dreary and pessimistic if you must.
i'm keeping my window open as long as i can. i need to be cocooned in the down comforter to stay warm, but it's worth it: nothing makes a bed feel more comfortable than the snapping of october air in the window. it does, however, make getting out of bed the most heartbreaking thing. and showers in the morning are terrible. still, i'd rather be cold.
i'm having that itch again -- i want to get out of my apartment, the city, this state. maybe i just want something from home -- a connection with a person, a chance to sit on the red-plaid couch and watch television, or to drive to wal*mart or blockbuster. i never claimed to love greensburg, and i'm sure i'll never go back, but sometimes just unapologetically leaving a place behind feels too empty. if i've got nothing to salvage from twelve years, are those twelve years gone? what does it mean if i didn't leave my mark on that place? and i'm wondering how i will reflect on pittsburgh next year or a few years down the line -- i hope i feel differently. all i want right now is to go home and have someone welcome me, but it's changed so much since i lived there. maybe i learned a lesson about so frivolously letting something go.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

only a few more days until i move into the apartment on south bouquet. alicia is on vacation until sunday, so she'll be moving in monday. i picked up the keys yesterday from our landlord, an older woman who lingered at the foot of the steep cement stairs outside our place while i stood on the porch, fiddling with the lock for the first time. the apartment is a little more run-down than i remember -- it's weird, when you're looking at apartments, desperate just to sign a lease to guarantee not being homeless in the fall, how even the worst apartments don't seem so bad. then in august, empty in the interim between tenants, the living room is smaller, the tile is grimier, one of the cabinet doors in the kitchen has a fist-shaped dent in its lower-left corner.

august is one of my favorite months of the year, not because of the weather or the fact that school is still out (its hot, i'm always anxious to go back), but because oakland is completely in motion. for a few weeks, dumpsters on sidewalks are full of the remnants of the old place that aren't important enough to drag across town. on my way to work today i was tempted to garbage-pick -- there were a few beige chairs, seemingly untainted, that would be perfect to fill up the kitchen table. i had to catch myself. cars are packed up, u-hauls park on front lawns. in the week before school, traffic lines the streets as the live-at-home-for-the-summer students return. then there's all the excitement of a new place: buying furniture, kitchen appliances, new sheets for the bed, new bath towels. meeting new neighbors. carving the groove of how things will be for the next eleven or twelve months -- which way to walk to and from the apartment, which chair is yours in the living room, where certain pieces of permanent decor reside about the apartment. all of this while it's still 90 degrees out; you can have something new, and still hang on to summer.

Friday, July 28, 2006

something i will miss about my apartment on neville street (things which might be impossible to call right now, with little distance, as the things i miss about mckee place were things i hated or was indifferent to when i lived there):
an across-the-street neighbor plays the saxophone, usually in the late afternoon. he's not any good; i never realized how difficult it must be to master this instrument until the warm months of this year. he usually plays scales, the notes separated, not smooth. i never figured out the musician and i don't know why i attribute them with a masculine pronoun. i'll miss laying on the couch, or sitting on the back porch, listening to him practice for hours in the afternoon. this is a phenomenon that doesn't occur where i grew up, where houses are too far apart for the neighbor's noise to drift in. the only time i can remember was driving past the house at the bottom of penn adamsburg road -- an old man lived there, played the organ all the time. that is one of the things i love about the city; even in an empty apartment, you can feel the presence of people living in houses not spaced out by green and miles of back roads.

i ran into my friend brandon at bootleggers wednesday night, haven't seen him in months, maybe a year. he used to hang out when we lived at mckee. he told me he'd just been thinking about that year, how he had such a good time and it may have been one of his favorite years ever. it seemed like all we ever did was play beer pong in our living room, considering whether or not to skip piano class on thursday morning. we drank american light, we pissed amber off, we woke up to the smell of leftover beer and cans strewn across the living room and kitchen.

someone in those houses around mckee-louisa-meyran played the bagpipes: my favorite thing about mckee place. i just bought a typewriter on ebay, a smith-corona silent from the 40s. i hope its loud; i can make up for never becoming good at the guitar by filling south bouquet street with the click-clack of typewriter keys.

Saturday, May 27, 2006

"the things we hold on to" - senior seminar story, part 1

After my dad succumbed to lung cancer on December 15, 2003, my mom started playing what she calls “the garbage game.”

The garbage game is essentially an aggrandized version of beat the clock. Time runs out when my brother, who is now nineteen and living on his own, moves out of our dad’s house, either to live on his own someplace else or with my mom and her boyfriend, Dale, in Penn Hills. Her goal is chip away at the mountain of junk in the basement one Sunday night at a time until his move-out day, when we will leave the two-bedroom house on the rear of 204 Penn Adamsburg Road behind forever.
I was nineteen when my dad died; my brother, sixteen. We found ourselves suddenly living alone together surrounded by the residue of our lives with our dad. I began stumbling upon the less-obvious packed-away things after my dad died because then, it seemed okay to open the lockbox or dig through the piles of papers in the center drawer of the desk. I found things in three levels. There were the things I always knew to be there – the kind of things you save for no real purpose other than to say you have, like miss-stamped quarters that escaped the Philadelphia Mint and the Tooth Fairy’s silver dollars. There was important documentation – our birth certificates and Social Security cards. Then, I found the things that existed only in concept to me: my dad’s wedding band, pictures of my mother, pictures of mother and father on their wedding day, match books saved from their honeymoon in Aruba. The kind of things my dad only ever showed himself.

The box was filled with things like this – things I’d never seen before, but my mom knew the meaning behind. I found a necklace – gold, with a long chain. The pendant was a gold elephant, adorned with tiny cubic zirconium jewels up and down its legs and on the blanket slung on its back.

“What is this?” I asked her. She walked over to me, touched the elephant with the tips of her fingers hidden under long, mauve-painted acrylic fingernails.

“Oh, that probably belonged to your dad’s aunt.”

I searched around the box some more.

“Isn’t this dad’s wedding ring?” I said. I had fished a gold ring from my dad’s jewelry box. It had a black face and a diamond set in the middle. My mother sat in the blue armchair (the chair my dad sat in every day), watching a black-and-white movie on AMC. She is forty-seven; her hair would be gray, but she dyes it, renews its medium brown and highlights it with blonde. She loves old movies; her hair is cut short like Audrey Hepburn’s in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. At this time, since my dad got sick, I lived at home and commuted forty-minutes everyday to the University of Pittsburgh – my mom slept over a few nights a week.

“No, our wedding bands were gold,” she said.

I had never seen these rings. I remembered my mother’s engagement ring – slung on the neck of a ceramic swan when she did the dishes – and the huge black ring on my dad’s finger. I always assumed it was his wedding band. Turns out he kept it hidden in the lockbox with the rest of the remnants of their marriage.

Friday, May 26, 2006

part 2

“The Giarrussos are pack rats,” my mother said to me once about the volume of belongings stashed in attics, in closets, under beds, in desk drawers, in the Secretary in the living room, in stacks under the glass of the coffee table, in the drawers of the entertainment center, and, to the highest degree, in the basements of the houses we had lived in.

I like to keep things; I also like to throw them away. Being this kind of pack-rat is a self-perpetuating hobby – I keep things so that, when they build up to a certain level, I will have lots of things to choose from when I start pitching. My dad kept everything he ever owned, I think, and never threw any of it away. Most of this followed him from the basement of 426 Ross Avenue, to the garage of 9 Gratz Street after he and my mother divorced, to our two-bedroom on Penn-Adamsburg Road. There were boxes full of never-opened children’s toys (trucks, dolls, Mork and Mindy figurines). A box of vintage Playboy magazines from the seventies. His mother’s sewing machine, jars full of screws, nails, bolts, salvaged squares of Velcro. Scattered throughout the house were treasure chests of things saved over two or three decades. Camping equipment saved since he was an Eagle Scout: tents, thick, green sleeping bags, a canteen, pots and pans, at least six different Swiss Army knives. A fire-proof metal box containing back-up disks for every computer he had ever owned. There’s a recycled wine box of pictures, thousands of them, from the mid-seventies until the time of my parent’s divorce. There’s a glass book case full of his old college textbooks (psychology, business, a Webster’s unabridged dictionary) and, of course, the lockbox in the bottom-left drawer of his desk.

Thursday, May 25, 2006

part 3

In my mind, I see the black ring on my dad’s finger, his hands on the steering wheel, driving two Turnpike-exits away to my aunt and uncle’s house in Oakmont. There are two ways to ride in the car – just riding, listening to music, eyes on the telephone wires along the highway, or having such a deep conversation that you lose track of time and scenery.

Car trips with my dad were always the former. Because of this, I don’t remember specific things my dad and I talked about when we drove; I remember what cars he drove in what years (the red Nissan, the silver Mazda 626, the green Saturn, the gold Saturn), I remember things from alongside the highway, I remember the songs that he played. Our trip went from mile-marker 67 to 48; right around mile 51, I’d look out my window on the passenger side for the Mushroom house (it was rounded on top, like an igloo, but calling it that made less sense). The play list – cassette tapes dubbed from compact discs to preserve the originals – rarely changed over the span of my childhood. The Eagles, The Beach Boys, Chicago, and Simon and Garfunkel (The Concert in Central Park, recorded on September 19, 1981).

When I think back, these seem like the only albums we ever listened to. My dad would sing along, always harmonizing, never leading, in an airy, raspy voice that spoke not only of his years spent in a barbershop quartet but also of the decades he spent smoking Marlboro lights.

“Am I a good singer?” I asked my dad once.

“You have a good voice, but you aren’t a good singer,” he said. “You don’t sing enough.”

“I want to take voice lessons.”

“You don’t need to take lessons, just sing along. Learn Art Garfunkel’s parts – they’re in your range. Practice them, you’ll get it.”

I’ve listened to The Concert in Central Park so many times now that I know both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s parts. I can tell you the banter they exchanged in between songs: the jokes about selling joints in the crowd, the reference to then-mayor of New York city, Ed Koch, the way that Garfunkel stumbled on the first few lines of “The Boxer” in the encore, starting the line “I have squandered my existence on a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises” too early. I put it on when I walk to class, when I’m trying to sleep, when I’m playing the garbage game in my own apartment.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

part 4

Riding in cars with my mom’s boyfriend, Dale, is the latter, the type that finds the riders deep in conversation. The times I’ve spent alone with Dale are usually returning from holiday functions at his parent’s house in Ligonier. I remember specific conversations we had; one, about his relationship with my mother, happened on Thanksgiving. We stayed behind to watch the Pitt football game – we listened to the second half on the radio, but I can’t remember any of the play-by-play. We tuned it out. I don’t remember how, but our conversation ambled toward Dale and my mom.

“How long did you and my mom date before she moved in?” I asked.

“We didn’t really date too long before that – but we had known each other for years. I always had affection for her.”

As we passed through green lights going west on Route 30, Dale told me why he loves my mom. These are things I never heard from my dad; there was no explanation, it was just a fact that he loved her. I knew that from the things he kept around, the pictures and the wedding band; I knew because we weren’t allowed to see Dale while my dad was still alive.
“I’ve never fought with your mother, ever,” Dale says.

“Well, are there things worth fighting about that you just don’t bring up?”

“No. We just don’t do things to each other like that; I think your mother and I are cut from the same cloth. Once, maybe, that time that your brother wrecked his car, two or so years ago. She knew about it, but she didn’t tell me. She knew I would have things to say about it, and she didn’t want to deal with it. She didn’t need to be hiding things. But that’s it.”

I tried to think back, to remember if my mom is just non-confrontational. She is; I could picture her being upset about things and not saying it. But I had never heard her say one thing about fighting with Dale, in the fifteen years she had known him.

“Why don’t you get married?” I asked. I remembered a conversation I’d heard my mom having with Dale’s mom on the way home from one of our trips to an arts and crafts festival in Westmoreland County. I could tell she wanted to, and Dale’s mom wished they would.

“I never wanted to get married. I don’t want kids. It’s just not something that’s in the cards.”

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

part 5

“If I get a hot dog, do I have to eat the bun?” I asked my dad. Every time we went to Eat N Park, I got the hot-dog-and-fries kid’s meal. And every time we had this argument.

“Yes,” he said.

“Can I ask them not to grill it?”

“Fine,” he said. “Hey, did you know I used to sell the ice machines that make these ice cubes?” He flicks his cigarette into the ashtray near the window, and then tries to fish one of the cubes out of his class of Coke.

“Why don’t you just eat your dinner,” my brother said. He kicked my leg under the table. My brother was probably seven years old, making me ten. He was short and thin, his hair still light brown but by this time the curls had grown out and his hair had flattened, parted down the middle. He had glasses; he had his first round of braces. At this age (and pretty much until I left for college), our favorite past time was fighting with each other.

“Stop it. Can’t we get through dinner just once without any bickering from you?”

The nights my Mom didn’t waitress at Tivoli’s Restaurant she visited– usually Mondays and Wednesdays. These were “mom days,” – she would arrive before my dad got home from work and take my brother and me out to eat dinner or to Westmoreland Mall. When we lived in the house on Gratz Street, my dad would stay in his room, watching television by himself, while my brother and I sat with our mom in the living room. From time to time he’d ask if we all wanted to go out to dinner together – which is how we ended up at Eat N Park.

When dinner was over, my mom reached for the check. She began shuffling through bills in her wallet.

“I’ll pay tonight,” my dad offered. He pulled his silver Discover Card out of his wallet.

“You don’t have to do that,” my mom said.

“I want to. You can leave the tip.”

I think he liked to pretend, on these Mondays and Wednesdays, when we went out to dinner together, that we were still a family.

Monday, May 22, 2006

part 6

I’m cleaning the bathroom of my apartment, tossing out old magazines; I stop at the copy of Coastal Living my mom sent to me a few weeks earlier.

It seems to me that Coastal Living is the cruelest publication in existence.

I mentioned to my mom, just once, that I had flipped through an issue of this magazine at work. Myself and my coworkers were having one of those discussions about having an interim year, driving across the country, getting jobs in romanticized American cities like New York or San Francisco – the same things that every almost-graduate talks about. There it was, sitting on the table in the break room. The magazine had pages and pages of double-spaced type, pictures of clear-blue water and skies, kids dressed in sweaters and jeans playing on porch-swings, and plans for beach homes. It included quotes like “I wake up in the morning and just look out the window at the ocean.” That was that day that I decided living somewhere completely opposite of Pittsburgh, somewhere like California, for a few years was reasonable.

"I don't see how anyone enjoys Coastal Living," I said to her. We were talking on the phone. I was pacing the kitchen, probably cooking something; by cooking, I mean heating up a frozen Green Giant side dish.

"Oh, I love that magazine," she said.

"Why? Doesn't it only make you feel sad about living in Pittsburgh?"

"No. It's good because you can compare different places to live, decide what you might want your house to look like."

The key to this conversation is my mother's certainty that she will, someday, live on the beach. I contemplate living on the beach from time to time, usually in early February while I'm walking to class through a few inches of snow, hair frozen, scarf wrapped around my face. Frankly, I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I lived on the beach -- or any place it wasn't cold or rainy at least some of the time. It seems that a good percentage of Pittsburgh conversation revolves around the weather; if it's going to snow and how much, the first time it will be warm enough to play beer pong outside, how miserable it is to walk to class in the rain because no matter what you do, your jeans will be wet up to the knees for the rest of the day. What do coastal residents talk about?

"I want to live on a houseboat," Dale said. We're sitting around the table at his parents' house in Ligonier. It's Christmas day; you can tell because Dale is wearing "the Christmas shirt," which is a short-sleeved button-down featuring the members of the band AC/DC. Also you can tell because it's snowing, Mrs. Young is cooking a ham, and Mr. Young is inevitably questioning some soon-to-be-adult in the house about his or her life plans.

"I can't live on a boat," my mom replied. She sipped Asti Spumante sparkling wine out of a green champagne flute. "Plus, do you think we can have cats on a houseboat? Won't they jump into the water?"

"Cats don't like water," Dale said. My mom and Dale have been vacationing to Myrtle Beach together for years. The last time I remember my parents going to the beach, I was one year old. It doesn't make sense that one day I will be visiting my mom at her home on Myrtle Beach -- and that home might be a boat. I can’t decide if my mom was always a beach person – if that was a quality that made an intermittent appearance, beginning with my dad, fading away and then resurfacing with Dale – or if she had become a beach person with Dale, revealing a new side of herself that never showed itself when she was with my dad.

Sunday, May 21, 2006

part 7

I cried exactly twice in the year surrounding my dad’s death; the last time, at the funeral service, as I listened to my cousin Lisa read a passage from the Bible. My brother and I sat in the front pew and I remember that I wanted to stop crying before we had to stand to give the priest the wine and plate of bread.

I didn’t cry when I went to the nursing home to find my dad in a deep sleep, hooked up to an oxygen machine, and was unable to wake him up. I didn’t cry when I got a phone call a few hours later from my cousin Ray, telling me that my dad had died. I didn’t cry between then and the funeral, not at the viewing, when my brother, mom and I sat, lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery, my dad across the room in the suit and tie my mom picked out, his eyes and mouth held shut with some kind of human glue. The only other time I cried was a year earlier, late December of 2002, when my dad told me he was ready to die.

We sat in the living room, he on the blue armchair as I sat on the red couch. Law and Order was on television; the room was filled with smoke.

“I just want you to know that I’m happy with my life,” he said. “I have no regrets. I did everything I wanted to do.”

The words were simple, even trite. When you imagine someone on their deathbed, this is what you want them to say. You don’t want them to regret decisions, to wish they had done more things or that the events of their life had gone differently. But somehow, I cried harder when he said that then I had in years. My chin bobbed, tears streamed down my face. I didn’t want him to see me cry, but I couldn’t help it – he wouldn’t die for another year, but the finality of those words seemed to end everything there. I couldn’t understand how someone could be ready to let go so easily.

I’m not a crier, but since December of 2003, the only things that can make me cry are father-daughter related. I cry at the end of movies, like I Am Sam, when Sam is on the witness stand in court to regain custody of his daughter and he uses Beatles songs to explain that he can’t be separated from her. Paul’s songs wouldn’t have been the same without John, and vice-versa. They were an inseparable pair. Sam says, “Paul wrote the beginning of Michelle, then handed it to John so he could write the part that goes ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ He said it wouldn’t have been the same without that part, and that’s why the whole country cried when the Beatles broke up.”

Saturday, May 20, 2006

part 8

When I call my mom for money, tapping into my poor-college-student lifeline, she always sends some extras down with Dale. She works late at the USPS handling building in Warrendale, but Dale gets done parking cars at Tivoli's around 10:30 or 11pm. Tonight he's bundled up in a pair of maroon sweatpants, sweatshirt and ski cap.

"Here's the stuff from your mom," Dale says. We're standing in the doorway of my apartment on Neville Street, only the light of the hallway illuminating us. Dale hands me a plastic shopping bag.

"Thanks." I rifle through the bag. There are a few magazines -- People Weekly, Coastal Living, and Vogue (which is funny, considering I rarely make it out of jeans and a sweatshirt on a daily basis). My mom slipped the Coastal Living into my care package because she has the uncanny ability to remember even the slightest thing I mention. I said once that I like Milano cookies. That was at least five years ago. I get them in every single care package. There's a four-pack of Angel Soft toilet paper. There are some snacks -- the Milano cookies, of course, and some cheddar-flavored Baby Goldfish.

"The Gamecocks, huh?" The team supported by Dale’s hooded sweatshirts is usually a toss up between the University of South Carolina or the North Carolina Tarheels.

"Yeah, check out my socks," he reaches down to his ankles, pulling the elastic ankle band of his pants away from his black and white Pumas. The heel of his sock shows another Gamecocks logo.

"How's school going?" he says.

"All right. I was just reading," I say. I'm lying. In actuality I was probably surfing the Facebook or checking away messages.

"Good. So you needed some money, right?"

I nod. Dale pulls two twenties out of the pocket of his sweatpants and hands them to me.
"Will that be enough?" I nod again. He fishes through his pocket his truck's keys and looks toward the door of the apartment building.

I thank him for the money, for coming down so late, for helping me out. Then I reach out both my arms for a hug. This is the first time I can ever remember us hugging, and I immediately have two thoughts. It is the most awkward moment we'd ever shared -- it feels like a move two young kids would make on a first date. And, at the same time, it feels like the natural thing to do.

Friday, May 19, 2006

part 9

My mother and I are playing the garbage game in the basement. She’s thumbing through papers in filing cabinet, deciding what is important enough to keep and what can become the game’s next victim.

“You’re not going to throw that away, are you?” My dad says. He appears in the corner of the basement next to the green Lawn Boy mower. He’s wearing the outfit I always imagine my dad wearing when I think back on him; holey red sweatpants and a white Hanes undershirt. He stands on the dirty, cold cement floor, a pair of ten-year-old, worn-out Wal Mart moccasins on his feet (this is the second pair he’s owned).

“There’s so much junk in this basement,” my mom replies. “Plus, what are you saving it for now? You’re dead.”

My mom turns back to the filing cabinet. I notice a bleach stain on the back of her navy-blue Bugs Bunny sweatshirt and remember that it’s always been there. I borrowed the sweatshirt in fourth grade, when it still reached my knees; the shirt and the stain had to be at least ten years old. I wouldn’t consider my mom someone who could be characterized by a Looney Tunes sweatshirt, but she seriously wears this all the time. On her, however, it’s funny; it’s not an “embarrassing mom shirt.”

“My death doesn’t erase my possessions of meaning. The kids might want to keep them around,” he says. '

“The kids never come down here. Jen wants to keep your records; BJ fiddles around in the workshop. Other than that, these boxes collect dust.”

“Sticky Fingers is kind of neat," I interject. "You can unzip Mick Jagger's fly."
“That’s the difference between us,” my Dad says. “You’re willing to throw things away too easily. Our marriage, for example.”

“I wouldn’t jump so quickly to assume that I was the one throwing our marriage away.”

“You cheated on me with Nick. Then as we were trying to reconcile, you shacked up with Dale,” my dad defends.

“Don’t bring me into this,” Dale says. He comes down the stairs. “I never intended to break up a marriage. I kept my distance for years, the first few years we worked together at Tivoli’s. I liked her, but I never stepped in.”

My mom, dad and Dale are now having, in my mind, the three-way conversation that never occurred in real life. My mom is now playing referee as two of the timelines of her life collide.

“I don’t understand why you hate Dale so much, why you refused to let him be a part of the kids’ lives,” my mom says.

“I don’t hate Dale. Obviously, I don’t even know him. We’ve had maybe two conversations, ever. I hate what Dale represents.” My dad scratches the salt-and-pepper beard scruff on his chin and lights a cigarette.

“And what’s that? Being in a relationship that’s actually reasonable?” In my head, my mom is sassy. She shoots this question at him.

“What’s more reasonable about your relationship with Dale?”

“Well, it’s an actual relationship,” she says. “He doesn’t expect me to be a housewife and have a job, while he comes home from work every day just to sit around.”

"I never stopped loving you. From when we divorced until the day I died. When you visited, when you brought the kids to the nursing home, I pretended like nothing had ever changed," my dad said.

“For whatever reason, there were no more sparks,” my mom says. “Don’t you believe in sparks? Why hold onto something when the reason for having it is gone?”

Thursday, May 18, 2006

part 10

Dale and I are riding home from Ligonier again – this time it’s Easter. My laundry basket is sandwiched in between us in the cab of his truck and I’ve got my feet propped up on the dashboard to avoid stepping on the paper bag of leftover ham, cheesy potatoes, corn and rolls (un-burnt, thanks to the preparation skills of yours truly) that sits on the floor. I’m telling him about a boy who I’ve decided doesn’t like me as much as I wish he did, as much as I like him.

“When I met your mother,” he says, “I just knew.” He adjusts the black Pirates hat covering his shaved head. “I hadn’t even met her yet. I just saw her. I knew things about her – she was married, had you and Beej. She had everything I didn’t want, yet I still found myself wanting to spend time with her.”

“I remember the first thing she said to me,” he continues. “We were sitting in the break room at the restaurant. I lit up a cigarette and she says, ‘you’re a smoker?!’”

Dale does a good job mimicking my mother’s voice, the tone she must have used. I can imagine it in my head – she doesn’t ask a question, she shoots it at you like a dart. The waitresses in the other room probably heard it, too.

“I was tongue tied,” he says. “And you know me. I’m usually pretty snappy with the rebuttals.”

Dale tells me about being young – the years he spent living in Nags Head, surfing and working, seeing girls here and there but never settling down.

“I had this self-centered mentality. But then I met your mother and I forgot all of that,” he says. “And the thing is, I still feel exactly the same way about her today as I did the first time I saw her.”

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

part 11

My mom, my brother and I are sitting on the empty bed in my dad’s double room at Baldock. This is the nursing home where he would spend the last three months of his life – today, it’s Thanksgiving. We’re visiting him for the afternoon before having dinner at Dale’s parents’ house. My dad will die in about two weeks.

“We have to go,” I say to him. He’s lying on the bed, propped up by pillows. He’s covered by one of the brown, fuzzy blankets emblazoned with a giant lion’s face that we’ve had in our house all my life.

“Where are you going?”

“We’re having dinner at the Young’s in Ligonier.”

“Oh,” he says. He looks around the room, up at the flickering scenes of the Food Network on the television in the corner. “Can you put my watch on for me?”

“You have your watch on,” I say. I look down at his wrist. He touches the face of his watch with fingers so skinny they look like sticks.

“I want my other watch.”

“You don’t need two watches.”

“I don’t have two watches.”

I fish through the drawer at his bedside table for the watch that hasn’t ticked in months. It has his phone numbers in it; maybe that’s why he won’t let it go.

“Joe, you don’t need another watch, you have your watch on,” my mom says.

“Please just put it on,” he answers. “And can you get me a piece of candy? A red one.” I don’t know what it is, but cancer gave my dad a constant craving for hard candy.

I sift through Tootsie Rolls, Werther’s Originals, bubble gum (which he always vetoed because it is not, in fact, a hard candy – even though my mom always shoveled some in the bag anyway). I find a cinnamon candy and unwrap it for him.

My brother and I walk outside while the nurse talks to my mom and dad. After the nurse leaves, my mom lingers in the room with him for a minute or two. They talk about nothing in particular; she unwraps a few more candies for him, places them on the table next to his head. She puts the second watch on his wrist beside the first.

Monday, May 15, 2006

part 12

“Jen,” my brother says to me on the phone. “I want you to look through all the stuff I cleaned out of your closet. Let me know what you want to keep.”

My brother played the garbage game in the closet of his bedroom, which for a time was my bedroom after it stopped being my dad’s bedroom. When I moved my belongings into my first apartment, I left some things behind – my white Adidas shell tops from the summer I worked at Kennywood, one blue and silver pom-pom from middle school cheerleading (what had happened to the white one, I wondered?), a flat soccer ball, and some other high-school related paperwork.

I’d come to a recent revelation. I don’t know if it can be applied to my family, because when it comes down to it, all revelations are personal. I decided I want to get rid of all the junk, all the relics of my past, the physical manifestations of memories I already have filed away in the corners of my brain. I don’t want to take two truckloads and two carloads of stuff with me when I move out of my apartment on Neville Street in August.

But I find myself struggling – which memories had lost their importance only intermittently? Which ones, in thirty years, would I wish I could stumble upon that seemed irrelevant right now? Do I need ticket stubs from every concert I’d ever been to – did I need a ticket to remind me that I went to see the Foo Fighters one July with a man, the 28-year-old nuclear physicist friend of a girl I was working with at Kennywood at the time? Do I need folders full of notes from every class I’ve taken at college – if I need to know about the myelin sheath, can’t I google it instead of digging through a notebook from Intro to Psych? Do I need this closet full of sweaters, old soccer t-shirts, pairs of jeans I never wear? When I snap out of this need for catharsis, the need to feel free of this clutter (which I inevitably will), what will I miss? I want to know what matters – who we are, or what we remember?

So, I start digging through this pile of junk my brother has set aside. Underneath some of the inconsequential (according to my recent decision) things was the cardboard wine box – the picture box. I am halted. This box never ceases to captivate me for hours, each time I see it, despite having looked at every picture tens and hundreds of times. On top were letter-sized envelopes with clear plastic windows – school pictures from every year since third grade. I notice the progression of my hairstyle – short curls in second grade, a frizzy triangle in third grade, long, combed-out curls in eighth grade, a poor attempt at straight hair in ninth grade. Always bad. The box itself is full of all the stages of my childhood, stacked upon each other like singles on a roof. I sift through the pictures – the time I dressed as a ghost for Halloween, a hole cut out in a Tivoli’s tablecloth for my painted-white face. A picture of my brother and I bundled up for winter like the kids in the movie A Christmas Story. A picture of my mom, dad and newborn me on the patterned couch in the apartment on Ross Avenue, surrounded by the seven kittens born a few weeks after me in July of 1984. This box is my childhood – memories exist like pictures, thrown in a box.

But the physical memories begin to blend with the ones tucked away in my head. I can remember things there are no pictures of: my mom and dad sitting next to each other on the piano stool in our living room, her fingers laced over his, teaching him to play a song. I remember the time I picked a green bean the length of my forearm from our garden – I was wearing a white t-shirt and a red and black plaid skirt. I remember the time I picked all the still-green tomatoes from their vines. I put them in a red plastic bowl and proudly handed them to my mom. I remember going to the Cogos across the street from our house in Wilkinsburg; I’d always ask my mom to buy me Sixlets.

My lockbox is an orange Fossil watch tin. Inside are the things that will never fall victim to my own garbage game – a phone number scrawled on a piece of Blockbuster receipt tape, stale sticks of Juicy Fruit from soccer camp. Some other things I snatched away that don’t have much meaning, except they belonged to my dad – the elephant necklace, an Allegheny Refrigeration keychain (shaped like the ice cubes from the machines he sold). I’ll never throw these things away, and as I go along I find ways to stuff more things into this tiny tin, which someday might expand a shoebox and then maybe a Rubbermaid bin or an empty wine box. These things I will never get rid of, but I also know that I haven’t stopped collecting.
“Can I inherit the picture box?” I say to my mom. She and my brother were in the room as I was picking through the pile of closet stuff awaiting the fate of the garbage game. My mom folds my laundry onto the dining room table as my brother is watching television on the couch.

“Do you think it’ll be safe with you?” she asked. “Or do you think I should inherit it?”

“No, I want it,” I answer. “It’ll be fine.”

Sunday, April 23, 2006

it's 5am, alicia and i are up late after a rousing random saturday. we began our day in shadyside at dean's, where alicia got a haircut. she may or may not have led the hairdresser to believe that i was her girlfriend, so that's good. we then waited for maybe forty minutes at the bus stop on craig street where we saw approx 9 billion couples enjoying late-afternoon dates. on the way there, a creepy man sidled up next to us as we walked down neville street and attempted to pick alicia up. however, he did not show the dedication to his endeavor that i think was necessary, as he mumbled most of his words. he asked us if we go bar hopping and if he could buy us a drink. then he asked if we wanted to go to a party -- but this invitation was after he already walked across the street away from us, so i'm surprised it made it the distance it did considering his volume problems.

we spent some time at barnes and noble (the highlight being the man we saw with a shirt that read "i am NOT a dinosaur") and ate dinner at eat n park. it was decided that i will attempt to get a job at the squirrel hill eat n park so i can hook alicia up with the hot waiter who checked her out at the salad bar and tossed her the skank eye while we waited to pay our check at the register. our next stop was alicia's apartment. as we walked through the parking lot, we stumbled upon my friend ian from high school. this is probably the weirdest oakland sighting i've ever had. i had not seen ian in about two years, so i was quite giddy. he doesn't even live in oakland so it's kinda weird to just run into him in the middle of a hospital parking lot. he invited us to his senior film showing at point park next weekend, which will probably be a ridiculously awkward high-school reunion. it was nice to see him, though.

spur of the momently we decided to go to buckhead's saloon with dan ruef and craig. it turned out to be horribly boring. we decided in the future to refer to this bar as "meathead's" because there were many meatheads in attendance, with their lack of necks and popped-collar shirts. the cover artist of the night played a bon jovi song and alicia got mad because she dislikes bon jovi. i drank two rolling rocks. mmm. we left, walked to downtown to catch a bus, but not before alicia called mark. he was at the matrix, and we would have gone in but the cover was $8 which is TRULY OUTRAGEOUS. so we came home. i passed out for maybe two hours, woke up, and here we are.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Alicia and i (clearly with nothing better to do) have decided to launch a myspace blog series of point-counterpoint arguments on various aspects of culture. the first in the series relates to the technology of tivo. alicia will take the affirmative position: why tivo is awesome; i will take the negative: why tivo is the worst.

I went home this weekend for Easter. Before arriving in Jeannette where we still enjoy the luxuries of extended basic cable, I stopped at my mom's house in Penn Hills. As we grilled hot dogs and drank Dr. Pepper, my mom's boyfriend Dale excitedly described to me the circumstances that led an English Premier League soccer player to do a series of backflips. He mimed the motion and then said -- "hey, i'll just show it to you." A series of water-drop sounding clicks through a menu later and we were watching the recording of the acrobatic feat of this spry young athlete from a week or so earlier. Dale then began reading off the values of the Tivo system: he could record any program he wanted, he could tell the Tivo which shows he liked and it would record them any time they played. The Tivo would even use its electronic brain to make educated guesses about shows you MIGHT like based on the ones that you tell it you like. Possibly most amazing of all, it enables you to stop and rewind up to a half hour back in a live tv show.

Sure, this seems convenient. I guess no one would rather fiddle with a VHS tape and make sure the TV is on the correct channel (the reason I have still never seen the final episode of Seinfeld). However, Tivo is essentially cheating. It blurs the lines between "sitting down to watch TV" and "sitting down to watch a movie or other form of entertainment not dependent on an outside schedule." Also, it can completely misalign your own schedule with that of the rest of the television-viewing public.

The whole point of watching on TV is the elusive quality the shows have. What's the point of releasing a tv series one week at a time? To get you to make it a point to sit down and watch that show. It keeps you coming back and in turn, keeps you seeing the commercials advertisers have paid to show. No one likes commericals, but without them, cable would be way more than $50 a month (which is outrageous anyway, but i digress). The point of Tv is telling yourself, "I'm going to sit down for a half an hour to watch One Tree Hill, and on the commercial breaks I am going to use my time wisely in such activities as walking to the kitchen to microwave some leftovers or go down to the washer to change the laundry, etc..." It is the existence of an external entertainment structure that you buy into. This is a different attitude than what one takes when they sit down to watch something pre-recorded. If I'm watching a movie, I've said to myself that I have two or so hours to kill. I do not watn to be bothered by commercials and if I desire to have a snack, I will hit pause. I will save the laundry for afterward because right now I am entertaining myself with the always lovable slapstick comedy of Jim Carrey. Tivo turns television into movies, which it is clearly not meant to be. If I am watching the Pirates game, I don't want to be able to stop and replay a questionable pitch. I will watch instant replays and/or suck it up because I missed it. Tivo sucks because it mixes these two separate entertainment options into a hodgepodge of viewer control.

And that gets me to what this hodgepodge creates: it throws the watcher off the schedule of everyone else's live TV viewing experience. For instance, I'm sitting here watching the Steelers AFC championship game. I'm waiting for Mike Vanderjagt to kick his field goal..he's lining up...he's doing that two step thing....the ball is snapped.... in the world without Tivo, I see the result of this kick with the rest of the world. However, in Tivoland, I stopped live action earlier to replay that awesome tackle made by Ben Roethlisberger. I said, I need to see that again! However, my live TV is now ten or fifteen seconds behind "real" live TV. So the ball is snapped.....it's in the air....and before I can tell if it's good, a car goes by outside, hootin' and hollerin. Unless it's the one Indianapolis fan in the tri-state area on this game day, the ending of this game has just been spoiled. Seconds later, after I already know the outcome, the ball flies wide right. This illustrates my second point: Tivo creates a viewer's own little entertainment world, misaligned from the schedule everyone else is on. It's like a little mini-version of time travel. After stopping for that one play, my live TV schedule is off for the rest of the night. Fifteen seconds doesn't seem like much but it adds up...ten here, five there and before you know it, shows are ending at five after like every channel is TBS or something. The essence of live TV is it creates a watching community: we're all seeing this as it happens. It may not seem like a big deal, but Tivo, my friends, Tivo = CHAOS. It's freakin me out, man. I don't believe in Tivo: it's cheating. Watch it with everyone else.

The end.

Did I mention I'm getting something like a B- in argument? And it's a comm class. Basically I suck.

Monday, April 03, 2006

plenty of things have happened since i last posted in this thing. i forget 80% of them. however, i will give you the cliffs notes version of what i can remember.

boston: best trip ever. some memories include: inventing the reverse birth sexual position, shooting the stink eye and tossing the skank eye, ordering a coors light at cheers because i am an idiot, dancing the "irish jig," throwing up after three yeunglings and a shot of southern comfort, peeing in the sand on the beach, hotel parties with kindhearted yet sleepy asians, mark's disappearing acts, moments of magical realism in boston commons (watching ice skaters in 70 degree weather), the doors as a motif, searching for an hour for wendy's, sitting outside a shady green door while the boys visited fenway park, riding the subway for the first time ever, alicia puking inside a bed, bath and beyond, nicknames nobody liked, and many other things i cannot remember but i wish i could.

it was pretty much the best time ever and i wish i could go back.

some other noteworthy events of march include: watching lots of basketball and mash while drinking PBR, a metaphysics test which i either failed miserably or aced but it's still up in the air, formal where i went from stone sober to puking drunk in record time (best tasting lethal punch ever), drinking on more weeknights than is really responsible and not feeling bad about it whatsoever.

i have become somewhat of a basketball fan recently, and i am very disappointed that LSU did not advance to the championship game. i have learned in life that the team i root for hardly ever wins. in fact, i can think of only one time that a team i like has won, and it was two months ago when the steelers won the superbowl. for instance, i always root for the "red team" on real world/road rules challenges. most of the time, this is the real world team. for the gauntlet II, it was the veterans team. the red team always loses. after pitt lost to bradley i resigned myself to feeling mostly unconcerned with the turnout of the rest of the tournament. then i caught some sort of interview on TV featuring LSU's team, and i decided glen davis is pretty much my favorite athletic personality in recent history. he just sat there with the dumbest look on his face. also, they showed clips of him dancing after a win wearing a yellow feather boa. he is more or less, as alicia said, an SNL character waiting to be born. anyone with a sense of humor should have rooted for LSU. unfortunately, that didn't pan out, and now we have florida and ucla. neither team has such potential for hilarity. all we have is ben howland and that guy that plays for florida with the hair. so when does baseball season start?

Monday, March 06, 2006

last wednesday i enacted a new "senior skip day" policy, which entails me shirking responsiblities in response to being denied for a job (probably because i spent four years shirking responsibilities). i went to work, but left at noon because "i had to write a sonnet." this "sonnet" ended up being a crappy poem in the style of yeats, which i turned in via email because instead of going to poetry class at three, i got on the 61C and spent a few hours walking around barnes and noble in squirrel hill. this is what i do when i get sad; i walk around bookstores, then i buy books i can't afford. alicia called, and we got some Dr Peppers and $1 slices of pieces from "the american deli," or really, "that deli next to cumpie's." if you haven't had this delightful treat yet, i suggest you do. they should probably rename atwood street "pizza street" or something more clever but equally indicative of the wide selection of pizza you can purchase on that street. antoon's, sorrento's and dollar slices. mmm.

while i was perusing the shelves of the barnes & noble reference section, i stumbled upon a book of lists. intrigued, i flipped through and was caught by this headline: "Sean Connery's Eleven Favorite Movies." among them were a bunch of titles that seem like movies you would pick as your favorite if you were purposely trying not be predictable and list obvious choices. and wouldn't you know it? number eleven on sean's list was "Finding Forrester." not only did he overlook some of the more likely choices for "best sean connery movie" (such as one of his bond appearances, the hunt for red october, that one with catherine zeta-jones...ok clearly i don't know anything about sean connery movies but you catch my drift), but he also chose to put the movie starring himself last on the list. obscure taste and modesty...what a guy.





ok clearly that didn't really happen. the list only had ten movies and finding forrester wasn't one of them. however, i like to imagine a world in which sean connery would make a list of his eleven favorite movies, not ten, and that list would include finding forrester.

boston in two days...i'm pumped. alicia and i watched elizabethtown, then decided we would try to find odd roadside attractions along the route from pittsburgh to boston. so far the most exciting one is the coffee-pot-shaped building, which is unfortunately too far out of the way. also of interest are the crayola factory and the world's largest glacial pothole. so we'll see how that turns out.

Monday, February 20, 2006

happy president's day!

all the proof you need that president's day is a useless holiday:

today there was an article in the post-gazette about this descendant of abraham lincoln that looks a lot like him. his name is ralph c. lincoln, he lives in johnstown, and he's THE ASSISTANT MANAGER OF VITAMIN WORLD.

he's really putting those presidential genes to good use.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

today was magnificent. it was beautiful; 60 degrees and raining, but it was okay because a few weeks ago i found a red umbrella in the second floor cathedral bathroom.

some notable events of the day:

for lunch, alicia and i dined at the five star 7-eleven on the corner. alicia bought v8, which is by far the worst idea for a juice ever. i had never had v8 before, but i was against it in theory; vegetables in a blender doesn't even sound appealing. upon trying it, i hated it more. it is essentially cold tomato soup. tomato soup is not even good hot, or lukewarm, or whatever temperature you prefer your soup.

i had a hot dog and some turner's iced tea. usually i prefer this particular iced tea in the carton, but they didn't have that; so i opted for the quart-sized jug. this has become my new favorite way to enjoy beverages; it has enough capacity to last all day, and it is very convenient to carry (instead of using your whole hand, you need only curl one finger through the handle).

metaphysics was wonderful today. from 4-5:15, i could not have been happier to listen to cian dorr talk about the ship of theseus. if you are wondering if something can remain the same if some of its parts are changed, i implore you to ask yourself this question: is journey really still journey with that fake steve perry? the answer is no. steve perry is journey; they got another guy named steve, but it isn't the same.

the highlight of metaphysics, however, was when our professor cian dorr used the word "wonky." george and i nearly died, for this is the best word ever. cian dorr was cool before; he looks and acts a lot like mick jagger. but wonky! after that, i couldn't even concentrate.

matt participated in deepher dude tonight. he didn't place, but we all had a good time cheering for him. we also had a good time proving that being in an honors fraternity does not necessarily mean you have good morals by making fun of the other contestants loudly whenever possible. the volleyball boys behind us got real irritated.

for these reasons (and others), today was a GREAT DAY. woooo!

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

valentine's day! i figured out why valentine's day bothers the single folk. it's not really the day itself, or the not having a date thing. because i don't have a date any other day of the year soooo it wouldn't be rational to be sad on a singular day. honestly, if i had to, i could just ignore the fact that it is even february 14th. that was my plan -- until, ALL DAY, people were walking around with their instruments of love hangin out all over the place. a bunch of flowers, balloons (carried in a plastic shopping bag so as to avoid escape), stuffed animals, a rose in a plastic box (and, come one, who are you impressing with that? if i got that, all it would say to me is that you do the majority of your shopping at the ghetto eagle). it isn't not having a valentine that bother's me; it's reminders, every few minutes, all day long that everyone else is getting a special valentine's surprise and i'm not.

so around dinnertime tonight, i was waiting for alicia in mcdonalds (our classy hetero lifemate valentine's date). i'm sitting there without food at a restaurant, so i'm looking around awkwardly, trying not to stare at anyone. mission failed because this kid came in, tall, blonde hair, good looking...he caught my eye so i did that thing where you purposely don't look at someone and it makes it even more obvious that you were staring at them in the first place. unfortunately he had a valentine's balloon-in-a-bag in his hand, so oh well. he walks up to the counter and orders two double cheeseburgers to go. my first thought is some lucky girl is getting a balloon and a double cheeseburger for valentine's day. he collects his burgers and somehow our eyes meet again, and he has this "quit looking at me" look on his face, so now i feel real stupid. but, all of a sudden he's at my table. "there is a girl who goes to pitt who looks exactly like you." he proceeds to tell me that i look like a girl named ingrid, and that i should look her up on the facebook. "i almost came up and said 'hi ingrid!'" and that was that.

alicia arrived and we had our dollar menu meals. a crazy man with a green thermos came in and made a beeping noise. we thought he might be friends with the mcdonalds worker, but decided he wasn't when he started talking to his reflection in the window. later, a man wearing a shirt that read "gangsta as fuck" referred to green thermos man as a "band-aid smellin' mother fucker." we couldn't decide if he meant that the man smelled like band-aids or if he was fond of smelling band-aids.

mcdonald's is the best.

Monday, February 13, 2006

Aw man. it's 1:35 and I have to be at work at 9 tomorrow morning. too many things are weighing on my brain right now to sleep...such as, homework, doing my teach for america application, completing my myspace profile. priorities! i read a sweet little ditty by peter van ingwagen (yeah i probably spelled his name wrong but i don't feel like going in the living room, searching through my folder and correcting it) about fatalism -- which is different from determinsim, but i'm not quite sure how. also i read some crappy manuscripts of my fellow senior seminar classmates. not that i think i'm better, but that doesn't change the fact that some of them were painful to read. last but not least i read this essay by george orwell which made me feel like i abuse the english language daily. namely, he would discourage the use of the phrase "last but not least." so clearly, i learned something.

today we had pinning for the alpha deltas. the most exciting part of that was tossing the football in G24 with the andrews. also, i let alicia eat my chili from wendy's. she spilled some on her shirt and blamed it on the fact that i grabbed a fork instead of a spoon at the condiment counter. who says you can't eat chili with a fork? i submit that you can. the best part was alicia's ensuing date, which she now had to go to with a chili stain on her white shirt. the whole situation raises the question: does she go home and change the shirt, or wear the shirt on the date and make a joke out of it? i would opt for the joke. because if the date turns out to be awkward, it gives you maybe 30 seconds of automatic material. then maybe you could take the conversation towards times you've spilled things on yourself. obviously, i'd make a horrible date.

i'm finding it really hard to care this semester. maybe it's senioritis, i don't know. i'm ready for the "schooling" part of my life to wrap up. i came home and anthony was back. we ate some eggplant and vegetable concoction he made, which was pretty good (way better than cheesy chicken), and talked about going to see his sister and her husband in erie this weekend. it's odd, but it just occured to me that i've never been to erie. after all that excitement, alicia and i talked on the phone about boys for maybe a half an hour. my life is full of substance.

retrospectively, last week was maybe the best week ever. the steelers won the superbowl. i love the steelers, but it's hard to imagine what it would be like for the team you root for to win the superbowl (especially if they haven't in your lifetime). i believed it could happen, but i guess i didn't think it actually would. it's surreal. on thursday, my senior seminar professor complemented "my work thus far," allowing me to ignore for a few days the recurring feeling that i am a horrible writer. also, alicia and i peer pressured mark into having a party. he had one that included a keg of natty ice and you know what happens when natty ice is around. today we found out that alicia locked herself in the bathroom for twenty minutes. mark had to break in with a screwdriver. none of us had any idea about those events until today. the best memories are the ones you don't really remember.

ok that made no sense. peace!