we seem to share a restlessness of spirit

Advanced Methods Digital Text Project -- The Hidden Speech

2011-02-07T22:10:00.004-05:00

This is a digital text I created as an assignment for my Advanced Methods class.

In the play Julius Caesar, what might have happened if a woman could have followed Brutus and Antony's speeches at Caesar's funeral? Here's a speech from a concerned female citizen, reacting to the rhetoric of Rome's strong, powerful men...

my bucket list

2009-10-17T17:39:00.004-04:00

don't worry, i'm not dying. (at least as far as i know.)* not that you would have begun to worry, necessarily. but i'm not. dying, that is. or worrying about it. much.

anyway, i am a huge proponent of new terms entering the general discourse and also of those terms taking a new shape not identical to their original meaning. it is my hope that we can have bucket lists** for the approach of all sorts of era-ending markers, whether big or small.

you can have bucket lists for moves (as you may remember, i had a "prague bucket list") or starting school, before you get married, before the end of the year, before you have a root canal, before you turn 30, 40, etc. maybe you have a sex bucket list that you'd like to complete before you dump your boyfriend/girlfriend. the possibilities are endless.

i have a bucket list. i don't know what to name it - maybe it's a 2009 bucket list. the "oughts" decade*** bucket list. but, who knows. maybe you don't need an end date? but then what distinguishes a bucket list from a to-do list?

i think there are a few stipulations, such as:
1. must be something that can be completed by a certain time.
so, i can put "write a book" on a bucket list but not "write for at least 30 minutes every day"
2. i had a 2 but forgot it.

anyway, here goes. in no order.

-visit friends in san diego, new orleans, wisconsin, DC, and chicago.
-finish infinite jest
-have something published
-find a suitable bookcase for my room that will hold all my books instead of most of them
-make a prague scrapbook
-see 'where the wild things are,' 'mysteries of pittsburgh,' and 'the road'
-have a pierogi party
-have a quiz night
-go to Bar 11 on the South Side
-write a letter to one of my former students in Prague
-find some unique but not expensive decor for my room
-remember to buy a good knife and some measuring spoons for the kitchen
-go out to a nice**** dinner with a loved one
-get tickets for a Pens game
-think of some creative presents for friends for christmas
-think of a good halloween costume

obviously, to be continued.

what's on your bucket list?

*if you are one of those jagoffs who, anytime death is brought up in conversation, says "well, we're all dying if you think about it," i advise you to stop. you sound like a pretentious douche bag.

**this is tricky, as the element of death is inherent in the term, the word "bucket" coming from "kick the bucket," and the movie "the bucket list" was about two men dying. work with me, though.

***i hope this decade turns out to be one of my lifetime bests so in the future i an wax nostalgic about the "oughts" as i'm sure we will all refer to them. i'm so happy to have lived through the turn of a century.

****nice is relative. i have been wanting to go to Nakama (a hibachi/sushi place) for a while. this is a good example of what i consider nice - not outrageously expensive but probably not somewhere you'd go every week.

unwritten laws of bathroom etiquette

2009-10-14T18:20:00.003-04:00

this is my clarion call for a new unwritten social law. i think forced small talk in the ladies' bathroom should be abolished.

i think that men have this rule. i mean, it's been a while since i've been in a men's room, but isn't it like NOT COOL, if you are a dude, to talk to another dude while both aforementioned dudes are at the urinal? i mean, generally you keep the fraternization to a minimum when you have your dick in your hand, right?

i guess what i want to know is - does this golden rule continue to the hand washing phase of the bathroom experience?

(let's assume for the sake of argument that everyone washes their hands after they use the bathroom. we have a "mandatory" hand washing policy in our office, and by that i mean a sign that says "employees MUST wash hands before returning to work" even though we work in a law office, not McDonalds. i mean, not that i wasn't going to wash my hands anyway.....)

well since ladies don't have that problem because we sit down in single-serve stalls every time, there's the question of what to do when you exit the stall and run into someone washing their hands or primping themselves in front of the mirror? is it okay to pretend they aren't there? because that's what i do.

but it sorta feels like there should be some sort of communication. like, should i greet you? do you need greeted upon entering the bathroom? and like, i just saw you five minutes ago in the hallway and i greeted you then too, so why do i have to do it every time i see you?

"i've mastered communication in this office," my coworker randy said. "i say 'hi, how are you?' and by the time they say 'good,' i'm gone."

and like, say you say hi to someone in the foyer or lobby of the bathroom, the sink area, whatever you want to call it. and you start having a small-talky conversation, but what do you talk about? you obviously don't discuss anything that's going on in the immediate present. and then what? how do you make the transition to the "bathroom act" if you will? do you just stop talking, or do you continue the conversation while you are both in your respective stalls? can you talk to a coworker while you're pooping?

"lousy weather we're having. yeah i finally turned on the heat... well i've gotta get to it, do you want to keep this going or break it up here? meet you at the soap dispenser..."

i think next to the hand washing sign should be a "no small talk" sign. just make everyone's lives simpler.

dear Tivo, please die

2009-07-20T18:31:00.000-04:00

I have problems with the way people watch TV these days.

I've said before that i don't believe in Tivo. I think it robs viewers of the communal aspect of watching TV on a schedule.

This was an easy perspective to have because up until now, I've never had a Tivo, so i didn't have to worry about it. Ii never had a chance to utilize or even enjoy its many features.

But the other night, my mom's boyfriend came in and said, "American Gladiators is on at midnight."

It was 12:43.

"It's okay, I'll get you the Season Pass," which, if you are not familiar, forces Tivo to record every airing of a particular show for the rest of eternity or until I shut it off, whichever comes first.

So last night we discovered not one, not two but THREE (American Gladiators is on three times a day!!!!) episodes waiting in the "queue" (another aspect of Tivo I don't support - British English).

We sat down to enjoy what was a "tournament of champions" episode, and who was playing but my favorite-ever gladiator, Rico Constatino. my friend Mark and I have an inside joke about Rico and I wanted to utilize another modern invention, my cell phone, to text him and tell him our boy was playing.

"You can't do that. this is pre-recorded, don't forget," Dale informed me.

So there you go. I wanted to be able to share this experience with someone, and I couldn't, because they were not at the same television console as I. Bullshit.

Another thing that bugs me, which didn't exist before I left for prague, is the prevalence of online venues for viewing TV shows. Why even bother sitting down to watch TV every night? You can go on nbc.com, or hulu.com, or whatever and find last night's episode.

For example, everyday I have been sitting down around 4pm to watch the Tonight Show from the previous evening. what was I doing last night at 11:35? Nothing. Actually, probably watching old episodes of the Office, or maybe playoff hockey games from this season.

The Pens won the 2008 Winter Classic, so that's cool.

Anyway, there seems to be no reason for TV to even have a regular schedule anymore. can't we go back to the days when we all gathered round the TV and shared some quality time?

OK, back to Conan.

America v. America

2009-07-17T18:29:00.000-04:00

Now that I've returned to the land/home of the free/brave, and because i don't currently have a job per se so i have a lot of free time on my hands, i've been considering what I'm returning to. Is the America of July 2009 better, worse or more or less the same as the America of August 2007? Have I upgraded or downgraded? Let's consider the facts.

Economy: I did some reading up on comparing the financial climate now to two years ago, and basically it was shitty then and it's shittier now. Also, two years ago i had a job and currently I'm unemployed.

verdict: DOWNGRADE.

Government: I don't care who you voted for in last years election, I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief now that GWB is out of office.

verdict: UPGRADE.

Late Night Television: Conan on an hour earlier? Means I don't have to feel like I'm getting old because I can't stay up to watch Late Night. also, Andy is back! Sadly, after watching some of the shows, i'm wondering if Conan has lost his edge. I guess we'll need more time to give him a fair review, but some of the jokes are pretty terrible. And Jimmy Fallon's worst career move ever was leaving SNL. quit wasting my time.

verdict: EVEN MONEY.

Celebrity Deaths: of course there's MJ. we'll be bereft of not only a musical genius, but also of the endless stream of jokes at his expense. also, i'm still not 100% convinced that Alan Alda is alive.

verdict: DOWNGRADE.

Beer: Upon returning to the cradle of socialization, Oakland, I learned that most of the establishments that used to offer $1 beers have upped their asking price to $1.50. Gone are the days of a night out for less than $10. And legislators have done nothing to remedy the archaic alcohol laws in this state: I still can't walk down to the 7-11 to get a beer, and I can't walk down the street with an open container. how in the world am i supposed to be drunk all the time?

verdict: DOWNGRADE.

Personal Effects: Two years ago when I moved away, I packed up most of my clothes and books to be stored in my mom's attic. At the time I figured I'd probably never touch most of those things again, that they would stay up there for twenty or thirty years and then my kids would find them and go "you used to wear THAT?" and we'd all have a good laugh and then i'd say something weird and crazy and pee my pants because by then hopefully i'll be senile. BUT, after unpacking all said belongings, i realized it's things i forgot i owned by I'm so glad I do! I found my Kordell Stewart jersey circa 1996, some sweet pajama pants, red rain boots and enough fleece blankets to build a badass living-room fort. It's like Christmas for free.

verdict: UPGRADE.

Mom and technology: Two years ago, my mom was essentially living in the year 1993. She had no idea about the internet, very little information about computers, had just got her first cell phone and didn't even have a debit card.

Tonight, however, I realized that she has learned how to text message. I'm proud of her but frankly it's a little bit of a pain in the ass; she texted me three times in a span of like 20 minutes tonight while she was at work asking about when I am free to get my hair cut.

verdict: DOWNGRADE.

Shaq: In August 2007, Shaq was gearing up for another season with the Miami Heat. In the previous season he had reached the milestone of 25,000 career points, but saw the Heat swept by the Bulls in the playoffs.

Now, however, in the summer of 2009, things are looking up. Even though he's super old (like 59), you know he and Lebron are going to crush peoples souls in Cleveland. Also, this year Shaq, like the rest of the world, discovered Twitter, letting not a day go by without gems such as "Oh lance armstrong i challenge you to a time trial anytime anywhere, i dnt smell fear do i, smmmm smmm dats the sniffn sound."

verdict: UPGRADE.

OVERALL ASSESSMENT:

After using my calculator machine to add up all the variables and hypothesizing with my very scientific method of evaluation, it looks like it's about even. America today is just as wonderful, or shitty, as it was two years ago. But if there's one thing we all should have learned from the Wizard of Oz, there's no place like home. I'd take a comparably shitty America over a normal or even above-average Europe.

Anyway... I'm glad to be back.

girl talk playing tonight at the smash club

2009-07-15T19:07:00.002-04:00

girl talk is coming back to pittsburgh on July 31, and thanks to my favorite pittsburgh boy coming up with a very thoughtful birthday gift, i'm gonna be there. i am brimming with the proverbial excitement, as the show i attended of his back in the summer of '07 was one of my favorite concert-going experiences ever.

girl talk has a special place in my heart for many reasons, most importantly because he is from pittsburgh. i did some cursory google-riffic research on him and he also seems like good people (though i would expect nothing less from a pittsburgher.) Greg Gillis was a biomedical engineering student turned researcher who did music as a weekend gig, never expecting it to take off the way it did.

he's a support of ALL music and has the utmost respect for the artists whose work he reinterprets. and hell, he bought Taco Bell for everyone at his May , 2008 show at Mr. Small's. what more could you want from a person, let alone a concert-going experience?

i also know a little bit better now how difficult it is to do what he does. thought it seems on the surface like he's merely taking other people's hard work and mashing it up, it's really a pretty intense creative process and technically very difficult.

i made friends with a guy in Prague who DJed the occasional set at a bar we used to frequent called Blind Eye. he did other shows around Prague but I only ever saw him at the BE. he gave my roommate and i once a rough tutorial on the program and equipment he uses to DJ, and it is hella complicated.

mash ups might be easy to do, but they seem insanely difficult to do well, and nearly impossible to do like Girl Talk does them.

and not only is he a talented artist, he's a unique performer. as he professes, it's not very interesting to watch a guy on stage clicking a mouse. since that's all he needs to do to produce the music for each show, he adds to it by going nuts onstage. he jumps in the crowd, brings the crowd onstage, strips down to his underwear...

the show i attended two summers ago was unreal. i didn't know what to expect, and as soon as the first notes boomed from the amps, the entire crowd broke out into the craziest, most perfect dance party ever. and it never lost energy.

the show this summer is at the Amphitheater at Station Square, which is a drastically different venue than Mr. Smalls; must less intimate, because of both size and the fact that it's outdoors. I'm not sure how Girl Talk's show will translate to an outside venue as I've never seen him at a festival.

the show is on July 31, and i believe the opening acts are "friends" including Wiz Khalifa and Don Caballero. I think the tickets are like $20 which, trust me, is totally worth it. see you there!

there are a million reasons to go and only one reason to stay

2009-06-17T16:24:00.002-04:00

it's that time of year again in prague: leaving time. spring and early summer is usually when people choose to make their exit (surprisingly, not winter), and this year i can't exclude myself from that bunch.

it's one thing to say goodbye to people you've are close with, but you're not sure you'll ever see again. promises of e-mails and phone calls and visits create sweet euphony with goodbyes, but who's to say which of those will be kept. but i'm prepared for that. you do your best, but one thing i've learned as i grow older is that people you expect never to see again reappear in your life in unexpected ways.

it's saying goodbye to the people whose relationship you're unsure about that sucks the most. a friend you've grown apart from, one with which the gap seems impossible to bridge. i'll miss yous will be exchanged, but will they be empty? will they really miss you or is it just something that sounds nice, when really they'll be almost glad to see you gone?

something i've learned a lot about this year is how difficult it is to repair unhealthy relationships. i'm not sure it can be done. it's unfortunate, because the more i see people come and go, the more i believe that when time is so short, differences should be put aside. in three weeks i may never see you again - can't we just enjoy the time we have?

i don't think there's anything more painful than a relationship that seems unfixable, no matter how much you want it to be back to what it was. and this is an impossible perspective from which to look at it. time and distance fix those problems; there's no forcing it. but faced with never seeing a person again, time and distance don't seem worth their salt. i want a band aid for a bullet wound, and i want it now.

the worst thing to face is that maybe the other person doesn't see in your friendship what they once saw, that they don't want to do any fixing. which makes that goodbye the worst kind.

a bittersweet Stanley Cup championship

2009-06-13T16:45:00.001-04:00

i've never wanted to go home more than on Saturday morning, about 4:30 Prague time, when Marc Andre Fleury made a miraculous save in the waning seconds of the third period and the Pens won the Stanley Cup.

i watched it from an internet feed of dubious legality in the living room of my friend's apartment. it was me, the light of the computer screen, and my friend Liz who was drifting in and out of a drunken sleep after a night of partying and dancing at Akropolis.

"Liz! Stay up! There's only two minutes left!"

"Yeah, okay, I'm up, I'm up," she said, as she closed her eyes again and left me alone to witness what Pittsburghers have been dreaming about since the early 90s.

In the 2 years I've spent in Prague, I've missed the Pens appear in two Stanley Cup finals and win one, the Steelers win a Superbowl, and the Pitt Panthers nearly make it to the Final Four. last year i spent $1000 to fly home to watch the last three games of the Stanley Cup, only to watch the series go to the seemingly unstoppable Wings, convinced that if there were some way the Pens could manage to win there was no way in hell i could have rationalized missing it.

but they lost. it was still worth it, but in the months following, as the Steelers came closer to their Superbowl victory, I began formulating a little superstition: when i'm away from Pittsburgh, my teams seem to perform much better.

so this year, as much as I wanted to pack up a month early and head home in June instead of July so I could catch what I knew would be an amazing Stanley Cup series, I couldn't do it. i'm the jinx. if i went home, they'd lose.

so i watched from the computer with only half-asleep Liz to celebrate with as Sid lifted the cup. and afterwards i called friends back home, and listened as they celebrated in their living room, then listened as they swarmed the streets, yelling and screaming and running around and high-fiving perfect strangers who, for one night, they had something in common with.

i'm not married, i don't have children, haven't made any huge accomplishments in any career or won any awards. call me irrational (though i have a feeling if you're also from pittsburgh, you won't), but this was the most important day of my life. and i have a feeling it was one of the most important days for the rest of the people from my hometown, too.

and to not be there to share it with them, that broke my heart a little. the feeling of pride that can't really be expressed by words is cut down to 1/100th of what it would have felt like had i been in pittsburgh.

i may sound overly dramatic or insane, but this win would have been so much better had i been able to celebrate it with people who can totally understand.

and this 'book you cannot change

2009-03-29T17:38:00.001-04:00

the more i think about it, i'm totally surprised that Obama was elected President this fall. you know why? because people HATE change.

but you say, no, Jen, you are totally wrong! we LOVE change! change is wonderful and exciting, especially in election years in democratic societies!

the same people who will someday tell their children and grandchildren about how they were part of an historic election that ushered in a new era of democracy*, who trudged to their local firehall or elementary school multi-purpose room on the first tuesday after the first monday in november 2008 and put their dirty fingers all over the smudged LCD screens of their states' shiny new electronic voting machines**, will say "we wanted change! and it was change that we got!"

they don't even realize they were totally lying.

how do i know?

all these people choose to spend their energy complaining about the facebook.***

a few weeks ago the facebook layout changed. again. it happens every six months or so, and it is always just radical enough to make people go UP. IN. ARMS. one morning you wake up, your wall is a little different, maybe the buttons for certain applications are in a different place, whatever, no big deal, but EVERYONE'S status is now "OH MY GOD I HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK, THIS IS TERRIBLE, MY WEEK IS RUINED, I THINK I'M GOING TO HANG MYSELF NOW :-(" or "UGH BRING BACK THE OLD FACEBOOK MARK ZUCKERBERG YOU DOUCHE BAG, I'M REALLY CONFUSED AND I CAN'T FIND THE BUTTON FOR SCRABULOUS!"

and then some genius with even more free time on his or her hands will create a group entitled "GO BACK TO THE OLD FACEBOOK, MARK ZUCKERBERG, YOU DOUCHE BAG, OR ELSE WE'LL ALL QUIT!"

here's the thing. who fucking cares? is it really going to inconvenience your life that much to click around and figure out where things are now? since most people are on the facebook about 8 hours a day anyway**** i bet you can have it down by lunch.

mark zuckerberg should tell everyone to shove it.

the submoral of the story is, if it bothers you that much, you should quit. but no one ever quits facebook.

the main moral of the story is, people hate change! if a new HTML script configured by some recent college grad in the Bay Area can ruin your day, how would you react to a change in SOCIETY***** that would actually affect your normal, day to day life in a meaningful way?

just make sure, future you, when you are proudly telling your children about how you wanted change so much that you voted for a Democrat, that you also explain how this crazy thing called the Facebook, on this old dinosaur called a computer, would ruin your week twice a year.

it's only fair.

*i suppose this remains to be seen, but bear with me for the sake of argument.
**i miss pulling levers
***i hate change so much i refuse to acknowledge mark zuckerberg's phase out of the definite article in his company's name
****you know you are, don't lie
*****i'm reserving judgment for now but we're operating on the assumption that this would happen

liveblog: atlanta international airport

2009-01-03T04:11:00.001-05:00

11:31. i arrived in Atlanta about an hour ago; i still have just a shade under 7 hours until my connecting flight leaves for Prague. i rode the cool little light rail train to Concourse E and situated myself at a Wi Fi Hot Spot in the food court. Atlanta is totally aware that it's 2009 and the internet should be ubiquitous and free. Awesome.

There are so many delicious food options around, I don't know what to choose for My Last Meal (in America). Arby's v. Qdoba? My brain isn't equipped to handle such challenges.

11:33. it is Hot As Fuck in this airport. I want to take my pants off. The man sitting opposite me is housing a tasty-looking quesadilla. One point for Qdoba.

11:35. Just realized my overheatedness may be due to the tall, thick socks I am wearing.

11:35:30. There is a badass player piano in this food court.

11:37. How early is too early to have a beer? I think general opinion would say noon. I say, as early as you are awake. JFK International Airport told me at 6:30 am, Friday December 19th that "the bar doesn't open until 8 am." Embarassing.

11:49. Just started thinking about how awesome it will be to have my NES in my apartment in Prague. No matter decade or location, having a Nintendo will always make you cool.

12:01. Some people are having beers across the way. I may make a move.

12:08. I am very bored. I am running out of people to stalk on the facebook.

12:10. There are two food court employees speaking to each other. One is on the phone, and the other is dictating a phone number for the person on the phone to relay to the person on the other end. Repeatedly. This gentleman has literally recited this same phone number 10 times at least. And he's also saying "fo" for the number four. I thought this only happened in movies.

12:21. Lunch break. I've decided on Qdoba. Chicken queso burrito, here I come. See you in a few.

12:52. If they don't have burritos in heaven, I'm not going.

12:53. The phone numbers gentleman commented on my "old school Nintendo. I think we're buds now.

1:25. Time is moving very slowly. There are tons of pilots wandering around this food court: wheeling their little suitcases, eating tasty food court foods and removing and replacing their pilot hats and jackets. This makes me nervous. I don't think the pilots should be mingling with the common folk. They should be segregated so they can focus on flying the airplanes.

1:42. Two people across from me are talking on walkie talkie phones. Presumably not to each other but I wouldn't put it past them. I don't get it. Can't you just call the person? Anyway, walkie talkies are cool until you're 12, and after that they're really fucking annoying.

2:10. Most pilots' hats look like they are three or four sizes too big for their heads.

2:22. The My Morning Jacket song I was enjoying just stopped very abruptly and prematurely. The next song was "In the Ayer" by Flo Rida. Scared the shit out of me. I nearly fell off my cha-yer.

2:42. More pilots. Pilots everywhere. One has Ohio sports team stickers all over his little pilot suitcase. Ohio is cool because, much like you can tell how far a star is from the earth by taking two measurements, six months apart, you can tell what part of Ohio someone is from by knowing at least two of the sports teams they support. The Bengals and Ohio University? Clearly south. Ohio State and the Browns? Columbus and North. I'm not sure how Columbus splits - who goes for the Bengals and who goes for the Browns? Ohio State and the Steelers - though rare - can signal Youngstown.

2:47. In the song "Panama," it really sounds like David Lee Roth is saying "Animal."

3:05. A while ago I switched the language setting on my facebook to "Pirate," and now I have no idea what is going on. It took me like three weeks to realize "betrothed" meant engaged. I'm tempted to change it back, but I like how it records time with shots of rum.

3:51. I forgot I was doing this for a few minutes. I realized that everyone I know is getting engaged or is already married. WTF? I mean, to each his own, but when did this happen? I feel like we just finished high school ten minutes ago.

4:14. Just saw someone with a killer-looking taco salad. Maybe I made the wrong choice.

4:25. I'm so tired. I just want to get on the plane so I can pass out.

4:40. No one is online for chatting purposes. I wish this internet connection would allow me to use G mail.

4:43. An old lady just bent down and picked up a penny I dropped earlier that landed heads down. Sucker.

5:07. I'm going to pack it in soon. Here's what I've learned about Atlanta in my eight or so hours here. People here have way cooler haircuts. There are lots of members of the armed forces skulking around, and pilots. Way more Spanish speakers than your average Pennsylvania town. The food courts are far classier than most airports. Owning a Nintendo can help if your social skills struggle. Like any honest American town, there's a TGI Fridays. Smoothies are gross. And free internet is freedom.

Peace be with yinz.

new year's playlist

2008-12-31T04:12:00.000-05:00

as we were braving the sudden winter storm that attacked pittsburgh on this fine new years eve, j robb and i discussed the viability of a new years playlist. i decided to undertake this challenge only to realize that the number of songs that directly refer to new years is rather small and that you can only stretch non-literal references to the change of the calendar so far (unless you want a list with a ton of songs along the lines of "A Long December" by the Counting Crows). and anyway, that's boring!

so my new years playlist is "resolution" themed, so all the songs refer to resolutions i will attempt to make and keep in the year 2009.

Song: Everyday I Write the Book - Elvis Costello
Resolution: I will write a book.

Song: Amsterdam - Peter, Bjorn and John
Resolution: I will start seriously looking into ways to live in my favorite city in Europe.

Songs: Grand Canyon - Magnetic Fields, Washington DC - Magnetic Fields, Chicago - Sufjan Stevens, No Sleep Til Brooklyn - The Beastie Boys, Tennessee Sucks - Ryan Adams
Resolution: I will go on a Great American Roadtrip.

Song: The Legionnaire's Lament - The Decemberists
Resolution: I will expand my vocabulary with words like "laudanum," "fecundity," and "charabanc."

Song: The New Workout Plan - Kanye West
Resolution: I will finally get in shape.

Song: Elevator - Flo Rida featuring Timbaland
Resolution: I will start taking the stairs.

Song: Love is Like a Rock - Donnie Iris
Resolution: I will listen to more "homegrown" artists.

Song: After the Goldrush - Neil Young
Resolution: I will give up on this whole "panning for gold" get-rich-quick thing.

Song: Cherchez La Ghost - Ghostface Killah
Resolution: I will learn French.

Song: Spiderwebs - No Doubt
Resolution: I will change the message on my answering machine.

Song: So Fresh, So Clean - Outkast
Resolution: I will try to bathe every day.

Song: Pussy Galore - The Roots
Resolution: I will catch up on all the old Bond movies I've yet to see.

Song: It's Not Easy Being Green - Kermit the Frog
Resolution: I'll start looking into sustainable sources of energy and becoming more environmentally conscious.

Song: Step into My Office, Baby - Belle and Sebastian
Resolution: I will stop sleeping with my secretary.

Song: Got Ya Money - Ol' Dirty Bastard
Resolution (well, not really): God give us strength to continue living on this planet another year without ODB.

Here's to 2009!

Love, Jen

liveblog: Steelers v. Browns

2008-12-28T14:01:00.004-05:00

for this, the final game of the season and the only game i've seen in pittsburgh, i've decided to liveblog. my liveblogging experience includes 2 Pens games and one afternoon of Austrian music television (see below and the raleigh street blog).

so far, not much has happened. in fact until about three minutes ago, this game was super boring. it seemed like at least 17 points had been scored but were not recorded on the scoreboard. i guess they were disallowed (or maybe it's broken?!).

bruce gradkowski is pitching for the Browns, which makes him i think the 4th person to quarterback the team this season? i have a soft spot for bruce, mostly because he's from pittsburgh (seton la salle) and because his name is super fun to say with a pittsburgh accent.

lots of exciting things keep almost happening. stallworth was literally flipped over by a steelers tackle, yet attempted to stand up after he landed and continued acquiring YAC. he ran pretty far before anyone thought to mention that his elbow had downed him.

this might sound stupid, but something i have struggled with my entire football watching career is the difference between an incomplete pass and a complete pass that is then fumbled. i'm not convinced that there is any discernable difference to anyone; whichever referee is in charge just guesses, then the rest of them agree because they have no clue either. the steelers picked up a "fumble" that turned out to be merely an incomplete pass. he ran it nearly to the endzone, but the whistles were blowing. disappointing. the thing is, i'm pretty sure everyone viewing with the naked eye thought the pass was complete then fumbled, including the announcer. i would love to ask a panel of referees about this.

i just remembered that in order to be a complete pass, the pass has to be caught legally and then the player has to execute a "football move" which is my FAVORITE term in professional sports commentary. IT DOESN'T EVEN MAKE SENSE. which further proves that the incomplete v. complete+fumble is an impossible call to make.

big ben has managed to throw a few passes this quarter to the players on his own team.

1:48 in the 2nd. roethlisberger is down, but don't worry because after willie parker scored a few minutes ago, and then threw the ball nearly to the second level of seating in celebration. remember that commercial where john elway threw that nerf football the entire length of the field? it was just like that.

ben does not appear to even be thinking about getting up off the field.

well, here comes byron leftwich. at least we're keeping with the theme of former MAC conference quarterbacks. (bruce - toledo, ben - miami of oh., byron - marshall*.) also all their names start with the letter B! fuuuuuck yeah.

"is he still...? he is dead." - my mom on the fact that ben hasn't stood up yet.

with no hope of securing the top seed in the AFC, there was really no reason for mike tomlin to play ben. now let's hope byron can get us through the playoffs.

what do you think about this? should teams bench their first stringers at the end of the season if a win is not necessary?

they're DRILLING his helmet to take it off!!!!! we're being assured that they do this in "any number of scenarios" but i think maybe to avoid inciting a panic they could have saved this for the locker room.

they're taking him out on a stretcher.
"it'd be funny if they dropped him." -mom

ben just gave a thumbs up to the crowd as the little motorized cart carried his stretcher down the sideline. WHAT A RELIEF.

"i hope leftwich throws about 5 touchdowns." -mom. you know, it HAS been quite a while since we've had a good quarterback controversy.

there's talk of Cleveland looking to sign Bill Cowher as head coach next year. am i the only one who sees this as completely implausible? you can't coach the steelers for 15 years then coach the Browns. Or the Cowboys, the Bengals, the Ravens, or the Eagles. The other 27 teams? have at it.

Leftwich just "scrambled" his eggs 8 yards for a touchdown. pack your bags, ben.

it's the 2nd half now. i got kinda bored of liveblogging.

winter is great. in the colder markets they put up those space-heater type things near the benches so the players can stay warm between plays. they have signs that say "caution: very hot. stay back 4 feet." EVERY GAME without fail, there is some sort of joke made using these signs. today, it was "the steelers defense is on fire!" as the camera caught townsend and the rest of them unknowingly standing in the vicinity of the heater. HILARIOUS.

okay this has gone on long enough. the score is 17-0 with 4:53 left in the 3rd quarter. i'm probably going to take a nap. PEACE.

*now in conference USA i guess, but recently. when leftwich played there, they were still MAC.

(almost)* liveblogging austrian music television

2008-08-06T06:01:00.003-04:00

i haven't had a TV in six months, and have barely watched any television in 11. With my recent move across town I find myself in an apartment with a TV and only one channel** - "gotv," or basically austria's answer to MTV.

having been out of the game for quite a while, i have to admit that when i see videos shown, it has a hypnotizing, paralyzing affect. i spent most of this afternoon listening to and watching music videos, mesmerized. here are some of the most interesting ones i saw:

"Hearts Burned Into Fire," by Bullet for My Valentine

because i was watching a German-language based broadcast, and on first appearances, i totally expected this band to sound like something like motorhead. the guys strode out with cut-off black muscle shirts and bottle-black, shoulder-length hair. the guitarist
played the opening notes on only the fret-board, and i thought "this guy is preparing to rock harder than slash ever dreamed."

i was totally wrong! it was emo! which boggled my mind. there was even a "screamo" break. i'm disappointed already.

"Erdbeben," by Fettes Brot.

I'm guessing these guys are German, but judging by their clothes, they are either sailors, mimes or French. i want to say they sounded a bit like German Reggae, but i don't know if the world is ready for that musical concept. nonetheless, this song was "ubercatchy." the rhythms of the german language lend themselves beautifully to bands that sound like the Bloodhound Gang. and death metal.

"Warwick Avenue," by Duffy

Duffy is allegedly the "next Amy Winehouse," which I think means she sings like she's black. I didn't want to like her, but my walls were bombed after about 2.5 seconds of this song. It's like getting to like Winehouse without the moral responsibility similar to how you feel about having to bail a younger sibling out of a bad situation even though you know they totally deserve what they got. and impetigo.

"I Kissed a Girl," by Katy Perry

This song makes me want to kiss girls, or at least boys that wear Cherry Chapstick.

"That Green Gentleman (Things Have Changed)" by Panic at the Disco

First of all, I read online that a few months ago, P!ATD officially took the exclamation point out of their name, changing it to simple PATD, which is nice because now, when typing the band name, Microsoft Word will stop recognizing the faux beginning of a new sentence. these guys are nothing if not practical.

the moral of this PATD video: change***. the guys change sizes, ages, generations, space-time continuums, musical instruments and, unfortunately, sound. i don't know about the whole album, but judging on this song, this will not spurn the kind of show that, in order to get pumped up for, you stand outside the open trunk of a friend's car in the parking lot of the Chevrolet Ampitheater shotgunning Natty Light.

next, we were launched into a "hosted by MGMT" segment. i'll have to say that at first, MGMT annoyed the shit out of me, but their video "Electric Feel" has changed my mind. And the one dude can rock a pink bandana like no other. they showed many of their favorite videos, but the stylish headwear segues beautifully into:

"November Rain," by Guns N Roses

I have a new theory about this video, and prepare yourself because it's pretty fucking mindblowing. Slash was totally fucking Axl's new wife.

I have only a cursory knowledge of the autobiographical details that inspired this video. I remember that Stephanie Seymour was Axl Rose's actual girlfriend (wife?) but beyond that I'm clueless. I could have done some research... but Google in the Brain hasn't been invented yet. someday, music video viewers will have to analyze this video without the firsthand knowledge of the zeitgeist**** that our generation has, and this is what they will decide.

In the chapel scene, Stephanie strides down the catwalk towards her future husband, who has shed his perma-bandana for the special day. she's beaming, but as she nears Axl, her smile fades. however, she doesn't bail and the preacher begins the ceremony. everything seems fine, but then its time to exchange the rings: Slash, clearly the best man, fumbles around. he can't find them. Duff McCagan/Izzy Stradlin (no clue) saves the day: he throws up a leather-gloved hand, where the rings rest on his pinky finger. Slash takes them and SLAMS them down on the BIBLE, then does a 180 and blows the joint.

after the nuptials are completed, Axl and Stephanie climb into the "just married" car to head off into the soundstage sunset. but before they drive off, Stephanie looks longingly off into the distance: presumably at nothing, or at the symbolic departure of her single life. but wait! she is actually looking for the one person not present and accounted for: Slash, who had exited the chapel early to prepare to play the most epic guitar solo of the video music era.

at the end of the video, after stephanie's untimely demise, Axl tosses and turns in bed, unable to sleep. Is he tormented about living a life alone after his one true love was taken from him prematurely? or is he tormented by the fact that he'll never know for sure that his best friend was bagging his girl?

i should be winning awards.

*in middle school, our morning news program claimed to be broadcast "almost live, from high atop our school (or something like that, as the AV studio was above my homeroom). "almost live" meant that we recorded it in the morning, but broadcast sometime around 10:30 am. despite this pre-recorded aspect, we didn't stop to correct mistakes or do re-takes, so language trip ups were left to scar the guilty party far into their teenage years. this means that basically, i watched MTV all day and am now blogging about it at 12:30am because i don't have anything better to do.

**later realized i was changing the TV channels, not the cable box channels. We actually have loads of channels, but so far they're all in German.

****I didn't know the name of this song while I was writing this... so, I guess this idea is not as novel as i thought.

****i'm allowed to use German words because this is Austrian TV!!!!!!!

you-hoo-hooooo may say i'm a pessimist, but i'm not the only one...

2008-07-27T17:49:00.003-04:00

this might seem alarming i think the john lennon song "imagine" is pretty depressing.

i know i am probably not the go-to source for trenchant insights into widely popular, yet, sadly, misunderstood songs*, but i think everyone has been looking at this song the wrong way.

guaranteed, if you and a group of your close friends, kin or a mixture thereof are sitting around and this song comes on, someone will inevitably remark about how idealistic and beautiful it is. if they don't say it out loud, one or more of them are definitely thinking it. because john is an excellent songwriter, you unconsciously do what he commands you to - imagine this utopian world he's thinking of. a brotherhood of man? who can really argue with that. sounds pretty awesome.

i think it's pretty much accepted that john was the token idealistic songwriter of the 60s/70s, but i think if he's worth his snuff, there's got to be more to this song than the simple, idealistic message of "can't we all just get along?"

he starts listing all the things that we'd have to take out of the equation in order to achieve this perfect world. so basically we're getting rid of possessions, countries, religion (including heaven and hell**), and consequently, things that we kill or die for, greed, hunger, and the negative side effects of living as though your fate is fixed.

but is the price worth the reward? i mean, yeah... this world would be awesome. but it would also be boring. these Utopians would have nothing to fight about or hate each other for, yes, but they'd also have nothing*** to talk about.

maybe this sounds ridiculous, but does he REALLY want to give up all of that, or expect anyone else to want to? i think no. and that's why this song is depressing and genius.

so he never actually uses the word "utopia" but that's what we're getting at here, i think, and while i was looking up the adjective form of the word (because apparently, in order for blogger to accept it, you have to capitalize it... even if you are not specifically describing Sir Thomas More's Utopia. idiots.) i stumbled on the etymology of the word, which i didn't know but maybe you did. it comes from the Greek words that mean "not" and "a place" so basically it means "nowhere."

so this perfect world is actually nowhere - it's some place we'll never find, which is one layer of sad. on top of that, to get it, we'd have to give up everything that makes most people's lives bearable. and so even if we could eliminate all those things, we probably never would.

which, to me, is fucking depressing. but maybe i'm the pessimist.

*but, doesn't make me any less right about "california girls."

**i read somewhere that at the airport in liverpool are written the words "above us only sky," which might be the best side effect of this song. this and FC's slogan of "you'll never walk alone" have me convinced that liverpool might be the coolest place ever. it's like those kids that write song lyrics and quotes all over their book covers... except they wrote them on their city. liverpudlians are awesome. and they're called liverpudlians! i love it.

***although, john neglects to mention getting rid of global warming, which would surely cause these Utopians some unforseen conflict.

speed friendship

2008-07-17T07:17:00.002-04:00

prague is a city full of transients. as far as the expat community goes, anyway. you'll find the occasional lifer, and a handful of 6-10 year residents, but for the most part, the people you meet are usually at some stage of on their way out.

a year ago i would never have thought i'd stay in prague longer than the end of the school year. in fact, when i first got here, i thought staying a month would be difficult.

now that it's official (i'm staying, at this point, indefinitely), i have to watch as all the friends i've made leave, one at a time. as everyone prepares to leave and i prepare to stay... it's time to make some new friends.

so we've employed a new tactic... speed friendship. it's pretty straightforward. you meet someone new and instead of awkward small talk and promises of future get-togethers that may or may not go unfulfilled, you immediately become best friends. because when you, or your new friend, might be leaving at any time, there's no time to waste.

we met our new friend pavel a little over two weeks ago. it was a Chat Boy's/Fatteau night* and we were dragging from Lucerna the night before (being unemployed in the summer leaves a lot of time and not much to do... so we get drunk). just as we were about to split, marie strolled up with pavel. we'd met him before, briefly, at the beer garden, but never really spent any time with him. that would soon change.

we were out until sun up (which, to be fair, isn't saying much when the sun rises at 4:30 am), got to mcdonalds so early (late?) that they weren't serving breakfast yet, and caught the first metro home.

"y'all want to go to the pool tomorrow?" pavel said as we parted ways at JZP. (he really meant "today." also, despite his czech name, he grew up in Georgia. so that should explain the y'alls.)

so a few hours later, we dragged ourselves in a hungover stupor down to the riverside to sunbathe. then we went out to dinner. then we went to akropolis for reggae night... and stayed out until sun up. again.

we saw pavel almost everyday that week, because that's what speed friendship requires. after less than 14 days, it's like we've been friends for years.

with anna and lori leaving in exactly two weeks (YIKES), all new friendships have got to be speed friendships. and it's fun. we started another speed friendship with tom, a guy we met wandering around in bratislava. at 2 pm we were introducing ourselves on the street, and by 6pm we were chipping in for a bottle of becherovka for the bus ride home.

i don't have a good conclusion for this post, as usual. i am the SNL of blogs. anyway, point is... watch out for us on the street. you may be the next victim of speed friendship.

*Chat Boy's and Fatteau are code names for two bars, Fat Boy's and Chateau, that are frequented by expats. They are on the same street, and situated in such a way that patrons of one bar often migrate to the other bar, sometimes with a drink in hand. if you say "let's go to Chat Boy's tonight" you are indicating that you'd like to go to Fat Boy's and then possibly to Chateau, or somewhere in between.

ginning up excitement for wagging the dog

2008-06-23T15:11:00.002-04:00

while i may not have any real life credentials, in my head, at least, i like to consider myself an amateur linguist. this is a difficult hobby/pasttime/non-paying profession when you are immersed in a culture where you don't speak the language. every month we splurge on one or two books each to be passed around, and the extent of our magazine collection is the "US Weekly" and "Allure" that come in my mom's care package.

anyway, as soon as i got back onto american soil in june, i stopped at the newsstand at the cincinnati airport to load up on the monthly periodicals i'd been missing since moving to europe. namely, esquire to read chuck klosterman's column. but i picked up a vanity fair to add to the reading material, and an in style* to serve as a picture book.

needless to say we've been devouring this sudden wellspring of english-language journalism. during reading i've come across two interesting phrases, both from political articles.

the first is "gin up," used in the article "the cynic and senator obama," from esquire. Here's the sentence:

"...the Republicans masterfully used the threat of gay people getting married to gin up turnout where they needed it most."

i think the meaning is pretty clear from the context, but i looked it up just to be sure. the meaning is "to enliven, make more exciting" but it's seemingly also used as a synonym for create or generate. you can gin up turn out, gin up interest, or gin up a new way to do something. it comes from the phrase of the same meaning, to "ginger up," which is taken from a method of placing part of the ginger root under a horse's tail to make it perk up at shows. (info from various online etymology dictionaries, and the New York Times article On Language: Whitewater Words, which is full of awesome idioms coined in the Clinton era).

thought it doesn't have a political origin, it seems to be used quite often (okay, based on a cursory google search, but still) used in political headlines. such as:

FBI pressured to gin up Iraq-Al Qaeda links
Huckabee sweeps through SC to gin up support
NW Repubican: Hateful moonbats gin up fake outrage

next question, what is a hateful moonbat?

ANYWAY, the next one that caught my eye was "wag the dog," from The Last Good Campaign in Vanity Fair. The article about Bobby Kennedy's 1968 campaign contained the following sentence:

"Kennedy was concerned that, if he ran, an increasingly unstable Lyndon Johnson might 'wag the dog,' provoking an international crisis or even starting a war to upstage the challenger's candidacy."

so, obviously, wag the dog means to divert attention from one problematic event by creating another for the attention to be focused on. the phrase comes from the saying "a dog is smarter than his tail," and if he weren't, the tail would wag the dog. (Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms). the most notable use of the phrase is in the movie Wag the Dog starring Dustin Hoffman, where i believe a fake war is launched to divert attention from a sex scandal (and who doesn't love dustin hoffman, really? for my money, movies featuring pirates, crocodiles and flying ageless men don't get better than Hook.)

so these are two phrases that i'm hoping will come into more common use. i'm planning to start ginning up excitement for lucerna this weekend on tuesday. and if any questionable events occur, i will certainly wag the dog on saturday afternoon by focusing attention on more important questions, such as how dark "kelly green" actually is or what an epic influence "google in your brain" would have on humanity.

yeehaw.

*why do i buy in style, really? i am not "in style" or really even close, for that matter. most days i don't wear make up. today i didn't wash my hair. and also, i wear jeans and t-shirts everyday. i guess it's wishful thinking. in my mind's eye, i see myself, someday, with the closet of carrie bradshaw.

miscellany

2008-06-16T14:33:00.003-04:00

spelled that wrong.

trip for july so far is looking like:

poland
-auchwitz
-krackow
-warsaw
lithuania
-vilnius
latvia
-riga
estonia
-tallinn
finland
-helsinki

effing awesome. if we can find a way to do it cheaply... looks like it will be a combination of planes, trains, buses, automobiles and one ferry.

in other news:
-the beer garden is amazing.
-i decided my favorite steeler ever is norm johnson, place kicker, 1995-1998.
-i just joined last.fm and use it with the application "what i listen to" on facebook. i'm obsessed.
-i'm addicted to coke
-okay not the drug
-delta airlines sucks. i wish i could vow to never fly with them again, but they are so cheap.
-anthony kiedis was on my flight from pittsburgh to nyc.
-i'm boring.

ttyl.

blogging the pens

2008-06-02T08:17:00.002-04:00

tmill and i liveblogged the first two periods of the penguins game on saturday night. because we were watching in squirrel hill, the posts can be found at 5534 Raleigh Street's blog.

we didn't blog the third period because we were all too busy trying to slit our wrists.

go pens.

I FORGOT...

2008-05-29T07:38:00.001-04:00

SHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEETZ!

PRETZEL MELT! TURKEY, PROVOLONE AND MAYONNAAAAAAISE!

I LOVE AMERICA!

GO PENS!

where my love lies waiting silently for me*

2008-05-26T15:02:00.005-04:00

so this friday i will return to pittsburgh, finally, after having been the farthest distance i've ever been from home and for the longest amount of time. my mom dropped me and my three suitcases off at pittsburgh international airport on september 5, 2007; i will return at 8:30 pm this friday, may 30, 2008.

i'm not moving back, only visiting. which sounds fucking surreal to say. i guess i had always thought about moving out of pittsburgh; i'd imagined myself in many places - penn state or washington DC in my high school days, berkeley in the days in college when i was convinced i needed a fresh start - but had never really come close to doing it, to leaving. until prague came up and i said - well i've got nothing better to do.

i suppose it's changed my outlook for the better. i think before i would have been content to stay in pittsburgh forever (and actually, part of me still feels that way. a little part of me wishes i had never left. sadly, there is something comforting about having such a provincial view of the world, and that is a feeling i'll never get back.) i wanted to settle there, even at the age of 23 (which, 9 months ago, i thought was old). but now i know that pittsburgh isn't going anywhere, and that what i really want is to live as many places as i can before it's too late, before i'm married (or in a serious relationship) with a family (which i want) and a "real" job (which, actually, will be my life's goal to avoid). a year here, a year there won't bother me. returning to pittsburgh, for the foreseeable future, will not be a move, just a visit.

which, let me tell you, feels awesome.

i guess it's a trite saying, but you really do have to move away before you realize how much home means to you. i've never loved every single thing about pittsburgh more than i do since i've been abroad and i've never wanted to go back as much. i cannot WAIT to indulge in all the things that i used to consider commonplace:

primanti's sandwiches
dr pepper (fountain drinks. free refills. and ICE.)
pierogies
cheap beer and more importantly, mixed drinks at a comparable price
JEOPARDY!
burritos (and mexican food in general)
chicken caesar wraps from hemingways
baseball
giant eagle
fast food options other than mcdonalds
PIZZA
being able to buy blue jeans that aren't ugly
shitty oakland bars with familiar faces
(and bars with jukeboxes)
the lack of graffiti (compared to here)
good old PAT transit, and actually riding in a car
the imperial system of measurement
my friends.

around christmas i felt that spending almost $1000 to go back to a place for three weeks that i'd lived in for 23 years was a bit insane. now it's worth every penny. it kinda makes me enjoy being away, strangely: i always want to feel this excited to return there. this might sound stupid, but it's the kind of town you never really leave. (who do i think i am, don henley? was i born in the fucking hotel california? yeesh).

i want to go to as many places as possible so that someday i can tell my kids - trust me, this is the best city in the world.

but for now let me know if you want me to bring you some mac and cheese from boston market.

*homeward bound, simon and garfunkel

when you say california girls, what do you really mean by that?

2008-05-22T13:39:00.005-04:00

i recently purchased "Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of the Beach Boys," for the low low price of $12.99. this purchase has renewed my faith in iTunes as a music purchase medium. finding this was kinda like if your parents steal your baby blanket from you because you are 18 and still carry it around, give it to goodwill, someone buys it, then you find it at some jobber down the street's garage sale a few years later for 50 cents. iTunes has sold me back my childhood, and at what those in the biz call "a steal."

my dad used to bump the beach boys in the car. he had a different greatest hits tape, but it included all the standards - beginning with "kokomo," around to "wouldn't it be nice" and "i get around." the sweet harmonies and unmistakeable falsetto are ingrained in my brain. anna might make fun of me, but listening to the beach boys takes me back to a time way before i even began to think that someday i might really enjoy the feeling of nostalgia.

ANYWAY, in my now (hopefully) more mature and educated state, how i listen to some of these songs has changed. one too many higher level literature classes has ruined my ability to enjoy words (whether written or sung) without thinking about what the really MEAN. this leads me to the "california girls conundrum."

the beach boys are renowned for singing about the simple things: girls, living in sunny california, going to the beach, surfing, and being popular in high school. ironically, wasn't brian wilson addicted to cocaine or something? anyway thats beside the point.

the song "california girls," on the surface, seems to fit right into this mold: the Boys wish to champion those bikini-clad, bleach-blonde, ditzy-yet-lovable girls that reside in their home state. or DO THEY?

in the first verse, they sing:
"well east coast girls are hip/
i really dig those styles they wear/
and southern girls with the way they talk/
they knock me out when i'm down there/

the mid-west farmers daughters/
really make you feel all right/
and the northern girls with the way they kiss/
they keep their boyfriends warm at night."

as he goes on to croon "i wish they all could be california girls," the listener assumes that he has experienced, even enjoyed, all of these girls from different areas of the states, but that they could never top the girls he knows and loves from california. he even begins with a conversational marker, "well," that while not officially, at least in use suggests that he might continue later with a "but." "well, these girls are great, but california girls are the best."

but, keep listening! in the next verse he continues:

"the west coast has the sunshine/
and the girls all get so tanned/
i dig a french bikini on hawaii island/
dolls by a palm tree in the sand/"

this verse is startling because, in all the 1000 times i'd heard this song, i thought this entire verse was about girls from the west coast and/or california. but upon further research, he mentions hawaii! another example of girls he likes that are NOT california natives.

and finally, the death blow:

"i been all around this great big world/
and i seen all kinds of girls/
yeah, but i couldn't wait to get back to the States/
back to the cutest girls in the world."

so here's what i'm thinking. the Boys are not suggesting that california girls are superior to girls from all other places, domestic or foreign; they are suggesting that they prefer girls from the United States and they wish that all of these different, wonderful girls could all live in california and, therefore, in closer proximity to where they live.

doesn't this blow your freakin' mind? all my life i was under the impression that i was somehow inferior to my west-coast counterparts (and if you've ever seen the video for david lee roth's cover of this song, thats probably the way he interpreted it, too. in fact, you should watch this video, it's hilarious: david lee roth, already too old and it's still only 1985. in fact, he tried as hard as he could to ruin that song by including confederate flags, suggestively shucking an ear of corn, and singing in the key of H. and still failed. )

anyway, i wonder if my dad knew what he was getting my brain into when he harmlessly sung along with these beach boys ditties... that i'd still be thinking about it 15-20 years later.

now, if you'll excuse me, i'm going to go watch van halen videos on youtube.

things i love about europe

2008-05-16T13:52:00.002-04:00

there are advertisements and sometimes movie posters on the walls lining the escalators in the metro. on the poster for that "what happens in vegas," someone wrote "fuck" on ashton kutcher's face.

as long as it's talking with you, talk of the weather will do

2008-05-13T04:27:00.003-04:00

the other day at the beer garden in riergrovy sady, drew acknowledged what most of us were thinking: all we talk about these days is the weather.

it's finally warm here in prague. like, really warm, not just the tease of a balmy day in the middle of february -- and suddenly it has become 100 times more pleasant to live here.

winter here was strange. it wasn't all that cold - in fact i can think of maybe 2 weeks of the whole winter, one just before christmas and one in february -- when it was really cold. other than that, it was a manageable cold. still cold enough for a jacket, but not so cold that you thought about throwing yourself in front of the 9 tram because it wasn't the 24.

it wasn't a bitter cold winter here, but it was bleak. the sky had been gray since september. i mean i can remember several fucking cold days in the pittsburgh winters i grew up in, but it never seemed quite as dreary and depressing as a mild winter in the czech republic. i've lived through blizzards and states-of-emergency due to ice storms and negative windchills but the sun always seemed to shine. and spirits were usually high with the hope of spring being right around the corner. even with such extremes, in pittsburgh we at least had 4 seasons. in the czech republic, it seems like there are two: summer and depression.

but summer is finally here. summer, not spring. on the first page of "a moveable feast" hemingway writes about the weather in paris, describing it thusly:

"then* there was the bad weather. it would come in one day when the fall was over. we would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the place contrescarpe."

the phenomenon that hemingway describes about paris's bad weather arriving is exactly how prague's warm weather arrived. one day it was in the low 40s and rainy and the next it was 75 and sunny and hasn't looked back since.

so, seemingly overnight, everyone is in a better mood. we're all walking to work, walking all the way to town just because we can, making extra trips to the store just to enjoy the sunshine. we've spent every night out at the beer garden (which is a european phenomenon that i give an enthusiastic two thumbs up) because drinking outside is far superior to drinking indoors. the weather's newfound clemency has even painted a new coat on the freakshow that usually congregates outside hlavni nadrazi. the lawn almost looks inviting now. almost.

consequently, about 80% of our conversations either revolve around the weather or begin with a comment like "it is SO nice out today" or "i can't beLIEVE how warm it is." i suppose it seems like empty small talk, but it's the only thing on our minds. i guess rightly so - weather affects what you eat, what you wear, what you do for fun, where you live, your demeanor. wars are fought over weather. weather has given a lot of people (namely al gore) a career. so maybe it's not such small talk.

or maybe we don't have anything better to talk about... just like i don't have anything better to write about.

*that is the first two sentences of "a moveable feast" and can i say how big a fan i am of beginning a book with the word then? genius.

the disco tram

2008-05-02T04:36:00.002-04:00

all right, so the disco tram that i mentioned earlier. i suppose i owe an explanation, as promised.

last week, as she is wont to do, debbie was perusing the New York Times travel section and stumbled upon an article entitled "After midnight in 10 European cities."

The premise is this: you pay 320 crowns (so, at a current exchange rate of 15 crowns to the dollar, about 20 bucks) for the privilege of boarding an unnumbered tram at namesti miru filled with 50 strangers who share the common interest of wishing to dance to disco music while drinking warm staropramen and hanging on to the nearest pole, strap or unsuspecting dancer for dear life. all while fighting the forces of a bladder full of beer. this continues for two hours as the tram traces routes you didn't even know existed to parts of town both remote and familiar, the endpoint being the club "roxy" near namesti repuliky.

during the two and a half hour tram ride, i posed for several pictures with perfect strangers (sadly not THE Perfect Strangers), asked for 4 beers, was given 6 and paid for 10, considered peeing in an empty beer can, a trash bag or simply in my pants until finally being allowed off the tram to pee in a park, met a canadian, did not meet a czech gentleman with curly hair speaking english with a british accent because he was at the back of the tram and we were at the front (the layout of public transportation discourages mingling, probably for good reason), and successfully communicated in czech with the affable, yellow-vested security guard manning the tram's middle door. "kolik minut until we stop?" yeah, i am pretty proud of myself for that one.

i suppose enjoying this kind of event lies in mastering the fine art of being just drunk enough to still be able to stand, despite the jerky movements of prague integrated transport system. much the same as it's american counterpart, the party bus, the "party tram" is not for the casual drinker. maybe i'm being a negative nancy, but i would almost rather have just paid the cover for roxy and started the night there.

on the bright side, drew and i managed to persuade a taxi driver to take us to JZP for "sto," which is 100 crowns!!!! this is amazing and completely warrants my use of four exclamation points in the previous sentence. 100 crowns for a cab ride is almost unheard of.

also, i didn't get hit in the head with any drink containers. so i suppose it was a good day.

funniest thing this week

2008-04-26T12:53:00.002-04:00

this afternoon, drew, marie and i went for a walk to a place around i.p. pavlova to pick up tickets for our "disco tram" ride next wednesday. (i know... what the fuck is that? more later).

we took the scenic route down what has to be the most beautiful street in prague. nice houses and blossoming trees everywhere. the weather is perfect today (FINALLY. for god's sake, it's been cold since september.) as we walked, we passed a group of gypsy children, i'd say with an average age of 9.5. for a while they were close behind us but, as we were walking at a faster rate, we ended up walking about 20 feet ahead of them.

a few minutes later, a rock hits the back of my leg. i say to the girls, "did those kids just throw a rock at me?" to which marie replied, "no, that was me. sorry. i kicked it with my boot."

fair enough. then, a few more minutes later, we hear the thud of a water bottle hitting the ground a foot or two behind us. then, minutes later, again. just as i began to wonder aloud if the kids were trying to hit us, the water bottle in question hit me on the side of the head! i turned around and the kids were running to hide.

i think one of the girls suggested i "go get them," but that begs the question, what could i have done? i can't reprimand them as they probably speak czech (or if they were indeed gypsies, i guess romanian or whatever language it is that gypsies speak) and i don't.

i felt that they should not go unpunished, but i didn't know what to do. i guess you can't hit other people's children, right? there were probably more gypsy children nearby, and they are ruthless. so any confrontation and i would have got much more than i was prepared to handle. next thing you know, instead of just a bump on my head i've got a knife would to deal with and no health insurance. so we just walked away.

PS, just to be clear, i mean no offense to gypsies. kids, in general, are jerks.

new developments

2008-04-21T13:17:00.002-04:00

it's been almost two weeks since my last post so i'm mostly doing this to get myself some momentum back. spoiler alert: all of the following might be boring.

-sergio has left the country. he is back in austin, tx, drinking dr. pepper and watching the spurs. this is sad because, not only is sergio really cool, but he was one of our only guy friends here. i'm used to being surrounded by at least one guy friend for each girl friend i have, and that's not been the case since someone up there decided we should have 22 girls and 2 boys in our TEFL class. don't get me wrong, i love all the girls i've met... but sometimes you need some testosterone. it changes the whole dynamic. and the great thing about sergio was that he wasn't just "drew's boyfriend." he was friends with us, too.

-drew is leaving on may 19. late last saturday night, whilst we sipped on a 120 crown gin and tonic together, we cooked up a scheme to save us both rent. drew will leave her lease early and move into my room for the weeks between may 1st and the 19th. this is interesting because if you've seen my room you know i only have one bed. it is a double, but drew and i will essentially be spooning for three straight weeks. i think it'll be a little interesting, but mostly fun. it'll be kinda like having a three-week sleepover. when i lived with anthony, we had platonic sleepovers pretty much every night, and i miss it.

-i want to inventory all the books i've read since i've been in prague. this might take time.

-i want to go somewhere. berlin maybe.

-i'm conjuring up a pretty sweet trip for july. more info later.\

bye!

payday is thursday

2008-04-08T03:49:00.002-04:00

i've only got enough crowns to do one of the following: put credits on my phone or buy deodorant.

which is the better alternative: ignoring my friends' calls and texts or pushing them away more passively with my stench?

i bet you look good on the dance floor*

2008-04-06T05:33:00.003-04:00

one of the first things i want to know about someone is what kind of music they like. in the long run this doesn't "matter**" -- i'm not going to prejudge the quality of the friendship on whether the person prefers ryan adams or bryan adams.

however, it does serve two important purposes: if you have favorite bands in common it gives you an automatic conversation topic until you know the person well enough that you have better things to talk about, and if their taste in music differs, it's like you just got free reign on a record store. you remember when we were kids, and nickelodeon (i can't remember if it was a specific game show or just something they gave away for no good reason) would bestow upon some lucky kids the chance to run through toys r us for five minutes? and whatever toys they collected in their carts, they could keep?

meeting people with different music tastes is like that. not in the sense that it's like free music, but that they can say "hey, i think you'd really like this band." and maybe you'd have had no excuse to listen to this band before, or maybe it is an obscure band that you wouldn't have discovered without their help.

i will always have jeff robb to thank for introducing me to the decemberists. i will have the combination of alicia's discovery on myspace, jocelyn's ownership of the album, and pete's taking me to his show at mr smalls for my love of the DJ girl talk. a former coworker, blockbuster steve, introduced me to dashboard confessional. mxpx will always be connected to my high school crush, ian.

and nick i can thank for english rock.

allow me to sidetrack for a minute. you know how certain smells, sounds, places, etc. will indelibly connect themselves to a certain memory? then, everytime you hear or smell or see that thing, that memory will come back to you more forcibly than any time you sit and try to think about it independently? off the top of my head i can think of these examples:

-clinique "happy" perfume will always remind me of the holiday dance in 9th grade, which i attended with adam bishop.
-the song "i'm real" by j.lo, remixed with ja rule, will always remind me of driving to work at blockbuster in the summer of 2002.
-the song "bandages" by hot hot heat will always remind me of the period of time, in 2003-04, when i commuted to school (especially because there is a sound in that song which is identical to the sound a 2003 saturn ion makes when it is low on gas).
-the band "city and colour" reminds me of driving through kansas in june 2006.

and so on. typically, these kind of associations don't happen automatically. i didn't think "okay, from now on, every time i smell this perfume, i'm going to think back on my first boyfriend and how i borrowed a purple dress from my neighbor to wear to this dance, and that he brought me flowers and we had an awkward photo session in front of our tiny, fake christmas tree in my living room and that three months later adam broke up with me, probably because i told him i wouldn't have sex with him." it happened last summer when i was coming around the corner in the offices of marcus and shapira, and bernadette, dan shapira's secretary, had just sprayed that perfume and bam - i felt like i was 14 again. this was years later.

and thats how it usually goes. however, i've noticed that this process has sped up considerably since i've been in prague. already, certain sounds and smells are triggering memories that happened only, at most, three months ago. i stepped into the staff room at the bell school the other day and immediately felt uneasy and anxious, as if being there reminded me of something bad. i don't remember any particularly traumatic experiences taking place there, other than maybe being vastly underprepared for lessons. also, the other day i sprayed my perfume and felt nostalgic, although now i can't remember for what. i'm not sure i felt it for anything specific, but isn't that a bit weird? it was a memory of nothing, but i could pinpoint the time to sometime in the last few months. it doesn't make any sense, i know.

now back to music. i've met loads of new people here and i've been fortunate enough to be given/steal music from them. most notably, by the virtue of mixtapes and shared ipods, i've been introduced by nick to english rock bands (the verve, the libertines, babyshambles, pulp, etc.). this is not music i would have sought out on my own, but i love it.

this music will always be prague to me. and it's already reminding me of prague days gone by. i can't explain this accelerated nostalgia, but a few years from now, songs like "albion" and "supersonic" will remind me of december 2007; of watching movies, going to pubs, hanging out in riegrovy sady, drinking gambrinus, watching dogs cum on each others backs (okay that was february, but you get the point).

*arctic monkeys

**chuck klosterman wrote an interesting column on this for esquire. in fact, for almost any topic, chuck has probably written something profound and hilarious. here's that article: me, on shuffle

lamenting the passing of the blockbuster era

2008-03-30T12:49:00.003-04:00

i think there comes a point in everyone's life where you stop acknowledging the arrival of new technology. you refuse to become part of this new technology community and simultaneously become ultra-nostalgic for bygone or moribund technologies. i think this usually happens when you're an "adult" which i guess is anywhere between the age of 18 to 45 (so, unspecific.) i guess it's different for everyone. also, it's not necessarily universal at first; you may balk at certain advancements and embrace others.

for example, my mom has no idea how to use a computer. she knows the internet exists and sees how it could benefit her life, but only at the hands of others. last week i mentioned that i wanted "all the pretty horses" on DVD, and she said she had looked for it but didn't see it at the store. she said "well i could go to barnes and noble and have them order it." then i suggested i could have amazon.com deliver it to her house, then she could mail it to me (since, even though it's 2008*, amazon.com does not deliver worldwide.) she reacted as though this made sense but was not an option she would consider. "i'll just see if i can find it."

also, last christmas i bought her an ipod shuffle. i loaded a bunch of her CDs on her computer then filled up the shuffle with songs she wanted. she began using it at work and said she really loved it; so much that for her birthday, dale (her boyfriend) bought her another one because she wanted to have two song-set options. so, she's embracing technology, but not fully enough to realize that she could drag and drop new songs and in about three minutes have a new playlist on her original ipod. although try explaining that to someone who doesn't know the meaning of the words "drag" "drop" or "playlist."

ANYWAY, i like to consider myself "young" and "hip" and "up with the technology of the time," but i realized recently that i am already falling victim to "technology freeze." i am 23 years old and already becoming stodgy. in fact it started 5 years ago when i worked at blockbuster.

blockbuster first opened in 1985 (nerd alert. but we had to learn all of this stuff during orientation). i began working there in late summer 2001; i'd say at that point blockbuster had just hit or was just coming down from it's heyday. to give you a benchmark, this was just about the last time you could rent a movie in your choice of DVD or VHS. (by the way, who the hell else misses VHS tapes? i see no advantage to DVDs. all my DVDs are scratched. VHS tapes were indestructible. and you could always find the exact place in the movie you left off.) now, blockbuster is all but dead. 9 or 10 blockbuster stores closed in pittsburgh about two years ago; the blockbuster i used to work at in hempfield plaza is now a mattress store.

blockbuster is all but dead, and why? netflix. and ondemand. and itunes. no one wants to leave their house to go rent a movie that, for the same price, can be delivered to their living room with the press of a button.

i suppose this is logical; however, i find it depressing. i think there's something lost when you're deprived of "a trip to blockbuster." this used to be a favorite past time of my father, brother and i; almost every weekend we'd get in the car, drive to the same blockbuster where i'd later work, rent two or three of the latest releases on VHS - sometimes he'd even spring for the over-priced, tooth-rotting snacks lining the check-out.

and what's more fun than going with a significant other and spending the better part of an hour arguing about the movie that you'll end up making out through the last half of anyway? this is an especially fun experience on a first date. suddenly a simple consumer transaction can have make-or-break status on the relationship. your cinematic tastes are on display; you're under intense pressure to make an impressive decision. frankly, it renders me helpless. i play the "non-decision maker," which can be equally as damaging. no one wants to date a waffler.

but who wants this situation?

"okay, let's watch a movie. what do you want to watch?"
"well, i just got braveheart in the mail today. and charlie and the chocolate factory has been sitting on top of the tv for three weeks now. so, you pick..."

the point is, going to rent a movie is as much of the experience as actually watching it. and yeah, right now i suppose you still have a choice; if you enjoy that, you can still go down to blockbuster instead of using netflix. but it won't be that way for long. netflix is running blockbuster into the ground. one day you won't have this choice anymore, and that day will be sad.

maybe the people it affects most won't notice; i suppose that i'm not exactly feeling bereaved over the loss of the drive-in movie the way that generations before me are. so maybe my children will not even notice. they won't even ask me if they can rent movies anymore; we'll probably have a robot like in "bicentennial man" that handles all of those kind of problems while i am busy taking a nap. but maybe, when they hit their mid-twenties, movies will be sent via telepathy directly to your brain, and they will wax nostalgic about the days when you had to sit down and actually press buttons on a remote control to watch a movie.

*i like to use the phrase, "come on, it is 200_ (insert current year)" to express my dismay that certain inconveniences still occur, like the inability to have things from american websites delivered to europe without paying exorbitant postage. also, i feel it is far enough in the future that i shouldn't have to:

-wait 3 minutes for a page on internet to load, ever, no matter what kind of internet connection i'm using.
-wrestle with my ipod earphones EVERY TIME i take it out of my purse to use it.
-take the lid off and stick my hand in the back of a toilet to flush it.

killing yourself to live (again)

2008-03-28T16:52:00.004-04:00

do you ever get to a point when you're tired of reading? i was at that point yesterday. i was stranded in the middle of "something happened," by joseph heller. it's well-written, interesting - i want to be absorbed in it, but for some reason i just can't get there.

i've found this year that without owning a tv and without having any real hobbies, i have a lot of spare time. i am one of those people that, when left with extra time and very little responsibility, chooses to nap. as perfect as this life sounds (30 or so hour work week and bars everywhere with very cheap beer), i often get bored. my roommates and i have resorted to card and dice games, but you can only spend so much time playing rummy before the thought of trying to find the six to complete a five-six-seven run in spades makes you want to stab your eyes out.

so i sleep a lot, probably more than i should, which when you wake up having wasted an entire afternoon in bed does nothing but induce a feeling of guilt. given all this time i should be developing some skill, or at least (the english major in me contends) reading.

but i read in waves and sometimes i just don't have it in me. there will be weeks when i finish a book every two days, then a month when i laboriously cover about 10 pages a day, if i'm lucky. i'm there now. i find myself zoning out through entire pages of "something happened," and reading them with little regard to what actually happens. reading this book has become less about enjoying it or getting any intellectual satisfaction and more about setting a landspeed record for number of pages per minute.

until today i was saved. i've discovered by observing books left on the desk in the teacher's office that john, a new guy at dino elementary, has excellent taste in literature. and by excellent i mean nearly perfectly aligned with mine. first he had "chuck klosterman IV." then "extremely loud and incredibly close," by jonathan safran foer. i don't know what else john has up his sleeve, but i want to. also, today he was hunched over his laptop, downloading an entire season of "america's next top model." he seems perfect.

he mentioned that he'd read "killing yourself to live," which is probably the best of klosterman's four nonfiction books to date. i've read it twice, both times completed in one or maybe two sittings spanning a few hours. i asked to borrow it, and in my third reading i think i've found the reading spark i needed.

in about an hour today i've already "read" 71 pages; i use the word read hesitantly, because it almost doesn't seem like reading. it's like having a conversation with someone you find endlessly interesting, who you'd listen to talk for hours on end without hoping to get a word in yourself and be pretty okay with it.

if i could write a book, in a perfect world it would sound just like "killing yourself to live," though if i ever attempted to mimic klosterman i would fail, as i am neither as witty or clever as he. that and i have yet to adopt an affinity for adverbs like "soul-crushingly."

if you are unfamiliar, "killing yourself to live" is klosterman's documentation of a roadtrip he took a few years ago working as a staff writer for Spin Magazine. He spent a few weeks and covered over 6500 miles visiting places in america where famous musicians had died. though this propels the plot and gives us a reason for following him on this epic trip, it's not really the most interesting part of the book.

klosterman gets away with, if not succeeds at making interesting, what every writer secretly wants to do - talk about themselves to a captive audience. i probably know more about chuck klosterman than some of the people i actually know in real life that i count among my friends. and though it seems like that would be maybe the most boring book ever, it's not.

so i'll probably tear through it and you should, too. and if you ever get the chance to see mr. klosterman read at a major book retailer in your hometown, don't forget to bring your copy of his book to autograph.

(what were we thinking?)

people you (want to) know go to chateau

2008-03-24T15:40:00.002-04:00

the great thing about the czech republic is that it's completely acceptable to go to the bar on major holidays. in fact i think it's encouraged.

after a few minutes of confusion caused by the changing of the clocks (apparently it's next week), anna and i got back an hour we thought we'd lost. we decided to take advantage and see what our friends were up to.

turns out we don't have many friends, or they were just not up to anything. until marie and amanda agreed to meet us at chateau. almost simultaneously, anna and lori's italian friend stephano agreed to meet us there as well.

so on a blustery (american) easter evening (the czech's traditionally observe a non-religious holiday on the monday after easter), we set out with the goal to maybe get tipsy but definitely end up at mcdonald's when the night was through, regardless of inebriation levels.

chateau is one of those places that you either love or hate. it's full name is "chateau l'enfer rouge" and, as the italians later explained, the upstairs is considered the "chateau" and downstairs considred "l'enfer rouge" or "the red hell." which is about right. it's always crowded with expats. upstairs it's your typical college-type bar. order drinks at the bar, try to find a table but usually end up standing, get hit on by random drunk dudes.

our first encounter, minutes after we got our beers, was with mitch. it went like this:

"hey, do you speak english?"
"yeah."
"cool! are you american?"
"yes."
"awesome! it's great to see some friendly american faces."
"yeah. how long have you been in prague?"
"oh, two days."

apparently mitch just couldn't stand being away from his countrymen. we talked to him for a few minutes before he was distracted by a phone call and never returned (guess we're pretty charming). we learned that he and his friends chose prague for spring break because "it's cheap - not on the euro."

next was the one-two punch of a guy from nigeria whose name i didn't catch and gary from kent, england. i got stuck with gary, who spent the whole conversation using his witty, biting sarcasm to make feel inadequate. two tidbits:

"where are you from?"
"england." (said like it's something that should be obvious.)
"yeah but where at?"
"kent. do you know where that is?"
"no, not exactly."
rolls his eyes.

like my brain has a world atlas built in? imagine if i asked him if he knew where scranton was. goodluck with that one, dude.

gary is a med student, five years in, so like most longtime residents of prague, he's bitter about almost anything. he "hates chateau" and "got dragged out." but then he named the bars he preferred - m1, bombay, harley's -- which are all just like chateau, as in they're crowded and full of expats.

"do you like tretter's?" (note: it's a swanky cocktail bar.)
"no, a little too fancy for me."
"oh, so you're one of those down to earth girls?"
what do you say to that? "uh, i guess..."
"i know. this whole red hooded sweatshirt thing is a facade."

i explained that yeah, i'm really high maintenance, i just dress in a sweatshirt and ripped jeans to go to the bar to throw everyone for a loop. i then explained that we were going to find our friends.

"so i'll see you in ten minutes, right?"

which is true. you really can't avoid anyone in chateau. on any given night, everyone you don't really want to run into in prague is at chateau. we ran into one of my coworker's russian friends, lori and anna's ex-roommate john (who is probably not too happy with the way things ended), and "tefl jen," a former teacher trainer at TEFL worldwide who's scathing lesson observation assessments left a bad taste in our mouths.

all in all though, chateau is not as bad as i used to think. you actually end up talking to people (even though they might be creepy dudes) as opposed to sitting around a table with people you already know, which is a nice change of pace.

on the way home we stopped at mcdonalds. to anna's dismay, you cannot order a swiss king sandwich (which includes bacon AND a slab of fried cheese). as we were enjoying our food, we watched a group of 19 year old brits get kicked out for being too belligerent. considering it's a 24 hour mcdonald's in wenceslas square - probably one of the more difficult places in the world to be ejected from - being tossed out was quite an accomplishment for them.

anyway, happy easter!

an evening at the movies

2008-03-23T11:48:00.002-04:00

isn't it always the way that just as you're feeling pretty good about living in europe, you get thrown a curveball deep from the heart of america.

the preview was in czech but that theme song was impossible to mistake.

new indiana jones movie!

i literally gasped.

i have not anticipated a movie so anxiously since my friends and i stuffed ourselves into a packed theater to see a midnight showing of lord of the rings: return of the king.

(i need to get a hobby.)

someone got too high in amsterdam

2008-03-22T06:44:00.002-04:00

so, i don't make a habit of smoking pot.

every once in a while i'll get into the spirit. last february i purchased my first and only eighth from one of my coworkers. i suppose i'll leave out names in case my partner in crime doesn't want his or her illegal activities published on the interwebs, but my "friend" and i decided to smoke one evening in my apartment.

there's nothing more hilarious than watching two people who've never smoked on their own before figure out how to do it it. i ended up balancing my cell phone on my shoulder while my (three-years) younger brother instructed me, step-by-step, how to roll a joint. so much for being the older, wiser sister.

after crouching on my bed near open window, wondering aloud if i was "doing it right," we got high. and then i layed on my bed ate two or three bags of microwave popcorn while my concomitant sat in the other room, typing furiously at the computer. at least i think so - i couldn't be bothered to find out. i was too busy thinking thoughts like "this popcorn makes different sounds depending on which teeth i chew it with."

and that was the last time i was high. i avoid it, mostly to avoid the embarassment that comes with being the newbie. i always need coached, or need someone else to light the bong while i try to coordinate inhaling with releasing my finger from the little hold, or whatever it is you're supposed to do.

but this weekend, in amsterdam, i figured... when in rome, right?

the six of us collected at a coffeeshop at about 8:30 saturday night. we parked ourselves at a table where two dutch were already seated, and they passed us what appeared to be a community bong. identifying that as an option with questionalbe safety, we purchased a joint.

leading up to this, i desperately wanted to eat some sort of muffin as opposed to smoke. i figured i could get high while avoiding the inevitable embarassment of attempting to smoke. the coffeeshop was out, so i settled for the joint being passed around.

i took a few hits and after 10 minutes or so hadn't felt anything. something seemed amiss. so in my crucial mistake of the night, i spoke up and confessed "i don't think i'm doing this right."

then came the onslaught of coaching. exhale first! hold it in! if you breathe out smoke, it worked! it was nice, i suppose - i didn't feel embarassed. in fact i felt emboldened. so when someone suggested i take an extra hit or two "just to be safe," i did.

the next thing i remember, i was outside. still sitting on my chair, exactly as before, all my friends circled around me in what seemed like the same order they'd been sitting in seconds before. it seemed like someone had rolled up the background of inside like a classroom map and rolled down one with a picture of the outside in its place. a bleach-blond gentleman whom i'd never met was handing me three huge, white tablets.

"eat these, they'll make you feel better."

isn't that what guys say to girls just before they try to date rape them?

at first, no one would really tell me what was going on. just that everything was okay and that i should eat the tablets. sugar tablets, apparently, not giant roofies. so i started sucking on one and it made me feel terrible. i was hot but the blond gentleman insisted that i put a jacket on.

so here's what happened (as i was told): i remember all of a sudden feeling very high. i wanted to get up to use the bathroom but thought pretty confidently that i wouldn't be able to walk the 5 feet between there and my seat. i leaned my head on my hand, which drew the attention of my friends (as i seemed to be lapsing into my usual state when under the influence of any sort of drug - sleepiness.) as i listened to pleas to "make it a happy high," i tried to comply but instead fainted.

apparently i went forward first, putting my forehead on the table, arms dangling at my sides. my friends thought i was joking, and the friend to my right nudged me so as to persuade me to sit up. i did, but not on purpose - and slumped back in my chair, mouth open, eyes closed, white as a sheet. that's when everyone panicked.

my five friends went five directions to seek help, and finally the bartender (the nice bleach blond gentleman with the pills) picked me up, chair and all, and took me outside. i was out for about four minutes.

so my fears of looking like a novice were verified. i got so high that my blood sugar dropped (something that allegedly happens quite often, even to large men with much more body mass than me), and i passed out in a coffee shop in amsterdam, the smoking capital of the world.

enough to make me not want to smoke for quite a while. that, and the terrible four hours i spent coming down from that high, of which about fifteen minutes were pleasant. i was in "funny" high mode, sitting in my chair outside the coffeeshop, wrapped in my coat and someone else's pashmina, from about 9:30 to 9:45. i was fed crackers, trying to muster up enough confidence in the ability of my legs to hold my weight, and for that time it was fun.

i convinced my friends that if the cracker was too small, i shouldn't eat it because i would bite my fingers off. "teeth are sharp," i told them. then i described the scene from batman where the penguin bites off someones nose.

"like mike tyson and evander holyfield," someone added.

"yeah! hey, if mike tyson had a mini-me, its name would be "tyke myson," i said.

so after nearly scaring everyone to death, at least i was able to entertain them nonsensical statements about popular culture. and smart ass remarks.

"hey," i said to the bartender, "do you think if i bit my fingers off, that would raise my blood sugar?"

amsterdam

2008-03-21T18:37:00.002-04:00

amsterdam was wonderful. i expected it to be dirty and seedy and altogether uninhabitable, but it was the opposite. it's clean. it's cozy. the people are in good spirits and ride bikes everywhere. and, dutch is way easier than czech.

we were on approximately hour 1.5 of our bike tour when i realized that i could probably live in amsterdam forever. i can't put my finger on why, just like i can't picture why i liked boston so much when i first visited, but it might have had to do with the weather.

it's unfortunate that opinions of places have to do with something so uncontrollable, but if it's pleasant outside (60-70 degrees F) it seems to be perfect weather to fall in love with a place.

since i've been back to prague i've been trying to find a way to move to amsterdam. it's almost impossible to teach english there (because most of the dutch speak better english than i do), but "mike" of mike's bike tours told us that holland and the US have some sort of agreement where they will grant visas as long as you invest a certain amount of money each year into a business (the figure is around $5000).

so i'm thinking, the dangling conversation in amsterdam? sounds perfect. plus i think in the two days i was in amsterdam i learned more dutch than i've learned czech in the 7 months i've been in prague.

so lace up your wooden shoes, let's move to holland.

conversation with pete

2008-03-12T16:57:00.002-04:00

so pete and i are chatting about ancient drama, nothing worth going into, but it brought up an interesting question. i guess it's almost a trite topic to debate but i've been thinking about it lately. how well do you really know someone?

my argument is that no matter what you think you know about someone, you don't ever really know them - you know what they let you know. despite hours of conversation, deep secrets revealed, the ability to complete sentences, it could be only a slice of the pie that they've carefully chosen to reveal.

i mean, think about it - is there anyone who knows every single about you? your best friend, your boy/girlfriend, your brother or sister, your parents? i doubt it. and if there is, it's because you let them, you chose to tell them everything.

how can you ever be sure what percentage you're getting? what criteria allow you to sleep at night? is it "oh, they are my best friend, they wouldn't hide anything from me." or "we've been dating for a year and a half. he's not that kind of person, she would never lie to me, blah blah blah..."

i think you'd be surprised. and isn't it just when you think you've got someone pegged, they slip up and allow one of the things they've chosen to bury surface?

the opposite argument, from pete: "all secrets stink. and eventually they all rise."

i'm not sure. flip through all the files in your head of the things you know about the people around you. then think about what they know about you. think the files are complete?

do you think you know what you're getting yourself into?

donald ducking it* and other things not to do on a street of curtainless windows

2008-03-09T15:23:00.002-04:00

i now live in an apartment on the second floor of a five-story apartment building whose living room picture windows face the bedroom and living room windows of another five-story apartment building across the street. this is the first time i've lived in such a large buildling and one in which all the windows face out to the street.

and the best part is, no one closes their curtains, so in lieu of television (which we don't have), one can be entertained by the goings-on of the across-the-street neighbors.

it's kind of cool. these people's day-to-day activities range from the relatively normal to the quite strange. normal: the other day an older woman wearing a hot pink shirt leaned out her window in the morning to greet the day. today, a man two-windows up mopped his hardwood floors. strange: from a window on the fifth floor earlier this evening, every few minutes, a few bright camera flashes. we couldn't see any sort of photo shoot set-up - so either someone's taking mystery pictures or attempting to fix a broken strobe light.

but it's a double-edged sword. i reazlied only a few days ago, just after a shower, that if i can see into all my neighbors windows they can also see into mine. someone has probably been getting a free show for a week and a half.

i wonder what the neighbors think of us? if they spend any time gazing into our windows, they probably just see three girls glued to their computers. sometimes its hard to pull yourself away from online scrabble.

*"donald ducking it," to those unfamiliar, is wearing a shirt but no garment on the lower half of the body, like donald duck. the style is almost always completely awkward and therefore not advised.

i'd follow you down but not that far

2008-03-08T08:02:00.000-05:00

in an effort to counteract itune's trenchant attack on my ability to withstand repetition, i've decided to bombard it with new music. by mathematical odds, if i put enough songs that are a.) good and b.) new, itunes will be forced to stop playing the crap it usually plays.

today, as a law-abiding "internetizen" (a portmanteau of internet + citizen! I'M CLEVER.), among other downloads, i fairly exchanged 11.28 American Dollars for the privilege of listening to and burning up to ten times "20th century masters: the millenium collection: gin blossums."

this brings up a few issues. first of all, from what i could surmise on itunes, the gin blossums had one album. but guess how many greatest hits albums they had? no less than two. is it me or does this seem a bit out of proportion?

but anyway, who doesn't love the gin blossums? there are at least six excellent songs out of eleven, that among these:

hey jealousy
follow you down
til i hear it from you
allison road
found out about you
until i fall away

ALL of those songs are amazing. and you have to figure, for a band that only put on one or maybe two albums, to have six hits is some pretty excellent batting.

i love the gin blossums for one reason only, the same reason the two-disc "buzz" compilation album is one of my favorites: nostalgia. the ages of about 10-15 or 16, for whatever reason, were the most impressionable on me as far as music goes. the gin blossums feel like the mid-nineties, and the mid-nineties were when i was "growing up." which means the gin blossums feel like growing up. they will always be perfect.

so i'm going to go rock out and try to rage against the party shuffle. fun game: see if you can spot the place in this entry that is influenced by the language style of the declaration of independence!

PEACE.

itunes party shuffle sucks ass

2008-03-04T16:14:00.003-05:00

lovely language skills in the title, i know. but who else is fed up with party shuffle?

almost everyone i know that listens to digital music and owns a computer has itunes, and everyone i know that has itunes HATES party shuffle.

i want to like party shuffle. i do. sometimes i can't decide on a particular artist to focus my ears on, and i'd like someone else to do that work for me. or i realize that as a music listener i am very predictable - i listen to probably the same 100 or so songs all the time. honestly, sometimes i'll hear a song play on my computer and actually think "where the hell did THAT come from?" so the party shuffle is a good way of brushing the dust off the songs that are good but most of the time forgotten.

but it's crap, and here's why: it plays the same songs all the time, too. i have almost 3000 songs and i swear i hear the same ones all the time. yes, i know that the best of frank sinatra is a 2-disc set so maybe i am asking for it, but how is it that in the list of 100 upcoming random songs, there are ALWAYS six or seven from old blue eyes? i don't see how it's mathematically possible.

alicia often utilized her party shuffle feature, and i swear that all we ever listened to was the song "we look like giants" by death cab for cutie. look it up and i bet it's in her top played list. it has to be. that, and madonna. everytime you turn around you're hearing that "this used to be my playground..." song.

so what's the problem? i checked my preferences to see if i had any funny settings checked accidentally, like "play more annoying songs constantly," or "i LOVE vertical horizon, play them 1000 times a day please." (okay, i'll admit that if that box actually existed, i'd check it.)

you can select "play higher rated songs more often," but i don't have this checked and i only have one rated song ("livin on the edge," aerosmith. 5 stars. why?). you can also adjust how "random" your random shuffle is - it can be more likely or less likely to play your favorite songs. mine is set right at the middle on "random." so, theoretically, every song should have the opportunity to be played, right?

not quite. apparently, party shuffle isn't random in the sense that each song has equal odds of getting played. the shuffle function on the ipod chooses songs by an alogrithm that uses no replacement - meaning that every song will be played, to the end of the entire library, before any are repeated (like choosing cards from a deck until it's gone.) however, the party shuffle feature works WITH replacement, meaning each time a song is played, when it's finished it is tossed back into the pot, with equal chances of being chosen again as a song that hasn't been played. so the party shuffle is only random so far as the number of upcoming songs you choose to show.

likely story. i think apple is lying. even with replacement, it seems like with songs numbering in the thousands, artist repeats would be sparse.

we're thinking either a.) this "randomness" is a lie. apple is actually, without telling you, trying to figure out which songs you play often and bringing you into a self-perpetuating loop by playing those most-often-played songs more often. sooner or later you'll be sitting motionless at your desk, eyes glazed over and fixed at a crack in the wall, drooling, thinking only "how the HELL did i end up with the backstreet boys on my computer, and will i have to listen to only "i want it that way," for the rest of eternity?

or maybe any even slimier scheme - a conspiracy with certain artists to write code that plays their songs more often.

jocelyn's thoughts:

"i don't mind so much hearing fall out boy all the time, but my party shuffle really doesn't need to be playing the RENT soundtrack all the time. it gets a little embarrassing."

so yeah, i'm not the only one who feels like something is up. if you can shed some light on the party shuffle mystery, please do. until then i'll be listening to "we look like giants," until i forget my name.

a few words on the death of myron cope

2008-03-01T13:53:00.004-05:00

at two points this morning i was describing the intricacies of the pittsburgh patois to my less yinzer prague friends. i think a while back we all discussed the fact that none of us seem to have regional accents, although apparently i say the word "potraviny*" a little funny because on several occasions it has led to these discussions on "pittsburghese." it's difficult, when put on the spot, for me to explain the differences (though when i'm drunk i'm quite fluent in pittsburghese).

i realized i could have just pointed to the apotheosis of the "yinzer," myron cope.

myron cope passed away last wednesday, february 27th. the four known regular readers of this blog run the gamut from those who are quite familiar with myron cope (alicia), those who have felt his influence, if only subconsciously (debbie, lori) to those who would not know a terrible towel if it smacked them in the face (nick).

here is the pittsburgh post-gazette's, in my opinion quite well-written, obituary for mr. cope:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08058/860750-13.stm.

so now we're all on the same page.

myron cope is synonomous with the pittsburgh steelers. he's their voice (a nasaly, scrappy southwestern pennsylvania yowl), he invented the "terrible towel" (which, if you're unfamiliar, is a bright gold tea-towel meant to be waved in a helicopter style, making a circular motion with the wrist, above one's head in order to show appreciation for a good play to rouse the excitement of players and fellow fans. it's nearly impossible to imagine a steelers' game without the sea of gold they create). he coined the term "immaculate reception," for the best-known play in steelers' history. before he retired in 2005, it was common practice for many to turn down the sound on the TV broadcast for the game and turn up cope's show on WDVE**.

if you're a steelers fan, i challenge you to imagine steelers football without myron cope; it can't be done.

his death has got me thinking about a few things. first, his accent, as i've already said. quintessentially pittsburgh in a time when regional accents like ours are becoming more scarce. and he's added quite the roster of terms to our vocabulary, most notably "yoi" and "double yoi." (i mentioned mike lange below; pittsburgh has been blessed with very linguistically influential broadcasters.)

secondly, at the city's memorial service for mr. cope, fans outside the city-county building downtown waved terrible towels and chanted some of his catchphrases. this sounds like the most ideal funeral service ever. even during a moment of silence, the towels were still waving.

third, it got me thinking about the vicissitudes of a sports town. i began watching football when i was about 9, so you can say i've been a fan for the better part of fifteen years. the steelers franchise has quite a penchant for stability; in all my years of watching football, we had the same coach, bill cowher. last year he was gone. now with someone as important to the idea of steelers football as myron cope to be gone, it makes it a little more apparent that we're entering a new "era."

i haven't been watching long enough to remember a different era of steelers football, like those who are old enough to remember the steelers of the 70s. but i'd imagine it's going to be quite strange. i don't know how someone remains a fan of a team for so long without being very sad about their nostalgic feelings for bygone eras of that team. i can't imagine how weird it would be for someone who had listened to his broadcasts to suddenly hear someone else's voice calling out plays.

for the meantime, cope's influence on the steelers and pittsburgh won't change. but someday it will. the things we associate with the steelers will be completely different. i know it might sound stupid, like it's just a sport, but i think anyone who has a hometown team can understand what a huge part of a city's culture its sports teams are. i'm reaching the point where i can start to remember a time when things were different, and that's odd. i suppose at this age that starts to happen with a lot of other things.

anyway. my last point about myron cope is this: what a wonderful time to be in pittsburgh. sad, yes, but one of my favorite things about pittsburgh is the camaraderie. pittsburghers have a way of pulling together in times of happiness and equally in times of sadness. i think that's really important in a hometown and it's absence is something that makes prague feel a bit empty. i'm not sure if i can quite put it into words, but i've never felt more at home than the celebration after the steelers' superbowl win in 2006. i've also never felt more at home than standing on the sidewalk, with a bunch of strangers, watching our new mayor bob o'connor's funeral procession slide down grant street last september.

this was a bit rambling, but the point is: he'll be missed.

"bye now!"

*potraviny in czech means food or groceries, although i think it has taken on the colloquial meaning of "grocer's." basically, there are hundreds of small convenience stores in prague and they usually list on their signs what they provide: cigarettes, alcohol, drinks, fruits, vegetables, etc. i'm no expert but i think groceries, or "potraviny" has become the umbrella term for all these offerings and therefore appears on most if not all convenience store signs. i don't know if czech speakers refer to them this way, but us english speakers with a dearth of czech knowledge use it as a noun to mean "convenience store."

**is this common practice in any other major sports market? because not only is it done for steelers games to hear cope's show, i know many penguins fans who will tune into mike lange's radio broadcast instead of listening to the announcers on TV. no one watches pirates games on TV, so to my knowledge there is no baseball equivalent.

i love brussel sprouts and other europe revelations

2008-02-29T07:04:00.003-05:00

living in europe has caused me to do a lot of things i never considered before. for instance, drinking tea when one is not sick. drinking alone (not tea.) using applicator-less tampons.

i've become a lot more lax in the frequency of taking showers; chances are, if you've skipped one you are still nowhere near as redolent as the better part of the czech population riding the metro on that given day.

today for lunch at school we had "kureci maso" or if you're anglophilic, "chicken meat," rice with veggies mixed in and some sort of gravy sauce. as i was picking through my rice, i saw it: and i panicked. a brussel sprout.

i have never in my life eaten a brussel sprout; in fact, it is the only food i've have been cultured to fear. that's a lie, there's two: brussel sprouts and liver and onions. everyone i've ever met who has had these two foods finds them disgusting. my dad hated brussel sprouts, so we never had them at home, and after i "grew up" it never occurred to me to try them because i was sure i'd hate them.

apparently i was all worked up for nothing because they taste exactly as they look: like tiny balls of lettuce.

i was wondering today what changes my friends at home might notice after not having seen me for almost a year. i don't think i've changed much, but i probably have. maybe i will be out of touch with pittsburgh when i return.

you know, beyond smelling a little funky and having a newfound love for ostracized vegetables.

got nothing to do today but smile

2008-02-24T07:56:00.002-05:00

i had quite a biting rant prepared on becoming legally employed in the EU (which i'm certain will resurface at some point, probably this week when lucka finds yet another way to delay my application for a work permit), but i suddenly find myself devoid of all negative feeling.

this sunday afternoon, february 23, 2008, it is 61 degrees farenheit in prague, which almost certainly has to be a lie - i would put it at at least 70 degrees. it's by far the warmest and most pleasant day i can remember since i've been here. almost immediately upon our arrival in september it was cold, chilly and rainy everyday and it only got colder.

it hasn't exactly been a cold winter, but it's been cold enough. (apparently, this october and november were colder on average than december and january were. one of my students told me this and i can't really be bothered to look it up; just take my word that its more or less true). the two times i can actually remember thinking "boy it is fucking cold" were the week leading up to and surrounding christmas, and last week.

otherwise it's been positively balmy.

i was on my way to use the internet at jama. i made it a few blocks down krizikova and realized i had left our windows open and thought it might be prudent, given the robbery a few weeks back, to close them. on my way i figured, why not try the internet in the park?

which has led to the greatest idea i've had in weeks, though not really revolutionary -- get a beer at the potraviny and use the internet in the park. lovely!

i don't think i've been in a better mood in weeks. there are kids rollerblading, people are out on balconies. i walked over to the park on the other side of our apartment building to give the internet a whirl there, and on my way back i almost said out loud "FUCK i'm hot." in a sweatshirt. it's wonderful.

this is my favorite day of the year. almost no one is in a bad mood on the first really warm day. march is probably going to end up being a bitch, but today (and this week at least), you can get a beer, drink it outside (no open container laws! what a utopia the czech republic is) and not really be mad or upset about anything. wonderful.

and meanwhile, it's 15 degrees and snowy in pittsburgh! haha.

if you want a show, just let me know and i'll sing in your ear again*

2008-02-20T06:34:00.004-05:00

you know what's embarassing? crying on an airport shuttle bus. because there's no way to hide it, really. shuttles are always crowded and the seats are arranged in such a way that you are forced to face your copassengers. so no matter what you do, they know you are crying. and crying people (especially crying people that are alone) don't do anything but make everyone else SUPER uncomfortable.

and they were probably all thinking, "seriously? who ACTUALLY cries at the airport?" then they look around to see if there are movie cameras and they've somehow unknowingly stumbled onto the set of a romantic comedy.

at least i made it out of the terminal. right? that would have been worse.

i don't really ever cry, so when i do i have no idea how to handle it. i suppose first i try to decide why exactly i'm crying. it's not because he's gone because that has happened before. maybe it's because last time, in the back of my mind, i knew i would see him again, and maybe this time i don't know that.

actually i think i was crying because life is just not fair. which sounds horribly childish. that is a lesson i have supposedly learned before, but maybe i hadn't.

it's not fair that i cannot legally work in europe. it's not fair that i spent an entire night trying to think of a way that i could but came up with nothing. it's not fair that relationships have to be decided by arbitrary things like geography. it's not fair that something like that makes it over before it starts. it's not fair that, because of airport security, you can no longer run to the gate to stop someone from boarding a plane. it's not fair that doing that probably wouldn't work anyway.

it's not fair that i couldn't think of something to say that could fix it.

and it's not fair that maybe that thing is not what he wanted anyway. it's not fair that the nonexistant fix-all might not actually fix all.

maybe i'm naive but i didn't think it worked this way. but maybe it does, and maybe that's the lesson.

so i was sitting in a seat, freezing, tired, hoping my phone would vibrate (but it didn't), crying like a child with a child's excuse for it. life's not fair.

i don't know how to conclude this, except to say that after i decided what i was crying about, i tried to think of something else in order to stop. there was a couple across the way who had just arrived from ireland and the woman had the most beautiful accent. so i listened for a while. but it just made it worse. somehow, listening to this woman say "wednesday" made me cry even more.

i wish i had an accent. life's not fair.

*this title is a line from "the drugs don't work," by the verve.

a short note about lists and my inability to properly utilize them

2008-02-17T10:41:00.003-05:00

my memory is slipping. lately i'll think of something good, maybe an idea for a blog or some place i want to travel, or i'll stumble on a word while i'm reading that i want to look up*, and i'll say to myself - i won't forget this one. how hard can it possibly be to remember that i want to look up "abseiling?"

pretty tough, apparently, because i just had to refer to notes to remember it. and that happens all the time now. if i don't write something down, it's even money that it'll be lost forever within 5-7 minutes. then it will occur to me later -- not what i wanted to remember, but in the form of that nervous, empty feeling you get when you realize you forgot something. then, usually, more energy than is proportional to the importance of the forgotten fact is used trying to remember it.

so i've resorted to making lists. my plan was to have several lists that are constantly updated, so i'll have one for "travel destinations" and one for "words to look up," another for "books i want to read," and maybe "blog ideas so nick stops whining about it not having been updated in a week."

the thing is, i'm crap at making lists! i get performance anxiety or something, i don't know, but when i sit down to write down all the things i've thought of, i suddenly can't remember them. then i end up with a list that is two items long or that ends up a lot more disappointing in quality than what i imagined it would be. (if you saw my "europe 2008 goals" list on the facebook you'll know what i mean.)

for instance, i wanted to start a list of "things i would like to see." obviously there are many but when i sat to write the list, all i could come up with was "space shuttle launch." (but, good one, right?).

i am also attempting to write for a friend a sort of "pittsburgh travel guide." i didn't know where to start really so i began making lists, neighborhood by neighborhood, of all the places i think someone visiting pittsburgh for the first time should see. now, pittsburgh is a place i like to think i know a good deal about, having lived there for 23 years. lord knows i can talk about it for hours. but when i sat to write this list, i got nowhere. all the places sounded lame and stupid, and it was rather short.

AND, even if i do get a successful list written, i don't use it! last week i made a shopping list of things i needed at tesco's (unnecessary possessive) and forgot to bring it. then, instead of going to tesco, i went to billa -- only to end up buying just ONE of the things on my list. fittingly i can't remember what else was on it now, but i walked out of the billa that day with only a bag of five ridiculously overpriced disposable pink razors.

i did make one quite good list today that i intend on using, and it is "blog ideas." however, my memory is already failing me on just what i meant by some of the list items. it is:

collections - ppl
itunes shuffle
immigrant (just one? and what about him/her?)
british eng.
the woods (rather unspecific!)
dealbreakers (okay i remember EXACTLY what i want to say about this one, actually)

and that was only about an hour ago. let's see what survives the night.

*my dictionary is being held hostage, and last night i found out USED, by drew and sergio! specifically "oh, i've been carrying it around in my bag. it's crap though. it's missing words."

in holland*, everyone is an expert in paintings and tulips

2008-02-09T13:29:00.001-05:00

prague is getting boring. not the city, i suppose (i love it here), but it's just falling into routine. maybe its the time of year or just the current state of my jobs, life, lack of hobbies, etc., but i feel like i'm entering a rut.

on the bright side, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. (what a terrible mixed metaphor)...lori, anna, debs and i are going to amsterdam for the weekend of march 14-16. this will be my first big trip since i've been in europe, which is pathetic and exciting all at once. i don't know what there's to do in amsterdam (other than the obvious, which we will be doing... use your imagination.)

i've decided that enough is enough, i'm going to start spending my money on travelling instead of whatever dumb shit i find to blow my paycheck on here in prague.

we're also pretty certainly going to dublin in june to see radiohead. the tickets are 53 pounds (i can't even make the pound symbol on my computer, thats how expensive they are). how do people in GB live? i have never spent that much on a concert, ever. i don't know if this is what you usually pay but JEEZ. that's around $120. out of control. however, i like radiohead, i want to see dublin, and this is a good excuse to waste that money, i suppose.

(however, i decided recently that i HATE going to concerts. it's always crowded and you don't get anywhere close to the stage. the opening bands are usually crap, unless you get lucky. and the band never plays the songs that everyone wants to hear, they play the songs from whichever album they're promoting, usually the newest. no one wants to hear that crap. so you stand there, barely able to see the band, getting bumped into by obnoxious teenagers, listening to songs you don't even want to hear. lame. dear radiohead, please play high and dry and will be forgiven.)

all other proceeds leftover from the next few months paychecks will be going to the "summer 2008 travelling fund." my educational obligations at both schools are over at the end of june. i want to ride on the trans-siberian railroad, hopefully to beijing (and coincidentally, the olympics will be there this summer... i wonder if that'll coincide?) i was originally planning to fly back to the states from there and be done with my year abroad, but now i'm not so sure.

in a perfect world, i'd like to travel for the two months remaining in the summer (july and august); then, either start a job in a new country (italy? i hope i hope i hope) or go home. i don't know if this is financially possible. i guess we'll see what falls off the truck.

i had this feeling that i needed to see as much as possible in my year in prague, but i suppose thats not true. i was dead set on only being here a year, but i'm not anymore. i'll have plenty of time to get where i want to go - no sense squishing it into 6 months. however, i'm still tired of wasting my weekends not doing much else other than reading, laying around, taking naps and cleaning.

*i thought amsterdam was in the netherlands, and i never realized until i was corrected yesterday that the netherlands and holland are the same place. although, not really - holland is a province IN the netherlands. but for 24 hours, i thought my 16 years of education had failed me at the most basic geography.
also, the title of this blog is from the book "the fall" by albert camus and hopefully i didn't remember it wrong.

adventures at tesco

2008-02-08T05:44:00.000-05:00

first of all, i guess tesco is an english company, right? so i was perusing deb's copy of "notes from a small island," by bill bryson, which i had already read but discovered that she had a different copy of which included a glossary of words that might be unfamiliar to a speaker of american english. for example, i learned that a "cornet" is an ice cream cone. but anyway, i saw tesco in the glossary. obviously i knew what it was because they are all over prague. however, in bryson's glossary it was listed as "Tesco's." that leads me to wonder - do certain dialects of british english feature the unnecessary addition of a posessive? or was it just a mistake on bryson's part? because i thought this was a characteristic of western pennsylvanian american english. almost everyone, especially older citizens of the area, add the "'s" to the proper names of certain stores, bars, etc. for instance the drugstore chain "Eckerd's" or "Buckhead's" instead of buckhead saloon. i will have to do some research on this.

ANYWAY, it amazes me how easily tesco can successfully manipulate consumers. as i was walking from the entrance to the toiletries area, i noticed a display in the middle of the main aisle. the "middle of the aisle," in case you didn't know, is the place where they put the most worthless items on sale. the good sales -- you have to search for those. they remain hidden deep in the aisles of their respective items.

this week's sale was for random household items -- tools and the like. bungee cords, wrenches, huge rolls of packing tape, scissors. that kind of shit. things you don't realize you need until they're right in front of your face for 30% off. i even found myself slowing down... yeah, maybe i do need 24 AAA batteries. but what would i ever do with that many batteries? i don't have the luxury of owning many battery-powered items. i noticed a lady finely inspecting a yellow, plastic flashlight. someone else carrying an armful of clear tape. things they all probably didn't need until they unsuspectingly stumbled on this sale display.

why does this work so well? and why are the things i need not displayed so prominently? just once i'd like to walk into tesco and see facewash! bubble-wrap lined mailing envelopes! paper towels! right in front of me. (where the HELL are the paper towels in the narodni trida tesco anyway? they're not with the household cleaning supplies, and not with the toilet paper. WTF.)

instead i spent a half an hour combing the shelves to ensure i didn't put foot cream on my face.

superbowl

2008-02-04T13:36:00.001-05:00

THE PATRIOTS LOST THE SUPERBOWL. there is a god.

i don't have anything else to say.

(PS. i only write about football and trams. sorry. i have a good one for tomorrow...)

random thoughts, tramspotting part 2

2008-02-03T12:02:00.000-05:00

first off, the superbowl is going to be boring.

i hope the giants can pull something out. if they don't, it'll be the most boring superbowl and the most boring NFL season in recent history. also, i really intensely dislike the patriots (if you haven't picked up on that yet).

enough.

i don't know how, but the arrival times of trams are scheduled in just such a way so as to encourage excessive eating. espcially sunday nights. you get there, you've got about 13-16 minutes because you just missed the last 24. so you're standing around, and it's kinda cold, and the natural thought process is... there's a perfectly good KFC down the block, i've got all this time... it'd be a shame not to take advantage, right? then you end up with a bag full of greasy chicken and fries and sub-par coleslaw* that you weren't even hungry for in the first place. but it wastes the time.

they also conveniently placed a sausage stand right near the main night tram stop in wenceslas square. cunning business sense.

also, i've been considering when it is appropriate to run for the tram/metro.
(it's always okay to run for a bus. they are unpredictable.)

i'd say the following:
ALWAYS run for the 24. it's like the haley's comet of trams.
NEVER run for the metro on the red line. especially in the morning. seriously, if you can't be 45 seconds later than you already are... you either work for a despot or you're life is in shambles.
IF you can hear the metro coming, it's okay to run for it.

at the Urxova stop near my house, i consider it worth running if i'm about a block back from the main street. based on my calculations involving speed and wind resistance, and amount of time it takes the tram to approach the stop and for all passengers to board and deboard, i can usually make it from there. any farther back is just heartbreaking... you want to run, but you know you won't make it.

as you can see, i'm rather giddy with the situation of having a stellar public transport system.

*oddly, all the McDonald's in Prague are far superior in quality to those in the States, but the KFC's are dismal. the food is terrible. it was some of the worst coleslaw i've had too, by the way. my little personal plastic bowl serving had to have contained an entire clove of garlic.

the dangling conversation

2008-02-01T06:42:00.001-05:00

so, i just spent some time backreading lori's blog (a life in the present, link to the right). among her excellent entries was one, an echo of her blog's title, that focused on her fear that she is wasting away the present by looking too hard at the future. i, and i think a lot of other people in my demographic, have spent of time recently (yesterday, the last few weeks, months, years) trying to answer two questions:

a. what am i doing now? and
b. what am i doing next?
-(and as a subquestion to b, how will what i'm doing now help me do what i want to do next?)

i wrote recently about not knowing what i want to do next and being quite happy about it, which is still true. it's really refreshing not to have to think about everything as interconnected steps to achieve some greater goal. i also don't really have a reason for a. either. at first i was here because it might look good on a graduate school application. also because i wanted to try something different, i suppose i felt that i had wrung pittsburgh dry.

those are not really true anymore. i still want to go to grad school, but for what? who knows. and being here for five months has made me realize i'm not really tired of pittsburgh; on the contrary, i love it even more. prague is just a different place; teaching is just something to make money so i can be happy, here, and when i'm not happy anymore, i'll leave. i'll go back home or i'll go to washington dc or i'll go somewhere else. why i'm there, and how being there will factor into what i want to do next, won't really matter.

i suppose i'm here because i can, i've been given the opportunity, and that's it. i'm lucky to have had the resources to pick up and move to a new country, i was lucky get an education and to be raised to expect these sorts of priveleges, not just to hope for them. whenever i think about missing home, or not wanting to be here, or wondering why i came in the first place, i just think about my mom. when she left me at the security line at pittsburgh international she started crying harder than i've ever seen and told me "i'm so proud of you." i haven't done anything particularly impressive in my life, but i know she's proud because i've done things that she was never given the opportunity to do, or maybe things that she never thought she could do (even though she probably could).

obviously, i don't know what it was like to be her, growing up, but i'd imagine she was caught in between what women were supposed to do in the past, and what they can do now. she finished high school and lived with her parents until she met and married my father, when she moved into his ("their") home. she had children and was a stay at home mom until that could no longer pay the bills. she didn't get to go to college, she didn't get to have an apartment and live on her own. she's barely been out of pennsylvania, let alone abroad; i don't even think she has a passport. i think it's a typical case of wanting more for your children than you had for yourself, though i think my mom was intensely lucky. she is in love with someone who loves her, she is one of the most loving and compassionate people i know. i can't really think of the right words to describe her.

so when i want to complain about not knowing what to do with my life, i think about my mom and that she is proud of me for just being here. which is something that, when i think about it, makes it a lot easier for me to "just be here."

which was quite a long way to lead me to the title of this blog, which is "the dangling conversation." it is a simon and garfunkel song, but it is also the would-be name of a restaurant i'd like to open someday, theoretically in pittsburgh but i'm open. i don't know exactly what i want it to be, yet, but i pick up things as i go; i want it to be a decoupage of things i've seen from places i've been. it started with crossword puzzle placemats on the tables. i think i want to decorate it with maps. i have one sandwich name so far, "the stinkin' lincoln." it involves onions. also, i "borrow" ideas, such as the way the bathrooms are decorated in meduza. there are old tiles from the floor to halfway up the wall; then an uneven frieze of jewels and seashells in some sort of cement or putty or something. anyway, at some point i'll put all these things into this perfect little place, the dangling conversation.

i used to think i needed to do something really "great," like be a famous writer or a scholar or something, and that owning a restaurant in pittsburgh was not that. however, i think i was wrong, and i think thats why i've spent a lot of my formative/adult years unhappy. i've been searching for my thing to be "great" at, and i've been frustrated because i'm not finding it. but i think i could be happy with the dangling conversation, or just being here in prague not really doing anything. which, and this might sound terrible -- is somewhat of a relief.

tramspotting

2008-01-29T15:09:00.001-05:00

some thoughts on the trams:

1. i really want to steal one of the routemaps. they put up new ones at the turn of the year and they are sweet. i have an affinity for maps. they are something i collect from places i go instead of souvenirs or postcards or what have you. however, i'm getting bored with the typical mass-produced city plans that you find most often. the new tram maps include not only the metro lines but all the tram and bus routes, and in full technicolor no less! debs and i decided the primetime to steal would be sunday afternoon. the night tram, ostensibly the best option for theft, is actually bad because it's usually crammed full of people. (crammed tram. ha.) i was inspecting the signs today and they seem as though they could be easily slid from behind their protective plastic display. i want one before i leave.

(setting goals is important.)

2. the hierarchy of tram seating is really getting on my nerves. back in america, where things make sense, the young give up their seats for the old and men usually give up their seats for women. that's not how it works in prague! countless times have i been pushed aside by a young, able-bodied gentleman in a race for the last empty seat.

here's how i think it should go. if there's one seat left, it should go in this order:
a. old woman with a cane
b. old man with a cane
c. old woman, clearly no longer at physical peak but lacking cane
d. old man, ditto
e. pregnant woman
f. person from age of young-adult to middle-age with a minor injury, ie a broken leg requiring the use of crutches
g. anyone holding more than a half-full bag of groceries
h. mother with young child
i. couple sharing a seat

aside:
i once had a cursory dicussion as part of a "couple sharing a seat" about this hierarchy.

"let's do the couple sharing a seat. that way we don't have to get up."
"who do we supercede?"
"um, i think single men."

however, i think that since the couples are exercising efficiency by taking up only one seat instead of two, they should be rewarded and be allowed to supercede any single rider.

j. able-bodied woman
k. any child
l. able-bodied man

men have much less regard for chivalry here, i've noticed. i know a lot of women are feminists nowadays and insist that chivalry is actually condescending, but i disagree. after centuries of patriarchal society, i think you can manage to open a door for us. or give up your seat. i don't think it's an unreasonable exhange.

3. they should invent a tram route that goes through the tunnel from karlin to zizkov. it would make my life 100% easier.

....and then i found $5. sorry, i'm bored and i've got nothing.

slaveryblog

2008-01-28T14:51:00.000-05:00

i've been put in the position of defending my country and my american citizenship countless times since i've been to prague. for the most part, i hate it -- i've never had so many people say completely rude things to me only seconds of cordial introductions. i understand that we are not the most popular of the world's citizens, but give me a break. that doesn't excuse you being rude to someone you don't even know. it's not like i meet a german person and the second sentence out of my mouth is "so, how about that time hitler killed all those jews?"

i can explain myself out of the barbs thrown by most. however, today, i was totally caught off guard.

i had some time this morning and found myself browsing in the bookstore. i saw a copy of "the adventures of huckleberry finn," and since it was only 97 crowns and it's one of those books i've been meaning to read for a while, i bought it.

i had it with me in the herna today, just sitting on the table. late in the afternoon, one of the girls from the fourth class, patty, asked me about it.

"what's it about?"

"well.. it's about a boy named huck finn, who runs away from home. he meets jim, a runaway slave..."

"what's a slave?"

"um."

try explaining several centuries of racial opression to a ten year old. i think i came up with "well, in the 1700s we brought people from Africa over to work on big farms."

i didn't quite finish and she said "ohhhh." like, ohhh, yeah, i know about that egregious violation of human rights carried out by your country. i just needed a refresher.

that was maybe the most awkward i've ever felt in a conversation. mostly because she was so young and i didn't want her first impressions of america to be george bush and books about racism. and how do you make it clear to someone who barely speaks english that we're not all a bunch of cunts?

where were you...

2008-01-25T12:24:00.000-05:00

alicia just read, and i have recently started reading, a book called "whatever love means." it was given to me by a certain english acquaintance of mine. i don't remember what i thought at first, but the other day when alicia picked it up to read, i read the back. when i saw "blah blah blah, vic started sleeping with emma the day princess diana died..." i thought, oh jeez.

turns out, the book is pretty good. it's not exactly the sun also rises or anything, but it's pretty well written and it's entertaining. but it got me wondering, is princess diana's death one of those "where were you?" moments in the lives of most british people? like a 9/11 or JFK assassination to an american?

i remember it happening, but i have no idea where i was. i know i was 13 years old. i remember feeling bad for princes harry and william, and thinking prince william was hot. reading the book has got me racking my brain to remember anything i can about my life when that happened, but i can't. i even tried to remember other details about the summer when i was 13, but i had no success with that, either. one of the lines in the book mentions that (in GB, anyway) that the hot summer weather didn't really arrive until august. i tried to remember the weather patterns of summer 1997 and got nowhere.

i guess in the long run it doesn't matter if july 1997 was extremely hot or only average in temperature, but its a little disturbing that for the most part, entire years of my life will be forgotten unless attached to some significant event. i remember where i was on 9/11 - in fact, my most vivid memory is that that evening i went to the eye doctor. i can't think of anything else noteworthy about 2001. or 1997. or many other years.

so my new gameplan is to try to get very invested in national events so that i can always "remember where i was." that way, every day i'll have a moment that will signify to my brain to remember every little detail. that way, i'll never forget. also, i'll have lots of great opening lines for parties.

where were you when they passed the 27th amendment?
where were you when anna nicole smith's baby was born?
where were you when jordin sparks won american idol?
where were you when barack obama won the iowa primary?

the fun never ends.

so, to begin, where were you when heath ledger died?*

*when exactly did it happen again?

musical (by anna/debs, alicia, me, and lori)

2008-01-21T07:21:00.000-05:00

it was 6pm, (18:00 if you're a douche bag) and the musical sounds on the tram were at their height. most notable was the youthful young man sitting at the front who was half muttering, half chanting to himself. it could barely be heard over the idle chit chat and the sniffling, the tram stop announcements and brakes. what he was repeating to himself was:

"co vas pryteli nocht von trizedi most breheli," which in english means, "what goes up must come down."

he was referring, of course, to the recent promotion of his arch nemesis, tim calhoun. they grew up in corn country -- mid-eastern kansas -- on rival farms. there wasn't much going on in their town -- bruno, kansas -- and their only form of entertainment was a battle, no so labyrinthine that it was impossible to understand, over the miniscule differences in the quality of the russet potatoes, the size and uniformity in shape and color of the autumn pumpkins, the length of the ears of corn. tim calhoun was always winning this battle.

but not anymore.

"pristi stanice - rahska zahrada" the tram proudly announced.

continuing to mumble, the man hobbled to the doors of the tram and exited. as he made his way to the five-star hotel pramen, he stopped into one of the many vietnamese vegetable stands.

"i've got it! i know how to defeat tim calhoun. i'm going to hire me some czech-speaking, vietnamese produce sellers and bring them back to bruno, kansas. those honkies won't have shit on my potraviny!"

and off he went, mumbling about his great ideas. and with his array of fruit, liquor and cigs he made a damn good business and eventually expanded to a fish and tackles shop and car wash.

you go, brother, you go.

i take back what i said about the patriots

2008-01-20T13:58:00.000-05:00

i am actually rooting for the patriots to win tonight. i never thought i would do this, but it's actually very important for them to make it to the superbowl.

so they can lose.

to the packers.

which would make it one of the best superbowls in recent memory. what better story than this, really?

aging, yet beloved brett favre has taken the packers from worst to first. everyone is caught up in this "perfect season" bullshit, high on tom brady as one of the best quarterbacks ever and the patriots as an unstoppable, dynasty-caliber team. also, everyone has been calling for brett to retire for a few years now. yet he kept playing because he loves the game and he knew in his dear little mississippi soul that he had another one in him.

so he'll lead the boys out onto the field and in 60 minutes they will crush the patriots, ruining both the pats' perfect season and making tom brady look like the punk that he is.

it's kind of amazing when you think about it. favre is the last man standing from his generation of quarterbacks. all the other "elite" quarterbacks -- tom brady, peyton and eli manning, and i'll MAYBE, begrudgingly, give you carson palmer even though he is a whiny little jerk -- are younger, having played most or all of their careers in the 2000s. favre belongs to the 90s generation, which gave us, most notably, john elway, troy aikman, steve young, dan marino and favre.

brady and favre facing off in a superbowl is kinda like if the san francisco 49ers of the 80s had a chance to play the 49ers of the 90s. a steve-young-quarterbacked team versus a joe-montana-quarterbacked team. its hard to believe how awesome that would be.

it's a shame, but from superbowl winning teams, you usually remember the quarterbacks and maybe the wide receivers.

if the packers were to lose, it would be devastating. it would be like the movie "rudy" ending without rudy making that tackle. brett would probably slink off into retirement, tail between his legs, and be remembered as just another victim on tom brady's trail to the hall of fame.

but they won't! the packers will win and it will be a fitting end to favre's career. he'll prove that the old school is better than the new school, and that brady might be great but he'll never be as great as favre, which is true.

also, fun fact, if the packers beat the patriots in the superbowl, favre will have won both his last and his first superbowl against the same team.

go packers!

jaywalk, started by marie (continued by sergio, drew, debbie, alicia and me)

2008-01-19T12:23:00.000-05:00

independence, freedom, step by step. cobblestone under my feet, a bell rings. where am i going, does it matter? green light red light, why do i have to stop? a baby is crying, mother and stroller, help her cross. peace and quiet, fresh air. gravel under my feet, just keep going. sunrise, sunset. stop to rest and breathe, only if i want to. tear the paper, break the rules, leaves in the wind. lines look better when you have drawn over them. step, step, stepping. past the bounds that are assigned. it's a small rebellion, just walking when you're not supposed to, but an important one. it is in steps that things happen, in steps that things unhappen. it is the way the world came to be (in 7 steps) and the way it will go might be fewer still.

each step grew larger still until i wasn't jaywalking, but jay gallopping, jay leaping. each step no longer represented one step in creation or destruction. it was an illicit street dance. pound, pound, pounce. her feet felt like quickly-drying cement, calcifying in the heat of the indian summer sunshine. yet just as she felt the final twinge of the hardening process end, a weight would lift off of her shoulders and she would begin her street dance once more.

from a distance, not quite so far but close enough that she could sense its origin, her ears began to process the notes and melodies of an ancient story. swaying ever so gently, her heart taught her feet to move in time with the rhythm of this haunting reverie. slowly, she found herself drawn closer to the aural center of this strange universe.

yeah, she had just chugged two bottles of robitussin. it was her thanksgiving day tradition now since the accident which left her blind two years ago. she had a delicate and specific schedule she followed every year. she would wake up at five, because getting into town for the parade always provided a challenge -- especially for a single blind woman. in her handbag she packed two bottles of extra-strength robitussin.

she would stand in the streets -- she liked to pick a busy one, like vinohradska, or preferably one with trams, maybe jugoslavska or revolucni. she would exit the metro, walking stick in one hand, robitussin in the other. she would bring the sweet nectar to her lips, gulp it down. then she would jaywalk, cross the streets like a metal ball in a pinball game, playing that game with the vehicular traffic. it was her parting shot at fate, her last chance to prove that this was always the future and never the future, that she was untouchable by the forces that had guided her to her thanksgiving day acccident.

the writing orgy breakfast/brunch

2008-01-19T12:12:00.000-05:00

so today, we had our first "writing brunch" of what is hopefully many. lori, alicia and i - all aspiring writers, to different degrees -- decided we needed some inspiration in the form of moral support. the rest of the prague girls (and sergio!) joined in as well.

we all cooked a breakfast food - alicia made vegan oatmeal, sergio beans on toast, marie "elvis lives" or peanut butter and bananas on toast, "drizzled with honey." the food was awesome. then we did a little writing circle and the results were hilarious. due to popular demand, i'll be publishing all the stories we created in my blog.

here's how it works: each person got a random word from the dictionary which was supposed to act both as the title of their piece and appear in the first paragraph. some chose to stick to this rule and others didn't. after 5 minutes, papers were passed to the person on the right, who would continue the first's story for another 5 minutes. i think we did this a total of 5 or 6 times.

the results were moving, hilarious, and usually borded on soft-core porn. enjoy!

disappointed

2008-01-17T14:32:00.000-05:00

i've never been more unhappy about only having mediocre guitar skills.

i'm at reporter's, where the population is me, sometimes alicia, and the friends of the bartender. right now they're sitting around the table across the room, rocking out on an electric guitar. there's the one who tries to talk to me, but only speaks Czech. he's playing right now. earlier they were playing "smoke on the water," but now i can't tell. he's wearing a ski cap and sunglasses. his friends are "pink mohawk guy" and the other guy who is here all the time. his shirt says "i am not a tourist."

i've spent a lot of time with these people but know nothing about them because i don't speak Czech. in a perfect world, i'd be able to go over, grab the guitar and play something for them. and then maybe we'd be friends, even though we aren't able to talk.

i find this problem a lot in my life -- wishing i had in real life the skills i have in my daydreams.

i want to be a toys r us kid

2008-01-16T13:23:00.000-05:00

i have no idea what i'm doing with my life, and i love it.

i spent a lot of time worrying about what i was going to "do" after college, which is how i ended up in prague. it was something to "do." fortunately it was a good decision, but when i made it, i didn't really want to do it. it just gave me something to tell people. it was plans.

then i spent a lot of time worrying about what i was going to "do" when prague was over. going back to school, getting a job, moving to DC. i was basically wishing away the days until july when i could get on with my life.

but i'm not sure i want to get on with my life anymore. i don't really care what comes next, and it feels awesome. if i go to DC, good. but i'm not worried about starting school right away. i think i spent way too much time in the last few years worrying about these type of things and it made me really unhappy.

but it makes me really happy to think that i could spend a few years here. or i could maybe be working in an entirely different city in europe or asia or wherever at this time next year. but the point is i don't know right now. i don't feel any pressure to live up to expectations or do something sensible or get a job where i'll make enough money not to have to eat rice and peas for dinner.

i think too many people worry about whats next, but what's the point? i guess this time in prague has made me realize exactly what it means to be 23 years old, and that there's really an "only" in front of that.

i don't feel like growing up yet.

i hate christmas shopping

2008-01-12T06:05:00.000-05:00

i hate it. okay i know it's january 12th and the stress of buying christmas gifts should have passed about two weeks ago, but i postponed buying alicia's gift because she was out of the country and i was out of money. so now i'm the only person retroactively christmas shopping.

what a nightmare. i hate buying presents for people, especially around scheduled holidays such as christmas, valentine's days and birthdays.

there's a tiny window of time in your friendship or relationship with someone when buying them a gift isn't stressful. i think it's about a month or two in. it's been long enough that you know them at least well enough to be able to pick out something they might like. all your inside jokes are fresh, and so in a pinch you can just buy them a joke gift. but it's still soon enough that you have some room for error. if you buy them something they hate, they're usually still eager enough to bolster the relationship that it won't have any devastating effect on it. it's the same when you're dating someone. they could buy you something really terrible, but you'll say "this is WONDERFUL!" and you'll really mean it, because you're so enamored. if only this would last.

people that are forever exempt from this are grandmas. they can buy anything, for anyone, and you're required to like it. if you don't, you don't dare tell them. why would you want to make your cute little old grandma cry. so you suck it up and wear an ugly sweater just to make her smile. (luckily, in this respect, i never knew any of my grandparents.)

but once you get to know someone, buying gifts for them is nothing but a test. it's a test on how well you know them or how well you listen to them, or both. my mom has an uncanny talent for this. i can mention something once and 6 months later, there it'll be, wrapped up for christmas.

i don't have that talent. this afternoon i was trapsing around the palladium, looking for alicia's gift. i had no idea what to do. i thought, oh, alicia likes this certain lipgloss. i was really proud of remembering this. but you can only get it at bath and body works, which doesn't exist here. then i thought, i should get her a piece of jewelry. but we have different taste, and i couldn't find anything that i knew she'd like. and i should be able to! i've known her for three years. the fact that i can't do this yet, and that i can't remember even one thing she's mentioned wanting, is disappointing.

so its january 12th and i still haven't gotten anywhere on her present.

i think i'm going to enact a policy of no gifts with all my friends. its just easier. either that, or joke gifts. anthony and i had this understanding that we would never try to buy each other serious gifts. once i bought him a sweater (which was really sweet, by the way) and he got mad. instead, we buy each other stupid stuff, like chinese checkers. or a 90s rap compilation album. i got him a car-a-day calendar three years running. it was wonderful.

winter vacation

2008-01-11T11:14:00.000-05:00

i didn't get to go anywhere for christmas vacation this year, which i was disappointed about. i feel pretty terrible because i've been in europe for a little over four months and i've only made it as far as dresden and vienna.

today i had some time to waste in the bookstore and, as usual, i spent it looking at the lonely planet books. i picked up one for venice and it got me itching to go to italy.

luckily, the paycheck gods have smiled favorably upon me. i got paid more than expected for december at the bell school, so i should have some extra money. i really wanted to go to italy after christmas, but i think instead i'm going to use the "spring break" we get from the elementary school to spend a day or two in a few different cities in italy.

it'll be better than going at christmas because i'll hopefully a.) have more money to spend and b.) get to spend more time there.

i think a lot about how cool it would have been to live in italy for a year. even though i love prague and everything that's happened here since september (except for the refrigerator breaking), i sometimes wish i would have tried harder to find a job there.

so hopefully about a month from now (february 14-21ish) i'll be cruising around italy. i don't have any idea how to start planning but i can't wait.

as usual, looking for travel buddies if anyone is interested...

czech children are adorable

2008-01-07T12:40:00.000-05:00

today, i had my passport with me in the herna (the kid's playroom). one of the kids asked me if he could look at it. after perusing all the stamps, he looked at me, searching for the english words for what he wanted to say.

"i...jumped from the belly in Poland. what city did you jump from the belly?"

i pretty much died. these kids are so cute. he was asking me what city i was born in. i didn't have the heart to correct him.

the czech republic's funniest home videos

2008-01-06T16:04:00.000-05:00

last night, it finally snowed in prague.

it started late. i was out watching the steelers lose to jacksonville, and when i left the golden star bar at 3:30am it was beginning to settle on the cobblestones. by morning it was a blizzard (by prague standards) and there was three or so inches on the ground. it finally seems like winter.

alicia and i embarked on our journey to meduza for brunch this afternoon around 1. we were walking to the tram stop and at the end of our street, there was a father with his two young sons playing in the snow at the edge of lyckovo namesti. by the way, kids in prague are adorable. as soon as it's october, they're all bundled up in jackets and hats. it's adorable.

so the father was standing to the side with his videocamera, filming his young children enjoying the first major snowfall of winter 2007-8. the boy was just running around, picking up the snow and throwing it, enjoying the cold weather the way kids can that seems to fade as you grow older, the dad happily recording it all.

as we walked through his mise en scene, i started to tell alicia that it would make a good embarassing video for the kid in about 10-12 years. something his parents could show when he brings a girlfriend home for the first time.

before i even finished the sentence, i felt my feet slide from under me and i was on my ass in the snow. the street wasn't plowed and it was slick with snow, and my chucks couldn't handle it. alicia enjoyed the opportunity to laugh heartily at my misfortune.

but the best part was, the kid was right behind me when it happened. so i'm pretty sure the dad had the videocamera pointed in our direction, and as an added bonus to the warm family memories he was capturing, he probably got a good shot of me slipping and falling on my ass.

i love winter.

the fish cafe

2008-01-03T13:10:00.000-05:00

so, i started my new job today at dino elementary. from 12-5 every afternoon i'll be dishing out red "tea" (which seems suspiciously like hot cherry kool-aid), playing hangman, coloring princesses, critiquing dances... basically, hanging out with kids. which is a lot more fun than teaching them at the bell school.

my new schedule leaves me with an awkard hour-and-a-half gap between my morning adult classes and dino. it's not worth it to go all the way home, so i had to waste some time.

i went to the cafe near I.P. Pavlova, whose name i can't remember, that i used to go to after T-mobile on Tuesdays with a certain English acquaintance. i decided that instead of trying to remember the name, i'm going to call it the "fish cafe" because in the two back corners of the cafe there are aquariums. the chairs in the corners in front of the aquariums are the most comfortable. that's where we used to sit, and thats where I sit still, even though the light is dim which makes reading tricky.

i suppose i chose this place because it's familiar. it's one of the only places i know in prague that i really like, that i'd suggest if i had to make a decision about somewhere to grab a drink. i guess i also chose it because it was somewhere i went with this person that i miss, that i think of fondly. maybe i thought there was a chance the loud footsteps coming down the wooden stairs would be his. wishful thinking, but still.

maybe i thought the dim lights and the bricks and the bubbling of the aquariums, the fish (polar bear, flat stanley and billy no mates in the one on the right), the pictures displayed for sale, the waiter with dreadlocks and hippie tie-dye who i think was a little alarmed that i ordered hot chocolate this time and not a beer, maybe i thought all of that would be comforting. i thougth i could float for an hour or so in the fresh nostalgia of december. maybe thats why i went.

but, surprisingly, it brought back other memories that had nothing to do with cafes, aquariums or even prague. i was reading "all the pretty horses," and for some reason, i can't be sure what triggered it, i thought about my trip to san francisco last year.

i remembered being in a tavern in sausalito last december. i remember sitting around a hexagonal table with ryan and his grad school friends, drinking beer and playing acey deucy. we got so into it that we had to keep running up to the bar, asking the barkeep for rolls of quarters to use for bets. when someone won the pot, they'd buy everyone a round. i think once i won almost $35, which i used to buy the table shots of jager.

which made me think about walking down the main street in sausalito, in the chilly december wind coming off the bay, looking across at san francisco all lit up. i have pictures, but i couldn't capture it. it looks like tiny dots far off in the distance. up on the hillside, the houses of sausalito were decorated in twinkle lights for christmas. couldn't get that on film either.

today i finished "the book of laughter and forgetting," by milan kundera. in it was this line: "whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come of their own accord! memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge!"

i don't really think about that trip to san francisco too often, but when i remembered the jager and sweeping a pile of quarters off the table to buy them, i smiled. and it made me think - i had to chase that memory all the way to prague.

when my nostalgia for december is not so fresh, how far will i have to chase those memories?

new years resolutions

2007-12-31T09:34:00.000-05:00

today as i was getting on the metro, an announcement came over the loudspeaker: "use of pyrotechnics is prohibited in Wenceslas Square."

so tonight should be interesting.

here are the new years resolutions:
1. this year i'm going to do more things that are not expected of me.
2. i'm going to make more "stupid" decisions. well, not that they're stupid, but maybe decisions that are more of a risk than those i'm accustomed to making.

i'm also going to try to give up coke.

stastny novy rok!

the patriots can go to hell

2007-12-30T08:27:00.001-05:00

so, the new england patriots are 16-0.

i hate them.

i hate that they are a dynasty, and that everyone thinks they are one of the greatest teams in NFL history. i hate tom brady. i don't think he's all that good -- i think he got lucky to be on a strong team. i'd like to see what he could do with the miami dolphins.

remember the first year the patriots won the super bowl? when they played the oakland raiders in the snow, and they won that game mostly because of a bad call? i think it was fumble vs. forward pass. what if the call had gone the other way? our lives would be 100% better.

i might not really have the sports knowledge to argue that the patriots are not as good as everyone thinks they are. but i can say this: the patriots at 16-0 proves that the NFL is boring. most people think it's a good thing to have these dynasty teams, that it proves what an exceptional group of people have been behind the management and coaching of one club in the last decade or so. but i can guarantee you the only people who are REALLY excited about this live in new england, whatever states or cities make up that region (massachusetts, vermont, new hampshire...connecticut? does maine count? what about new york? rhode island? do they even get any input? i have no fucking clue). to everone else? they resent the hell out of it.

i honestly don't care if the steelers get nowhere in the playoffs this year. i just want the patriots to lose, embarassingly.

so, if it were the steelers winning three or four superbowls within a decade, yeah, i'd be whistling a different tune. this also proves that the "rules" of what makes football good change relative to whether they are happening to your favorite team or one of the other 31.

that being said, since the steelers are not the 00s patriots, i'm pissed that they are doing so well. it's boring and predictable. at the beginning of the season, everyone thought the patriots would be unstoppable. and they were. it's yet to be seen what will happen in the playoffs, but so far. i'm bored. if the patriots win the superbowl, this might be one of the most boring seasons ever.

wouldn't it be more interesting if there were a good story to this year's winning superbowl team? like, an underdog winning (like the sixth-seed steelers two years ago). i'd much rather see the packers win this year, so brett favre can finally retire. he deserves it. everyone thought he should quit years ago, and he didn't, because he loves the game. he deserves it. i hope the patriots and the packers meet in the superbowl this year and brett favre makes tom brady look like a 12 year old playing pickup football in the backyard with his older brothers on christmas.

that would be interesting. the patriots undefeated? lame.

it's been a long december

2007-12-30T07:25:00.000-05:00

i missed yesterday. i didn't get a chance to get on the computer all day, except for exactly 9 minutes at globe yesterday, after a lively little exchange with the clerk in the bookstore (who i think is half of the guitar-comedy duo that performs at the globe's open mic night, but i can't be sure).

me: can i use the internet?
guy: i don't know, can you?
me: um. may i? is that what you're looking for?
guy: oh you know that one?

in a perfect word i would have responded "yeah, i've been to third grade." but much like george costanza, i often find the perfect witty, biting remark coming to me hours later.

anyway. i don't have anything interesting to say. we watched true lies last night.

a few months ago i asked my mom to send me some DVDs. i intended for her to send me DVDs i already owned, but instead she bought a few at wal mart. "there were a bunch there for only $5!" in the mix were match point, barefoot in the park and true lies.

i wasn't actually all that excited about watching it, but boy was i mistaken. what a great movie! i totally forgot about it. everyone was making fun of me as i squealed during the action scenes. but come on! there was a lot of dangling from unsteady perches hundreds of feet from the ground, which is one of my worst fears apparently for others as well as myself (second only to being chased up stairs, which also happened!).

we felt that james cameron was jipped by not being given an academy award for his directing. fuck titanic... true lies was amazing.

also, another thing i was thinking... whatever happened to the actor who played Sam on Clarissa Explains It All?

lastly, things i'm not excited for:
a. going back to work.
b. making new years resolutions.

ugh.

the smokiest bar in prague

2007-12-28T08:16:00.000-05:00

last night i got a call from drew. i met her at the globe and after a few beers/glasses of wine and some dishing about our respective boy troubles, we decided to mosey elsewhere.

we ended up at u sudu, which i had to make a point this time to remember the name of because i usually can't. when drew asked if i had any idea of where to go, i described it as "that bar that we were at that one night, it's downstairs, looks like old catacombs, the really smoky one..."

eloquent, i know.

most bars in prague are smoky, but if you say to anyone "that really smoky bar," they'll probably know that you're talking about u sudu. it's amazing the amount of smoke in there. i've been there three or four times in recent weeks and every time i wake up the next day ill from the smell of smoke lingering in my hair, in clothes i wore and ones i didn't even have on, on the sheets and pillowcase and blanket. it soaks into your skin, you can taste it in your mouth. i swear, for an entire day after drinking at u sudu, a cloud of smoke follows you around like Pigpen.

so drew and i were having a good time by ourselves, just talking and drinking and whatnot, when a guy came up to us. he rattled off a long schpiel in Czech and i was delighted to be able to proudly exercise my only language skills and say "nemluvim cesky!"

but he got me. english? he asked.

he said something about his friend and himself wanting to sit with us, and that they were going to do a shot and they wanted to buy us one too, so what are you drinking? i'm not as graceful in these situations, so i looked to drew and she said confidently "sure! we'll both have a beer."

so these guys sat down and we talked for a while. the one that was talking to me asked "do you want to play soccer?" and by soccer he meant foosball. we played several games, of which i think drew and "vaclav" beat myself and "honza" (we managed to meet two guys with both of the most common names in prague). honza had some particularly excellent defensive skills, executing some backfield passing on a foosball table that my high school team could never master in real life. i was disappointed to learn that we weren't allowed to spin the handles as hard as we could, and thats just about where my foosball skills end.

it started to get a little creepy when vaclav kissed drew square on the mouth in a post-goal celebration, so we bounced.

i don't know if you noticed but i'm not good at conclusions. basically i woke up this morning drenched in smoke and feeling the several beers and shots of jager. those were the first honest to god czechs i've really talked to, and it was interesting to say the least.

some archives

2007-12-27T13:16:00.000-05:00

i'm afraid of losing all the files on my hard drive, so i'm trying to put most of my writing here as a back up.

i just posted my senior seminar story. it's in May 2006 (i wrote it from January - April 2006). it's quite long but if you're interested, go for it.

i can't decide what i think of it now. i suppose it's not fair to retrospectively edit; but there are things i would change. there are also lots of things i still wouldn't.

it's called "the things we hold on to." i think only 3 people have ever read it.

the world by road

2007-12-27T11:26:00.000-05:00

so i'm here at reporter's, again. christmas is officially over (yet, the christmas markets are still open... which i don't understand. close them already so i can walk from mustek to the post office without running into 157 people, milling around eating those sugary roll things and not paying attention to where they're going).

i feel pretty terrible because i've had 6 days of vacation so far and i've been just sitting around. having fun with the girls, of course, but feeling like i/we should have taken advantage of this time off to travel. some did -- lori to budapest, anna to the mountains, julie, amanda and marie to vienna -- but i just didn't get it together in time. i had wanted to go to italy, but after christmas shopping for myself, buying a new metro pass and filling my phone with credits, i've got about 400Kc leftover.

i've been in europe for almost 4 months and i've barely been anywhere. dresden and vienna for less than a day combined.

one advantage of staying in town was the opportunity to meet lori's friends, steve and steve. all of those stranded in prague for christmas gathered at drew/marie's apartment saturday night. lori had just returned from her trip to budapest and bratislava, which she embarked on with her friends from college -- the aformentioned steve and steve -- who are in the midst of travelling around the world.

i can easily say that every one of the people i've met so far while i've been abroad have opened me up to a new experience or worldview and whether very or maybe only a little different than mine, they've all been valuable. but these two blew my mind. they dropped everything -- quit very secure jobs, cashed in 401Ks, planned for two years -- and have been travelling now for almost a year.

and they're driving all of it. they started in LA, went through new zealand and australia and asia. lori met them as they entered eastern europe. they came through prague on the way to berlin to go through denmark, sweden and norway, back through london and eventually to africa. they still have about 10 months or so left to circumnavigate the globe latitudinally and longitudinally.

talking to them was fascinating. we couldn't stop asking them questions (that i'm sure they've heard a thousand times), but they were always willing to share their stories. they talked about catching dengay (sp?) fever, which causes internal hemorrhaging and at its worst makes you cough blood and bleed from your eyes. hat-of-child steve showed me a scar on his elbow from a cut he stitched himself. i can't remember all the things he told me, and that was only the tip of the iceberg.

it was pretty inspiring. they're smart guys but there's nothing unusual about their story other than they both were willing to do anything to have this experience. it made me feel pretty bad about never having left the united states until i was 23 and staying here in europe without taking advantage of the opportunity to travel.

i can't really put into words how cool it was to meet them and how amazing their story is. you can check out their trip on http://www.theworldbyroad.com. they have a blog and pictures, and you can meet up with them for a part of their journey.

some artsy-fartsy writer shit

2007-12-26T14:59:00.000-05:00

i know what it's like to be close to someone without ever having kissed them; a different kind of closeness. the closeness you feel when someone takes your finger and traces the skyline of their bottom teeth. when they can tell you they don't change their underwear everyday. when you tell them things you've never told anyone, like fights you've had with best friends or things you've stolen or that you sucked your thumb until you were twenty.

i didn't tell you that yet.

but i haven't decided yet which kind of closeness is more dangerous; the sexual kind or the other kind. i don't know which kind is safer or which one is less likely to rip open old wounds.

ugh

2007-12-26T14:45:00.001-05:00

dear audience,
i miss you. please come back.
Jen

simply having a wonderful christmastime

2007-12-25T10:59:00.000-05:00

i want to write a blog today but i really don't have much to say.

i woke up later than usual, around 11, and figured i'd spend the whole day in bed. i was out late last night and i sort of didn't feel like getting dressed, going out in the cold, etc. my gameplan was to sleep and read all day.

i finished "the god of small things" by 1 o'clock or so and then got bored. i headed into town, hoping to find an internet cafe run by someone with very little christmas spirit (so it would actually be open). instead, i ended up at lori's. so we're internetting, possibly watching nip/tuck soon, and eating leftover carp and potato salad.

i never disliked christmas as much as i do this year. my dad always hated it and i could never understand why -- i knew the reason, that it was a holiday he used to celebrate with my mom and it only reminded him that they were divorced. he never bought into all the hoopla -- he hated having a real tree (if it was up to him we wouldn't have had one at all). he played along for a while, but after i reached high-school age, he stopped wanting to put the effort in and we were forced to settle for his compromise -- a three-foot artificial.

i remember senior year, BJ and i drove to the tree lot at the "pitt rent-a-center" and picked out a tree by ourselves. we bought it, strapped it to the roof of my old black cavalier, and put it up ourselves in the living room. we spent hours decorating it as my dad sat in the next room, uninterested. (i can remember every ornament. the gingerbread men, one for each of us -- mom, dad, bj and myself -- made by our family friend, the huge Coca Cola balls that, as a rule, went on the bottom branches because they were heavy, the stuffed animal Flounder from the Little Mermaid. there were so many more, and they're all broken now, water damaged or lost. the lights were the 140 set that played christmas songs and had 12 different blinking patterns.)

my brother would also be left in charge of putting up the outside twinkle lights.

being alone at christmas in prague has helped me understand a little better how my dad must have felt. it's a holiday that makes you appreciate all the good things you have -- family, love, wealth or comfort -- but also highlights the lack thereof. i never thought i'd feel sad about not seeing my family on christmas, or not having anyone special to spend it with. but when i woke up this morning, i didn't want to see anyone -- i just wanted to sleep the day away.

it's even worse because every single person i have encountered makes it seem like the saddest thing ever that i might be alone on christmas. students, friends. i couldn't understand what the big deal was, but now i think i do.

i think the saddest part of christmas is that it ends abruptly -- on the 26th it's over. weeks are spent shopping, decorating, planning, then its gone in a blink. you put away the stockings, the decorations. the lights come down. the tree is un-trimmed. the christmas dinner is now some scant leftovers packed into tupperware. wrapping paper discarded, greeting cards tucked away. on december 26th its like none of it happened. all that build up for one day and then its over.

christmas used to be one of my favorite holidays. i never thought i could be so pessimistic about it.

anyway, we had a great christmas, the six or so of us stranded alone in prague. we made the carp and turkey, got drunk and went to a casino. lori and i even stepped into midnight mass for a few minutes. i'm not a churchgoer but it was amazing. easily the most beautiful church i've ever seen in a country full of atheists. tonight we'll watch nip/tuck and eat leftovers.

tomorrow will be december 26th.

christmas eve

2007-12-24T15:24:00.000-05:00

so tonight, for christmas eve, the girls got together to have dinner. lori made a turkey and i was in charge of the carp.

apparently the traditional meal in a czech christmas is carp and potato salad. i don't know why. so, being the testers of new culture that we are, we decided we should eat carp on christmas, too.

yesterday lori and i went to namesti miru to buy the carp. about 6 days before christmas, the carp stands turn up along the streets. it's amazing.

we walked up. a little timid at first, we stood around watching, hoping to see some other people order their carp so we'd know what to do. lori asked the "carp man" if he spoke english, and he didn't. so we decided we needed to ask for "jedna" or one, and if he asked us any other questions we were screwed.

we observed that someone would walk up and say something, then the guy would fish a carp out of a big bucket with a net. he'd throw it on a scale and then ask the person if it was big or small enough. so, we thought we could just say "okay" or maybe say "malo" which is pretty close to saying "small."

we tried that, but he started asking us questions in czech that we couldn't answer. we gave him a thumbs up and a "dobre" to okay the size of the fish, but then we got stuck. luckily, a red-headed lady behind us in line spoke some english. otherwise i think the guy was ready to hand us a live fish. she told him to kill it and gut it.

it was disgusting. maybe i'm just not used to seeing it. a little girl, maybe four years old, was with her father and she seemed to be loving it. she kept leaning over the bucket, trying to touch the live fish. she didn't seem phased at all by the three guys less than five feet away who were chopping the heads off of those same fish.

so they take a fish, weigh it, then the guy promptly kills it by severing its spinal cord (i think?). then he cuts its head off. when we first got there, four heads were sitting on the butchering platform and one was still "breathing," or i guess its gills were gasping for water. this guy was laughing as he chopped off the fishes head. they seemed to take their jobs lightly; five minutes before they were butchering our fish, elbow deep in blood and guts, all three of the fishmongers were chowing down on sandwiches.

they handed back our change, crowns covered in fish blood and guts, and a bag of insides and the fish head. cleaning, skinning and cutting up that fish tonight was one of the toughest things i've done for a meal in my life. it's pretty cool to know what it feels like to actually work for a meal instead of only having it slapped down in front of you.

we've proudly displayed our carp head, named "vaclav," on lori and anna's dining room table.

the white t-shirt roadtrip and other travel plans

2007-12-23T10:43:00.000-05:00

everytime i look around my room, i'm disgusted at myself for bringing so many clothes with me. i brought two huge suitcases and a carry on and another big bag, and there is no reason for it. i hardly wear any of it. up until last week, most of it had been dirty since september.

i'm a packrat. i love keeping stuff, but i love keeping it so that someday i can throw it away. nothing feels better than shoving stuff into a trash bag. so, i think it would be equally liberating to travel with hardly anything. instead of lugging three giant suitcases around prague -- through the airport, into a transport van, up the fucking stairs at the villa, into a taxi, up 5 floors in our new place -- wouldn't it be awesome to just have one?

so the next time i travel i'm travelling light as possible. when i get back to the states, whenever that will be, the next big trip i want to take is another cross-country roadtrip. i was just looking at pictures from the trip i took with brendan to LA in june 2006, and it made me want to do it again. i want to take the northern route out to seattle, come down the west coast, then take the southern route through new mexico, arizona, texas, etc. then back up the east coast.

i want someone or several people to come with me, but the only rule is: you can only bring one backpack. you can only bring an extra pair of shoes and jeans, a thicker layer (sweatshirt or long-sleeved t-shirt, maybe a jacket if its cold but this would ideally take place in the summer), underwear obviously, and a pack of plain white t-shirts*. that's it!

everytime i've travelled i overpack and i always think "oh, i'll want to wear all these things..." but i never actually want them. i always end up wearing jeans and a t-shirt. and it's better that way, because who cares.

my other travel plans are: the trans-siberian railway. from january on i'm saving money so i can go in july.

let me know if you want to join me.

*piece of advice: if you ever find yourself in the men's department in target/walmart/your respective discount department store, purchasing your plain white t's, and you're trying to decide between the five-pack of Hanes or Fruit of the Loom, always buy Hanes! I've made this mistake one too many times.

saturday, bored.

2007-12-22T13:26:00.000-05:00

i spent the whole day inside. i woke up at 10, read a little, ate some soup for lunch, sat around some more, took a nap, took a shower. you cannot imagine how boring it is to be alone in a strange city with no internet, tv, or way to watch movies. i guess i could go out and "do something" but its really cold, and i kinda don't feel like it. it's the first day of christmas break, which i think is suitable only for loafing around. but i couldn't stand being inside anymore so i went to use the internet.

so i'm sitting in this little cafe, called reporter's, that's nextdoor to my apartment. it just opened maybe two weeks ago. it's pretty cool inside, but i don't think anyone knows about it because i'm always the only one in here. the barkeep speaks english a little, so basically the two of us just sit in silence while i use the internet and he texts on his phone or reads. he usually puts music on. (today, i think the same song played for 20 minutes). it's the kind of situation where you would usually talk with the other person or else it would be super awkward, but its not for us, because we do not share a common language. so we both mind our own business, which is nice.

today, however, i'm not alone at reporter's. i'd been here for 45 minutes or so by myself, and then this older gentlemen came in. i've never seen anyone else come in that didn't know the person working at the time, so i assume that the only other patrons are friends of the business. he started speaking to the barkeep. after a while, though, the barkeep stopped listening. he came back over and sat at the computer like he usually does while this guy kept yapping away -- which leads me to believe this guy is a crazy drunk.

the guy kept talking at him, and he'd answer occasionally, sometimes even walking over to the bar to chat.
sidebar: that song that played for 20 minutes earlier just started again! he must love it.
anyway, so the guy kept talking and then started motioning to me. he said something to the barkeep, who replied in czech "she speaks english."

then the weird guy went: "anglicky! anglicky! you speak english?" to me. i said yes. he said "so you are english?" and i said "no, i'm from the united states."

"oh!! the united states! so, ac/dc and judas priest!"

i pretended i couldn't understand him, but he definitely asked me something about ad/dc and judas priest. presumably he wanted to say that he either knew they were american bands (and actually i think ad/dc are from australia, right?) or that they were bands he thought i'd like.

i just sorta shrugged. he made a motion like "oh, nevermind." then just kept yapping away.

so, two other guys just came in, and they all seem to know each other. i'm kinda nervous and actually really, really glad i can't speak czech, because i can just sit here and eavesdrop on them.

i'm so bored.

pitt basketball memories!

2007-12-21T11:39:00.001-05:00

yesterday, i learned how to use titles. i couldn't figure it out. turns out you have to turn them on...
i'm smart.

pitt beat duke!

i don't know about everyone at pitt, but is this the "same old, same old" story - where pitt does really well in the preseason, only to disappoint in the tournament - or is this year different? i want to say beating duke is a pretty big deal, regardless if it was only by one point in overtime. i haven't seen any pitt games this season, so they could be playing like shit for all i know.

i guess there's always a year when a team surprises you. sometimes it takes 15 years (and counting - for the pirates), but pitt has been strong for ...what... 5 or 6 seasons now?

it seems like every year has been marked by some sort of failure instead of triumph. i can still remember freshman or sophomore year (not sure -- i guess i can't remember that well after all), donatas zavakis whining on the sideline as pitt lost prematurely in the tournament. i think they got to the sweet sixteen? who knows.

remember when yuri demetris punched his girlfriend in the face? i wonder whatever happened to him.

chris taft looked like snoop dog and/or plaxico burress.

carl krauser was never as good as brandin knight.

2 years ago, the scoreboard on the TV during pitt's matchup with bradley in the second round read "BRAD PITT."
haha.

i hope this is the year for pitt basketball. jamie dixon deserves it, if nothing else. i'd be kinda sad to miss it because campus will be out of control. go pitt!

prague public transportation awards

2007-12-20T11:08:00.000-05:00

i don't ride the metro much anymore. mostly just the green line. but the best thing about riding the metro (other than metro surfing) is seeing the signs on the wall that identify the metro stop. some of them are really cool, and some of them are downright ugly.

i've decided to rank them.
best: hloubetin on the yellow line. i've always been a sucker for the yellow-green-blue color combination. also noteworthy, cerny most is a boring stop (color-wise), but the coolest thing ever is seeing the scenery go by through the tinted windows that enclose the tracks after it comes up from underground.

runner up: namesti miru/JZP. mustek is okay, but the green-yellow is a little bit of a cop-out, considering those are the colors of the lines that intersect there.

honorable mention: namesti republiky (chrome!) and starometska.

worst: almost all of the stops on the red line are boring. they all look the same. so take your pick.

this is an ongoing project because i've yet to see every stop. also, my next project is "best tram line." there will also be a category for "most difficult line to tram surf" and "line that could use more frequent trams."

stay tuned.

2007-12-19T04:21:00.000-05:00

"if you lose your mind, come back."

i was just looking at pictures from my last "american vacation," when jocelyn and i went to DC to visit brad and ngav.

it was the middle of august. oppressive heat. we were in the adams morgan area of DC at dan's cafe, my favorite completely irresponsible place to drink in our nation's capital. if you aren't familiar (which is a shame), it's situated in a dirty basement. it's tiny and always crowded. it smells like a zoo. the bartenders are grumpy. best of all, the drinks: if you unsuspectingly ask for a "rum and coke," for $11 the pile-of-sunshine barkeep hands you a glass (probably somewhere in the ballpark of 8oz) of rum, a can of coke, and a bucket of ice. basically... a shitshow ensues.

you and your party end up completely wasted, but it's also a place that's pretty conducive to meeting new people. somewhere between my "gin and tonic" and falling asleep on the metro, brad, jocelyn and i befriended some guys and one girl who were standing near our table. i believe the events unfolded thusly:

jocelyn got up to go to the bathroom. i couldn't hear what they were saying, but a group of three guys started talking to her. she came back to our table and told us about it, saying they were being kinda creepy. i suppose i thought it wise to give them a piece of my mind. the one guy came over and this is the conversation we had:

me: "you're a creep!"
guy: "what? why?"
me: "you touched my friend!"
guy: "i just wanted to dance!"

(note: there is no dance floor at dan's)

i guess instead of haranguing (i think i spelled that wrong but unfortunately my dictionary is being held hostage :P ) them, we were at that point of drunkenness where you suddenly become best friends with strangers instead of trying to fight them (lucky for brad). so these guys just sat right down at our table, and we talked about who knows what... (i think they made fun of brad's magazine and pointed at jocelyn's boobs a lot).

anyway the whole point of this story is that i never managed to catch their names, but i remember the words on the back of the one guy's shirt, and they were: "if you lose your mind, come back." i don't remember what was on the front of his shirt, but i assumed it was some band, probably dave matthews or something.

i did some intense research (googled it) and found out it's a buddhist saying.

i didn't find much interpretation, and on the first read it didn't really make sense to me. but i suppose it means if you find yourself feeling lost, all you have to do is simply come back. and because the solution is so simple, maybe it means that you weren't really lost in the first place. you're looking for answers and getting lost, but maybe you knew the answers all along.

maybe i'm looking at it the wrong way, but it doesn't really matter, does it? it's what you make of it. strange what you remember when you've had an entire glass of liquor.

2007-12-18T11:59:00.000-05:00

i don't have much to say today. i've been thinking a lot lately that i really wish i had my guitar here. in retrospect, i could have easily left an entire suitcase of clothes at home and brought my guitar instead. i might try to find a cheap used one somewhere, just to play while i'm here.

i barely touched it last year, which i regret. i wish i could learn to have a better work ethic about things. i don't have any talents. there are so many things i "want" to be good at, but i'm just not a hard enough worker. i think i expect to be good at things without effort, and if i'm not, i get frustrated and give up. obviously this is a negative quality to have if you want to be successful at something.

i have so much time here that i waste. maybe if i had my guitar, and it was the only thing i had left to do, i'd practice.

actually... probably not. i'd probably still take naps.

2007-12-17T07:37:00.000-05:00

two days in a row.. holler at yer boy.

ever since i've been teaching english, i notice language a lot more. i think about it all day. it's a little bit odd, but mostly i love it. i spend a lot of time trying to figure out what words mean in czech. we were drilled so much about "teacher language" that everytime i talk to someone i'm wondering if i'm talking clearly and simply enough for them to understand what i'm saying (even native speakers). i've learned a lot of british english, which is cool because even though its mostly the same language, we use it completely differently. i never thought it would be so hard to talk to someone from england. basically, language is on my mind all the time and it's great. my mind is always occupied with thinking about something i love. it's kind of like getting paid to think about your girlfriend or boyfriend all day, and then at some points of the day, talk about them with other people for 60-90 minutes.

uso i've been noticing things i wouldn't have before. today i was listening to my ipod on the tram on the way to class. the song was "playing favorites" by the starting line, which is quite a nice song actually. there's a verse that goes like this:

"wait for me to move out west/
it's okay if you don't/
i hope you know you're my favorite thing about the west coast/
i wish i stayed/
i hope you wait/
i'm counting down the days til california comes"

lovely. but i started thinking about the phrase "move out west," and i realized that i've never heard anyone say "move out east." more often you'll hear "move back east." and i've never heard anyone say "move back west." you always move back to the east and out to the west. obviously you COULD say whatever you want, but i think it's kinda neat that for the most part, the... i don't know what you'd call those...directional prepositions?...(back and out)... follow the pattern of "manifest destiny" ...in america we settled in the east first then went west later. i mean i'm sure there's californians that move east... but do they ever say "move out east?" it seems like the pacific coast is usually the endpoint, and from there you can only go back.

that might seem ridiculous but these are the kinds of things i think about all day. jealous? no? okay...

2007-12-16T08:12:00.000-05:00

my philosophy on advice is that if i were asking for it, i would want to hear the blunt truth. i want to hear what i might know is true but don't want to admit to myself. someone has to be the voice of reason and it's not usually the person asking for advice, or they wouldn't be asking for it.

it's pretty odd to be in a situation that is almost exactly like one that you gave someone else advice about before. you're suddenly like... shit... now i have to follow my own advice.

a few years back, one of my friends (no names to protect the innocent) was lamenting having to leave someone she had met while studying abroad. she was saying that she felt that the things she shared with this person didn't really mean anything because he had gone back home, to his girlfriend, and she was sure she'd never see him again.

i gave her my best attempt at being a wise and insightful friend and i told her that she should be really happy that she got the three months that she did. she could always look back on those three months and remember them fondly. she could remember that this person had a really deep affection for her, even if it wasn't quite manifest in the way it she wanted it to be. and that it doesn't mean any less just because it's in the past tense instead of the present.

so, to me, even though this thing i said to her sounded really idealistic, it also sounded like "the right answer," even if that's hard to follow. really i just wanted to her not to be sad about something she couldn't change.

that being said, i realize now how completely unfollowable that advice was.

this isn't something you can actually do. you can't turn off your feelings for something and transform it into a pleasant memory in a split second. eventually... but after some time. i realize that i was telling her this advice thinking "don't be sad! you have these three months of memories, don't be sad about them, be happy. turn it on like a switch." which is completely crazy. no one can do that.

so i know what i need to do. i've put myself back to two years ago and i'm listening to myself give this advice and telling myself to follow it. but i know exactly why she thought about it feeling meaningless.

this friend wrote this really wonderful story for one of her nonfiction classes about how this guy lived a life she described as transient -- he had no qualms about moving from one part of his life to another, just picking up and leaving everything behind to start something new. he would look at his experience abroad the way that she wished she could. like a great time in his life that's over.

i can't remember the moral of her story, if her prose decided this was an ideal way to live or a sad way. i sort of wish i could be that kind of person, but i know that i'm not and i probably never will be. i don't have the capability of remembering things without placing myself back at that time; it's only one place or the other, now or then, and it's usually then. i was actually just thinking about how often i do that; sit and look at pictures or think about things i've done and wish i was back at those times rather than right now.

i understand why people become writers or musicians or artists or photographers or filmmakers. you want to cement something into the present tense that otherwise would disappear into the past, into memory.

i've never been good at taking my own advice, but then again i don't know if that's true of anyone. i suppose you can either waste your time being sad or just decide to be happy, i just don't know how possible the latter is.

i recently learned the term "gutted" and at first i thought it just meant sad, but now i think it's a little bit more than that. i actually feel like i've been gutted, hollow, i feel like i don't have insides. but maybe you need to feel that way first to make the memories move vivid. like a chrysalis for memories... i don't know.

i'm not sure if i really got at what i'm trying to get at with this.

2007-08-05T18:58:00.000-04:00

i learned something today that, i think in the state i was maybe a few months or a year ago, would have devastated me. i can't really be specific but i guess maybe i realized i'm getting used. but then i thought about it, and maybe i'm using this person, too. and as long as i'm getting what i want maybe i can't be too critical of that person taking advantage on the other end. i think it was nietzsche but i can't be sure, anyway it was some philosopher i studied in "intro to philosophical problems" freshman year, but all relationships are based on a mutual desire of something from the other -- like... hey i'll be friends with Joe because he has a convertible, and i need to get around and look cool doing it, and he'll be friends with me because I can get him pot or something. and we talk to each other in the meantime and enjoy each other's company -- and maybe that's a really simplistic and cynical way to look at it, but think about friendships. why do you have the friends you have? not because you admire them more than anyone else. a lot of my best friends are not perfect people and neither am i. you need something from them. they make you feel better about yourself or make you jealous or make you competitive. they feed to your personality in some way. so maybe we're all using each other. and we try to make it out like using someone is the worst thing you can do, but you do it all the time. normally i'd be pretty upset to learn the piece of information that i did, but who knows what that person would think if they could figure out what i was using them for. we've all got these deeply complicated reasons for seeking out the people that we do, and they're mostly there from childhood, from all the things that happened to us, and they'll never be undone. but they dictate why we need the people that we do. you're using everyone you know, to fill a hole or to highlight a strong point, to superimpose revenge on something that happened to you a long time ago. so, who knows. maybe this is the same thing.

2007-08-01T16:13:00.000-04:00

sort of in the same way that alcohol amplifies all the aspects (good and bad) of one's personality, i think august amplifies all the aspects of pittsburgh's "personality."

it's unbearably hot... i'd compare it to being stuck in the bathroom after a long, hot shower. i walked outside to get lunch today and it felt like the air was trying to strangle me. i complain just like everyone else about the bitter cold in the winter, but i'm almost certain i'd prefer to be cold rather than hot. i don't think there's anytime hotter in pittsburgh than this time in august... and it won't go away until the end of september. christ. i woke up at 2am in a pool of sweat, and that was with the help of jocelyn's window AC unit. i guess they don't make them like they used to -- we had an "emerson quiet kool" growing up (actually i think my brother still uses it, which is a testament to it's unstoppable structural soundness) that would turn my dad's giant master bedroom into an icebox. granted, it was probably an egregious offender to the environment... i can't even fathom the ingredients of the chemical stew that dripped out of that thing onto the grass. but it worked a lot better than the crap thats on the market nowadays. i sound like an old fogey. pioneering the business of waxing nostalgic for a bygone era of home cooling appliances.

and it's steeler's training camp season, which marks the climax, with a collective exhalation, of the whine that has lasted since march about the pirates 15th abysmal season. these are two examples of the need for pittsburgh to get something new to talk about. every year the pirates suck. and yes the management and the ownership is terrible, and doesn't care about winning, and is not upholding what they promised 6 years ago in return for a shiny new ballpark. but frankly, it's old news. i'm tired of hearing about it. but every sports writer in the post-gazette treats the pirates losing as if they just came off a world series win.
also in the realm of i've-got-better-things-to-think-about, it's training camp. and the steelers DID come off a superbowl victory only to wade in the mire of the mediocre. and now there's a new coach. so i guess that entitles the PG to put the goings-on in old latrobe on the front page of the sports section. i mean, don't get me wrong... i'm a steelers fan like everyone else, but it's getting ridiculous..."day 9! today, jeff reed made a 42-yard field goal that allowed practice to end early." who gives a shit. the city lives and breathes hating the pirates and loving the steelers, and that's never more apparent than it is in early- to mid-august.

maybe it's starting to wear a little. i don't know. august, die she must.

2007-07-16T21:11:00.000-04:00

i'm terrible at this. but really this time, i'm trying to write more -- hopefully it'll make it easier to keep everyone up to date on my adventures in eastern europe.

i'm starting to feel the creep of sadness about leaving -- most days it still seems too far away to be real, but things are starting to happen to bring it into focus. plane tickets, payments. passport in the mail. it's not so much that i'm afraid to go, it's more that i'm afraid of what i'm leaving. either they'll be too much to come back to or nothing. both options are equally terrifying.

sometimes i think i'm attempting to run away from my problems... or to avoid having to do some work to achieve something in my life. i should have taken this year to write, but i didn't. my fear of failing paralyzed that muscle. i'm still not who i want to be -- just when i think i'm making progress, I meet a random middle-aged Canadian gentleman at the airport bar who tells me he can see straight through what I thought was a confident exterior. apparently you drink a few glasses of jack and you're suddenly dr. phil. i feel like i've done so much, and i don't know what else to do. there is nothing else i can do. maybe i'm looking for a clean slate but i know that's not what i'll be getting.

someone said to me a few months ago "are you just doing this so you can have something to say you're doing next?" i don't think that's true. i want to live abroad and i want this experience, i want to learn another language and become better at English and meet someone who has no clue who the Steelers are and walk on stones in the street that older than everything manmade in this country.

but am i done with this city? i remember things that seem like they're from another lifetime. there's no connectivity, no common thread lacing together the parts of my life. i look back on things and the memories seem like things that happened to someone else. different lives entirely. the stupidest things will trigger it -- the other day i lost myself staring at a flourescent heineken sign at the bar. i watched the inclines move up and down for ten minutes, thinking... how can i leave this. am i really done with this life.

i suppose it's not worth wasting time with what-ifs, but i can't help but think that if my dad were still alive, i wouldn't even be doing this. almost certainly not. it makes me hate myself. this whole life i've been living since December 2003 seems like a trade off. i want him to see this person i've become, that i'm still becoming, but if he could see it then i wouldn't be this person. imagine that.

2007-04-28T15:30:00.000-04:00

how i learned to love the draft (from jockmockery.com)

Up until today, myself and the NFL Draft were mortal enemies. I was tired of reading about it and hearing people talk about it; tired of mock drafts and especially tired of hearing "Sorry, I can't hang out this weekend. The Draft is on."

You're WATCHING the Draft? In the hierarchy of television boredom, I put that right up there before the Antiques Road Show and after watching re-runs of Hawaii 5-0 with my mom.

What's there to watch about it? I mean, there was an America's Next Top Model marathon on. For my money it doesn't get any better than watching Tyra Banks chew out some skinny bitches who "just don't have the passion for modeling" that she does. And Cassie is bulimic? Reality TV gold.

The thing is, I was SO WRONG.
This thing was brimming with drama and intensity.

First of all, I think the whole Brady Quinn thing was grossly mishandled. You could see the discomfort building up. Not drafted in the top 3? Okay, still calm, not time to panic. Jobbed by Miami? Your poker face is starting to betray you, Brayden.

Why wasn't someone milking that for all it was worth?

Whoever left Suzy Kolber in charge of asking the tough questions must have been on drugs. She was creaming her pants just knowing she got to sit as near to Quinn as she did. As the picks got higher and higher, she inched closer and closer.

"Aw, honey, it's okay... how about you ditch your slampiece Lindy and get with a real woman?"

ANYWAY, all she did was ask him how he felt about not yet being drafted, and when he replied with the athlete stock answer of not really saying anything with as many words as possible, she let him get away with it. You know even though he pretended not to be super pissed, he was. Who wouldn't be?

Character was a huge theme this year. Why not say "So, you're getting passed up by a lot of teams here. What do you think is wrong with you?" Better yet, ask JaMarcus Russell why HE thinks no one's drafting Quinn. Or, ask his girlfriend if she's going to leave him now that he's not a top ten pick.

This problem would have been solved if they'd had Steve Young doing the interviews. He's not afraid to piss someone off. He was about to drop kick the commentator who looked like Matthew Perry after he called him out on that "You don't want to have to be the next Dan Marino..." argument.

"You had to follow Joe Montana."

"Oh, did I, Chandler?" Bitchslap.

You could cut the tension surrounding that desk with a knife. You talk badass ex-quarterbacks, you talk Steve Young.

The closest they got to hard-hitting journalism was asking him if he was going to stay even though he was getting passed. What was he going to do, walk out of the Draft? You don't do that. He was staying, even if he had to stay until Sunday. Eleven-thirty tomorrow evening, he's passed out on the couch, shirt all untucked and rocking day-old-shave stubble, hair greasier than it was today (IF POSSIBLE), half-eaten KFC family bucket on his lap when he hears his name.

"Now, with the 297th pick in the 2007 NFL Draft, the recently-annexed Pittsburgh Passion select quarterback Brady Quinn from Notre Dame."

Justice.

The best part is he kept saying "There's nothing I can do. It's not my pick."

Yeah, because you're not Eli Manning.

And how about the Jets snaking Darelle Revis from us with 6 minutes left on the clock? I guess people saw that one coming, but I didn't. That was the exact moment I fell in love with the Draft.

Also, if the fans of the team that just drafted you boo when the pick is announced, you're in for a long haul. I can't remember who it was but I want to say it was Green Bay. Have a fun career, buddy.

Case in point, I take back all the whining I did about Draft weekend. Today was amazing, only to be topped by the fact that when I got home, I found out that the old Lothrop What What episodes are now on YouTube. Life is sweet.

2007-02-20T00:17:00.000-05:00

"the tomster, the tommarinooooo. you are the friend i never Met! FABULOUS"

there are two bohemeths of the online social networking world, and they are myspace's tom and facebook's mark zuckerberg. alicia and i were going to present this as one of our point: counterpoints, but her myspace account is malfunctioning like a toaster in a bathtub. seems as though tom is already one in the hole. ANYWAY, the question: who would win in a fight? myspace tom or facebook mark zuckerberg?

this subject has been tackled before, in an inchoate discussion thread in the facebook group "all hail mark zuckerberg" and more prominently in the group " if 43902948.3 people join this group Mark Zuckerberg might fight Tom," but the majority of this group also belongs to the group "1,000,000,000 Browns Fans," so their ability to discuss the subject intelligently is immediately called into question.

as far as site success is concerned, myspace has more users, estimated at around 140 million. the facebook was created as a vehicle strictly for college student networking, not open to all, and was only recently expanded to workplace and regional networks, so it has less and is only the 7th busiest site on the internet. the most prominent feature of myspace is the blog, which facebook countered with the "notes" feature that i really think hasn't caught the wind like they wanted it to. facebook, however, trumps myspace in ease of use, site quality and security. myspace riddles computers with viruses, causes profiles to self-destruct, and routinely presents inexplicable error messages. it's allowance of non-uniform page layouts, music, photos on the comment wall, etc, makes it ugly and cluttered.

has anything about myspace changed since you joined? i can't even remember the original facebook because the current version is so different. facebook may have a team of five goons in an office in palo alto, california, but those kids are constantly working: they probably surf the facebook all day looking for things to improve. if you ever thought "boy, i wish facebook did this..." usually a few weeks later, it does.

last year, yahoo offered zuckerberg a cool billion to buy the company, but zukerberg declined, which leads me to my next point: zuckerberg is a badass. he comes into work in adidas sandals and turned down an 8am conference call because he said he'd still be in bed at that hour. he once had business cards that read "i'm ceo....bitch." do you want to mess with him? i thought so. tom is a more affable character: he extends friendship to every member and leaves his profile open for all to view. i immediately was able to learn that he loves battle-themed movies and his eclectic music taste ranges from guns n roses to the cardigans. he also declares himself "President of Myspace" which is kind of like saying you're the Mayor of America. zuckerberg, on the other hand, is cocooned by his site's own restrictions: i cannot view his profile because i'm not in the harvard or facebook networks. i suppose i could friend him, but would he accept? i can only learn about him by gleaning facts from articles written by outside sources.

one thing we do know about mark? despite his badass nature, he can admit when he's wrong. i submit to you the newsfeed riots of 2006. when millions of lameass facebook users flipped out because zuckerberg made stalking easier for them, he apologized. he stood by his improvements, but gave users the opt-out privacy controls. a badass who can admit when he's wrong? i can't even think of a pop culture icon to compare him to. zuckerberg is blazing his own trails.

but despite tom's openness, how well does he really know his 157271163 friends? has he read each of the 54769 comments? amy addiction says "tom, i love you lots" and someone with an indiscernable handle claims her husband is jealous of tom because she spends more time on myspace than she does with him. but is he really jealous of tom or of her keyboard? i point you to the introductory quote: he is the friend we don't know. mark doesn't extend faux friendship, you have to earn it. tom spreads himself too thin. he wants everyone to like him, and those people never get into fights, let alone win them. winner? mark zuckerberg, on site quality, sheer net worth and badassery.

2007-02-04T03:24:00.000-05:00

here's the thing: i don't care if you are a huge football fan or not, no one really cares about the superbowl unless their team is playing in it. i can't even remember who won the last handful of superbowls, other than last year's. no one in pittsburgh is going to be rioting in the streets tonight either way -- in fact, tomorrow, we'll all probably be thinking about when baseball season starts. which is funny: probably the single biggest sporting event in the given calendar year, and yet, as soon as it's over it's more or less meaningless. i don't remember who even played in that superbowl where janet jackson's nipple was exposed, but i do remember justin timberlake saying it was an "accident." guaranteed, no one cares that the Steelers won last year, except people in Pittsburgh, who will care forever.

that being said, it seems like a hell of a lot of people who have no allegiances to the Colts or the Bears seem to want the Colts to lose. i can think of a lot of teams I wouldn't want to win the Superbowl -- the Ravens, the Browns, the Eagles, the Patriots, the Bengals -- but the Colts aren't even an afterthought. even though this Superbowl is a pretty excellent matchup, all anyone can talk about is how much they want peyton manning to never, ever win a superbowl.

this actually doesn't make any sense. peyton is by far the best quarterback playing the game right now (i guess you could make an argument for brett favre, but he's obviously no longer at his peak), maybe the best since he's been in the league, on a short list for the past decade or two. however, everyone wants peyton to go down in the dan marino flames of great quarterbacks who never got a ring. peyton's definitely way better than tom brady, and that goon has won three already by the grace of adam vinateri's toe.

no one likes peyton manning, and i have no idea why. he (along with favre) is probably one of the best-marketed players in the NFL. brett favre has a lot more fans because everyone, whether they like it or not, knows every detail of his life story -- the struggle with painkiller addiction, his wife's illness, his dad's death, the loss of his home in Mississippi to katrina. its really hard not to want that guy to win. if i could be that guy's friend, i probably would. likewise, i can't think of a player that has been given more personality nationally than peyton manning. he makes carson palmer look like a whiny douchebag and tom brady look like a pretty boy who dates supermodels. petyon comes off way better even in comparison to eli, who is only really known for wanting to be drafted first at any cost, but not wanting to play for the chargers. peyton is the funny guy, the guy who roots for people in office jobs, the down-to-earth guy who realizes that football is just a game that he's lucky to be really fucking good at.

i don't know why everyone chooses to root against peyton when they have no reason at all to dislike him or the colts. despite the fact that the "never won a superbowl" argument is, in my opinion, a stupid one, the fact of the matter is, it will always be the asterisk next to his name, just like it is for jim kelly and dan marino. something in me really wants peyton, the susan lucci of the NFL, to slap everyone in the face this year.

2006-12-09T03:35:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-12-07T23:08:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-10-31T13:24:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-10-28T13:18:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-10-27T13:30:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-10-23T22:30:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-10-16T22:05:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-10-03T13:40:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-08-01T12:31:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-07-28T19:07:00.000-04:00

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.

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

2006-05-27T12:55:00.000-04:00

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.

part 2

2006-05-26T12:57:00.000-04:00

“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.

part 3

2006-05-25T13:01:00.000-04:00

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.

part 4

2006-05-24T13:03:00.000-04:00

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.”