— tapioca world tour

First of all, I totally take back that comment about not having a social life. Because man, I haven’t slept at all this weekend. I should have said: “I just realized I have no typical social life.” After going to bed at 5a Saturday and working all day Sunday, I went out to The Burren to see Danielle & Teresa & Larry sing, and to let polite guys buy me cranberry & seltzers and to tell Hugh McGowan how much I enjoy his music. Then I got a frappe for Ry and went over to watch our Sunday night Elvis movie.

This week’s movie: Girls! Girls! Girls!
General plot: Elvis works on a boat he built with his father. Someone else owns the boat, but Elvis’s only goal in life is to own it for himself. His fisherman’s life is complicated with too many hot women, including a lounge singer at a club where he moonlights. It’s at this club that he gets in a fight with a drunk. The drunk’s date chases him out the door, spends the whole movie wooing him. Finally she buys him his father’s boat as a present, but Elvis says: “I earn my own money! I don’t accept hand-outs from no one!” We think he can’t stand this crazy chic, but he ends up marrying her, after manhandling her and very nearly getting it on on several occasions. I don’t remember the very very end because, well, I kind of fell asleep during the last five minutes.

Best line of the film: (Some girl to Elvis) “Scuse me, can you tell me how to get to–”
(Elvis, exasperated with women) “SCAT! SCAAAAAAT!!!”

Best accurately-predicted line of the film by Ry: (Lounge singer, to Elvis, after female love interest walks away) “What is she doing here?”

I don’t not recommend this movie. It was classic Elvis in the sense of making absolutely no sense, everyone’s personalities changing per scene and season, a suffient amount of homoeroticism, a couple good boat chases, and women going stupid over The King. As Ry aptly noted: “This movie is 12% great…But it’s also 100% terrible and 100% awesome…”

I’m going for 100% awesome. Which is a larger parallel to my life in general. ROCK!

(That’s a Hugh McGowan lyric reference. Just another local musician I’d never heard of before but now listen to all the time.)

So anyway, SPRING IS AWESOME. I can tell because good, fun things are happening.
Reviewing my Saturday til its 5a ending, I think I really made use of a great 50-degree day: brunch with BB, an extended sabbatical at Sephora where I finally came away with a new summer perfume (“Sake”, by Fresh) which is taking a while for me to get used to because it makes me smell like a person I’ve never met…then I went to an indoor driving range with J., which was insane because the wall is 10 feet away from your putting area so when you slam the golf balls they travel for about .003 seconds before crashing into the wall in front of you. It was really funny too, because they have these webcams that record your swing so you can watch it afterwards and learn what’s wrong with your stance, etc. But J. and I just stared at our bodies: “God, is my butt really that big?” “Do I really have such awful posture?” “Man, I hate myself.” But it was all in good fun.

Then we picked up S. and drove over to other S.’s party in Dorchester where J. and I proceeded to beat everyone in pool. Then I 86′d over to the Paradise where Ry had his big (sold out again) show, which I watched in a corner from the 3rd floor balcony because it was so crowded with ex-high school football stars and dancing hippies. Afterwards I joined D. Miraglia and T. Storch, also singers of the Beantown scene, and retreated to T.’s kitchen for our own afterparty since the boys were more interested in drinking and talking to girls who’d put out (even though our company was way more enjoyable). So that was it: I made two new pals, and they’re actually girls! Who’d have thought?

And now, I offer up the bulk of my Sunday to the sacrificial alter of Perpetual Childcare. Someone’s gotta pay the bills…

— compared to my contemporaries. But that’s ok. For now.

The best part of my incredibly boring evening of sitting around for four hours in case a baby woke up was not the part where I read aloud an essay in Harpers on “American Exceptionalism” but rather the 2-mile walk home, blasting the Run Lola techno soundtrack on iPood at 11p down the looooong hallway of the MIT building (the “infinite corridor”) while making conspicuous eye contact with all the boy scientists in an effort to determine if they were really MIT students or just jacks like me, taking a warm indoor shortcut to or from Mass Ave.

The part where I realized I have no social life was when I walked past throngs of hip 20- and 30-somethings standing in the outdoor line to get into that new club, whatsitcalled, Middlesex Lounge (where I went only once, on a reconciliation mission to say hello to G., only to turn around after getting there and realizing he wasn’t spinning that night). So I walked past them tonight and they all stared. At first I thought they were staring because they thought: “Why is that 20-something with the really cool jacket walking alone instead of coming into this hip club? She must be super lame.” Then I figured they might be staring because they were thinking: “Wow, that’s a really cool jacket.” Then it occured to me they were probably staring because I was walking in time with my music, which was Franka Potente’s fast-tempo’d techno single, meaning I was walking incredibly fast.

What can I say? I’m incredibly fast.

Fast as in The Autobahn.

Ha!

***On Edit***
Babysitting 5+ nights a week doesn’t make me entirely lame, ok? It just means I cram a week’s worth of socializing into one day & evening, which will be tomorrow’s brunch, party, other party, & show. And whatever, dude. I still wear miniskirts. You saw the photo.

***On 2nd Edit***
Why am I being so defensive? I think the excessive childcare is getting to me. There is a limit to the amount of hours you can spend being jumped on, wiping up cracker crumbs and peeling small dirty underwear off the floor. I’m really nearing that limit.

***On 3rd Edit***
Props to Nayiri for the hallway photo link.

And by “my people”, I mean the leprochauns. I was a child who never since birth believed in Santa Claus, but was fiercely defensive when anyone dared question the existence of those little Irish trolls.

A shout-out to all my melanin-less comrades, and another shout-out to my teenage half-brother who still doesn’t know I exist: PK, on his saint’s day.

SINN FEIN!

E., age 6, and I., age 8, tonight in the back of the car:

E: Alan always sits next to me when I’m trying to do my work. It bothers me, because I really want to finish Book 6 of “Explode the Code”.
I: Well tell him he distracts you. Just say, “Hey, I need to be concentrated when I work. When you sit next to me, it’s distracting. You need to sit over at the yellow table so I can be more concentrated.”

I bought them chocolate pastries after gymnastics. Course, E. threw a fit because I wouldn’t buy him a fizzy Perrier. “You don’t need it,” I said. “You already have fizzy water at home.” Pout. Pouuuuuuuuuuut.

“But it’s not the same! The water at home isn’t as fizzy!”

“There is absolutely no difference between the Poland Springs fizzy water at home and the Perrier water at the bakery, except the brand name,” I said. “He’s never had Perrier before,” whispered I. “He just wants the small glass bottle,” I told her. “He’s not interested in drinking it.” Pout. Pouuuuuuut. A quiet wailing.

The trick with kids is simply not to give in, because if you give in, they brand you as a sucker and a sucker you’ll stay ‘por infiniti’. You just have to stay resolute…and concentrated. Like lingonberry juice.

I mean what does Wolfowitz have on me, besides a friendship with The Man and a small FBI file of really boring photos where I’m standing at various anti-war demostrations with a broken camera and fingerless gloves? Man, I gotta exercise my Freedom of Information Act rights. I just can’t imagine what juicy info they’d ever have on squeaky-clean little me, or why they’d care. My life is painfully average, in a broke, bored, non-profit average kind of way.

In agricultural news, have you noticed your apples are a bit unripe lately? Because honestly, none of the apples I’ve purchased in the past 3 weeks have been ripe. They could all use a good two more weeks on the tree. It makes me think of driving four hours on the bus from San Jose to Cahuita, Costa Rica, passed the sea on one side and acres of banana plantations on the other. The bananas were all covered in blue plastic bags so the bugs wouldn’t destroy them. It was an eerie sight: thousands and thousands of banana trees on empty plantations with blue plastic bags shielding their fruit. It was one of those moments where you think: Every day, while I’m commuting to work, making photocopies or toasting bagels or cycling through exhaust from the backs of dirty buses, these banana trees are here, swaying in the wind.

An existential moment, or something.
An immortal moment, perhaps.

More than anything else, the one constant thing that drives me crazy is the knowledge that, at every moment, I could be anywhere else in the world.

I mean seriously, why is that?

So instead of blogging about myself and the epiphany I had last night about my life, which is apparently one of the many stupid things one should never blog about (in addition to never using the word “blog” as a verb), I will write about the epiphany I had when reading the article at aforementioned link, that the word “blog” comes from “web log“. It has to be true. Boy did that clear up a lot of confusion…

No but really: here’s the big news: I’ve sorted my housing situation! My pal A. is looking for a roommate for her spacious 2-bedroom flat in Porter Square, and guess who’s the lucky winner? That’s right: ME! Contingent on Ry finding someone better than me to take his other room (as if that’s possible), I will move into A.’s either April or May. I even get to repaint the living and dining rooms (no really, it’s a bonus) and use all of A.’s furniture and cooking pans and stuff. “But there’s one thing you’ve got to be ok with,” she warned me. “I go away alot. Like, for a month or 6 weeks at a time. In fact I might be gone all summer. Don’t worry, I’ll still pay half the bills.” A. is a booking agent, a band manager, a sometimes singer, an occasional commercial product promoter, and a seasonal temp. She has lots of stuff and knows lots of people, occasionally babysits other peoples’ cats and travels often. We are going to have parties.

Woooo!