The library reeks of frustration. Young men with stubbled jaws who engage me in conversation on lift rides to the fifth storey smell like freshly-ground coffee beans. These amicable fellows who misplace their razors and smell like a Starbucks—why do they gravitate towards me in lifts, where witty bantering is truncated by the electronic ding that lets you know you’ve arrived on your desired floor, and why so late in the semester?
The ambitions of sleep-deprived undergraduates saturate the air and anywhere, anytime, at any given nook and cranny of this building, thoughts and ideas are skipping across miles and miles of of myelinated neurons. Somebody needs to look into harvesting alternative energy from school-induced stress, if ever we run out of water or wind one day.
In one corner of the library, some mathematics student who should have his eyes fixated on the inherent wisdom of a statistics textbook is shunning his academic duties (he is stalking somebody on Facebook). We don’t know each other and probably never will, but he knows that for one week, there is a solid probability that he has something in common with the history student whose eyes should be fixated on the inherent wisdom of a Woodrow Wilson speech (she is updating a weblog).
But what we have in common are not riches or everlasting love or a desire to change the world; what we have in common is a little less heartwarming. What we have in common is.
At Times — 5 Comments
1. How did I let it get this bad?
2. If I were not made out of propriety and chickenshit and irony, then yes. But I am sober and scared and cynical, so no.
3. And you. What is wrong, and why won’t you let me look after you?
4. Aaaaaarrrggghhh.
5. End of cryptic transmission.
At Times — 9 Comments
This will be the last Coachella-related post, I promise! Here is a set of bands I took a great liking to when we were there, and I am currently busy pumping my iPod with their tunes:
Electric Touch - what nice, polite boys, and they have a solid repertoire of foot tapping-worthy numbers as well. An Austin-based foursome with an English frontman, a piano, and the good sense to do a lot of interacting with the mosh pit, they score high on charisma and catchy tunes.
Holy Fuck - their live performance was amazing, and from gig reviews I’ve been reading, ‘amazing’ is pretty much a word used constantly to describe their performances. But would you expect any less from a troupe that employs toy phaser guns to generate some sweet electronica beats?
VHS or Beta - when we sat down on the grass for lunch to dine to what we thought was Minus the Bear, I look up at A after a few minutes into the set to ask if she was sure it was Minus the Bear we were listening to. She checks her watch and says oh no, this is VHS or Beta. A fab accidental find, I think!
If anyone is at all interested in going to the fest next year, contact me and I can hook you up with Abid, the Best Taxi Driver in Southern California. He will try his best to get you into accommodations that do not cost an arm and a leg during festival weekend. Now if everything goes as planned, A and I should be hitting Austin City Limits come September for more great music and catching up with Caleb. Roll on Texas!
Music — Share Your Thoughts
To put it plainly: I had a great time, and I wished you all were there with me. All of you.
Music + Shorts + Travel — Share Your Thoughts
In a few short hours, I will get on a plane to sweat it out at Coachella! As excited as I am for this, I think I’m also already exhausted just thinking about the hassle of flying into and living in the desert for three days, drinking overpriced campground water and eating expensive junk food. And don’t even mention the toilets! Ignorance is bliss, ignorance is bliss.
I’m going to bring along some homework to put me to sleep when drunken revelers are going to keep me awake, so let’s see how well organizational theory, Emperor Hirohito, and Portishead mix together. Hah! Check out this week’s Muxtape for a selection of artists whose music I will be enjoying the hot southern Californian desert sun to. I would put in some Goldfrapp, but Muxtape won’t let us upload .m4a files yet.
Tent, check. Cameras, check. Composure—uh, rain check on that. I am so nervous! If internet cafe prices are decent, I’ll work on letting you all know I am alive and having a good time, maybe put up a couple of pictures on my Flickr stream. Or maybe I won’t, because who has time for the internets when you are stuck in the desert with a boatload of wonderful musicians and interesting characters?
On that note, I bid you adieu, and let’s put in another exclamation point to stress just how jacked up my nerves are!
P.S. Dear SP crew: I really meant it when I said bring on the welcome wagon on my arrival; nothing like rambunctious fanfare to welcome a girl back home and wish her a happy birthday with! Have I mentioned how much I love you all?
Music + Travel — 2 Comments
Last night was proof that I am a master at the craft of choosing friends. You see, the people I encounter in my life are filtered through a battery of torture tests to determine whose friendship is worth the time and effort of cultivation. I have them jump through rings of fire, swim with sharks, and trek across the Serengeti with nothing more than the clothes on their back and a pistol with one bullet; when the sifting is over, I end up with only the most outstanding of human beings who know what to do when I don’t, and who help me out when I am in a pickle—the way they did last last night.
Apparently, I spent twenty minutes with my face inside a trash can, regurgitating the contents of my stomach. The next thing I remember is flitting in and out of consciousness and waking up at three different points of the evening: first I woke up slumped over the futon, making a mental note to eat more carbs the next time P swings by with a bottle of Absolut. When I woke up a second time, I found myself sitting upright on the floor with E’s knees straddling my limp torso from behind and my neck draped across his right leg; the third time I woke up, I was lying flat on the ground, my head resting on E’s lap (poor fellow, wonder how long it was before blood circulation in his legs resumed normal operations).
M bravely held down her sensitive gag reflex and soldiered through not one, but two people hurling their dinners out of their oesophagi. She also made a fuss over me when she found out I had exceeded the dosage on my albuterol and spent the rest of my short waking minutes making sure my hands went nowhere near it. K and N shelled out more “Are you okays” than you can shake a stick at, and I distinctly remember my stubborn self shunning good advice—something about not drinking milk in my state—from their well-meaning minds.
I woke up this morning lightheaded and groggy, but otherwise in perfectly good shape. My undying thanks to everyone for not picking up a Sharpie and getting creative on my face, you guys are all too good for me, TOO GOOD I TELL YOU.
At Times — 10 Comments
The wonderful Id of Notbrainwashersafe fame has tagged me for a meme. I haven’t done one of these things in ages, and will probably not be tagged for another in the near future, so do indulge me! Here are the premises:
The “Ten Facts” Meme
Once you’ve been tagged you have to write a blog entry with 10 weird, random facts, habits, or goals about yourself. At the end, choose 5 people to be tagged. Don’t forget to leave them a comment saying “You’re it!” and to go read your blog. You cannot tag the person that tagged you.
1. When I was eighteen, a new friend I made at college thought I was twenty-five. He said there was “something” about the way I carried myself. I think I was just having an ugly week.
2. That friend still has a hard time remembering how old I am (apparently, I was twenty-two last year).
Continue reading And Now For Something Completely Different
At Times — 5 Comments
They just voted me Vice President of the largest student organization on campus. Haha, cool!
Shorts — 6 Comments
When in a schoolwork-induced rut, I make my way to the library to find a quiet, unoccupied crevice and spend hours flipping through art books at the oversize stacks. I read early-Islamic poetry, Tuareg oral histories, picture books that contain Coptic art and Alphonse Mucha’s works. After a while, my frazzled nerves untangle and my breathing comes to a comfortable slow; but sometimes this method of art therapy backfires because looking at Mucha’s women make me feel inadequate as a human being. His women are soft and delicate and have wonderful names like Camellia, Ivy, and Magnolia. I am not soft or delicate, and my name begins and ends with the most agressive consonants in the English alpabet. My schoolwork-induced rut is then further exacerbated into a more general rut, and my self-esteem flounders.
When this happens, I wander over to the literature section and pick out books printed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I like hunching over musty anthologies of chapbooks, second-edition Jules Verne prints, and short stories involving ladies who turn into foxes (stories which, I reckon, would make for amazing films). I find warm-and-fuzzy type gems like the following:
“For when we are overcome with the greatest sorrow we act not like men or women but like children whose comfort in all their troubles is to press themselves against their mother’s breast, or if she be not there to hold each other tight in one another’s arms.”
- David Garnett, Lady Into Fox, 1922
I could use a visit to the library. Or my mother’s kitchen. Or something.
At Times — Share Your Thoughts
