Filed under: life progress
I am alive. Really.
I had this plan in which I would descend upon DC, perfectly organized, and begin living my life in a more efficient way than ever before. I am not even joking when I say that I sincerely believed this would happen.
Here is a more accurate summation of what my life has been like: I am in House #2, with boxes strewn across my room, a room that is in no way in the original place I was planning to live. I can’t find my keys, which I threw down last night as I stumbled home from an outing with the teachers in which I am pretty sure I talked way too much. I acquired furniture about a week ago; before that, I was rifling through my suitcase at 6 AM every morning.
Are you ready for a shocker? Life in the real world is unexpected. It’s hard. I feel like kind of an idiot a lot of the time. Teaching special ed is also hard, a statement that is approximately akin to saying that the sky is often blue.
But I’m still happy here on my own. I have a room in NW that will be lovely when I get it finally, finally, cleaned up. I am writing more, mostly here, which is the latest iteration of what I was doing before. I’m learning more about how to be a teacher and a decent human being than I even thought I didn’t know. Mostly, I’ve managed to keep it together a little more than before, the keep-it-together-meter inching ever upward, which seems like what happens when you do finally grow up.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Bonnie Prince Billy and Beirut lately, but I’m looking forward to music for the spring, whenever it comes.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I’m professionalizing my Facebook profile, so I wanted to immortalize my description of Summerbridge here.
From “job description”:
1. wake up, go to work
2. work: teach middle schoolers (from lesson plans)
3. have meeting at work where we talk about work. and lesson plans
4. go home, talk about work some more, as well as middle schoolers and lesson plans
5. sleep
6. write more lesson plans
7. eat candy I had previously reserved for student incentives, rationalizing it by telling myself that they are unlikely to earn it
8. eat other food while thinking about other things I can do to my students, like eat freezee pops in front of them
9. write some more lesson plans
10. sleep
11. dream about Summerbridge; middle schoolers; freezee pops; lesson plans; or some combination of the above.
More later today.
Filed under: IGR Recommends, blogz, design, holidays | Tags: Christmas music, design
CLASSIC CHRISTMAS ALBUM POST #2
It is not Christmas in the IGR household without the dulcet tones of New Edition.
“Ha ha!” you are thinking. “She likes it in an ironic way because it’s kitsch! And because of the nostalgia it induces! Look at their pseudo-Motown styling, complete with sequined tuxes!”
You are wrong. I really like it.
Believe it or not, this is the one album that I can remember being played every holiday season, without fail. My uncle Pascal, a quiet computer programmer with a secret passion for dance music and techno*, sent us this some time before my memories begin. It’s the kind of disc that has the songs printed on the CD itself, along with the label (RCA). My father, who likes to compare himself to attractive black men**, fakes a microphone every year in order to sing along. Which is how Bobby Brown has become an inextricable part of my holiday season.
This is not, like most Christmas albums, a series of covers. Rather, it’s a group of originals – including “Give Love On Christmas Day” and my personal favorite, “All I Want For Christmas Is My Girl.” One might think that this makes this easier to judge them, as one is not faced by the twinges of conscience that would occur with a condemnation of “Silent Night.” Conversely, it could also be postulated that it’s harder to judge these songs, because there’s nothing to compare them to, with the possible exception of that song from Love Actually. Truthfully, it’s neither. I don’t even know if these songs are good or bad anymore, just like you probably can’t give an opinion regarding the objective merits of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” They just are, and they always will be, now and forever. Amen.
I’d like to change the subject briefly and highlight a few discoveries I’ve made lately, as well as provide more life updates.
First off: Logo Design Love and The Lovely Package. Font lovers’ dream.
Next, a series from the magazine Format that speaks for itself:
Thirdly, DCist, which may or may not make me give up my beloved Daily Intel. Via Iris, who is my new friend and whose blog should probably count for #4.
Fifthly, the group I work with in Johnson City gets on TV…when I’m out of town. Fortunately, they uploaded the story, because I guess TiVo doesn’t work on local channels. Thx TiVo.
Sixthly (good God): a book whose illustrations are entirely made out of letters. Could not be cuter.
LAST OF ALL! I have housing, although I’m sort of crashing for the first month, which means I can’t decorate, but I’m going to start reading Apartment Therapy anyway.
*He looks and sounds like a taller version of Eugene on Top Chef: New York. I am not the only one to notice this.
**He likes to compare himself to Denzel Washington, although he once got compared to Arthur Ashe by a childhood friend of mine who didn’t have a lot of exposure to minorities. This is actually not a bad comparison.
Filed under: cultural theorizing
Filed under: I am not cool, IGR Recommends, history, life progress, meta, music | Tags: music, Vietnam
I thought I only had one thing to write about, but actually I was wrong.
1. You probably have (not) noticed that my avatar has changed. Tricia Takanawa seems to fit me, since we’re both essentially Connie Chung 2.0. Given the fact that I do have a job that will be starting soon, I need to make a much stronger effort towards anonymity. I’m also going to try to sort of consolidate my internet identity in the new year, because I have so many damn projects going on. I need to make sure that everything is identifiably me, where “me” is “anonymous” (unless you already know me). At least that’s what I’m thinking right now.
2. I lost my watch. I really hate losing things, which is strange, because I do it so often that one would think I would have established some sort of fail-safe by now. I know it’s in my room somewhere, and what I’m inclined to think happened is that I probably left it out on my dresser and the cleaning people MM hired to come every couple weeks put it somewhere I can’t find. (I don’t think they took it, because there are a lot of other nicer things they could have taken.) At any rate, I am usually okay with trying to find things over the course of time, but occasionally I lapse back into my old panic mode, which usually involves me blowing the whole thing out of proportion (i.e.: this means that I am forever irresponsible, that I have no appreciation for the nice things my parents have provided for me, therefore that I am a bad daughter, etc., etc.). All of which means that although I sound calm, I am secretly freaking out. I am reminded of a story I never liked about my father: when he was little his grandfather gave him a piastre and he lost it and went ballistic, so much so that his grandfather tried to give him another. “No,” he said. “I want THAT ONE.” I hated it for two reasons that should be fairly obvious: 1) even as a child I was concerned with the prospect of buying love and wanted my parents to know that I would never be so materialistic that I would care what they got me (yes, I was the most neurotic six-year-old on the planet); 2) I totally sympathized with my dad and knew that he never got that stupid coin back.
3. I will hopefully write a series of entries re: my favorite Christmas CDs, and I would like to start by discussing a set we listen to with some frequency every year:
We actually have 1 and 5 as well, but they never get as much play. It should be unsurprising that as a middle/high school student, I was far more taken with traditional songs covered in a way that could be construed as “edgy” (well, if you’re thirteen) than anything else. Also that I’m a big fan of what was considered cool in the mid-1990s. NONETHELESS: AVSC2 has an absolutely incredible cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Believe in You,” by Sinead O’Connor, as well as an awesome jazzy version of “What Child is This” by Vanessa Williams (yes, that Vanessa Williams). Meanwhile, 3 features the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Christmastime,” which makes wonderful use of that joyous thing the Pumpkins do so well when they want to, as well as “The Christmas Song,” one of my favorite Dave Matthews songs. SHUT UP. Also “Christmas is Now Drawing Near At Hand,” which is probably the best and weirdest thing that Steve Winwood (!!!) ever recorded.
4. I went to look at house shares in DC this weekend, which was for real almost as difficult as trying to get a job. Demand > supply. Fortunately, I managed to meet a lot of really cool people whom I would like to see again, even if I don’t live with them. Still, though, I got to experience the open house, which is basically like a co-ed Greek rush in which everyone is desperately trying to convince the current tenants that:
- they are the most fun person there, except
- that they are totally cool and already have friends and thus are not doing the housemate thing to make friends at all and that it doesn’t matter if the housemates want to hang out with them or not, and
- that in addition to being fun they are also responsible and employed and
- will simultaneously be really clean and not care at all if anyone else is dirty.
FUN STUFF. I will have housing updates by tomorrow at the latest.
We stopped at a Vietnamese place in Arlington on the way out, and it had canh chua tom, which is probably one of my favorite Vietnamese soups ever and is often absent from restaurant menus. I think it’s kind of a pain to make. The walls were lined with pictures of American military officials, all of whom had written notes for the owner. During the meal, I think I asked MA who used to cook for the family when he was a kid, and he started telling us about the nannies and the cook and the chauffeur/bouncer (”He was like a cool uncle”), none of whose whereabouts are currently known. At least not by us. Later he said, “The owner probably knows my mom.”
“Why?” I asked.
There’s a large Vietnamese community in NoVa, and apparently it’s full of ex-military officials and high-ups – which makes sense when one considers its location. Which is the circle my family would have been in. “You should ask to see him,” I said, and he shook his head.
For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking about that man a lot, and how young my father was when he lost all of that – a loss for which most people probably wouldn’t have much sympathy. No one has any love for the bougie.
Filed under: life progress
Being without a job has meant watching more television in the past six months than I have in probably four years. Maybe five. Which means, in turn, that I now have opinions about things I never have before: Dancing With The Stars (weirdly, I sort of liked Lance Bass, and I definitely liked Warren Sapp, but that is only because of my family’s long history with the Bucs), Jon and Kate + 8 (just watched the show where they go on GMA, and decided I am over them – I am not interested in how they are famous, and I’m a little weirded out), Top Chef (better than Project Runway, and the Hawaiian former busboy looks and talks like my uncle).
But this state of affairs is about to change, because I tentatively have a job. Although I’m still planning on making time for Top Chef.
More details as things get more definite. In the meantime, I’ve still got a few side projects going. Things are getting exciting, my 친구.
Also, I have a few important questions, totally unrelated to the above content.
Q: Rock Band or Guitar Hero?
Q: What is this song? It’s driving me crazy. I keep thinking it’s something by the Cure, but I’m not sure. This clip is from This American Life, so just listen to the music in the background. I tried to use Audacity to fade out the voice, bu even after I split the tracks it didn’t work, probably because I know nothing about audio engineering. Edit: I had to use Garageband to clip it to a decent size and it took me almost an hour, so please help me out.
Filed under: IGR Recommends
It is the day before Thanksgiving and I am the second-sickest person in my house, a state of affairs that can plausibly be attributed to the fact that I spent the better part of last weekend chasing down a sick six-year-old, a sick three-year-old, and a sick baby. I would take some Sudafed but I generally find the side effects (for me) worse than the symptoms it addresses, which means that I am doomed to a cloudy head and a throat that feels like it’s filled with Karo syrup.
Anyway, topic at hand.
THE STRANGE
1. Is my audience familiar with Mick Collins, possibly the coolest (and oddest) man currently alive in America? Mick Collins is one of the few black punk pioneers of whom I am aware. He once released an album called I Sing The Booty Electric. He sounds sort of like James Earl Jones, he’s apparently an accomplished UNIX programmer, and he writes furry fiction in his spare time.
There’s a worthwhile interview with him (and his bandmate, who is significantly less cool) on The Sound of Young America. I think that link should work.
2. Weird musical genres, courtesy of This Recording.
MUSIC I SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO TEN YEARS AGOOOOO
1. Billy Breathes by Phish. I heard the last song off this album in 1999, when I was a freshman in high school. I loved what I heard, so naturally, being me, I never listened to the album again, with the exception of “Prince Caspian.” Of course I like it now. I wonder if there is some sort of cosmic principle preventing me from being timely/cool.
2. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces. Truthfully, I’m setting off on the same path here, because there’s only one song I know off this album: “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, And Understanding,” and I only know that because of Lost in Translation, but I started listening to some of the other songs and I liked those too, so hopefully I am not condemned to repeat it (history).
PSAs, RACIAL HARMONY
1. Aliens in America. I have only seen one episode of this show, which I found because its theme song is, as you might guess, the aforementioned E. Costello masterpiece, but I’m in the process of watching more. As you might expect of a television program about the wacky misadventures of a Midwestern nerd’s family and their Muslim exchange student, it is mo corny. As a result, I am not terribly surprised that it got cancelled after one season. But it’s sort of adorable even though it’s not that good, because aww, people are learning tolerance and understanding! There are also a few moments of absurdity that shine through (e.g., “This is the worst thing that ever happened in our house, and we once had a clown die in our living room,” “I found myself telling the exchange student things I wouldn’t have even confessed to the guys in chorus”). It also features Amy Pietz, from one of my other favorite crappy television shows, Caroline in the City.
SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
I had this dream last night that I read a poem. That was it; that’s all I can remember; and I didn’t even remember that until I started looking for “One Art” in order to reference it for this stupid essay for this fellowship program, and as I read it I had this vague memory of reading poetry and being struck by the perfection of its composition. It was a feeling that I haven’t had in the waking world in a really long time, and, thinking about it now, I didn’t appreciate that in this fictitious version of my life; I was just thinking, “This is a good poem. I like it.”
I haven’t read a lot of poetry lately. It’s one of my fairly constant goals, to broaden my horizons instead of returning to the same ones over and over, and there’s no reason for me not to do such a thing, but I just don’t always. It’s kind of like going to sleep at a decent hour. On any given night, there is every incentive for me to sleep and almost no positive results from staying awake until 2. (The allure of sleeping until 10AM wears off after five months of unemployment.) And yet I just don’t, whether through some sort of mental sloth or a fear of failure (failure to what? to understand a poem? to fall asleep?) or God knows what. Until I suddenly want to again, and then I read everything I can find for a week or two and set my alarms. There are a lot of things I haven’t been doing lately that I should.
But the memory of that poem inspired me to spend half an hour going through the archives of Rachel’s old blog to find this poem that she posted a long time ago, that I loved at the time, that I knew had something to do with maps and was by Sharon Olds. The only other poem-seeking I’ve done lately is Frank O’Hara, and quite frankly, that’s only because I a) saw him quoted on someone’s Facebook profile and b) Mad Men. Surprise: I don’t like the Sharon Olds one as much as I used to – I’m not crazy about it at all right now, actually, but maybe that’s because I’m not in any sort of love – and I really like Frank O’Hara. But I’m going to post them both here anyway, because I’d hate to lead you on.
Topography
Sharon Olds
After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco againt your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas, your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Animals
Frank O’Hara
Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners
the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water
I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days
Filed under: Uncategorized
Paul Simon’s hair is heartbreakingly old, and tonight on the Colbert Report he pretty much disavowed one of the first Simon and Garfunkel songs I ever loved: “Red Rubber Ball.” Apparently he wrote it for some quick money in London, and not to remind me permanently of sunny mornings in Yerkes 205 at My College. I am embedding the video below to express my disapproval.
Although the idea of time travel makes me uncomfortable, I would like to utilize it to see some of my favorite bands in their element.
SCIENCE HILL HIGH SCHOOL’S PRODUCTION OF SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS
The orchestra pit was loud enough that I had trouble hearing the lines. Also, most participants were good at either acting or singing. At least one of Miguk Brother’s friends was in the band, wearing an inside-out Led Zeppelin hoodie in place of the black dress shirt he was supposed to sport.
AMERICAN NERD: THE STORY OF MY PEOPLE BY BENJAMIN NUGENT
Benjamin Nugent gets points for being Kelly Kapoor’s boyfriend. Linking that reveals that she’s started updating her blog again: a positive development. I don’t doubt that he’s a nerd, but to be honest, I found the book rather…slight, which is to say, not all that nerdy. He doesn’t delve all that deep into his subject, and I think more of a David Foster Wallace approach would have been more appropriate, because if there’s one thing that nerds love, it’s minutiae.
Other issues I had with the book:
- classifications: He distinguishes between nerds who are unable to interact with others and nerds who are placed in that category by dint of social circumstances. These are not inaccurate, but they are inadequate; they fail to take into account the category of people who have a legitimate and substantial interest in information that may or may not be important, but that the majority of people do not consider worth their attention. E.g. the way people used to make fun of me because I, quote, “actually like to read.” (Further taunt: “I bet she doesn’t ever watch TV.”)
- He doesn’t spend a lot of time on girl nerds, although as my brother pointed out, as a male nerd it is doubtful that he has spent a lot of time with the opposite sex.
- My brother says that he mischaracterizes gamers. (I disagree.)
- He references Paul Feig’s characterization of nerds as essentially liberal and jocks as essentially conservative in a way that fits in with his own paradigm, which suggests to me that he agrees with it. However, I know multiple guys from My College alone whose pursuit of conservative ideology made them, to say the least, not the most accessible people; in fact, I would argue that it was something of an alienating factor, and that their willingness to expound upon the nuances of what can appear on the surface to be a rather harsh (i.e. realist) ideology placed them squarely in Nerd Camp.
That having been said, his analysis of the “nerd trend” is absolutely spot-on, and articulates the way I’ve felt for a long time. As a person who used to sit alone at lunch and took to going to the library every day in order to avoid social interaction, and who used to read the encyclopedia for fun, I give others’ claims of nerdiness close scrutiny (even though I can interact with other people now). It’s the sort of thing I would have expected from Chuck Klosterman, and Mr. Klosterman is the only person I can think of who would have written about it better.
You hear fake nerd conversation. It follows a model. You bring up an “obsession” or “total fascination” with a purportedly unfashionable subject. “I am such a dork about old Hawaiian slide guitar. I actually have every King Benny record. I’ve so got a problem.” “Dude, you want to hit In-N-Out Burger? I basically live on their Protein Burgers when I’m in LA.”
This is a way of whipping out cultural capital, but not in the same way as leaving guests in the living room to retrieve a hollow-body guitar or a first edition of To The Lighthouse. The Gretsch and the Woolf say, “I am creative and educated, so I have an understanding of the blues and the Bloomsbury group.” The Hawaiian slide recordings and the In-N-Out Burger, which are both low-end consumer products, say, “I love the things I love because I am guided by some untamed voice within me that causes me to have random obsessions. I will follow my individualized obsessions, not trends, and be transparent about those obsessions, even when those obsessions tell me to like things widely considered ugly and cheap.” It’s the cultural capital of quirk.
BEYONCE’S “IF I WERE A BOY”
I’ve always been sort of indifferent towards Beyonce, so I am a little surprised by how much I love this song. It sounds like the sharpest and most heart-wrenching breakup letter possible, with a surprisingly nuanced take (more so than it needs to be) on gender double standards. It’s a little more sophisticated than “Independent Women.” If I were Jay-Z, I’d be squirming a little. The melody hits this perfect balance between melancholic balad and angry tirade, too.
PAUL RUDD ON SNL
I can has?*
EAT ME BY KENNY SHOPSIN
Kenny Shopsin is like a fully realized Daniel Pinkwater character come to life. I really want to go to his restaurant, but I’m afraid he would hate me, so I will content myself by trying his macaroni-and-cheese pancakes.
THE SQUID SALAD AT STIR FRY
Seemingly the only thing that hasn’t suffered at the hands of their (apparent) new management. For $5, it’s an incredible pile of calamari in a very fine gingery dressing. You will not need anything else to eat.
*Look, I like weird not super famous actors. Besides, Clueless.
