Friday, February 29, 2008
now i've had Solsbury Hill in my head all day! that's much better than Electric Avenue.
11:25 PM
1 comments
Thursday, February 28, 2008
they need you
to clarify that last post (even though no one asked):
i just found out a couple nights ago that not only is my brother david getting married this august in belize, which will be fabulous, my cousin david is getting married in december in costa rica. woot marriage!
9:08 PM
3 comments
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
rockin'
it is officially the year of the davids.
10:41 PM
0 comments
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
i want
i've been listening to Electric Avenue all day. I think I need help.
9:53 PM
1 comments
Monday, February 25, 2008
ain't got nobody
so, i went to dinner with Mike, at our usual place (slash his usual place, being that as he has absolutely no variety in his life). The most annoying 12 year old on the planet was sitting at the next table, and lucky for us because most of our dinners together turn into listening in on stupid conversation around us and making fun of them without them hearing. it's like a game - how close can you sit to them while not letting them hear you?
anyway, so this girl hit a high note in our game. At one point during the evening, a man walked by outside walking his dog. He tied the leash to a parking meter, and came inside the restaurant. The first thing that came to both mine and Mike's minds was that he was picking up a to-go order on his route with his dog. However, not so with the girl at the next table. She saw him walk inside, and said to her parents (and unintentionally to me and Mike), "What? He's leaving his dog outside while he comes in here and eats? That's so mean!"
10:30 PM
2 comments
Sunday, February 24, 2008
hearts!
Dear Hannah,
I <3 you! Thanks for being lovely. Also, I sat next to a cute guy on the train on Friday and he made small talk with me and it was super adorable. There's my "stranger on a train" story.
Love,
Nora
12:13 PM
1 comments
Saturday, February 23, 2008
i saw a stranger on the train
Okay, so I'm going to write an I-saw-a-stranger-on-the-train story, because I associate stranger-on-the-train stories with Nora (and actually can't remember why, but let's let it stand). Now, I hardly ever see strangers on the train like she does, really SEE them - I'm usually limited to disbelief that such-and-such person has been talking on their cell phone from, like... the Howard stop all the way down to Cermak and Chinatown, which is at least 45 minutes of cell-phone-talk, and it's been about the new styles of ballet flat the whole time, or about how short to trim one's eyebrows before or after one plucks them. But for some reason, when Nora gets on trains, there are all sorts of mysterious, intriguing strangers, just sprawled out across the seats and lounging on the piss-soaked floors, wrapped around the grab bars, hanging from the poster-covered ceilings. Their eyes burn when they look up, which they hardly ever do, because they all have moleskine notebooks or thick texts about obscure topics like the role of opium production in the Vietnam War or details of Richard Brautigan's final years and subsequent breakdown and suicide. They have beautiful hands and tapping feet in torn shoes and their images beg to be photographed and written about later.
This is apparently what happens when Nora gets on trains. When I get on a train there are twenty identical businessmen and four hobos, one of whom is spitting up phlegm every ten seconds. But I'm not really a train-rider. The motion makes me nauseous. I fly. I have always flown. So:
I saw a stranger in the airport. I was there to pick someone up from their trip to Mexico, because they had drank the water and didn't think they'd make the bus ride home. There was an electrical storm outside and although flights were landing basically on schedule, through the lightning and all, the arrival/departure screens were fizzling like melting butter and the lights, despite what must have been a million emergency generators, were flickering on and off, plunging the whole airport, and the masses, into darkness.
My place was amidst a pack of panicking people, who every three minutes would rush from one tram exit to the other, across a huge arched ballroom-shaped entryway with a giant fountain in the middle, because they weren't sure which tram their passenger would get off, and they didn't know when they were even landing. People were yelling their targets' names, squeezing through each other on their journeys, a sea of 'pardon-me's and 'excuse-me's and stepping on feet. We reminded me of a terribly polite and clumsy school of fish. I was in the middle. People had made welcome back signs out of the daily newspapers and ballpoint pens pressed hard and outlined fifty times, but I had nothing, and instead chose to use my height and my hair to my advantage. I gathered it into a ponytail on the top of my head, a swinging beacon for my sick companion, and strained my eyes for someone coming off the tram clutching their stomach.
Instead of him (and incidentally he didn't show up until two hours later, when the room had cleared and me and my 80's ponytail looked ridiculous in a sea of empty, rumpled chairs), I caught sight of someone leaning up against the edge of the fountain, backwards - I mean that instead of looking out she was looking in. The crowd kept surging around her on their wild journey every three minutes and she would take no notice. I couldn't see what she was looking at. No fish in the airport fountain. Just coins. Her hands were flat against the edge and she was spellbound, like this coin-filled fountain was the octopus room at the Monterey Bay Aquarium or something.
Because I am me, and can't let crazy sleeping dogs lie, or just observe them and write conjectures about them later, which is perhaps why trains never bless me with intriguing strangers, and only bless Nora, I asked her what she was looking at. Without even turning her head, or cringing against the coming onslaught of crazed airport patrons with newspaper signs, she said loudly and unmistakably angrily:
"I...$14.29... AM... $14.36... COUNTING... $14.46... THE MONEY... $14.51... IN... $14.76... THE WATER... $14.77... $14.82... $14.83."
Oh.
No mystery here.
(posted by Hannah)
11:02 AM
5 comments
Friday, February 22, 2008
all that i needed
aww, barack obama thinks i'm cute.
also, i'm going to madison for the weekend. which meanssss: guest poster tomorrow! yay!
4:10 PM
3 comments
Thursday, February 21, 2008
my luxury
sorry guys, i got some really upsetting news last night, and today my heart's not really in a blogging contest. this is all you're getting.
10:34 AM
4 comments
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
i don't know
wednesday already? i wake up every morning thinking its monday. it is a much more pleasant way to wake up than how i used to: thinking it was the day after when it actually was. every tuesday i would think it was wednesday, every wednesday was thursday, every thursday was friday. friday, though, was always friday. it was a devistating realization to figure out that the weekend was further away than i thought. now, i get to wake up and realize the weekend is actually closer than i originally thought. AND, on top of that, it's project runway day. how good does it get?
1:56 PM
4 comments
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
don't want to
i woke up at about 4 am this morning from a dream where i had posted. it felt re-assuring, and then i shot up in bed and thought "WAIT! I DIDN'T POST! DAMN!"
these mulligans are dropping like flies..
6:24 AM
14 comments
Sunday, February 17, 2008
these eyes
Kat is out. That makes me sad. I'll totally still buy her a hamburger, though.
7:39 PM
5 comments
Saturday, February 16, 2008
that way
it's been a tired day. i got a flat tire last weekend when it was 6 degrees, and lost rubber in the time it took to drive from one gas station (whose air pump was broken) to another. my stepfather had to drive out and rescue me, and taught me how to put on a spare tire. our tire place closes at 5:30 every night, which leaves me absolutely zero time to get home from work first, so i had to put off getting a new tire until this morning. so, i leave at 10:30 to head up there, and guess what? my spare tire went flat. i hit a fucking pothole or something, and it died. i made it within 4 blocks and had to pull over and call a tow truck. so, in addition to needing to buy two new tires, i need a new spare, and had to pay for a tow guy. my mom is convinced that the guys at the body shop (where the car was the week before the flat) slashed my tire so i'd have to bring it back. silly lady. but really, if this isn't the last of the shit i have to fix on my car for a while, i'm going to cry.
10:03 PM
3 comments
Friday, February 15, 2008
i won't always be around
a good friend of mine was supposed to come to chicago this weekend to hang out with me. instead, though, he is in a hospital with a broken arm and three broken ribs because he got hit by a car. i'm not especially in a chatty mood tonight.
10:25 PM
0 comments
Thursday, February 14, 2008
that's all you will be
How I spent my lunch hour:
Let's say you have nine rubber balls and a scale (the kind that has two platforms and you weigh things against each other.. a balance, if you will). You know that one of the balls weighs differently than the rest. You have three opportunities to weigh any combination of balls you want. How do you figure out which one is different?
12:48 PM
4 comments
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
montage
i started writing at work today, but i got distracted and didn't edit and am still not happy with it so i'm putting it off. in other news, over half my first week done! i almost, almost got started on real work today. hopefully tomorrow. oyyy i'm tired.
9:46 PM
2 comments
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
i hope
stupid new job is getting in the way of my blogging.
i thought up something really beautiful to write on my way home, but then i got distracted by being incredibly tired, and didn't write it. i'll do my best to get it on paper tomorrow, and post it when i get home.
10:25 PM
1 comments
Monday, February 11, 2008
make up your mind
i've been thinking all day on how to describe my first day at my new job as compared to my last day at my old job, but there's really no words for that. my last day at booklog consisted of surfing facebook trying to think of the last names of my coworkers to see if there was an easy way of keeping in touch. At one point, she got bored enough to start throwing grapes across the room at me. one got stuck under my desk and i had trouble finding it. i made a comment to that effect, and they said that it would be how they remember me in two weeks.. that girl who threw grapes and lost them under her desk. i asked why it would be under my desk if it was me throwing it, and from the other room we heard "well.. you ARE a girl."
today consisted of meeting after meeting explaining things about the company i could have figured out on my own. the rest of my week is going to be reading a ton of manuals to get myself familiarized with the standards of the industry. slightly different.
8:43 PM
3 comments
Sunday, February 10, 2008
up to 10
the poem read at the memorial service this morning (Sonnet XXX by Shakespeare):
WHEN to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er 10
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.
12:04 AM
0 comments
Saturday, February 09, 2008
one thing tonight
I have been listening to Dan Bern non-stop all night. I think I'm addicted.
Anyway, it's been kind of a sad day. This morning was a memorial service for the father of a friend of mine/my mom's. then, the minute we got out, we went to my sister's school to pick her up because she broke out in hives yesterday and has no idea what she's allergic to. It's a lot of people i love in pain, and i was in a funk for a while. i'm not feeling super chatty so it's gonna be a non-descriptive post. <3 you guys.
10:22 PM
0 comments
Friday, February 08, 2008
making you proud
68
i'm almost catching up to dave and iain.
(real post later, i just wanted to put that out there)
1:11 PM
1 comments
Thursday, February 07, 2008
one note song
*obligatory next day post*
today's been a little slow. i mean, incredibly busy, but not in a particularly good way. as compared to the last couple days, though, it's a nice change of pace.
good news: my favorite guy on Project Runway won last night. It made me so proud.
yes.. the challenge was WWE chick wrestlers. how hot is that?
10:45 PM
1 comments
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
my ghosts
I've a friend who lies in her hospital bed after fifteen operations from a botched appendectomy. I go to her with a heart heavy from the things on my mind, she cheers me up.
(Dan Bern, "Lithuania")
If I knew how to post a song on blogger, I would.
12:01 PM
3 comments
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
what i want
proof why iain is the best:
Read: i really want that damn comic. (i <3 you iain). also, happy birthday to me. i'm two dozen today.
8:57 PM
1 comments
Monday, February 04, 2008
hello, i'm here
i burned my hand on my plate taking it out of the microwave. that's just the icing on the fucking cake today.
(i'm reveling in being angry at the world right now because, honestly, it doesn't happen very often. about this time last year i went through a revelation that made me okay with who i am and what i have, and i've been generally happy since. so when i get all emotionally distraught like i am now, i kind of like it to last just to remember what being a whiny little girl feels like.)
7:53 PM
2 comments
Sunday, February 03, 2008
in love
Happy Superbowl! After a lot of drama about where to watch the game, I ended up back at my parents' house with them, a family friend, and my brother. Who, coincidentally, happen to be the four people in my life least interested in football. An actual conversation that happened tonight:
(right after the kickoff, when the Giants had possession of the ball):
Paul: So.. why isn't Tom Brady on the field?
Me: Because the Pats are on defense.
Paul: .... I'll pretend I know what that means.
Me: It means the Giants have the ball, so the Patriots are playing defense.. the quarterback is only going to be on the field when their team has the ball.
Paul: Oh... that makes sense.
Then he found a magazine and read for the entire second quarter, and left to go home two minutes before halftime. By the end of the game, though, I had my stepfather using actual football terms in a sentence, and I was really proud.
Also, as much as I dislike both the Patriots and the Giants, I'm glad the Giants won. I went into the game rooting for the Patriots because a) one of my co-workers really likes them and I don't want her to beat me up and b) because I hate the Giants more, but I couldn't be happy knowing they played a perfect season. So I'm happy they didn't, as mean as that sounds.
10:02 PM
2 comments
Saturday, February 02, 2008
so much
i picked my car up from the shop today. they fixed the door for an absurd amount of money, which i had to pay in cash, and as upset as i am about being broke now, my car looks really good. i turned it on in the lot and a new light showing something new being wrong lit up, and reactively rolled down my window so my mom could stick her head in and look at it. and that's when it hit me: since i started driving this car six months ago, my driver's side window has not rolled down all the way without the door being open. it was one of the quirks of my crappy old car, and as annoying as it was, i kind of loved it. now it's fixed. i can roll my window down and up with no problem, no having to open anything. strangely, i think i'm going to miss it.
sorry for the lame story post, but i was considering writing something much sappier and disgustingly "pity me", and then decided against it.
6:32 PM
1 comments
Friday, February 01, 2008
so i thought
update: i linked the wrong post in Chris's journal that explained the contest. It was one post earlier. My sincerest apologies.
Read: easy post for Day One.
2:30 PM
3 comments
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