You actually have no idea how much time I've spent drooling over that picture and babytalk-babbling to a silent image on my computer. My modmates have been like, "I actually thought you were tickle-strangling an infant down here. How do you even make those noises?" But when faced with such brain-exploding cuteness, how can you not? Her name's Hanley, she's half Collie and half...sumthin'. And I get to see her in about two weeks when I go home for Spring Break, which means my adorableness-induced squeals will actually reach glass-shattering proportions. And as always, I'm psyched to rupture some eardrums.
Secondly: sometimes previews for movies can be the most deceiving things ever. I know, I know, the media only ever deceives us for our own good, but they really should just be upfront about us about our film selections. I mean, they can tell me Iraq has literally been rebuilt as Disneyworld: Arabia and I'll pretty much accept it, but it's when they start lying about the most important films of the year that I really start thinking about doing some protesting. I feel they're usually somewhat accurate, but the Bridge to Terabithia trailer made me think my childhood was going to be strapped to a screen and flogged to death. It's got all this CGI and these action sequences and the booming voice guy going, "And these two young warriors must save their world because this is the most crucial moment in the universe's history..." while Lord of the Rings-type music plays in the background. However, I went to see it with Harry and Kate this week, and we ALL ended up crying. Even Kate, who I didn't even think had tear ducts. It was super-sappy a lot of the time, yes, but in this way that made me 7th grade self (the one who had read the book in the first place) go "Awwwww!" And for a Disney movie, it really delved into the whole religion and hellfire and damnation issue. It was amazingly sweet and affecting, and, as someone who loves the book, I have to say, it's definitely worth seeing. I don't know if it would really have this effect if you didn't read the book when you were younger, but it made all of us have this really serious, intense conversation about middle school and growing up and how awkwardly adult we're all starting to feel. And then we spent the car ride home not talking because we were singing an improvised techno-beat kind of ritual chant thing for about twenty minutes. We're really getting the whole "growing up thing."
However, as Kate pointed out, stories like Bridge to Teribithia are the reasons why stories like Lolita happen. I don't mean that random guys are going to read Bridge to Teribithia and suddenly get the urge to seduce underage girls...I would kinda hope not, anyway....but the character of Jesse totally paves the way for the character of Humbert. You know, you meet the most amazing person in the world when you're like 12 years old, they die, when you're both like 12 years old, and you spend the rest of your life trying to replace them with their exact replicate. It's creepy and it made our childlike enjoyment of the movie seem really creepy in like .6 seconds flat. We were like, "Um...we literally just compared a young, beloved Disney character to the most famous literary pedophile ever. Awkward."
This week has been a working week like whoa, but Kate and I did still managed to carve out time to go to the Mirah/The Blow concert last night. And when I say we "managed to carve out time," I mean we "used up hours that supposedly would have gone towards work but actually would have been filled with Scrubs and cereal and complaining about how much work we have." The concert was at the Iron Horse, which was completely packed even on a Wednesday--the bathroom line, which I always end up having the weirdest conversations with complete strangers in, contained about twenty people at any given time. The girl from the Blow was hilarious--she pretty much danced like a robot on the fritz and told all these ridiculous stories about her life in this flustered, Miranda July-esque way. She started off with this a capella song called "How Naked Are We Going to Get?" and then launched into this story about how the first time she had ever sung that song was in a karaoke bar. She started with, "A couple of years ago, I had started running...every night....in my jeans...to the karaoke bar." And then she talked about how one night she was up on stage and had a moment of soul-crushing self-awareness and was like, "Barkeep, please don't play the music." So she started performing this a capella piece instead and everyone in the place was like, "What? She's not singing along to the words on the screen?" and gave her a lot of applause so she wouldn't feel awkward about it. She also went to Evergreen State College, which is basically Hampshire: the X-Treme Edition. They gave her credit for performing one of her songs about this boy who never called her back for a presentation in a social sciences class, which seemed maybe even too Hampshire for Hampshire. I'm not going to say I haven't seen it done--somebody definitely did an interpretive dance, complete with dinosaur mittens and a Journey song, for their final in my Creative Writing, Design, and the Body class last semester--but improvised dance numbers are not always accepted for credit in the more text-based classes. I mean, I tried to do a spontaneous ballet to pass my Organic Chemistry class, but I just ended up with a sprained ankle and a bill for $250 in broken lab beakers in lieu of an evaluation.
So the Blow did her awesome schtick, then this girl got up and peed onstage. Not like, drunkenly--she got up, introduced herself, and was like, "Now I'm going to urinate." She was demonstrating this thing called a pStyle, which is sort of like a plastic penis-substitute that allows girls to easily pee standing up and then--using her words, here--"squeegee" off the excess moisture. It was bizarre, but if you can stand up in front of a huge crowd of people and casually piss into a bucket while making a sales pitch, I'm definitely 760% more inclined to buy your product. Plus when she was like, "You know you've always wanted to pee standing up," I was like, "Well, I'm not going to lie, that would be THE flyest thing EVAH." However, I had no cash on me and Kate was like "I am not let you buy something that will actually make you and Amy so lazy you'll just start peeing out the window," so I am officially putting this item down on the "Things to Buy Katharine For Holidays Centered Around Urinally-Themed Gifts." Come on guys, March 25th. I know you've all got it on your calendars.
The whole concert, I had been trying to convince myself I didn't have to pee so I wouldn't miss the beginning of Mirah, but honestly, if you think you have to pee and someone actually gets up on stage and says, "Hi, I'm going to pee now because it's awesome," you should pretty much take that as an unarguable sign that peeing is in your near future. So I went downstairs to join the bathroom line, which was predictably long as hell, and talked to a couple of people from Hampshire before the girl in front of me sparked up this random conversation about the poor grammar of the wall graffiti. Last time I was at the Iron Horse for a show, I ended up in an equally intense convo with another random girl in front of me about my professor Michael Lesy and her deep love for poetry. Nope, not kidding, I think she might have even used the actual phrase "my deep love for poetry." So I was telling graffiti grammar girl about this bumper sticker I saw that read "My son was 'killed' by a drunk driver," which was a horribly sad sentiment made inappropriately hilarious by quotation marks that made you go, "'Killed?' Is that like, a euphemism or a metaphor or something? How can you be (air quotes) 'killed'?" Then she went into the bathroom and this wicked tall guy behind me, who hadn't said anything to us the whole time, tapped me on the shoulder and I said, "I couldn't help overhearing, and I'd just like to interject--what if the kid was in a coma or paralyzed? Like, his life 'ended' but didn't really 'end?'" To which I went, "...Yeah...oh, the other bathroom's open, guess we'll pick this up later!" Then I fought my way through the crowd to get back to Kate and watch Mirah, whose music was gorgeous but kind of sleep-inducing after the strange energy and magnetism of the Blow. We were all sort of like, "Oh...we just remembered it was a Wednesday night and we're kind of tired. Let's all sway and half-close our eyes and contemplate life." But, just like when we went to see Grizzly Bear, there were this group of spastic girls who could have moshed out to a funeral dirge. They were spinning around and bumping into all the stationery hipsters and occasionally making comments about how beautiful the night and the music was even though they couldn't hear anything and the room kept tilting. That, my friends, is why we do or do not do drugs. I just can't remember which.
Tomorrow I'm working at the Eric Carle and not at Small Beer Press because everyone who usually works there (read: three people) are out of town. But last week I finally got to meet Kelly Link! She had been in Australia teaching a seminar or something, so I had just been hanging out in the office at the back of her house with my boss Jedidiah and being like, "Wow, there are sci-fi collectibles and books everywhere. I want to be Kelly Link when I grow up." So we talked about Buffy (because the Buffy: Season 8 comic is coming out next week, if you have somehow managed to avoid The Good News That Will Sustain All Whedon Geeks For A Little Longer) and ate kabobs from Cafe Lebanon in her kitchen, because though the internship is unpaid, my perks include free lunch, hanging out with Kelly Link, and cool free books like The Science of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, which I nabbed from the advance copies pile last time. I also got to write the renewal plea for Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, their literary zine, which I did in the style of a lusty, longing love letter. I went so far as to accuse lapsed readers of "eyeing the massive magazine racks at the bookstore" and "fingering the pages of younger, thinner volumes of prose." I think it might win us back some readers, or just convince them that the new intern's kind of sketch. Either way, it'll be a victory for me.
If you managed to read this whole thing, your love for me must be at least at Stalker Level. And, as you well know, at Stalker Level you receive a free song. (Upgrade to Worshipful Servant Level and get three free songs for only 3/4ths of your soul today!) So here ya go:
Parentheses by the Blow
1 comment:
Glad your back. Will we have to wait until next year for another entry?
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