*blows dust off keyboard* Hello there, patient readers. I’m at home recovering from surgery. Fun times! August was a blur of either days off with my kids during their summer vacations or frantic work days trying to get done all the work I needed to before having my gallbladder removed. Each day gets a little better but having never had any surgery before, I underestimated what having a piece of your body cut out would do to you.
I won’t go into any gory details but I’ll just say that this is one part of getting older that no one told me about. Yet it’s funny how once you tell people, “I have to have my gallbladder out” it seems like every fifth person has had theirs out too. The world is full of surgical secrets that people only reveal once you break the code of silence.
School has started back up and you’d think that would mean I could rest up but for whatever weird twist of climate fate, now is when we are finally having the hot, sticky summer weather we should have had in August. I’ve also discovered that my neighborhood is far from quiet during the day. It’s a constant flow of trucks making deliveries, lawn machines buzzing, home improvements out of sight but not out of ear shot. Who knew?
Hopefully I’ll be back in the groove here soon. I’m calling the last week a loss and if you posted something you really thought I’d like, please do point it out, but for the most part I’ve missed a lot and that’s just kind of my tough luck.
This past weekend we were up visiting my mother so I took the opportunity to go up to her attic and have a look for some things I thought I might have left there. My mom was thrilled at the prospect of getting more junk out of the house. We hauled two big boxes down and four or five small boxes (old 8×10 B&W photographic paper boxes) that I knew were mine. One of the big boxes turned out to be my mother’s stuff so we sat on the screened porch and went through our old things together.
My boxes were full of old letters and postcards from college and my early 20s. I also found a dozen or more concert stubs that I’ve been wondering where I’d put them. My mother’s box also had old letters and pictures from her college years and early 20s. It was fun looking through them and we’d stop and show each other some of the pictures or read aloud funny parts of letters. I found a postcard from my DC days with a Victorian illustration of a Valentine’s Day card on it and on the back, written in red ink and all capital letters it said only, “THE CAPITOL CUPID HAS HIS EYES ON YOU. BE PREPARED.”
Her one box was dispensed with relatively quickly but I needed more time for all of mine. The next morning I woke up before everyone else, took some boxes out to the porch and started going through them again. Tons of old bank statements and pay stubs and college records that I have no idea why I kept but they all need to be shredded. I divided things into piles; trash, shred, keep.
The keep pile quickly took over the table. I got an empty plastic bin and started filling it up. On several occasions I opened some old letters to see what was inside and found myself taking a seat on the porch swing, reveling in these wonderful old letters. My friends and I used to write really great letters. Even the envelopes got in on the action. I have many that are hand made, true works of art, or that are covered in quotes from songs or books we were reading. Things like, “Sometimes, at a certain point in your life, you come across an artist—or anything; it could be a pastrami sandwich, I guess—and it takes on incredible significance.” – Hubert Selby. Or, “Keep away from hairdos altogether. A hairdo, by definition, always makes you look like someone else. Or think you do.” – Cynthia Heimel. I have no idea who those people are, not then nor now, but reading them today makes me smile and think of the friend that felt they were just the right finishing touch or last thought to include on a letter that had already been sealed.
And the letters themselves, filled with observations, feelings, doubts and fears, emotions and dreams, are a glorious tribute to a time when communication wasn’t instant. Several letters I re-read mentioned missing a phone call, or being unable to reach someone by phone and the resulting regret or worry it caused. No cell phones, no email, no text messages or status updates. We wrote long letters with little notes in the margins documenting time or place. One letter might cover several days, with thoughts being dropped in favor of recounting something that had just transpired then coming back to that thought a day or two later, maybe with some new perspective.
I love that they are also to and from all kinds of different addresses. There were many sent to me c/o a relative or friend I stayed with for short stints while job hunting. Return addresses from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Montreal, Philadelphia, New Hampshire, Tennessee, North Carolina. We were young and moving around a lot but we stayed in touch the only way possible.
I miss the letter writing days. I miss the time we took, the time we had, to sit down and put pen to paper, to ponder things and write it down to share with someone far away. Whether they were really important life decisions or tales of the ordinary day-to-day, these letters are something that tell me more than just what we were up to twenty-odd years ago. There is a large measure of our personalities in them. There is trust and truth. I see what made us click.
I’ve decided to write letters again. I was once a really great correspondent, if I may be so bold, and I want to try to rediscover that pace of writing and that level of attention and observation. I may not get any in return or I may fizzle out and they’d all become letters never sent, but I think it’s worth a try.
The Music Vault has this full concert on video. The quality is amazing. Do yourself a favor and check it out on their site.
I am done being depressed. I am done being disappointed. The fight is on.
I remember being in my early 20s, living in Washington, D.C., the first George Bush was still president and I couldn’t imagine a day when I would feel confident that Roe v. Wade was not constantly under attack and when we could rest easy that women’s reproductive rights weren’t threatened. I went to protests and counter-protests, sometimes even on my lunch break (I worked right on the Mall).
Then Clinton was elected. It was a week-long party on the Mall. There was hope in the air. They built this “town square wall” where they encouraged people to leave notes about their hopes for the country. I wrote “Keep abortion safe, legal, available.” That was over 20 years ago, but you wouldn’t know it based on current events.
Today’s Supreme Court ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby has infuriated me. There are so many things wrong with it that I hardly know where to begin. Winning the case doesn’t even make good business sense for them. It’s way more expensive to pay for someone’s pre-natal care and then pay for the resultant child’s medical expenses on their dime than it is to pay for birth control pills. But it was never about that. Not really. It was about control, don’t kid yourselves.
I’m not normally very outspoken about my political views, though I think they’re pretty obvious, but it’s time to get back in the fray. I have children now and as long as we’re living in this country I’m going to fight to make the country they inherit be one that respects all its citizens. Crazy idea, I know!
Except it’s not. It shouldn’t be. Take a fucking stand, everyone. At the very least boycott businesses like Hobby Lobby. “Be a conscientious consumer.” That was some parting advice I received at a concert (yes!) when I was 20 and it has stuck with me and it’s still true. Think before you shop. We’re all busy and tired and money is tight, but there are so many more of us that if we all really put our minds to it, really tried, things could move.
Look, I’m not an especially big Muse fan and I don’t like big arena shows but I love this song and video. I love the way it gets the crowd pumped. I love the message in the song. My one hope after this debacle of a ruling is that it will propel people to get off the sidelines. I never thought my daughter would face the same struggles I did, and more, but it’s time to show the next generation how to use their voices as well as their votes.
After months of deliberating, I got my haircut on Saturday morning. I delayed it for so long because I can’t find a hairdresser I like near either my home or office. The last two times I got it cut while visiting my mother, and the woman did a better job than the previous cuts I’d had, but I also didn’t really try to get the cut I want.
Which is what, you might ask. I have no clue how to describe what I want and I never find a picture that really matches the idea in my head. I think I used to have this haircut, pretty much, not exactly right, but closer than I’ve managed since, well this New Order song was new.
This time I had two pictures that were not alike at all, really, but both had elements of what I wanted. I explained that I did not want a standard short haircut. That I wanted to be able to flip my head over, use a hair dryer, scrunch it up so it would be wavy (which my hair will do now in the hot and humid summer weather), but that I can’t stand having hair on my neck. So, it’s a short haircut, very short on the nape of my neck but long enough elsewhere to curl up some.
She started cutting and was making the very bottom hair in the back way too long. I told her, really, make it much shorter back there, I don’t want it on my neck (which it would have been in a big way). Ok, she made it much shorter and continued on. It seemed to be going fine. It was only when she was nearly done that I thought, fuck, I’ve got the standard mom short haircut. How did this happen? It looked nothing like the pictures I’d brought along when she was done. There’s no difference between my head flipped over or standing up. There’s not enough length to curl anything. I can make it poofy but that’s it. Yeah, the back is short but even that is still not right.
Sigh. In high school my mother used to limit my sister and me to one conversation about hair a day. I’m sorry, it was the early 80s. Hair was a big topic (pun intended) even if we weren’t big-hair girls. I got a short haircut during my senior year of high school and went off to college with one of those asymmetrical short haircuts that stood out on my campus full of Jersey girls with perms and teased bangs that sat up four inches high. I grew out the uneven cut and discovered that if I went to the on campus barber and held most of my hair out of the way, I could get them to buzz cut about an inch of the part on the nape of my neck by telling them to make it like the top of a ROTCs head. I believe you would call this undercutting but I didn’t know that then.
It’s hard to describe to people how to cut something they can’t see. I have failed, yet again. Here I am with the good hair weather before me (warm and muggy is perfect) and yet my hair is now too short to take advantage of it. I should have gone down to Astor Place. I should have waited until I went back up to my mother’s. I couldn’t take the hairgrow I had any longer though and now I am really regretting it.
But, only one conversation about hair a day. Everyone at work has seen my cut and heard it wasn’t what I wanted, though they all said they liked it. If you saw me over the weekend you probably are thinking, what’s your problem? It looks perfectly normal. Which is my problem. It’s probably much more age appropriate, and it is a big improvement over my grown out cut from just a few days ago, but it’s very ordinary. It looks good, she did a nice job, it’s just… not right.
Yes, that’s Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band in the Astor Place video and no, I don’t want my hair cut like that either.
One drawback to my new-old car is the lack of a decent antenna. I’ve decided that must be the reason why I don’t get as many radio stations as I used to and I lose the ones I do get a lot sooner on my drive than I used to.
It hardly seems worth it to buy an antenna but I kind of miss being able to check out something I may not already know. I did have on my local college station the other day and Shazamed a song I liked since I felt sure I’d lose the signal before the dj told me the song. Only now did I get around to looking up the song and the band. This isn’t the same song I heard but it is the band, the Sam Roberts Band from Montreal, I think.
I love that I can find out a song by tapping on an app, then find it online, check out more songs by that band, look up some background about them, all on my phone. The speed and ease of music discovery is fantastic. I do really miss the depth of the old ways though. Even for bands I already know a lot about, I want the liner notes and the album art. I went to a record store in a nearby town yesterday that had lots of new releases on vinyl. My local record store doesn’t get in a lot of new releases and I had a bit of sticker shock looking at some of the album prices. $25-30 for a new record, just a normal length single LP, is not in my budget. I picked up an $8 CD of Superchunk’s Majesty Shredding instead. Of course I don’t have a CD player in the car so I’ll need to rip it to iTunes and transfer it to my iPod which I can use with the cassette adapter I bought. Yeah, I see how just streaming music is easier but I still want to read the booklet and buying an album, even at only $8, is going to mean more money going to the band.
As for Sam Roberts, I’ll do some more listening but so far I like the songs I’ve heard from this album.
Sometimes the internet is a beautiful thing. I live in a small town in New England but by following my interests, I’ve “met” people from all over. Recently I posted a #tbt of a concert ticket on Instagram and two people I follow there, that I’ve never met in real life, had been at the same show. 26 years ago!
I don’t have a big footprint on the internet but when you find people who enrich your life, even in the smallest way, by reblogging an image of a classic film that made me smile, or posting a link to an article I found interesting, it helps me feel like I’m not confined to this small town.
I have found people who are on my wavelength. When you come across something cool that you want to share and you hop on Twitter or Tumblr and discover one of the people you follow already beat you to posting that new Savages video, I actually love that. I hit the retweet or reblog button like it’s a high-five button. Yeah, I was just going to say that!
I’ve also learned a lot from these friends in the computer (or the smartphone, as the case may be). They come from different walks of life and different countries, and by showing me what they’re interested in, my own views expand. I encounter new things all the time because of these connections.
I found this song, and this band, because of one of these people. I really like it. Kind of shoegazey and right up my alley. Plus, you know me, you can’t go wrong with a bicycle.
So thanks, friends, for putting yourselves out there.
It’s May 1st, International Workers’ Day. I thought I’d take the opportunity to post a Billy Bragg song. Not his version of the Internationale, though I thought about it, but this song always brings a smile to my face even while it entices you to be active with the activists.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen Billy Bragg but each time I’ve seen him perform this song he changes some of the lyrics to put it in context with events that are relevant to the current time. I looked at a bunch of live clips on YouTube but I’ll leave it to you to look some up if you’re interested. They’re like little historical snapshots. For myself, I’ll always remember the time he sang, “In a perfect world we’d all sing in tune but as we’re all Smiths fans give us some room!” That was the same show where he covered Deee-Lite’s “Groove is in the Heart” with help from the opening band, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, on the pretext of proving that Billy Bragg fans could dance.
I love the rousing end of this song. I don’t know how you can not feel fired up. When I start feeling pretty discouraged about the state of the world, and lately that’s really easy to do, I need to remember to play this song. One of the live clips I watched was from the City Winery in Chicago about a year ago and I really love how he talked about fighting cynicism, more than anything else. I’m pretty jaded but he’s right.
“So join the struggle while you may, the revolution is just a t-shirt away!”
My Billy Bragg t-shirt from the Internationale tour.
The back! Were you at one of these shows?
A little t-shirt #tbt with your musical interlude.
Whew, what a day. Week, actually. Did you ever have one of those weeks where nothing particularly bad happened, no work crises, nothing horrible on the home front, just a series of frustrations and disappointments that pile on top of each other until you feel like you just can’t take anymore? Yeah. That’s when you need to blast this song as you go peeling out of the parking lot.
When we were teenagers, all the Elvis Costello records belonged to my older sister. I have a 7″ now, I’m not sure where or when I got it, but she owned all the LPs. I taped some of them way back when but I have a hole in my collection where all the Elvis should be.
Tomorrow is Record Store Day and I’ll be hitting my local record store, just down the street. Or as my son once called it, The Most Forgotten Place on Earth. He was only seven at the time and it is down a little pedestrian-only alleyway, but I’m sure it will be busy. Most Saturdays there is some regular traffic through there but it’s not crowded. Tomorrow will be bumping elbows, waiting your turn busy. I may not end up buying any of the special RSD releases but I might pick up an old Elvis Costello album. It’s going to be tough to top my great find from RSD last year.
It’s also Easter weekend and my kids have been off from school all week so I contemplated going up to Maine to visit my mother. We could spend Easter with her and I could go to an event at a branch of the record store where I had my first post-college job. I had too much going on at work though, and didn’t really want to spend that many hours driving up and back for what would end up being a day and a half there. It’s also just as well we stayed put because I’m close to securing a new (to me) car and I need to do some things to get that all lined up.
Normally, I try not to let politics bother me. I mean, it does bother me, a lot. Too much for my health, so although I care deeply, I try not to listen to the daily deluge of bad reports. I read the news, I just try to stay away from the audio and video because it quickly becomes overwhelming.
I live in a very blue state in a very blue part of the country. I put up with crappy winters because I enjoy living somewhere with values that are similar to mine. I generally feel like my elected representatives are going to vote the way I would on issues and they introduce legislation that I agree with so all of the pleas to email or call your legislator are things I don’t usually feel I need to do. I don’t live in a battleground state. Now and then I have fired off a letter when I feel especially strongly about something but mostly I get out and vote at every primary, every local election, every seat. I make sure I vote even when it’s nothing but a local bond issue. I show up at the off-season special elections. Voting always seemed to me like the truest way to take democracy into your own hands.
But I couldn’t help but be really disappointed by the latest Supreme Court ruling further dismantling the already weak restrictions on campaign contributions. Nothing gets my blood boiling faster than trumped up campaign commercials paid for by some patriotic sounding organization that is a front for who knows what or whom, advancing the candidate they think will let them get away with what they want to do. If I had my way, there would be zero dollars allowed in elections. Not even your own money. Public financing only, equal dollar figures (of a modest amount) for all candidates, and if you want to increase your visibility, get your ground game in gear. Polish that stump speech and criss-cross your state and show up and talk to actual people. Real human beings. And your tv commercials and radio ads would only be allowed to say where you stand on the issues, not trashing the opponent. The same policy for both sides.
This very disturbing trend toward handing over the reins to the uber-wealthy infuriates me. I know I’m not the only one. I saw Jon Stewart’s segment on the Daily Show from the other night and just watched in horror as a couple of the Justices basically said they don’t see how money equals influence. At best, it’s willful blindness though I’m sorry to say that I think that’s being way too generous.
I am not someone who is going to be taken in by advertising because I’m not an undecided voter. I don’t really understand how people can be. I am not a low-information voter because I feel it is my responsibility as a citizen to find out about the issues and where the candidates stand. Maybe it’s the fact that I grew up in the age of School House Rock and spent my Saturday mornings learning about bills becoming law and the three branches of government, set to catchy tunes. If you’re about my age I bet you can recite the Preamble to the Constitution, but maybe only if you can sing it.
However, I think there aren’t enough people for whom that’s true and sometimes they are swayed by misleading advertising. If we can’t count on the Supreme Court to see the evil inherent in allowing the voice of a few to rule the air waves, then I guess we are going to have to get a whole lot louder ourselves. Crank the tunes, folks, it’s on.
I need to replace my car. It failed inspection, which was not a surprise, but when I took it to the garage to see about getting it fixed, they advised me not to bother. It’s a 15-year-old car with 180,000 miles on it and the problem that caused it to fail is far from the only thing wrong with it.
I bought this car from my sister four years ago when it had 65,000 miles of hard city living on it. It had a lot of scrapes on the bumper from years of parallel parking on Brooklyn streets, the rear windshield washer has never worked since I’ve owned it, the glove compartment requires a special touch to get it to shut, but we needed a car and the timing and price were right so I didn’t complain.
I have put 600 miles a week on this car just getting to and from work. It’s nearly all highway miles but that’s bound to take a toll. Other problems have developed, as much from age as neglect on my part. I’ve bought new tires, new spark plugs and connecting wires, maybe brake pads once? It smells mildewy, the side view mirror is held together by duct tape, it burns oil, and the odometer light burned out a long time ago. It’s got manual windows and door locks. My kids think it’s so cool that they can roll down their windows without the car being on.
Looking for its replacement, however, is making me see it in another light. I don’t have money to spend on a new car and I can’t really take on a car loan right now either. I’ve been looking on Craigslist and wondering about the chances of finding anything reliable, let alone something that can take my commute. Nearly all the listings say things like, “Runs and drives good. No reverse.” or “Excellent car, great on gas, needs new motor.” Um, no. It is not an excellent, or even good, car if it needs a new motor or you can’t put it in reverse. The ones that don’t appear to have major mechanical flaws have 250,000 miles or more and that just seems like trouble to me.
Today I happened upon a listing for a car that is the same model I currently have, one year older, but with only 100,000 miles. I have never really liked this car but the pictures show it looking in better condition than the one I’m driving. Is it foolish to consider it? I feel like it’s the devil you know. Maybe I could get 80,000 miles out of that one before it succumbs to a similar fate? I should probably stick to looking for old Toyotas and Hondas but ones that are cheap enough for me to afford are so high in mileage that it doesn’t sound smarter. Sadly, public transportation for my route doesn’t exist or I’d jump on that in a heartbeat.
My family has a long history of car problems. When I bought my first car I only looked at new cars, hoping to avoid all the issues that might arise from buying a used car. Twenty years and two kids later, I just want something that isn’t going to fall apart while I make my way to the office. I want to be sure I can get home at the end of the day. Is that too much to expect from a 15-year-old used car? Is history doomed to repeat itself or have I paid enough dues in the old car wars to come through unscathed? Stay tuned.
Noisy Cats 