sound -update

sound, originally uploaded by Hot Pants.

if you want to listen, I got most of the tracks on 8track in 2 mixes. thanks for the idea joanna!

bikey, face eating and then some

i made soup for breakfast since it didn't seem like i was going to get more then 4 hours of sleep.

looks like baby food, tastes like awesome

recipe here

I pureed all of the soup instead of just a portion by accident but it still came out great. The soup has a lot of flavor without a ton of salt, which is nice. i subbed thyme for cilantro since i didn't have any on hand and it worked. the lemon adds a nice brightness to it. something about lemon and cayenne together makes me swoon.

last month was the month the internet complained about early darkness. this month is the month the internet complains about arctic temperatures. i am one of them but after talking to my sister in Beloit, WI where it was snowing 2 inches an hour, i am putting on a scarf and shutting up.

i spent most of the past few days curled up with the dr. doing the various things we do. cooking, eating, reading, watching tv, putzing. sometimes i feel like i need to be more exciting and spontaneous. i'm fearful my homebodiness is reading as boring but as all the holiday invites pour in the more i'm inclined to pull the covers over my head to hibernate until after january 1. i am sure to be banned from yelp eliteness next year due to missing the holiday party but the last thing i wanted to do was wait in a long line in the cold to get into a hotel ballroom full of food we couldn't eat. free booze really isn't all that appealing to me these days and i don't necessarily have very many yelp friends. who needs free booze when i can drink in the comfort of my fleece pants inside a warm apartment? not that that's what we did. the dr. bought me a bike for xmas and we found a parking lot for me to practice in instead.

after a couple of false starts i started whizzing along and turning, something i've not been able to do previously, which was exciting. i thought about the chunk of my childhood spent indoors. i kept myself chained to a pair of headphones and the record player my sister and i shared. i learned how to live inside my brain. i feared the outside world. it was cold, people were mean and concrete hurt you. the training wheels never came off my bike. i rode my big wheel until i grew too big to fit into it. then i decided i would walk everywhere for the rest of my life.

i got my driver's licence. i still decided i would walk everywhere for the rest of my life. i wasn't stoked to drive. driving didn't mean freedom like it did for a lot of my friends. i knew i was bound for a city soon enough and driving wouldn't be necessary.

being in sf and not being able to ride a bike or drive a car has made me feel transportationally challenged at times.

i circled the parking lot several times and it finally clicked that there was no real way to explain how i was doing it or how i got from the wobbly death grip up and down the dr.'s street that first night he took me out to learn to now. i don't know how i was doing it. i wouldn't be able to teach anyone if they asked me. there are certain key steps for sure, pedal position on taking off and the whole 'don't lean' thing but other then that, i don't quite know how it works or how i got there.

i still lean and for no real reason turning left is really difficult but i can stay upright and haven't broken my face yet.

cars still scare me though. i'm still working on that.

the dr. has the patience of a saint and i am well aware of how lucky i am.

sometimes i get so consumed that i try to eat his face.

10 months and he still makes me swoon. like that whole cayenne & lemon thing, except better. there is this quiet ease and for that i am grateful.

and with that i should get out of the house and get the things i need to start a top secret present project complete with intrigue and mystery. and more brussel sprouts. i love those.

beer happens and then i fall down

this is what i did friday before passing out around 3AM tipsy and unable to pull off making banana wontons.

there is such a thing as too much baking i guess.

also, beer happened. i'm just lucky the baklava and cookies happened before beer otherwise it would have been a bit disastrous.

running late for the bakesale saturday morning i ended up face planting in the middle of sanchez st when my shoe decided to get stuck in the train track. i had woken up full of frenetic energy that i couldn't seem to reign in. i woke up, putzed around the house stupidly wondering what i needed to get done before the bakesale, what did i need to pack, should i pack the cookies and baklava? none of this shit is going to fit in my messenger bag. clothes, books, laptop, food, kombucha. shower. do i need to shower? yes i need to shower. do i have time to shower? no, but I NEED TO SHOWER. my brain running a million miles a minute but my actual body moving at the speed of corona light.

and then i fell.

a car at the intersection had stopped and rolled down their window.

"HEY MISS! ARE YOU ALRIGHT?!"

i thought about answering no. i thought about bursting into tears and asking the kind driver to drive over me and put me out of my misery. but when i peered into my paper bag to see that the baklava was still in tact, unscathed from my bellyflop onto the pavement, i decided that i was ok.

something about that fall sorta helped disperse that frantic energy. all of a sudden, i felt a lot better despite a sore knee.

screw the bruised ego. i fall down a lot and i've accepted that this is just a part of my life. coordination has never been my strong suit.

i'm just happy i didn't break my face or my baked goods.

"I'M FINE!" i yelled to the dude in the car as i got up and dusted myself off. i was relieved to find the street pretty empty. no witnesses to my disaster. this is always good.

i dropped my goods off at the busy bakesale and walked away with a box full of goodies that jessica, the dr. and i consumed throughout the day. i tried to take pictures but they didn't do the goods justice. the cinnamon roll was devoured first. then the chocolate croissant. then the ginger apple cake and then the apple pie. there is one lone plain croissant left that i carefully wrapped in saran wrap for the dr. it's not everyday a vegan can have a vegan croissant. my roommate is obsessed with making those pilsbury crescent rolls and their scent in my house taunts me. now that i know vegan croissants are possible i no longer have to covet bread that comes in a scary exploding can.

i'm glad my scattered self settled down. i found a comfy space in maria's house and ate my vegan nacho boy from ike's and spent the rest of the afternoon helping (but not really helping) jessica untangle yarn.

i was a cat in another life.

in other news, the dr. and i ate cardoons last night. weird.

oh and a warning: these sorta suck. don't be fooled by its lure of pretzels, chocolate & cherries. it tastes like none of these wonderful things. it tastes like a cliff bar gone awry.

meh.

sound

sound, originally uploaded by Hot Pants.

arling & cameron - W.E.E.K.E.N.D.
asylum street spankers - taint nobody's business
beirut - elephant gun
ben gibbard/postal service - clark gable
ben gibbard/death cab for cutie - i will follow you into the dark
bon iver - skinny love
built to spill - velvet waltz
camera obscura -french navy
cloud cult - take your medicine
colin meloy - ballad of el goodo (big star cover)
david dondero - when the heart breaks deep
devotchka - along the way
dntel- (this is)the dream of evan and chan
elvis costello - miracle man
emancipator - when i go
erlend oye - every party
fanfarlo - the walls are coming down
girl talk - night ripper
handsome boy modeling school - the truth
hot chip - wrestlers
jenny lewis - happy
julia nunes - i think you know
magnetic fields - 100,000 fireflies
metric - blindness
ms john soda - misco
neko case - this tornado loves you
neutral milk hotel - the king of carrot flowers parts 1, 2 & 3 (esp. part 2)
the notwist - sleep
old crow medicine show - wagon wheel
optimus rhyme - sick day
phoenix - lasso
pinback - b
pomplamoose - makin out (mark owen cover)
stevie wonder - as
sufjan stevens - that dress looks nice on you
thao & the get down stay down - beat (health, life & fire)
tv on the radio - love dog

what i did instead of writing press releases and various other requested writing things. it was tough to narrow it down. big huge labs noted a 36 pic limit so I had to shave 10 artists off the list. i mean, andrew bird isn't there and yet he and bon iver got me through a rough January. I had to pick and choose wisely. music has always defined times and places for me. i've listened to more music this year then i have in forever simply because i had a lot of time on my hands to do so. i wished i could say the same for reading and books but my attention span for reading was pretty awful this year. I spent 3 months in traction, taking a painfully long time reading 'The Omnivore's Dilemna'.

i sat at CTTP today thinking of what songs i listened to the most, songs i knew almost all the words to, and this is what i came up with. some of it is really random. this year sounds more mellow then i've ever been.

i'm still a bit tortured that i had to leave out andrew bird, lily allen, bruce springsteen, the mountain goats, friendly fires, the new pornographers, feist, lyrics born, anni rossi and paper route but i guess i can always figure out how to make a larger mosaic on my own without BHL's limits.

but maybe that's for later, when it's not 5:00 AM.

so i went for that walk yesterday

hello, originally uploaded by Hot Pants.

it was lovely and i felt better and i decided i shouldn't be so whiny about things that only happened to me in my dreams or about random people and their unpredictable phone etiquette.

it's all scarves and layers and bundling to keep warm. i like coming in from the cold. i like that it's crisp out.

1 cup vanilla soy milk
1/2 cup mimiccream
1/4 cup or so melted dark chocolate
agave to taste

1 functioning steam wand attached to 1 functioning espresso machine.

happiness

i'm trying to stave off my usual winter need to hibernate and climb out of my nest as there is a world of things out there worth discovering with enough time to make it back home for evening vinyasa.

pudge budge

According to the scale I've only put on 3 lbs. during Nanowrimo. According to how I feel, I've put on 10. Sluggishness I'm sure is due to being sickly, it sucks that I want to go be active, but my body reminds me that I spent a good chunk of last night hacking up little alien life forms. Yin Yoga was nice, ligaments definitely needed some room to breathe but the class is passive. My yang wants out. It wants to run through fields of fennel singing, skipping and raising my heart rate.

I was up ridiculously early. Strange dreams. I was a human sized Lite-Brite for Halloween and people kept stealing my pegs, which was like stealing my soul. I was trying to explain to them that it wasn't funny and I could call the cops if I wanted to but no one was listening. Frat boys moved my pegs around to make a picture of a penis. Surprise, surprise. I felt somewhat helpless as both elbows and knees were hindered by the Lite-Brite box. Dreams like this make me wanna stab the human race in the face.

This coupled with being flirted with on the phone by whoever was handling my call at the credit union this morning has me feeling weary and baffled. Who asks you if you've got a boyfriend on a customer service call?!?! Who? Isn't this call being recorded for quality assurance purposes? This normally wouldn't have bothered me but I apparently am feeling rather defensive and cranky this morning.

Since I can't go running or do anything too taxing lest I want to cough up an organ in public I guess I'll go for a walk.

Now What?

Blinky has seemed to forgiven me for ignoring her this past month and climbed into bed with me last night. Despite my attempts to pass out early I found myself writing some more, going back through and deleting some scenes that I wished I had never written, rethought the idea of the gun, figured out that Ivy was my brain's reincarnation of my old college friend Maria Guerriero, decided I'd like to go back to visit Boston someday even though I know the moment I set foot in the North End my brain would explode into tiny little pieces that would scatter and stick to the old brick buildings of my former neighborhood. Such a quaint life I lived there, it seems so long ago that I can almost trick myself into thinking that that life was someone else's, not my own, not mine, never happened to me.

The novel has so much New England in it, bits and pieces pulled from my memory. It's odd to go back and read my writing and recognize that I am not Laura and that it took a month to give her some substance, it took a month for the story to gain some real momentum, it took a month to figure out what this story is really about. It's not about the gun, it's not about eating disorders or coming out of the closet or a disinterested father who wants nothing to do with you. It's about relationships and how you actually build a life and fill it with people. She started out by herself. 120 pages later there are two people she had decided to let in and in the future (as I had written some future scenes) there is a third that comes along as well.

Without too much premeditated thought, this all goes back to what I was thinking about in October and something Josh said back when he returned to SF in February.

"Your family you're stuck with. You had no choice in the matter. Your friends though, you choose those. And if you choose wisely, those friends are family in ways your family can never be your family."

I'm lucky enough to have a gigantic family that I know if I was drowning in the ocean there would be over 15 Inaldos/Suarezs/Ferrers in the water to fish me out.

But what if you don't have that? And your idea of family is really just nothing but an idea and you've resigned yourself to figure shit out on your own for the rest of your life? Except you realize that you don't want to do it by yourself for forever?

That's what the book is about.

I've never been able to articulate what the story is until now, 51,345 words later.

I feel like that's more of an accomplishment then actually making my word count. It made me uncomfortable talking about the novel since I had no idea what I was doing and what it was about until I went back and read it. When I write, it just comes out of me and I'm not really conscious of the big picture until I get close to the end.

About 15,000 words or so are useless and will probably be cut in the next couple of weeks. I want to keep working at it, fleshing out parts, deleting parts, changing things now that I know what the heart of the story is.

In the meantime though, rest, satsumas and hot liquids to get me through this winter head cold. Oh, and Michael Pollan. For good measure. My brain has been asking for non-fiction these past few weeks and I had been feeding it Tim Sandlin to keep my prose up to par.

Oh, and lots of Beirut, Sufjan Stevens, Fanfarlo & Bon Iver. It is the season for such music.