fuck, i'm in love with my band

fuck, i'm in love with my band 

stoked/bummed/stoked/bummed

ok so my horoscope today said that there would be some fantastic culmination and climax and wonderful grandiose finale of some thing i have been working on, but it turned out to be quite a normal day and nothing out of the ordinary happened. i did, however, think a lot about what i'm stoked about and what i want to change. here's the start of the list. 

the stoked about list

1. sleep and how i have been getting more of it

2. explode into colors 

3. playing double drums with danny yesterday

4. stoner jams with todd today

5. drawing fliers

6. teaching drums

7. five weeks left at the desk at work, (200 hours)

8. getting my book made into a book finally

9. freestyle entomology after the job is done

10. coffee tomorrow at the pot with lids and clayas. 

11. jenny jenkins is moving to town. 

the bummed about list

1. five weeks left at the desk at work, (200 hoursssss)

2. bike making funny noises

3. probably have to move but i love my house

4. no productive crushes

5. hardly ever get to the woods. 

.....

oh, thats cool as fuck, my stoked about list is much longer than the bummed about list.  

yesterday and today

were not nearly as interesting as last week, which was highlighted by the tag team! show at holocene, our mfnw show, and my birthday celebration all weekend long. Yesterday i took the day off work, which is one of my favorite things to do in the world. i got started on changing things up for the better. sat at the fresh pot for hours and hours writing a resume to give to trade-up, where supposedly theres a good chance i can get a job. brought my ravishing new feather earrings, one of which had lost its feather, back to Blue, and theyre going to get it fixed. ate an ok  7-dollar burrito at laughing planet, and reminded myself not to go there again. biked to tradeup in SE and met one of the managers, gave them my resume and cover letter, and realized i'd somehow forgot to mention on my resume that i have taught at rock and roll camp for girls. speaking of which, yesterday i found out i'll be teaching there in the fall, and you could say that i am completely fucking jazzed about that development. it is in line with this whole transformation of my life that i've started. basically, the plan is to engage myself in the creative and engaging activities that make me happy, and not to do insect work unless it fits in with that somehow. everyone at work found out i'm leaving, and theyre all apologizing about it, in a solemn way, and i'm just like 'hey, i'm excited to have time to work on other things. i've got a plan.' My list of other things has been waiting for a long time. OH back to my yesterday and my today....after dropping my res at tradeup, i met up with clea, we updated each other on our lives, and we biked downtown. She to happy hour, me to the lucky jeans store for my irresponsible birthday present to myself of a pair of jeans. i managed to rip the crotch out of every pair of my favorite jeans by the beginning of summer, and was more than content wearing cutoffs the last few months, but its getting chilly again, and i have always wanted a pair of luckys. After that i biked home, and taught jolene a drum lesson. Jolene is one of my favorite students. And this time she brought me a cream cheese brownie for my bday. After the lesson i made an eggplant and potato invention for me and lydia and hit the pillow. This morning i woke up from dreams of bomber planes flying over staten island dropping bombs on the city, my parents holding a historical tour of the house i grew up in that they still live in, and some bullet piercing my neck and having not much of an effect on me at all. I took a few minutes to stretch, planning to make sure my day went differently than my dreams. Lids and i had our bagel fix at the Pot, i biked to work. I spent 30 minutes at my desk then decided i would work at the albina press until i got hungry enough for my eggplant and potato lunch. This lasted a few hours. A few hours of the aforementioned "cut and paste and italicize and bullshit on myspace....etc".  Returned to the office in time to down my lunch and meet with some of my bosses to hand off two projects i'd been the main person on. One was a series of workshops on pollinators we held on farms for farmers and ag professionals from various govt agencies...the other was an identification guide to the native bees of the united states that i was the primary writer for. Its been through the hands of many editors, and i am hoping the final product still resembles my work and my name is all big on it and shit, because i spent months and months on that thing, and learned a lot from it. After this meeting i was having trouble keeping my eyes open so i returned to the Press for a coffee - one of only two caffeinated coffee drinks i've had in the last week and a half or so. It did the trick and i didnt get a panic attack. I copy and pasted and copy and pasted some paragraphs on some flies and water insects that are nearly extinct, and didnt increase their chances of survival by one bit in the process. Cest la vie. Biked home and taught another one of my students, who is a 10 year old boy. He asks funny things like "did i learn all the beats there are on the drums?" and "can you please show me a beat I haven't done before?" and "who invented the first drums?" and he makes me think of fun new ways of teaching rhythms so i end of saying things like "boom-cha-ca-boom-cha-ca" and "one - and - two - and - ready - and crash!" and "bass-and-snare-and-bass-bass-snare-and."  I also taught him me and treadway's celebratory 'high sticks' that we give each other at practice when we figure out our new beats. Lids and i shared some delish thai, a friend sent me a digitized make-out chart for olympia that looks like a fucked up spider web, and i have since been sitting on a nice wooden chair at the dining room table writing this blog. and....i think i will post on my myspace that i made this blog...so tell me what you think about what i think. please.

these next few months

are supposed to be quite fabulous for me according to every in depth horoscope i read. something about how everything is going to come together that i've been working on for 31 years now, and its going to keep on getting better. So i'm starting this blog to let y'all know how things are proceeding. i'm pretty stoked. this might be boring for you to read, and you'll likely have heard most of these stories and such before you even get to reading my blog, and probably more than once. My tendency to tell every story to my bffs multiple times isnt something i'm intending on changing during this new period of triumphant accomplishments and radical developments, so be warned. by reading my blog you're getting these stories yet another time. 

this past week was phenomenal. i turned thirty-wonderful. on friday we played a show at rotture at 1 am. we showed up at 5 pm to load in our gear as required by the festival. then claudypants and i made the rounds about town together with our fancy white MFNW bracelets. My favorite part were the art openings we went to at grass hut, emily's store, and work/sound, which werent even part of MFNW. it was my first time at grass hut, and its like this little fantasy land of perfect color combinations with beautiful materials hanging from the ceiling. old time relijun was sweet to see as usual as was best fwends and typhoon, and it was nice again to see kim from matt and kim's smile, but the highlight was for shizzle the art openings. go check it out, its all still up.  

I had an amusing realization at grass hut. several months ago i met this fantastic person who was introduced to me as don riddle. i'd always thought it neat that she'd been named don, which wasnt a usual name for a woman. at the grass hut show she had some art up - and i saw they'd written her name as dawn, and i asked claudia something about why everyone pronounces her name as if its spelled 'don'. in new york its 'dawn' (daun).  Can someone explain to me how "Dawn" pronounced "Don"? Does that mean "Lawn" is pronounced "Lon"? and "Fawn" is "Fon"? Anyhoo. 

On Saturday, I got my favorite sandwich at Moxie and a decaf americano at the Pot. I've been cutting out the coffee because it makes me feel like i stuck my finger in a socket if i go to work and sit at my desk. So i also cut it out this weekend, just for fucking kicks, even though its the desk & coffee combination of the weekdays that sets it off .  I've been successfully controlling what chemicals i take in, and have eliminated alcohol and/or coffee during separate periods of time but pretty successfully and with satisfying results. 

That afternoon Lydia and i biked to St Johns with Teresa, my friend from Jersey who i met on tour with Kickball last year in Munich.  We got gelato and played cribbage, my new favorite pasttime, under the cathedral bridge. I'm thinking of organizing a cribbage night at our house, the foxxx house, sometime soon, because that game is the shit. 

After ST Johns, Kerkyra, one of my oldest friends who shares a spatula tattoo with me, came down from Oly with her bud Dianna, and we dined at Lorenzo's. We went all out and ate duck and sausage and gnocchi and some asparagus and mozzarella appetizer. Then we returned to the Foxxx house and played my other favorite game, settlers of catan. Then the partying started, at brett's house and that was a generally good time that led to my feeling fantastically shiteous the morning of my birthday. We all met up at the Pot; i am really glad to have the Pot, to have a default cozy meeting place where i feel like i am in my living room. Oh, yeah so the rest of the birthday weekend went like this: breakfast, nap, concert in forest park (grandfather claws!! grandfather claws!), make many grilled cheese sandwiches, host potluck for birthday, and hang out with teresa, who brings over still-warm vegan chocolate chip cookies at 1 am. 

Today i went to work. I've got really intense mixed feelings about my job that cover a broad spectrum of emotions. Today was one of those days where my tasks at work made me really depressed and hopeless about the world. I was doing web content, and wondering to myself why the internet exists, and how it i merely supplemental to our existence.  Something that drives me absolutely nuts its when people utilize computers to make things 'easier'. Its not easier. Its just a different way of doing it. The thought of so many people doing the same redundant tasks i've been doing at my job the past few weeks - copy and paste and copy and paste and copy and delete and paste and copy --ops, control z, control z, - and paste - and copy and paste, and - FUCK! i erased the html! re-write the html - and copy and paste - and insert an image - and make a hyperlink - hyperlink it and hyperlink it and copy and paste and copy and paste and copy and paste and tab tab tab italicize the species names italicize the species names copy and paste and copy and paste and ETC.  The content is about endangered butterflies, but theyve so far likely paid me $800 to do this task, when i'd possibly been more effective at saving these butterflies with some other more direct approach.  I made it easier by doing a few hours of work  at the hawthorne albina press. 

hey this is long enough and i need to get some rest. its 2:15 am and i have only slept 6 hours a night since midway through last week.