p.s.
Kevin Bacon connections for the day: besides driving past Holmes Ave the other day, I just had to look up on the Andersons website to see when a particular author was coming in to do a signing (go to http://www.andersonsbookshop.com/events.php if you're bored, scroll down to the list of events...the site sucks, but I have to go on it all the time for work-related inquiries)We couldn't find Jeffrey Deever's appearance date, but I did find an author named Mark Sprague, whose signing on Sept. 14--who is this writer? And he's a Sprague? Bizarre. I'm going to see if I can find the book on our website, but my co-worker Ben said we have a bastardized version of Amazon.com, which is why about ten authors with the last name Sprague came up (no Erichs though). Turns out someone in Naperville entered in Mark's last name wrong, and it's actually Spragg, and he's a children's book author. Sucks for him to have his name posted wrong on the site of the bookstore he's doing a signing at! I'd raise hell if people had me pegged as "Skerritt" or "Skirrett" or whatevs (there's about a billion variations). I have more Kev Bac connex, but not enough time to write about that. Another day, perhaps.p.p.s bought tix to Bloc Party & the Kills for me and my cousin Kate, and I'm already looking forward to it like crazy! can't wait...
today I'm wearing polka dot rain boots
...and Rog said to me, "You expecting floods this afternoon?" My reasoning was I'm working the sidewalk sale today, and when I woke up, there were rain puddles everywhere. I didn't check the weather, and I thought I might have to be outside today, wading through puddles to guard the cheap-o merchandise we're selling. And I'm wearing my pink Blondie shirt, the one I wore on Girlfrieeennds Day with Lainey. I kind of look ridiculous, but that's pretty much how I'm feeling today, and have been feeling lately.I just started reading this book called "Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood" and I've been thinking about drinking lately, which is almost the only thing I feel okay doing lately. I have no interest in smoking weed, not only just on doctor's orders, but bc I realize how damaged it left me after smoking pothead-amounts for so long. Same deal with "white drugs"--though never with the frequency as weed, it still interests me but I'll never do certain drugs again (ecstasy for example, I'm pretty certain contributed to my first round of "breakdown" when I left Portland in October 2001).
But then after reading parts of "Smashed", I started to feel guilty about drinking too. And then I wonder, am I just destined to be a straight-edge/PLUR girl who is "high on life & nuthin else" ? But then I think of how much I love to drink, but I worry about my quantitative approach. Like, in the shot picture of me and Steph taking Cuervo, my jaw is open and the shot is tipped back, ready to swill tequila down my throat. Yikes. Steph takes hers more cautiously, and rightly so, since she'd probably had too many shots already but the orders kept coming. So...I guess I feel lonely lately, just bc I don't know how I'm "supposed" to be, other than as I already am. I've been getting a lot of "constructive criticism" regarding how I am when I'm drunk, and I appreciate that friends are looking out for me and whatnot, but I can't exactly be chill, laid-back Sarah anymore. Simply bc I was that way for a reason. I'm frustrated and bummed that I feel like I have to adjust my energy levels in accordance with others. But I'm doing okay, I've been keeping busy, and thinking I may move to Portland in the fall to sublease an apt for a few months, so I can be in Portland and get some writing done. Okay, I've been on the computer long enough and things are crazy during this DG sidewalk sale...I have to race home and walk Fatty on my 30 min break. Not sure if I can make it and not get pulled over. I'm going to try anyway; the Jeep is a bit more broken in than the Honda and I can lane-change like a lunatic, necessary for getting to LGP in seven to nine minutes!
fundraising day + New Yorker cartoon captions
My manager at Anderson's, Don, entered the New Yorker cartoon caption weekly contest and his caption was one of three finalists!I told him that I would spread the word to get votes swung his way [is swung a word? I don't think I've heard it used in the past tense very often] and I checked out the New Yorker's site today, a little later than I had originally intended. He is the finalist in contest #9, and at the moment, they're tallying the votes, to be released July 25. Here's the link: http://www.newyorker.com/captioncontest/but I can't quite figure out how to vote. Am I retard? Er, at least more retarded than normal days? So vote if you can figure out how to do it; or enter yourself, it seems kind of fun, if you're a word nerd. Or just a smart bastard.Steph's post made my millenium. I was convinced Bloc Party wouldn't be touring the States for a while, since when me and Maura were leaving Paris at the end of Eurotrip 05, they were all over England, doing those giant open-air festivals and college/universities, etc. I put on "Silent Alarm" and I'm FA-reaking that I will get to see them live. And I might have a seizure if I try to dance; that drumming is so intense! God, I can't wait. I'm pretty sure I'm going alone though, unless anyone decides to get their act together. Maybe I'll see Brad there and we can duel over the legitimacy of Bloc Party. I will win of course. So for the rest of the day, until I have to work at Anderson's, I'm doing major fundraising for 826CHI. Oh, and if you're in a surf-y kind of mood, check out their website: http://www.826chi.org/and save your calendars for Sept. 22 (also my mom's bday)--the first 826CHI event. You might have to pay to get in though, I'm not sure what kind of "event" this is yet. I volunteered to sell cookies by the door, but then realized that this isn't an LTHS pep rally, and we need funding for new stitching on the cheerleaders' uniforms.
blog the planet!!
I haven't seen "Hackers" in a long time, but I used to watch that movie in 7th and 8th grade like it was my fuckin J-O-B (that, "Empire Records"; "Dazed and Confused"; "Prayer of the Rollerboys"; and assorted SNL comedian movies a la "Tommy Boy" and "Happy Gilmore"). I was cool, obviously.But everytime I'm tapa-tap-tapping away at my cool laptop (dude, it's a Dell, don't worry), I always think about that scene where the future Brangelina and her ex-husband Jonny Lee Miller are having that hack-athon to see whose the better hacker, and then I remember Matthew Lillard getting arresting and he yells, "Hack the planet! They're trashing our rights! Hack the planet" Then I imagine a cool blog community that spray-paints their computers and roller-blades everywhere and goes to cool house parties where Prodigy is playing, and we yell, "Blog the planet!" But really, there is no reason for anyone to blog the planet, particularly me attempting to "blog the planet." I can't even handle controlling the amount of info I put on dance the night away! The purpose in blogging is hypercommunication: presenting a glorified diary to entertain your readers (or yourself, in my case--wait, and Tommy! Btw, I sent your hate package yesterday so start getting excited in...three days...that's how long FedEX/Kinko's said it would take to get to Cambridge). Maybe this is just another example of how I wished my life were a movie. I don't know if I'd pick "Hackers" though, as the movie I'd want to live in; Fisher Stevens (from "Short Circuit") is in it and he annoys he. He's like the poor man's Richard Lewis. Yeah, that's right, the BOKU guy. I think he has more talent than Fisher Stevens. Okay, I'm lying. I don't know if either "actor" could out-talent one another. But I've pretty much always wanted to be in "Goonies", ever since I saw it for the first time when I was five(ish) at the Boerman's cottage in Lake Geneva. That's also a reason I went to school in Oregon--of course, I didn't tell my college counselor or my parents that; I made up some other bullshit-riffic reasons about the caliber of the english and history departments and L&C having a really "stellar study abroad program." Ah college. College #1, to be followed by College#s 2 & 3. Well, I should take out Mulligan. She's been barking from downstairs, but I'm pretty certain she's barking at leaves or possibly sticks. There aren't any minorities on north Ashland Ave for her to bark at, so she's left barking at hydrangeas, and the occasional stroller. She leads an interesting life, that Fatty.
Caution: I drive like you do
I found some real-life bumper stickers in the Uncle John's bathroom reader that I thought were great. Here are some of the best:BOYCOTT SHAMPOO! DEMAND REAL POO!Politicians and diapers need to changed--often for the same reasonWhose cruel idea was it for the word LISP to have an "s" in it? Try not to let your mind wander--it's too small to be out by itselfI'll bet you a new car that I can stop faster that you can!Honk if you've never seen an Uzi fired from a car windowTherapy is expensive; popping bubble wrap is cheap! You choose.If I had a car, and actually did the bumper sticker thing (mostly I just like looking at other peoples' but most likely wouldn't put any on my car), I would pick that last one about therapy, and then I would put this one on a t-shirt: I'm multi-talented: I can talk and annoy you at the same timeMy mom's colleague Gary suggested that I make myself a tee that read "Don't ask a question if you don't want an answer"--which I thought was a pretty accurate representationof me. I tried making a visor instead, but I ended up putting all these green question marks all over it (in Sharpie marker) and it wound up looking like something a fan of the Riddler would wear at a Batman/comics convention. So...I threw it out. I almost titled this post "Cuz Luv & Deluxe Tattoos" because I went out to brunch yesterday with my cousins, Anna and Kate. Anna just graduated Monmouth College, and already has a career (mortgage brokering) and an apartment (in Westmont--with a pool!). Kate has been in New Lenox for a while, but has been super-busy with work, school, friends, life, the works, and we haven't hung out in almost a year. It was so good to reconnect with them, although we were all talking turbo-speed (okay, maybe just me) so we could catch one another up on where we're at right now, plus things that have happened in the last few months. It was great too because we made the effort to hang out, and it wasn't our parents dropping "subtle" hints about getting together with the cousins. After me and Kate saw Anna's apt (so cute-ified: Anna's room is pink & her roommate's is Lily Pulitzer-lime green, and the whole place smelled like fresh fruit), we decided to go into the city and get tatttos. Which we did, and I read Maxim magazine with Carmen Electra on the front while my artist Josh went crazy with an inking needle. Yowza! Forgot how uncomfortable that feeling is, but kind of a strangely nice pain. I initially wanted five stars, since Maura and I agreed on the symbology of five when we were in Paris, and I almost got one our last day in Paris, but I needed 1) an appointment and 2) to speak French, which I didn't. Maura was basically my translator the whole trip since she picks up languages so quickly, and I kind of...spoke like a cavewoman with hand gestures? And lots of hem/haws. Kate got a star on the back of her ankle (we've now gotten two tatttos together--we both got one in Joliet 3 years ago, in this dive tattoo "parlor" and that was the first time I smoked a cigarette in front of my aunt Mary) and I finished up my side/lower back stars...I kind of let Josh's creativity go apeshit, since I ended up getting a few more than five stars. I'm already obsessed with it. Deluxe is quite a place though, and I'm pretty sure that's where Kristin got her coy fish bc they have a lot of Asian art on the walls, and a bunch of the artists seem inspired by a lot of Asian influences. I can't wait to tell Carmel at Anderson's that I finally went there!What else...tired today, have to go to the dentist. I haven't had my teeth cleaned in a while so I'm kind of..nervous? I don't want to sit in the chair and have Dr. Mark's hygienist scrape at my teeth with that thing that looks like a hook. Ugh, I can hear the noise in my head of what it's going to sound like against my teeth.One more thing. I took a book from the advance copy table at Anderson's and it's a book called Puff. This is where the creepy similarities start: I wrote a story (brace yourselves for this, it's pretty ridiculous) called "Puff" from the POV of a cigarette during my first semester of senior year for advanced writing workshop. Now, I knew people were going to have trouble with this, but in my head, I was thinking of the talking cigarette from Doonesbury, but the people in my class were like, is this addiction personified? Maybe it's the smoke telling us the story? I felt stupid defending this story bc logistically, yes fellow writing workshop participants, cigarettes are smoked, then thrown away, and a new pack is opened, so you really can't have the same cigarette be a main character/narrator. "Inconsistent narrative voice" was the consensus, I think. Additionally weird though is the premise on the back of this book: "Meet John Gullivan, age thirteen, obsessed with the moles that dot most of his body." I almost fainted in the basement of Anderson's when I read that, basically a re-written version of the first sentence of my thesis. This was released in Feb 2005, but I was writing my thesis a full year before, probs around the time Bob Flaherty was writing Puff. I have to start this Kevin Bacon church soon.
