Aug
22
News: Walls no longer bare
August 22, 2010 | 2 Comments
This happened a while ago actually. But my buddy Mairead recently put a thing on her wall and I shared my tip to find picture frames at thrift stores. Here are some of my things. They’re blurry because my camera’s not awesome!
L-R: A small postcard map of something neat; Andy Dick (creepy man, good picture); Anthony Kiedis; beloved photo with college newspaper compatriots; and remnants of my Fraggle costume from last Halloween.
L-R: Some hands; Axl Rose; some Florida fishes; a beautiful silk scarf of butterflies that’s too fragile to wear; and a Subversive Cross Stitch rendered by my patient friend Crystal.
L-R on wall: Roger Waters; most beloved departed grandfather; an old photo of some mailboxes from Beloit; favorite surfer Kelly Slater. On shelf: Most beloved mom and dad; photo of me, small, wearing a Sunday dress and somehow holding a large matching rooster.
Apr
13
History: Teen People, 1998
April 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Yesterday Pajiba ran a column on Elijah Wood by contributor Michael Murray. He tries to put a finger on what’s so fascinating about Wood, and describes what I agree is the most memorable scene in Deep Impact:
As a tsunami is about to wash over the world, Wood — mobile and courageous on a zippy dirt bike — dekes in and out of the doomed motorists jammed on the highway.
My dad hates Elijah Wood and has since Wood starred as the kid in the updated Flipper movie. But I loved that movie (and still do: the statute of limitations on childhood taste has not run out), and countless others he made in the ’90s starting with Radio Flyer.
Deep Impact continued a fundamental shift in my taste. 1997 had come and gone with Titanic, which my friends and I liked a lot . . . then some of those friends saw it twenty times, while others decided a month later that they hated it. The combination of schizo obsession and backlash seemed even more ridiculous after the release of Armageddon, one of the biggest waste-of-time pieces of tripe I’ve ever endured, but for some reason people LOVED it and hated Deep Impact. I began to think about how this quieter, box-office-failing movie was better regardless of its level of commercial success. That’s not to say I didn’t continue to see questionable things and often do now.* But I started to understand the relationship between good movies and entertaining movies and their overlap.
It’s hard to explain the place Wood holds in my pop-culture memory because you just had to be there. In a way, our whole generation grew up on the same trajectory, and I’d seen him in movies from childhood to adolescence and onward, playing various parts that felt really truthful even though they spanned different historical periods, different backgrounds. I flipped through the December/January issue of Teen People — a teen magazine so honestly good I asked to get a subscription — and saw this spread on Elijah Wood:
For some reason, this magazine spread is one of my strongest sense memories to this day: I remembered this exact photo (and spent a lot of mental energy finding it online), the colors of the title font, how the shirt he’s wearing is blue because you see it on the next page. I was listening to a CD I’d just received for my birthday — 1996′s Yourself or Someone Like You by Matchbox 20, one of my first favorite CDs and one I still love for its importance to me then — and one of those songs is embedded in the memory too. The CD rode a continuous wave of successful singles and sold millions and millions of copies. I can’t listen to this album without thinking of this story on Elijah Wood in this magazine, and I can’t think of Elijah Wood without thinking of this album.
There’s some mental coin flip where this particular moment on this particular day won the memory game: An actor I like but don’t love, in a fairly typical photo spread, for an embarrassing movie (The Faculty!), sitting in my room, looking out the window into town, listening to a fairly typical mid 90s pop rock group. I feel a connection to Elijah Wood because of it, and I still think he’s great even though I fell asleep during each installment of Lord of the Rings.
* Here’s a clause to strike fear in your heart: Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D.
Jan
25
Early: a definition
January 25, 2010 | Leave a Comment
In a city of millions of people, I am always surprised by how un-crowded many places are, how entire times of day are so empty as to feel completely private. In a city of millions of people, there is frequently no line at the grocery store; my prescription can be ready in five minutes; I can drive from here to downtown in about ten. I am the first and only car at the red light, with no one waiting to drive through the intersection on the perpendicular street.
In the suburbs this feeling only intensifies, fewer people per square mile and more whole areas made up of stores without any residential. Where the city feels peaceful during the empty times, the suburbs feel a little bit alarming, desolate. Instead of enjoying having everything to yourself, you wonder why no one else is there.
But I love the stolen time, the feeling of accomplishment. Completing tasks in less time with no lines or traffic; freedom to look around and think. As it starts to turn light on these short January days, I watch the streetlights switch off in the blooming near-sunlight.
Jan
20
Sad news.
January 20, 2010 | 4 Comments
My sweet, precious little cat was put to sleep on Monday because of a giant, growing, inoperable mass in her throat. She got very sick over the last few months and she started to suffer a great deal as the tumor obstructed her breathing and eating, which made this the only humane and decent thing to do. She was 7. I loved her so much, and I am so, so sad.
Jan
19
Green: a definition
January 19, 2010 | 3 Comments
My workplace now houses an environmentally friendly tankless water cooler. It taps into our main water line, filters the tap water, and dispenses it hot, lukewarm, or cold. It is marvelous (literally) to press a button and have water hot enough to brew tea within a few seconds.
Our ongoing conversation here about ways we can be more conscious is almost a matter of company policy more than moral fortitude, and the natural manner in which we all assume we will move toward a smaller carbon footprint and less waste is one of my favorite things about working here. Of course, in homes and in personal lives the dialogue can play out very differently. The New York Times ran a tragicomic piece on the rise in green issues among reasons to visit a therapist, like one California couple:
Mr. Fleming, who says he became committed to Ms. Cobb “before her high-priestess phase,” describes their conflicts as good-natured — mostly.
Even being a vegetarian has opened my eyes to how sensitive everyone is to feeling like they’re on the receiving end of someone’s judgment. “I don’t care what you eat, I’m just choosing for myself,” I hear myself say constantly. And sometimes I forget how easy it is to be a vegetarian in a huge city, or how understanding my parents or other people from previous generations have been for me. Imagine if this were your life, from the NYT piece:
If Ms. Petso prepares a vegan meal for the family, her parents prepare hot dogs to go alongside. Her parents serve on throwaway Styrofoam plates; she grabs a plate that can be cleaned and reused. Her mother, who says she prefers the way food tastes when it is served on Styrofoam, notes that washing dishes has its own environmental costs.
“She prefers the way food tastes when it is served on Styrofoam”?!
Dec
22
Growing up: a definition
December 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Mindy Kaling, who executive produces, writes for, and Kelly Kapoor in The Office, has a sweet holiday feature in the New York Times. In it, she tells a stranger that she’ll be spending the holidays with a family she doesn’t have, a fictitious husband and children. Instead, she’ll be with her parents and her older brother:
Do I want to be the child in my current family, or the parent/wife/grown-up of some other one? The first seems real and comfortable. The second seemed like a silly bit of mischief, a game of pretend, even though I have a sense it might be just around the corner.
I hope my future family always feels like this. Like I got away with a little lie, but with accomplices. “Oh, this is just the cute boy I married and the crazy kids I have, can you believe it? I can’t.”
Dec
16
Pilgrimage: a definition
December 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Sometimes before work I get my act together early and decamp to Starbucks for a little bit of reading.
One day very recently I sat, reading Sue Grafton, admiring that morning’s musical choices in the shop. Some semifolky classical knockoff came on and I longed for Clair de Lune, one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, lovely, at once plaintive and powerful, understated, filled with enormous life. It makes me think of winter, and light glinting off of water, and my grandfather, who always tuned the radio in his Mercury to the classical station. The abused old baby grand piano I made my parents keep when they moved to their new house, because how can you get rid of a piano?
I stood and put on my coat, and what piece came next? Clair de Lune, as I live and breathe. “Hokey smoke,” I said. People turned but I left, and strains of the piece rang in my head as I walked to work. As I turned the corner I looked up and saw a flock of geese passing overhead, standing still in the strong winter wind.
Isn’t a pilgrimage a beautiful concept? These geese make one every year and its significance is on par with any religion: They live because of it. We grouse about the weather, the inconvenience, our dead car batteries or freezing groceries. But what we can fix with extra layers and patience, the geese must fly thousands of miles to find.
Nov
2
Photos: My city in a nutshell
November 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment
LEFT: Looking out from the buttresses on the 25th floor of Tribune Tower.
CENTER: A chalk Bubbles by the front steps of the American Indian Center of Chicago.
RIGHT: Typeface at the Columbia College printmaking studio.
I like the similar colors across these three photos. They have a palette like (season 6 of Project Runway) Christopher’s doomed Santa Fe dress, and something about sandy brown with light blue is always pleasing, probably because they’re very mild, washed-out versions of complementary colors.
Oct
15
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming . . .
October 15, 2009 | 1 Comment
. . . for pictures of things that improved my mood yesterday!
First, my small collection of small things to put food in, appropriately stored in a small drawer. Note the small ring molds intended for Jell-O? Tiny tiny bundt cakes? A mystery:
Second, my small collection of small stuffed toys that belonged to my grandparents, including Herman the beanbag frog, who is unspeakably priceless to me:
Oct
4
Vegan Mofo: Dietary choices
October 4, 2009 | 2 Comments
I have never been a one-size-fits-all eater, and while on the one hand I envy those who can eat anything, order anything in a restaurant, try any new food fearlessly . . . There’s a certain meaninglessness to a foodlife with no limitations at all. Where’s the challenge to learn to cook for yourself if you can eat anything you find? How will you learn what purpose a certain ingredient serves if you never try something different in its place? If you’ve never thought about where it comes from or what it does to your body?
At some point in my childhood I stopped being able to drink cola (I don’t remember if this was all soda or just the browns, haha), and I was also lactose intolerant. Then that went away for a while, but I developed general digestive malfeasance and have gone through that ever since — the kind of thing doctors tell me is IBS, which is doctorese for “I don’t know, and gosh, that sucks for you. Will your copay be cash or credit?”
I’m back to lactose intolerance these days, and with migraines in the mix since college, I try to avoid some of the standout migraine trigger foods. Soy’s the biggest offender here, since regardless of what I read about soy and how much it can fuck you up, I know that the way it mimics estrogen in your body does affect my occurrence of headaches, and I know that it did for my dad as well, since we were both chug-a-lugging soy milk and getting migraines three or four times a week or more.
The most poignant moment of apartness came in high school when I was talking to a friend about something I’d eaten recently that had made me sick right away. “About five minutes later, I knew something was really wrong,” I said.
“No, that’s impossible,” she said. “Digestion takes six to eight hours.”
O ho ho, simple girl, I envy you your blissful unawares.