I've been really slacking on the original intent of this blog, to pick a word and riff on it. On Friday, I picked the word toposphere. Jeez. I'm not really sure what to say about that. It's about the earth's atmosphere, which honestly, I haven't really given much thought. Maybe I should. Maybe we should all think more about what's intangible--invisible things and ideas-- like breathing, air and smoke or love, shelter and friendship (equally as invisible).



This Place Has Atmosphere or Taking Notice of the Invisible

Breathing/ Love
Does this ever happen to any of you? Right before you go to sleep, you become so aware of your own breathing that you can't fall asleep? You stay up counting your breaths and feeling air moving in and out of your chest. This also happens to me a lot when I'm sleeping with another person. I become super aware of my breaths in and their breaths out and the rhythm it creates. Sometimes the rhythm is perfect and makes you feel whole and other times it's a little off and both of you are trying to keep up with each other, or you're both really self-concious about it and make efforts to not breath in and out at the same time because it unites you in a way you're not comfortable with. Then it feels like there's no separation between the two of you at all.

Air/Shelter
There was a blackout just on our side of the street that lasted about four hours. B and I are so used to our central air, we almost take it for granted (but not quite). No other apartment of mine has had central air and it's still a luxury to me. As soon as everything buzzed off last night, B and I hoofed on over to Thai Village and scarfed down some Noodle Kee Mow and Thai Iced Teas. We came back to the apartment and it was pitch black and the air was blanket thick and B was getting uptight about it. I tried to make him relax and just enjoy it. I lit some candles and opened up all the windows and we laid on the couch together taking in the quietness and watching the lights from the candles dance all over the apartment and each other's faces.

Some people are frightened by blackouts but I've always loved them. They are a reason to do something you don't normally do. They are a reason to be quiet or tell stories or light candles and watch them flicker, get out the Ouija board, slow down, have hot sweaty sex, sit outside and drink wine, play hide and seek, get naked and eat an ice cream cone, or make up songs about the dark on your guitar. I wish we had blackouts more often.

Smoke/Friendship
I smoked a whole pack on Friday night. Had to work a party for my job at this gallery in Lakeview. There wasn't very much to eat, so I started drinking instead. I only really had to two glasses of wine, but it was enough to get me going. After the party, the gallery owner locked the doors and let us all smoke indoors and drink wine with him. He had a grand piano and we sat and laughed and listened as everyone (except me, I ain't no player really) took turns playing for us. I talked a lot my friend K about life and about taking chances and doing things that make you feel happy. I tried to convince him to try out for my band.

B was playing a show with the Functional Blackouts at the Big Horse, so after my last puff, I hopped into a cab and jetted on over there minutes before the show started. Drank two beers, ran into my friend TT and did a show of Jaeger with her, told my friend E she had the cutest voice ever and didn't feel embarrassed by saying it at all. Watched B's band, finished off about 7 smokes during it, jumped up and down and yelled ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-kamikaze along with the crowd and felt good. After B played, he was dripping sweat. Grabbed him anyway and kisskisskissed him and said good job. Had to jet again to a birthday party down the street so said byebyebaby and hopped into another cab over there. Was especially chatty with the cabbie (so unlike me) but had had some beers and was feeling particularly brave. Got to the party, saw friends, danced to the Monkees, sang songs with John H, lost an earring somewhere in the mix, pretended I was a Born-Again Christian while JP took pictures of it (don't I look just like one?). Finished off the pack.

B came over with friends post-show and brought the Sneaky Pinks with him. Sang "ohyeahohyeahohyeahohyeahohyeahoyeahohyeah" to them. Did a shot of seagrams with B. Made up a rap about Sydney and how she donated me a kidney. Listened to Mac (decked out in awesome short shorts) tell a story about the Batman traction holes in his legs. Got honorably (or horribly?) discharged from the party and started a caravan over to my place. Drank a beer on the way. Had R and R roll one of their cigarettes for me because I was out, but it fell apart on me. Woops. Declared to everyone that it was now OK to smoke in my apartment and then tried bumming smokes off of everyone there. Too bad. No one really had any. Shit outta luck for the rest of the night so just kept drinking instead. Finally fell alseep after making out with B for an hour or so, which ended in incoherent mumbling and somesuch kookiness. Sleep sleep sleep.

The Big B Has Landed

Big B is back and yesterday we went to the Newberry Library Book Fair. I got 6 sweet books for $33.

The Book of Kells: And Illustrated Introduction
Magritte
William Blake
Book of rare Art Nouveau posters
He Said, She Said
and an another illustrated book about birds to add to my collection

And B got Gargantua and Pantagrue

Nothing quite like good, cheap books. I've been wanting to start a good art book collection for awhile now and I have 5 new ones to add to the collection, so I'm really bulking it up. Think I'll need a new bookshelf soon. B's books pretty much take over 3 bookcases we have in the living room and my books are all in my spare room on a little built in wall shelf. When I moved to Chicago, we had very limited space in the car and I was only able to bring my most favorite books with me (which was only about a quarter of them) and leave the rest at my mom's. Over the past 5 years of living here, I've acquired a good number of new books but it's nothing looking my old collection, which is either collecting dust in her basement or has been donated to a library somewhere (boohoo).

birds of a feather

a girl and her guitar

A Day of Many Penises

Today I had the day off from work, so I treated myself to an art day.
My doctor has been an avid art collector since the age of 14 and today she gave me an invitation to an art show she curated at the Loyola University Museum of Art. It's called "The Gods as We Shape Them". It's her personal collection of ancient and modern artifacts from cultures all over the world and includes likenesses of deities and gods, objects used in rituals, icons and attempts of different cultures to represent sprituality concretely. Check it out here. It's free on Tuesdays or if you have a student ID, or $6 every other day.

The three things I was most drawn to in this exhibit were firstly, a wooden sculpture of a Mexican mermaid hanging from the ceiling. Accompanying the sculpture was a pamphlet on the history of mermaids as spiritual icons across cultures and the history of how that iconography was carried from culture to culture through water trade routes over hundreds of years.

There was also a whole section of a room devoted to the use of devil imagery in Mexican folkloric culture. Many depictions were of devils practicing everyday tasks of humans. One favorite was the ceramic statues of a posse of devils "hanging out" together and getting drunk, but the coolest one by far was the ceramic sculpture of two devils dressed in doctor's clothing performing surgery.

Last, but certainly not least (that's for sure), was the collection of wooden phalluses. There were about 10 of them in total and they came from all different regions throughout the world--just big wooden penises that looked like large tree stumps with anatomically correct penis heads on top of them.

Next to the garden of pee-pees stood a carved wooden tree, and all of its branches were penises. It was great.

Maybe it's because my boyfriend has been out of town for a week and a half and I miss him terribly and his....ahem, well, you know...but I just really immensely enjoyed this part of the exhibit (tee hee).

And if you thought that was enough cheekiness for the day, oh no, kids. There's more.

Since the LUMA is a hop, skip and a jump away from the MCA, I decided to keep searching. And guess what I found? Yup, you guessed it, more penises. I stumbled into a photo exhibit by the amazing Woflgang Tillmans. He had a huge amount of work hung and some of his photos were blown up to 30x30 or more and others were small 3x5 snapshots. He even had a portrait of the modern day Penis King himself (and I mean that in a good way, of course) the man, the icon: MORRISSEY.

The photos that really stood out (and again, maybe I just need to get laid) were the nudes. He had this great series of couples in the woods without any pants on and the female in the couple would be holding her lover's penis in her hand in a very intimate and almost nonchalant kind of way. Not nonchalant in a way that she didn't care, nonchalant in a way that she was extremely comfortable and very familiar with it.

I know my words aren't doing his photos justice and I can't really find that many good images on google either. Here's one:
I like this one

Enjoy!

Today's word is mature.
The older I get, the less mature I want to be. And I don't mean that in a naive, punk rock sort of way. Maturity is for the birds (tweet tweet) and apparently my sub-conscious thinks so too.

What follows is a little tongue-in-cheek but also something that has been on my mind a lot in the past year: MARRIAGE AND BABIES. Yowsa. If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will. Here's a list of dreams I've had in the past year involving both. Just try and pick these apart, you armchair shrinks!!!


Red is the Color of Love and Babies

• I had just rented my own studio apartment. It was really big and everything was connected in one big room, loft style. I wasn’t completely moved in yet, as there were still piles of someone else’s old junk and a whole “library” room of their old books stacked around. While B and I were in bed, I commented on how great it was that the kitchen and the bedroom were in the same room because now we could have breakfast in bed all the time and I could serve him hot coffee whenever he wanted it. He responded, “You are the cutest and most generous girl I’ve ever met.” Then we had sex. We got up afterward to go to the bathroom, fix our clothes and whatnot and came back to the bed to find it already made (and I never make my bed). I check in the messy “library” room and find a tiny little girl who looks like a baby but has graying hair. She's really frail and brittle, almost like she’s made of dust or going to break. She has a scabby gray dog by her side. I realize they are ghosts haunting my new place.

• My brother and I were at a public event in a hall, like a craft show of sorts. I had S (my sister) with me, or it was more like a little boy who was supposed to represent S. He was dressed in white, which denoted special treatment from others or an extra ability or something. With all the shuffling about, I lost the S-boy in the crowd and became frantic. The bulk of the dream was spent with me spastically running about and screaming the little boy's name over and over again. We went outside and into a neighborhood, which coincidentally was Ma's (my grandmother) old neighborhood in Roslindale, mixed with some sort of hilly, rural farm type of area. Whenever I asked someone if they had seen the little boy, I told them to report him back to Ma's old house. I had a vision that this little boy was standing in the middle of a hilly field getting harassed and pushed around by a group of older bullies. The dream ended with me calling 9-1-1 and screaming hopelessly into the phone. I never found the little boy.

• I was taking care of a premature baby. It was tiny-tiny-tiny, like the size of my hand. I took it swimming in a pool. Its head went under and it couldn't breathe for a couple minutes. The baby turned blue and green and stopped breathing altogether. I took it out of the water and tried to do CPR. Every time I blew into the baby's mouth, its head would turn pink and inflate a little, but it never started breathing again.

• I was at work and had to take care of a baby mouse that was really really small and fragile. Y gave me a little wooden box to put the mouse in so it wouldn't run all over the office. I went out to lunch or something and left the mouse. I came back and it was dead

• I was with the girls in my band and we were all dressed in beautiful evening gowns. We stumbled upon this new neighborhood in Chicago that was really affluent and beautiful. We went into this banquet hall type place with gorgeous hardwood and lush carpets. The architecture was beautiful and very old and ornate. The building was one long, long hallway that we kept walking through, moving into different rooms, each more beautiful than the next. A member of the staff came by and commented on the popularity of weddings at this place and I inquired about the cost of such a wedding.
  
  We eventually reached the end of the long hallway and stepped outside. There was a huge green hill and in the distance I spotted some people and what looked like a funeral procession on the hill. I pointed and said, "Look, it's a funeral" and L said, "No actually, it's a wedding procession." What was peculiar about the procession was that all of the members of the party had to walk up a steep, long, green hill as part of the procession. Everyone was really worn from the climb.

• It was my wedding day and I lost my dress and was hiding naked behind bush, looking for anything I could cover myself up with.
  

• It was my wedding day and our cake was the biggest one I had ever seen and was made out of chocolate and peanut butter. Big B and I both grabbed huge chunks of it and started throwing it at each other and smearing it on our faces and laughing.
  

images of images

OK, sorry. I've been on a picture kick lately. I have one more installment for the word image today. It's images of images, pictures of pictures. I'm getting all meta on you. Sorry, you all might think this is really boring but I'm really having fun looking through my old stuff and it really makes you realize what you find "important" and how some pieces of paper are thrown away and others are guarded like heirlooms.

letter images

Today's word is image. To start y'all off, I'm gonna link to a bunch of art I've been really into lately. I've found most of this stuff from reading other blogs. Hopefully looking at this stuff inspires you like it inspires me. I'll be back with a story or a little something tomorrow most likely. I know promises, promises (sigh).

Charles Harper here, here and here

Amy Cutler (Oh, man. She is fantastic) here, here, here, and here

The Black Apple here, here, here


And Sabrina Ward Harrison, check out her site here

BAD BLOGGER! BAD BLOGGER! SO SO SO SO BAD!

Sorry, I've been really shirking my blogging repsonsiblities. I've actually been pretty busy at work lately and haven't had time to wander too much.
Recap of the past week: Last Thursday The Big B and I went to dinner with his parents. They were only in town for one night. They are always so refreshingly nice and welcoming to me, and they love to play games. We played this awesome game with them in the hotel called The Name Game. It was great. Friday night I stayed in with the b-fri and ordered Chinese food and Saturday I went to the breakfast and then the beach with Lady M. It felt so great to be in the sun (but I did get a little burnt, ouch). Saturday night we had a little last minute get-together at our apartment as a going away party for the Big B (he's away on tour for 2 weeks). It was sad to see him go but I'm actually doing pretty well on my own and have been surprisingly busy.

Last night I went to the Gene Siskel Film Center and saw a great documentary called Stolen (I would link here, but I'm lazy today. Google it, fools). It was about this art heist in Boston at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (which is a gorgeous museum if you ever get the chance to go) about 10 years ago where some priceless Vermeers (seen in the pic above) and Rembrandts were stolen, and the theives have yet to be caught. Some theories point to a couple famous Boston area art theives and another theory is that it was connected to Whitey Bulger and the IRA. If you don't know who Whitey Bulger is (I know all my Boston friends do and my Chicago friend Bryan H. definitely does too) look him up. He was basically THE premier Irish crime boss in Boston for years. He's wanted by the FBI for 18 murders and suspected in about 80. He went missing a few years ago and nobody will say where he is. He's very well protected in the city.

On another note, I'm going to see Journey tonight! Woo-woo! It's ridiculous that we're going, but I'm really looking forward to it. I mean, when's the last time I went to an actual concert? And we have lawn seats. Perfect. So in honor of that and because I'm a big sleepyhead today, I'm going to post something I wrote in my journal about the last time I saw Journey 2 years ago in Rockford, IL. Enjoy, pals.

7/7/04
Went to Rockford, saw Journey, got drunk, screamed at the lead singer and told him to take off his pants. Stood next to a biker dude and his girlfriend. She had fake nails. They stood in an embrace for the entire show. After show, hopped over a security fence, hid in the bushes by the tour buses, got shooed away by a security guard. Went over by the tour buses behind a fence, ripped down the plastic blocking the view. Met a woman who owns a bottle of Evian water that Steve Perry drank out of ten years ago. Shook hands with the drummer and got the lead singer's (not Steve Perry, new guy, Steve Aguieri) autograph. Got stuck in the parking lot for awhile trying to get out after the show and really, really had to pee. Jumped out of the car and found the perfect spot in some bushes.

After Journey went to a shitty metal club in Rockford called Elixir. It was a "battle of the bands." Ha, I haven't been to one of those since the days of Xaverian High School with E when we tried to pick up (or just ogle) metal boys. The bands were awwww-ful, but I was drunk and got up and started to dance by the stage. The bass player had a cordless bass and jumped down from the stage to play "at" us. I couldn't stop laughing. 21 year old lost suburban kids moshed all around us.

Drove to Denny's after the bar closed and inhaled a Moons Over My Hammy without the Hammy and some fries. Some local guy walked by our table and saw us giggling about something so he asked us if we wanted to hear a joke. Sure. "What's pink and smells like pussy?" "Salmon!" L yelled out. No. The guy stuck out his tongue. That was the punchline of the joke. His tongue smells like pussy. Ah, the wit. Somehow this fits in perfectly with my Rockford experience.

Boy, was I stupid as a high school freshman and so dour about everything. This will be humbling.

Letter I Never Sent #2

******,
Hello! Are you having fun? I hope so because I'm not. I feel like shit and my nose is running oceans of slimy snot. Yuck. You see what you did? You made me sick, you jerk, and I'm stuck in school. Yikes! I asked my mom if I could stay home but she said no. That sucks.

I'm starving to death. My stupid stomach is grooooooowling again.

So do you miss *****? I miss *****. I haven't seen him in a week for chrissake. He lives down the street too! God.
And now I'm sick so I can't kiss him or anything. What a drag.

Well, it is last period and I am in the dumb library. I have to take the bus home. Shit. Oh well. You missed the fire drill we had today. It was pretty stupid though. I wanna go to sleep. I think I'll just daydream about *****. That sounds like fun. Right?

Anyway, guess what?

SHE FOUND THE BEEBEES! HAHAHAHAHA!
BYE BYE. BE BE. YOU LOVE *****! I LOVE *****! SCABIES BABIES RULE!

Two posts in one day. Woo-woo. I'm on fire. I'm going to do something a little different today and interrupt the regularly scheduled picking-a-word-from-the-dictionary thing. I had this idea for a zine a long time ago that never came to fruition mostly because I'm lazy and also because I wasn't sure if there would be much interest in it. See, I used to have this really bad habit of writing letters to people and then never sending them. I wanted to start a zine called "Letters I Never Sent" and recruit other people to include their letters as well (all anonymously, of course). With the advent of e-mail, this problem has kind of dwindled away but I still think a lot about letters I have gotten from people, letters I have sent but mostly, the ones that never made it. I have a box in my closet full of letters, birthday cards, love notes, show fliers, etc. In that box are about 5 or 6 wingless letters just sitting there. I'm going to post them all in the next week. I wrote this one awhile back. Don't worry, they're not all love letters.

Letter I Never Sent #1

Dear ****,
You said you don’t remember anything you said or did the other night at ******* so I’m not really sure how to go about asking this. But I think you said you loved me, and you were probably drunk so you probably don’t remember saying it or you do remember and wish it never happened and that you could take it back. Or maybe I just misheard you…or maybe you just meant that you really like me a lot. I’m not really sure. So if you want to take it back, go ahead. I know you tend to be a lot more affectionate with me when you get drunk and you may not feel the same way when sober. That’s understandable. I just really want to clear this up so that I don’t make an ass out of myself or anything.

It’s OK if you take it back. I overthink everything and it’s driving me nuts. You make me very very very bashful, so this is really hard to write. I’ve been obsessing over this all day and it’s really helping me to write it down and get it all out of my system. This is really dramatic and life/death type thinking here, I know, but I’m really starting to like you and I’m so afraid and I just want you to feel the same way about me so I don’t get hurt. I’ve always wanted to share with someone, I’m really giving and plunge headfirst into stuff like this. I can’t help it. And I always end up getting hurt. I have no way of protecting myself. I want to find a best friend and all that sappy bullshit. I’ve gone through all of this before numerous times and I never learn my lesson. So if you don’t love me, please don’t say you do. Because if you do, I’ll fall completely.
--Me

In my previous post I lied and told you I would make two lists pertaining to the word fall: one of all the times I've fallen in love and one of weird stories I've heard or witnessed of people falling down. Screw the falling in love part. Looking back, at least half of 'em weren't "real love" anyway. Boooorrr-rrring. I really don't want to think about past loves right now anyway. The current one is just fine, thank you very much. Plus, people falling down is way funnier than a laundry list of stale crushes anyway. Above is a picture of the back porch stairs in my old apartment, which I've more than probably taken a spill on before. See, I have a reputation as being a bit of a klutz. Get me near some stairs and watch out!

Oh yeah, and if any of you have any great stories to share about falling down, post them in my comments section.

Catch Me Now I'm Falling

• When my Aunt L was a little girl, she climbed the tree in the backyard of my grandmother's house and fell out and got knocked unconscious. My family used to tell me this story probably to thwart any ideas I had about climbing up onto things. Whenever they said "knocked unconscious" I heard "knocked un-conscience" and for years afterward everytime I fell down or bumped my head on something, I would check to see that I still felt guilty when I thought about doing "bad stuff" like stealing or lying.

• When my brother was a wee baby and I was about 4 years old, he crawled up the staircase at my grandmother's house and tumbled back down and bumped his head. He had a bump on his head the size of a large egg and everyone ran around the house frantically and then out the door to take him to the hospital. I just stood there and watched, amazed about how huge the bump was.

• My good friend K from college got really drunk one night and was gallavanting around campus with her friends. They were all practicing how to jump up in the air and click their heels together in mid-air, a buncha regular Gene Kellys. She jumped up really high and almost got it just right but then crashed back down on her foot and sprained her ankle and had to get a cast.

• I was about 3 or 4 and at the beach with my mom. While she was sunbathing, I was busy building sandcastles in the sand. I got really excited and ran to show my mom something I had done, without looking where I was running. I fell into a hole about 3 feet wide and 3 feet deep that someone had dug right in the middle of the damn beach. I was only about 2 feet tall myself at the time. My mother figured out what happened soon enough and came to rescue me from the hole. The whole time I screamed, "Mommy, I don't want to go to China!"

• My best friend E was climbing a fence in the 6th grade and slipped and fell and got de-virginized by it. I still don't know if this is the complete truth, but I don't think she would lie to me about it.
  

• I was at a cool girl's birthday party in elementary school. The theme of the party was that everyone had to come dressed in pink. I didn't know the girl that well and was only really invited because her mom made her invite every girl in the class. After we opened the presents and had some cake, her mom took all the girls aside and told us a story about how her sister had died at her own birthday party when she was a child. She was playing on a porch with all of her friends and somehow flipped over the side of the porch. All of the other girls at the party were too afraid to say what happened, so they all left the party. The girl's mother found her dead after all of the girls had gone. Is this true or some sort of weird parable about taking care of your friends? Ha, I have no idea.

• My mother was involved with an alcoholic for a few years when I was very young. One night he was particularly drunk and self-hating and proclaimed that he was going to kill himself by jumping off of our 3rd floor front porch. He clenched onto the metal bars that held the porch up and hung there, shouting about how he was going to end it all and how sorry we'd be. The thing is, and I don't think he was aware of this, the drop was definitely not high enough to be fatal. The most damage he could have done is maybe break an arm or a leg. My mother called the police while he hung there. They came and forced him to climb back up onto the porch, and then they took him away for the night.

• Around age 9, my brother and I decided to pretend I was blind. We tied a blindfold over my eyes and my brother led me around the living room like a seeing eye dog. I was having so much fun that I decided to break free from my brother and flop down onto our couch. What I thought was our couch was really a coffee table. I landed on it face first and knocked out my two front teeth. Luckily, they were still my baby teeth and started to grow back soon after.

• I was at a school rollerskating trip in junior high and was good at rollerskating but had a little trouble when it came to stopping. The floor was pretty packed and I was rollerskating behind a mother and father with their toddler between them. I started to pick up a little speed and got dangerously close to the skaters in front of me. I lost control and couldn't slow down enough to stop bumping into them or falling down. To steady myself and prevent falling, I reached out my hand and grabbed the first thing I could that was in front of me, which was the toddler's head.
  

• My other friend J has a friend from high school who was a house painter for awhile. While up on some scaffolding, he slipped and fell and caught his scrotum on something and RIPPED IT OPEN! He had to wear big grown-up diapers for the rest of the summer and had to keep his legs apart at all times.

It doesn't get much worse than that, so I'm going to end it there. Enjoy!

Sorry for the big, big delay. Had a pretty eventful weekend. Starting on Thursday, my band played a really fun show at SubT and it was the last one for our keyboardist, Lara Hollywood. It was a good farewell and afterward, we enjoyed fine drinks at the fine establishment next door, Estelle's. Bebe Gun stayed out a little too late (boo-hoo) and was very, very tired on Friday but it was well worth it.

Friday night, I had to work at this singles party for work at the Irish American Heritage Center. There were so many Irish people there, I felt like I was at a family reunion. Seriously, it is weird how Irish aunts and grandmothers look and act exactly the same as Irish aunts and grandmothers in Boston. I had also never been to the Mayfair neighborhood. It's always so fun to find a new nook in this huge city. Chicago is a harsh city at times but never boring, that's for sure.

Saturday, woke up and headed straight to the movie theater to meet up with a friend from out of town. I had movie theater nachos and a diet coke for breakfast. We saw that Pirates of the Caribbean sequel thingy and it was awful (much to be expected) but Johnny Depp is a fox. And I'm not huge into the whole celebrity worship thing either. There are very few celebrities (John Cusack is one, Matt Dillon is another) that I really melt over. So here's a tip for you all, the movie sucked but if you need some hot pirate masturbation fodder, see this movie!

OK, so back to word at hand. It's fall. For a little cross-referencing, you can check out The Big B's recent post on Mark E. Smith. Fall, fall, fall.

Here's two lists. One is a chronicle of times that I have fallen in love in my life and the other is times I have fallen down or witnessed people falling down. Work is mucho busy so this will be a work in many parts today.

Today's word is fall. I'm not sure if I have the inspiration today to come up with anything. Two days worth of Fourth of July festivities have left me a little worn out. I'll try but I ain't promising anything. I'm such a bad Kenny Bloggins!

Here's a little diversion for all the people that have to work today. This is a really neat and innovative "mini-movie" (haha, OK, that's a reference to an Upright Citizen's Brigade episode if you've seen it).

It's actually a music video for a song called Don't Fuck with Love and frankly, I think the song isn't that good and a little trite (but my tastes in music are too discriminating for my own good, so don't listen to me). The video for the song is as cute as a button though. Check it out here and happy Independence Day, fools.

Let's forget that polygamy thing ever happened, shall we? (I picture a drunk Burt Reynold's-type slurring that to a weathered, pill-popping Lonnie Anderson-type). Today's word is psalm.

Psalm has two definitions really. One means a sacred song or a hymn and the other means a prayer in the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament.


Boys and Lights, or Bebe Gun is an Unintentional Racist

From the age of 6 until the age of 13, every first Friday of the month, my classes were postponed and I had to go to mass. The whole class would line up, one line of boys and one line of girls, and were herded across the street to the church. Most of the time (and maybe it's just my sentimental memory) it was raining on those days and very dark outside. The streetlights outside of the church walkway were always lit up so that if you squinted your eyes, everything would look blurry and glowing.

Churches (especially Holy Name where I went to school) always make me think of lights. The streetlights on the way to church, wet and blurry, and the lights and candles inside the church. Once we filed in and were seated in the pews boy/girl/boy/girl/boy/girl, I'd look up at the ceiling, orantely decorated with gorgeous bas relief carving and bright Roman colors--my own little miniature Michelangelo. I was mesmerized by the lights and would spend most of the time staring up and squinting to make the tiny lights way at the top of the ceiling next to the angels and the lambs and the frills seem twinkling like stars.

When I wasn't staring at tiny lights at church, I was talking to boys. I still have a soft spot in my heart for funny boys and I think this is why. The boys who sat next to me always knew they could make me laugh very easily and would relentlessly push me over the edge until a teacher scolded us or separated us into different rows.

From age 11 on, all of the boys in my class were metalheads. My best friend E and I started listening to heavy metal around that same time too, partly because we were feeling disenchanted with the whole popularity game going on over in the girls' half of the recess yard and partly because we had crippling crushes on all of the metalhead boys. We decided to ditch our Paula Abdul and MC Hammer tapes and replace them with Slayer, Black Sabbath, Anthrax and Guns N' Roses tapes. It was around that time that E and I started referring to ourselves as "psycho metal chicks" or "PMCs" which in hindsight is nothing short of full-on retarded but it was really cool at the time.

The great part about liking "real" music as all the metalheads so aptly put it was that it gave you such an upper hand on all of the other girls. Once E and I realized the easiest way to win the popularity game was to bow out of it, we were free. Now weird was good and freaking people out was our ultimate goal. It also gave us a lot to talk about with the boys. Most of them still thought we were dorks and even went so far as to call us (gasp!) lesbians (haha, good one, dudes) but occasionally one of them would break away from the crowd and discuss with us why Cliff Burton was a better bassist than Jason Newstead or how we kinda like Public Enemy now that they did that collaboration with Anthrax.

A couple years earlier, when I was about 9 or 10, one of those metalhead boys inadvertantly turned me into an Anti-Semite. I know, I know, it sounds crazy but it's true. Right before first Friday mass on a typically rainy and blurry day, we were all sitting in class waiting to be herded over to the church. Our teacher handed out photocopies of the psalms we would be singing that day. The class was restless and buzzing, just waiting to get the hell out of the classroom. I looked over at ****, a boy who always looked a little older than the rest of us. He was always getting into trouble and talking to me in church and teasing me about everything, but in a nice way that made me blush.

**** wasn't paying any attention to the rest of the class but was instead doodling on the back of his psalm sheet with his yes, left hand. I strained my neck forward to see what he was drawing but without seeming to obvious about it. He was drawing some type of symbol which I know I had seen before but I didn't really understand. I just thought it looked cool. I would find out later that day that it was not cool at all. What I had been watching him draw was a swastika on the back of his psalm sheet. Holy moly. He probably saw it on the back of a Deicide album or something. I guess I was an unusually innocent 10 year old.

But that's not the worst part. After I saw his drawing, I decided to try to do one myself on the back of my psalm sheet. It took my all of 3 minutes to complete and the it was time for church.

We lined up, one line of boys and one line of girls, and started the walk over. After we were seated in our pews, I pulled out my psalm sheet and started reading from it, the symbol on the back in clear view to anyone who looked back at me from a seat in front of me. I have no idea why no one in the entire church saw it. I just sang away, psalm after psalm, innocent as the day I was born, holding a freakin' swastika in my hand, unaware of its meaning.

Later on that day, when I got home from school, I sat down at the kitchen table and emptied the contents of my backpack. The psalm sheet fell out onto a mound of books. My mother's boyfriend was cooking dinner and saw the paper flop out of my bag. "Sara, what is this?" he said. "Oh, nothing. I just saw this kid in my class draw it and I thought it looked cool." But the way he said it, I knew I had done something wrong and I think deep down, I knew there was something bad about that symbol but I wasn't really sure what or maybe that the bad part of it had faded away over time.

My mother's boyfriend sat me down that night and lectured my on the holocaust and genocide and all of those big words that a 10 year old is just beginning to understand. I wonder if **** understood them or if anyone sat him down and talked to him about his psalm sheet.

Whenever I think of it now, I feel extremely guilty but also I'm amazed at how much meaning a tiny symbol or a tiny word can hold and how they're bad independent of who uses them or in what context. Now when I see that symbol, I feel scared, guilty, and ashamed of what it means instead of feeling curious and wondering if I could draw it myself. I'll never be that innocent again, to see a symbol as an empty vessel devoid of its meaning.

By the time I turned 12 and started listening to metal exclusively and kissing a lot of those same metal boys in the back of busses, innocence became a much rarer thing to find.