I will admit that the the last 3 weeks have been difficult, for a number of reasons, which i have not and will not go into here.
BUT, one benefit to all the insomniac late nights… i’m writing songs for the first time in 6 months…
early drafts will of course be seen here before anywhere else, doesn’t that make y’all feel special?
Last week i went back to boston for thanksgiving. This was my first trip back to the east coast for a non-wedding related event since i moved out here. that fact is not important in any way to what happened over the weekend, but i thought i’d mention it anyways.
For once, the JetBlue flight from San Jose to the east coast went off without any sort of “6 hour delay“. I watched Little Miss Sunshine on the plane, which i enjoyed a great deal. Then i think i watched Spinal Tap and VH1 Classic rock videos for the rest of the flight, including a Scorpions Video that appeared to be about a guy in jail and a woman on an aircraft carrier. It is possible i didn’t catch all the details.
Upon arriving in boston at 5AM, i proceeded to my mom’s apt in Charlestown, right in Monument Square.
this is Monument Square at 5AM. not pictured is my angry cab driver (who was upset that i was only going to monument square ($25 fare) and not to somewhere far away).
I grabbed my mom’s amazing car and headed for providence.
it doesn’t show in the photo, but at 6:30AM on a grey day in the rain, the sky and road sort of merge into one grey entity, and all i could see were black blobs that looked like cars. it’s possible i need to go to the eye doctor again soon.
Other things about driving my mom’s awesome car
1. it’s REALLY easy to stop paying attention and all of a sudden find yourself doing 85MPH on wet roads
2. the car is so smooth that i might have just been hydroplaning the entire time.
3. the “auto sense” winshield wipers are annoying, because it’s impossible to develop a rhythm with them.
anyways. i made it to my mom’s house around 7AM
keep in mind that my flight got in at 5AM, so i made it from the airplane to Narragansett in 2 hours flat. I dont mind saying that i think this is amazing. granted, the 85mph driving probably had something to do with it.
dinner itself was off the hook. my mom made 2 turkeys.
turkey #1:
turkey #2
sadly, most of turkey #2 (the sweet turkey) went straight to left overs, and um… all the sides were cold while waiting for turkey #1. but it was still excellent. i don’t care how cold stuffing is, it’s still bitchin.
friday i went up to lexington to hang out with my dad. we did all the normal things i do while in lexington, like:
going to the burlington mall. and seeing Steve Carrell! he was browsing around banana republic. apparently he’s from Concord and went to Middlesex (like Kevin K. and my ex-girlfriend Krissy M.)
and hanging out with P.T. and Lisa, while P.T. and i did our “remember when we were in improv and really funny and rockstars” glory days impersonation. good times good times.
and last night jetBlue was delayed for 2 hours on the way back. Because apparently no trip to the east coast is complete for me without an annoying plane delay. i will eat jetBlue’s soul.
more blogging fun: Liana’s recap
Ok, so after much struggling with running a php script with a cron tab (hint, you have to send the results to null or it won’t execute), I think I’ve finally set up blogging with photos by email. this wont’ be so helpful right now, but it will be very useful once I get a better phone and can start blogging with photos by phone. That will be sweet. Happy thanksgiving!
I just got my mobile blogging setup. Cause im awesome.
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Mobile Email from a Cingular Wireless Customer http://www.cingular.com
this is a test to see how good you are at recognizing the difference between two musical phrases. it tests to see if people are tone deaf. it’s purposely hard so even great musicians don’t score much higher than an 85%.
So, this weekend was all about music. yay, music!
Friday I left work early and did the WFH thing in the afternoon. Micah and I were supposed to head down to mezzanine and check out Hot Chip, but he wasn’t feeling so well. I took his bank card to pick up the tickets (and drinks were on micah all night!!), and headed down to meet up with Ali, Willo, and Harry.
We tried to go somewhere for dinner that was closed, so willo coyly suggest Chevy’s.
Chevy’s has great margaritas. I had 2 of them.
Hot Chip was very good. I texted Mike back in NY and said: “i have a new band for you. Hot Chip”. he texted back: “yeah, check my fm playlist, i’ve been listening to them a ton lately”. you gotta wake up pretty early in the AM to find an electronica band before mike.
The show was great, afterwards we went to Ryan’s for a party. I had one drink and realized that i was just about to fall over, so i went home.
the next day i was supposed to get up and do things, but was so ridiculously out of it that all i could manage was a few phone calls (happy birthday mom!), and a few naps. I finally made it out for dinner in Cole Valley, then passed on the Laughing Squid party (lame of me), to go to bed early.
Sunday i watched football and worked a bunch. good times good times.
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So… sometimes i walk home drunk (ok fine Lyandra, often). And when i walk home drunk, i send out text messages or make phone calls to friends back east (which arrive at ungodly hours for them, though my friends have learned to turn off their phones after 2AM), and try, in my inebriated haze, to send a cohesive message about my feelings at that very moment. and it often always comes out incredibly pessimistic, and negative, and is usually vaguely cursing out something or someone or an entire city (sorry san francisco, you know i love you, and didn’t mean all those nasty things i said last week about you… except for the public transporation thing).
So the problem is that it’s been a rough couple of weeks for me. Work has been remarkably hard and annoying, my personal life has had some ups and downs, i’m off any sort of diet i may have been on, i feel my body slipping out from under my control, and everything cascades and i just tend to say: “f#$k this city. i miss New York”. I was talking with some friends here on Friday about why I dont have a SF number yet, and i think i (somewhat callously) said: “well, i might leave at any time, so why would i get a SF number?”. and that’s not true. like, i won’t leave tomorrow, or probably tuesday. I will leave wednesday, but that’s for thanksgiving, so it doesn’t really count.
But the thing is (was), i had bad nights in New York too. hell, by the end of my stay in NY, i was having a lot of bad nights (And now that i think about it, 2003 was something like 300 bad nights out of 365, including the 3 worst nights of my life). And i hated my job, and i felt like i had no direction, and somehow the answer to that was drinking 5 nights a week.
I was chatting with someone tonight, and she was complaining about her job, and then started talking about how it’s important to step back a second, and say “hey, things could be worse, right?”. And that’s what i haven’t been doing, and i really need to. Work has been bad, but man, it’s sooooo much better than getting paid nothing to resize banner ads for Ella Enchanted (that was my job 2 years ago). And my social life has been somewhat rocky, but at least there are rocks! 4 months ago there was just a barren desert. And at least i’m not constantly trying to avoid someone, or in the middle/end of a bad relationship, or putting up websites about my computer, right?? I mean, i moved across the country, from a place where i knew 60-100 people (ok fine, maybe closer to 50) to a place where i knew 6, and i had things to do all this weekend! i even had to flake out on a few things saturday (umm… sorry to everyone i flaked on saturday, dinner went very long). Sure, maybe it’s not all wine and roses, but i don’t really love wine, and roses have thorns (and nights have dawns, and most cowboys write somber ballads). So… what? what does that all mean?
I think it means that maybe, just maybe, i should stop sending text messages to Neil cursing out ideas or places, or people, and start just being proud of the progress that i’ve made. Because it’s possible that the real tragic ending to this story isn’t that i’m going to stay in CA and feel disconnected, but that i’m going to move back to NY too fast and be dissappointed.
i still want to start a band though. we can play rock music.
it’s so late. i can hardly keep my eyes open. i’m just waiting for files to upload. and my iPod busts out with:
Soundgarden - Jesus Christ Pose
Pixies - here comes your man
Elliot Smith - Rose Parade
Heart - Crazy on You
Portishead - Wandering Star
thank god. files are done.
now i can sleep.
Rhainnon - Fleetwood Mac
I know i’m going nuts with the iPod stuff, but i’m so tired, and it’s so late, and winZip sucks, and i shouldn’t try to code this tired, and i can’t help but feel that Stevie Nicks knows exactly what keeps creeping up in the back of my mind
Dead Souls — Joy Division
For years the only version of this i had ever heard was the nine inch nails version that’s on the crow soundtrack. when i finally heard the original i was shocked than anyone could make a song that sounded grittier than the trent reznor version.
