I really want this to happen. This place is so much better than it was 15 years ago. Case in point? The subway, while still smelling like urine and chicken soup, actually tells you useful information now about connections at each upcoming stop. The bus stops have clearly marked routes and even in some places have schedules posted. Things make sense here. People, with the exception of tourists, walk on the right side of the sidewalks at reasonable paces. When I talk, no one says “Yer not frum ’round here, huh?”

Also? There is a PIZZA TRUCK that goes around this neighborhood. You don’t even have to order pizza, it just shows up. Are you fucking kidding me? Even if I hated it here, I would stay just for the pizza truck dinner option.

So yeah, life is a litle scary, but also exciting and I’m totally into it.

Check out this dude I met at the shore the other day:

I’m getting my hair cut tomorrow and for the life of me I cannot remember what I was going for when I started growing my bangs out and fell into this state of perpetual ponytail. The evidence points to a beatnik Cousin Itt.

I don’t even know what to ask for tomorrow. I might be over my quest for unattainable Jennifer Love Hewitt hair. I’m trying not to let the heat wave influence me, or I’ll end up with a repeat of the dreaded pixie disaster of first grade. (A mistake I’ve repeated more than once hoping it would somehow suddenly work for me? It’s so perfect on so many ladies, including my own mother!)

Anyway, the reason it is so pressing that I get this mess trimmed up: I’m taking an undeserved vacation from my idle life to hang out with a good friend I haven’t seen in over a decade (with some job hunting on the side). As much as we all love shit-talking Facebook, I gotta say, it’s been good to me.

• a karaoke diner
• the cook was ladling sausage gravy all over the place
• birds were flapping around inside, their feathers landing in the sausage gravy mess (also: bird tracks in puddles of sausage gravy)
• no one was wearing shoes or socks
• all of the surrounding conversations were about surgical mishaps
• strangers wearing wool kept bumping into the bare portions of my arms
• at some point I got glitter in my eye
• my wallet fell out of my back pocket and into a toilet (one of my greatest fears)
• my toothbrush cuddling with other toothbrushes
• a drinking fountain filled with milk. “Eco-friendly” recirculating milk.

You know what? I have to stop right there and die a little bit faster.

First, this new Wuthering Heights cover makes my heart hurt:

I can’t even. Just. Really?

Dangnabbit. I lost my entire train of thought and this just became a list.

Things that make me happy, July 2K10 edition:

• almond tea
• all the awesome dogs that live in my town
• finding Kobo Abe’s The Box Man at the used bookstore
• Kate Bush videos on youtube
• the sweet brush in Sally Hansen’s Insta-dry polish (& blazing blue)
• Sebastian Bach as as Gil in Lane’s band on Gilmore Girls

There’s a lot more. I’m in a really good mood lately. I think I am in love with this summer. Is that allowed or is it like when lions lay down with lambs? Fickle, fickle kid, no?

Here, have some tunes –perhaps to fold clothes to. A mostly new wave mix:

Don’t turn your back on me baby
Don’t turn your back on me baby

1990. I was 12. It was hot and sticky and my father’s car didn’t have air conditioning, but it did have a tape deck and one cassette. The tape was a blank one he’d filled both sides entirely with Santana’s Black Magic Woman, and the deck kept auto-flipping so that we’d been listening to it nonstop from Philadelphia to wherever it was he lived back then.

Yes, don’t turn your back on me baby

At one point he pulled up to a gas pump and shut off the car, and then gave the key a slight twist to keep Black Magic Woman going. “No!” I shouted over it, but he was already inside paying to fill up.

Stop messing round with your tricks

I hit the eject button and flung the tape into the bin between the pumps. His radio was, of course, tuned to the classic rock station and when he got back in the car Black Magic Woman had just started again. As it finished I side-eyed him, watching his mustache twitch before he turned to me.

“Did you take my tape?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to give it back?”

“I threw it out of the window.”

“What?”

“I didn’t litter. I tossed it into the trashcan back at the gas station.”

“That doesn’t make it ok!”

“I won’t do it again. You don’t have anymore tapes.”

“They’re just at home.”

“More tapes of just that one song?”

Don’t turn your back on me baby

I didn’t see him again after that, but I did get an email right after I’d left school, about a month before my university account was purged. I refused to listen to his bullshit. Six years and not even a birthday card from him? (Let alone years without court ordered child support checks.) And now he was blaming his long, silent absence on my mom? I replied with the coldest, meanest dismissal I’ve ever produced. He fired back an angry reply and I told him to leave me alone. He did.

Turning my heart in to stone

Several years ago my stepfather had a heart attack, and a bit later spent an entire night on the telephone with me telling me all of the things he would’ve done differently if he could do it all again; none of it included my mother, me, or my step brother. He insisted I promise him to not repeat his mistakes, to do what I want, and not be miserable like him. A few months later, or maybe even then — who knows? — he was cheating on my mother. They’ve been separated for three years now and he lives in their house with his girlfriend and her kids –a replacement family younger than the one he’d had plus one more kid. (I don’t really get it either.) I’ve tried to be civil, but it’s easier to just leave it alone.

His almost-dying and turning into a completely different person made me wonder how often people do change. Does everyone? And if one can change from a relatively decent person into a complete ass, is the opposite also true? Could I be less of a jerk to my own father now? Could he have also grown up a bit over the years? I started looking for him, and the closest I came was discovering that my grandmother had passed in 1998 — not very long after our ridiculous email argument.

I can’t leave you alone

Last week it occurred to me that perhaps my search was too narrow. As soon as I checked the social security death index, I found him; he’d died in 2008.

How do you lose two fathers at the same time and not know it?

In my painful leisure I’ve been sleeping and not sleeping, in a weird schedule that on the upside is decent for keeping up with the fun stuff. That’s right, the World Cup, friends! My favorite part of it is when all the people who love to talk about how not into sports they are join forces with all of the people who are always more than happy to expound on how psyched American football or hockey or whatever makes them, to make sure everyone knows how stupid they think everyone who is “suddenly” excited about soccer² is for being stoked about a sport they like actually being on regular tv for a change. Because the United States is entirely made up of only NFL meathead jock douchebag fans and too-cool hipsters, and totally not a place where people from nations all over the world have immigrated –a world that is hugely taken with … soccer?

Soccer is a touchy subject for me because when I was little soccer was the one organized game that I could play where my best friend Melvin and I could be on the same team. Soccer was awesome and most of the people who told me otherwise insisted they were right because it was the sport that girls played too. I very strongly believe that is at the root of soccer not being regarded as a real sport here. And still, today, despite it being a worldwide phenomenon, you have people trying to erase a large percentage of the country’s interest in something because it is deemed “lesser than” — a stupid thing that even little girls (and foreigners) can do. How could it possibly be popular if it’s not a real sport? And anyone who is talking about it must be faking it because if people –meaning this very limited notion of the default American– really enjoyed it, it wouldn’t require some fancy sports package to keep up with more than once a year. This American essentialism and sexism rolled together and casually thrown around, even by some of the raddest women I know, is such a bummer.

Anyway how cute would a sock monkey in a wee soccer uniform be? Oh look, I found one³. God, my fucking back hurts.

1. except, no you shouldn’t
2. I’m calling it soccer for sake of clarity, and when I say “American” of course I mean USian.
3. adorable soccer monkey ganked from flickr user sockmonkeyfun.

So I’m sitting up late working on a design in the living room and there’s a terrible Syfy movie on in the background about giant spiders. I glance up from my laptop just in time to see a real, live, unacceptably large spider hiking up the wall directly behind the television. If the movie was at all creeptown that shit would’ve been like if The Ring had been unsettling.

Anyway, if you are going to watch Ice Spiders, I feel you could greatly improve your viewing experience by watching it in a 100+ year old home that you share with impossibly huge arachnids. You should probably just go to bed though because I’m positive your dreams would be more entertaining.

Oh hell, it’s 6am. I’m too tired to write about the tornado. Bedtime!

I have an elaborate, likely Skinner Pigeon-ly, system for getting optimal Netflix recommendations. My interpretation of “like” is loose to say the least. I might hate a movie but like the idea of it, and so I want similar movies with the same themes less poorly executed, to pop up on my lists. And maybe I liked something but my only reason is, say, that I’ll watch anything featuring Julian Sands. (See also: Helena Bonham Carter.)  If I clicked “hated it” for everything I hated, my recommendations would be nothing but director’s cuts or full screen releases of movies I’ve already watched. No really, this was what started my obsessive ratings-tweaking.

You know who else I find so endearing that I’d watch anything she was in? Melissa Joan Hart, the most underrated actor I can think of at 5-something AM. Oh hey, Julian Sands and MJH both played witches. Maybe I have a type?

I should probably devote some time to implement a complex series of Google Alerts filters that will keep me from missing out on all the latest developments in awesome. (They do get complicated. I finally just got my “anteater” alert to stop emailing me little league stats.)

Case in point: I had no idea Skunk Anansie was back together!

You know what else I like? Except not really? How these shoes I lovelovelove finally go on sale, and they’re no longer in my size. I am linking to them (Aldo’s Ambrosio) because I feel like someone should enjoy them even if we weren’t meant to be together. This is Very Mature Adult of me; I am definitely the kid who would buy something at the thrift store that wasn’t my size just because it was too me and then I would send it off to friends who lived far, far away.

I walked away from these in gray (!) in the store for $70 (?!), and then again in the outlet for $50. And I didn’t keep good tabs on them online because I honestly don’t care about shoes unless I really need to replace some. But now I’m having non-buyer’s remorse.

OH! In the mere minutes that I’ve been writing this the gray just became an option again, but still not in my size. Y U Do, Aldo?

Is this what it sounds like when doves cry?

As a fan of the supernatural thriller type movie I am happy to suspend disbelief to a degree beyond that of my more obnoxious spoil sport nerd friends. You can even hit me with some preposterous fringe bullshit like aquatic apes or hilarious hybrids or really stretch string theory if you want, but when your human characters react in ways that defy explanation, you’ve lost me.

I was really into this movie I was watching tonight when the lovely protagonist is startled awake by scary sounds from the empty apartment above and decides to investigate barefoot and in a negligee. What horror flick could this be, you ask? ALL OF THEM EVER.

Who would do this? Granted, I am a kid who can’t sleep without socks and the idea of being barefoot somewhere that isn’t my bathtub horrifies me –but who wanders around dark, unfamiliar, vacant places after hearing who-knows-what busting shit up in the immediate area without grabbing their slippers, or better yet throwing on actual shoes? Someone who is going to step on a rusty nail or through broken glass and/or a puddle of blood, that’s who.

Of course I am aware there are a stupillion more significant problems with the genre, many of which account for the extremely irritating extremely vulnerable ladyvictim trope, but this absurdity drives me bonkers. Instant spell breaker.

While I’m complaining about petty things –how useless is the new Netflix layout that provides the opinions of everyone in the world except the people you’ve specifically told them you care to hear from? I want to read random strangers’ reviews of movies just about as much as I want to overhear them on their cell phones.

For example, here is a 1 star review of The Big Lebowski:

Not that it is a film beyond reproach — but no plot? Really? This person rated Beverly Hills Chihuahua five stars. We are 18% similar, it says. If they can produce movie recommendations based on my ratings, why wouldn’t they screen out reviews from strangers that I’m less than 50% taste-compatible with? What is the point of collecting huge amounts of data and then not utilizing it?

I am done complaining for the afternoon! It is time to go have dinner with a puppy. (Sadly, not my puppy. But related! We are like second cousins.) There will be pictures!

Puppy!!!