where’s the man with the jive
BLOW UP LIKE THE WORLD TRADE
Hello comrades. Let’s sneak one in under the wire so my archives page continues to look nice, with at least one entry a month. Good thing I didn’t follow the crowd and try to start a paid Substack thingy, huh? Because you sure would not be getting your money’s worth! I will just stay on the internet and give it away (give it away, give it away now).
I do wonder sometimes what the next thing will be. Blogs are mostly gone, no one can reasonably pay a whole bunch of fifty dollars-es per month for a wide variety of personal newsletters,* and the Instagram-influencer thing is increasingly considered a joke even by people who consume that kind of content. Something else must be just around the corner. WHAT WILL IT BE? I demand to know so I can make fun of it and then decline to participate, like the crabby Gen-Xer I am.
*I realize that lots are free, but there’s still like…a mental load? To getting an email, even a fun one, that you “have” to open and read? As opposed to just browsing around, wasting time on the internet, going to your favorite sites? I don’t know.
MUSIC TIME
This will sound dumb at first read, but if you re-listen you’ll know I’m right: “She’s Gone” by Hall and Oates is the ultimate Flight of the Conchords song. Yes, I know which one came first.
More music: listening to Prince “Gett Off” and the line about 23 positions in a one-night stand just seems improbable, or maybe even indicative of trouble, like something wasn’t working.
GOING NOWHERE
I already moaned about this on Twitter, but the original plan for October was for me and LT to spend most of it in Turkey and Greece. This was going to be a 25th anniversary trip, turned into a 26th anniversary trip, and now is postponed indefinitely. Not only was the coronavirus news less than great, but it seemed like every day there were conflicting reports about what was and was not open, where masks were and weren’t required, and now you have to be tested before coming home and ugh. It all started to feel more like prepping for some scary, difficult maneuver than like planning a relaxing trip to gawk at antiquities and eat street meats.
Let’s stay home, then! Let’s keep it boring! I actually will be attending a (safe, carefully planned) wedding in North Carolina at the end of October, so we spent some of the airline miles on upgrading to first class for that flight. And I spent some of the street-meat money on a necklace to make my boring special-occasion dress a little less boring.
FREE YOUR MIND
Recently read: this! An amazing essay for anyone who is into space, literary theory, or the eternal fumbling toward and investigation of how to translate the workings of your mind into actual words. (Personally I am interested in two of those three things.) Adapted from a longer book, which I may have to purchase.
NEST STATUS: STILL EMPTY
Aaron has been at college for over a month now and I am slowly getting used to it.
It seems so…abrupt! I spent 18 years living with that guy and he just moves out? Just like that?
I have not inquired too much about classes or grades, although I know there have been some fun projects in the engineering intro class and that EVERYONE fucked up that chemistry test, mom. He has a new piercing and a full-size car tire in his room (“found it in the trash”) so that seems on track for a college guy. He is slowly getting over the culture shock of being somewhere a lot whiter than his high school (which was only like 15% white), and of meeting people who in turn are surprised by his surprise. Apparently some of the more artsy of his weirdo friends have never been to Chicago and are dying to experience a city, and some of them have cars, so we may become a flophouse for interesting-haired college freshmen one of these weekends. In true teenage fashion details are sketchy but I guess I don’t need to alter my plans. You have a house key and a Ventra card, we have floors and couches and extra blankets: figure it out.
WHAT IS MORE METAL THAN MENSTRUATION, I ASK YOU
Stop reading if you hate period talk, although this will not get very graphic. I use a Saalt softcup to contain the monthly situation. If you have no reason to know, you probably won’t know, but there are a lot of different ways to fold cups for insertion and one of them, where the corner gets folded down, is commonly called the “7-fold” and of course I always think of Avenged Sevenfold. I know literally nothing about Avenged Sevenfold except [a] what I read in that Wikipedia page, [b] that their music and especially their videos would probably crack me up; I always start giggling when I witness too-serious metal-ish bands performing (it’s a reflex), and [c] they will always be linked to menstrual cups in my mind. I hope they consider it an honor.
Similarly, LT was playing some video game called Control and I kept asking if it was a Joy Division-themed video game but it seems not. I wish there were a Joy Division-themed video game. I can imagine all sorts of fun possibilities.
VERY ROUGH LIKE CHEESE GRATERS
This is an article from 2014 but I keep it on standby to cheer myself up because every part of it is ABSOLUTE GOLD.
- A species whose name more or less means “micro dick”
- “Further investigation revealed that this was the male fish’s genitals”
- “Square-dance style”
- The illustration!
—mimi smartypants has small arm-like fins.