dancin' in the streets

As Erica pointed out in her blog, much of my "readership" is currently in China and can't look at blogspot sites. Ah well. Does it matter? Not too much.
Pride has come and gone. Anna wrote a good review of her thoughts on the whole thing in her blog, mostly about her insane desire for free beads :-) It was overall a pretty fun experience (I keep telling people mostly because we could drink in the street, which is probably true; standing outside for three hours or whatever watching politicians roll by would be a lot less fun without alcohol) but not entirely what I expected. It seemed like the queer community was out-represented by the aformentioned politicians and companies that were just using the parade as a way of advertising themselves. Both of these groups function in the same way: they hire a bunch of hot dancers who run around holding signs and/or giving away cheap crap with the company or politician's name on it. I wonder how many of the people in the parade were actually queer and how many were just hired to be there. Not that I have anything against straight people of course, but this damn parade is supposed to be about pride, not advertising. I guess I just wanted it to be more radical than it was. I wanted people to be in crazy costumes and radiating political awareness. Maybe I was just on the wrong street :-/
But still, there was booze, there were hot dancers (regardless of why they were there), I hopefully made some new friends, and it was goooooood to see so many happy people. Everybody was just thrilled to be there, you could tell just by looking around you. I'm sure I'll be there again next year, yelling my head of and drinking something with a high proof out of my water bottle.

"I like to be surrounded by...women."

This is Pride weekend for Chicago. We missed this last year because we had already started on our road trip, so this is actually the first Pride either of us has been to. Today is the Dyke March, and tomorrow is the actual Pride Parade. I'm excited, but also unsure of what exactly to expect. I mean, I know Prides everywhere have generally become a giant corporate whore-off (a few years ago SF pride was sponsored by Budweiser and they even used their corporate slogan for the festival motto), which I don't particularly appreciate. But I'm still excited to see all the parts of this community showing off for once, and just to be surrounded by so many people with at least one interest in common. Isn't that always a bit exciting?
Anyway, I'm also going out in just a few minutes to my very first solo apartment interview. It's right on a main street in Girlstown, which would probably be handy and fun. I hope I am chatty and nice and not chatty and neurotic. It can be a fine line when I'm nervous.
Finally, my favorite thing read on an internet profile recently (I'm sorry if I go on about these, but they crack me up): "I'm flawed, but I'm intelligent, so it's alright." Go you, I guess.

grace

"In the best of times, I hold in mind the need to care for things beyond the self: poetry, humanity, grace. In other times, when it seems difficult merely to survive and be happy about it, the condition of my thought tastes as simple as this: let me be a good animal today. I've spent months at a time, even years, with that taste in my mouth, and have found that it serves.
"In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again."
-Barbara Kingsolver, "High Tide in Tucson"

amendment

Well, perhaps I'd like to amend that past post a bit. There are days when I abhor change, when I desperately want to travel back in time about two years and have everything as it was before I left Tucson and came to Illinois. But other days, I feel like maybe things are moving in a good direction, maybe my life will become a better place and things will all work out fine, etc etc.
Anyway, still jobless. My current options seem to be either volunteering for an insomnia study that may pay well (finally I get payment for all those shitty sleepless nights!) or working at the Hollywood Video near my house. Hmmmm. Such thrilling choices...

tell it to the sky

You know what I've discovered? I don't like change very much.

gettin' wiggy

Finally, pictures from the crazy Mozart gig!



Me looking a little goofy.



Sarah, looking much more photogenic.



A toast!



The quartet plus the pianist's father.

suggestions anybody?

I am realizing that a lot of the books I have here are either depressing or difficult reads. I'm looking for something easy and fun for a little while, and every book that I have that fits that description I have read about 10 times. I'm having a hard time brainstorming, also. So, basically, does anybody have a suggestion? To recap: not depressing, preferably funny, not too hard (like not theory, etc). Thanks :-)

dreams

I had a dream last night where I was trying to explain my taste in music from a couple of years ago to a musicologist I know and we bonded over the Smashing Pumpkins. Interesting. But two nights ago I had a really awful dream about getting sexually assaulted by one of Anna's co-workers (who is a very nice person and I'm sure would never act like that in the real world). I don't know what's going on in my own head.
I have a job interview or something like it in about half an hour. It's for a vegetarian/vegan cafe near my house, which sounds cool except I think they will want me to work a lot of evenings and weekends. I don't know... I don't mind working some of them, but I need some off too just so I still get to see Anna and have a life that doesn't start at 11 pm. We'll see. I feel really nervous about the whole thing, like either they'll find me lacking and not hire me or they will like me and I'll end up hating the job. Ugh. Jobs.

sometimes

life just sucks. just thought i'd put that out there.

outlaws

My favorite line from the Craigslist missed connections today (I'm addicted): "OK I'm off to drink a Schlitz and read some Kant. Put that in your cultural category pipe and smoke it." People have been arguing about this guy who asked if any women had ever heard of/had any appreciation of Ingmar Bergman, with most people calling him pretentious and stupid for thinking he was the only one who liked Bergman. Then HE wrote back, calling them all pretentious and himself cultured and merely looking for someone equally so (or something like that). That prompted this response. I'm sure there are some excellent academic essays being written about Craigslist and online communities in general. It's fascinating.
I just finished Kate Bornstein's "Gender Outlaw" for the second time last night. It's funny how much can change in a year... Last year, I was so fucked up just by trying to think about the concept of considering oneself neither man or woman that I think I missed much of the rest of the book. (I'm still fucked up by that concept, but I've also spent a lot more time thinking about it so I was able to focus on the last 2/3 or more of the book a lot more effectively.) Bornstein has some really great thoughts, especially after the first bit which is kind of like an introduction to gender studies/gender thought/whatever. She has some decent ideas (far better than anything I could come up with) for restructuring gender activism to be transgender-inclusive without forcing people into molds, and she makes some awesome connections between things that surprised me a bit (for example, she talks about how S/M, because it deals with acting out power, also is related to acting out gender. I'm not explaining it well, but the way she did it made so much sense to me.) I like her writing because she trys to ask as many questions as possible and not necessarily answer them; I respect that because she says right out that with something that's so fluid and culturally constructed, you all-too-often find out that whatever you thought was stone-cold right is totally not. If you just keep questioning it instead of just making a decision and sticking with it, you're much more fluid and able to adapt.
Anyway, I've gone on too long. Read it sometime if you're interested, I highly recommend it.

and another

When I got home on Tuesday and checked the mail, I was surprised to find an application for the National American Miss competition addressed to me. This was confusing not only because I fall outside of the age limits of the competition by a good four years (it's for girls ages 4-20) but because there isn't any way in hell I would ever do something like that even if I was still 16. Me in a pageant? Are you kidding me? The brochure is full of shiny happy teenage girls holding crowns and wearing poofy gowns. I will admit it's kind of fun but weird to imagine myself doing that. Even better, listen to this quote from the website: "The National American Miss pageants are dedicated to celebrating America’s greatness and encouraging its future leaders." That's me all over, huh? I always wonder how they get my name for stuff like this, what they thought sending it to me would accomplish. It seems like for something that has such a specific target audience you wouldn't just mass mail a bunch of people. But what do I know?

a prime piece of bullshit

"Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all."
I guess "all" means something different to him than it does to me. I am not particularly "for" gay marriage, by which I mean that I am as for it as I am for hetero marriage. The whole issue seems to be frequently used like a band-aid approach to fix things like immigration strictures and adoption issues, and frankly I understand the idea of marriage less and less the more I think about it. But to say that everybody's interests are served by denying rights (however gained) to a group of people is such an obvious load of crap.

finally

Today has been rather more traumatic than I anticipated. I'm not going to get into it, suffice to say I didn't make it to postsecret. Instead, I'll use my new (and more expensive than I expected) USB cord to put up some pictures from my camera.



A sunset in Flagstaff.



Someone fishing in Lake Michigan in the middle of winter!



Do they have these ads anywhere else? They have these zombie-eyed children doing regular kid things with this video gam controller or whatever. They creep me out. We actually saw them first as graffiti, on trucks and things, and thought they were a good indictment of fucked-up consumerism. Turns out they were just ads.



The view from the music building student lounge at northwestern.



The tulips in the center of the roundabout by the school.



The lake in the midst of icing over.

I wanted to post a picture of the lake as it is now, but it won't let me. Fucker.