rose-tinted

As I was walking home tonight from having an excellent conversation with a friend, I saw three people standing on the corner and squinting and pointing in my vicinity. I thought maybe they needed some directions, and so I paused and looked at one of the men. He did a double take and said to me, "Aw, it's all right, love, we were just admiring your beauty." I thanked him and laughed, and the girl in the group turned to me and said, "Do you have a boyfriend?" I laughed again and said no, and the first man told me (but not in a creepy way) that his friends were trying to hook him up and asked my name. As they seemed friendly and harmless I shook his hand and introduced myself, and asked them if they needed any directions. The second man in the group told me that he had simply been trying to get them to look at the twilit sky through his blue sunglasses, and offered them to me. I looked and admired the deep indigo, handed the glasses back, crossed the street and went home.
It was a surprisingly relaxed ending to an overall annoying weekend: it's been Pride here in Chicago, and I've been feeling irritable and left out because I had to work the entire time. I write on here so often about how goddamn happy I am, but that level of up tends to lead to the occasional day or two of feeling down and grouchy and generally much less happy. It's inevitable; it would be almost impossible for me to keep up this feeling of joy all the time, and so I accept my down days and wait patiently for them to pass so that I can feel sparkly again. This weekend was particularly rough, though, because I could tell I was headed for a downswing and I was also just so jealous of all of my friends, drinking in the streets and flogging each other on parade floats and dressing up in outrageous costumes.
I'm proud of my current ability to wait out these downswings of mood. When you know that it will pass, it's so much easier to prevent yourself from extending the depression into something that will hurt you for longer. Recognizing the roots of my discontent defuses it and makes it into just a phase to wait through. And so I take time to myself, write angsty journal rants, dress up in cute clothes for the hell of it, make myself smell the flowers at work and just generally accept that life is full of nights that make you want to scream and punch something but that those nights are just that: nights. They pass. And then I look at the dusky sky through a stranger's glasses and laugh my way home to bake a strawberry rhubarb pie to share with my friends.

obligatory, perhaps

Michael Jackson made a relatively minimal impact on my life, but I've always felt sad about what fame and fortune did to him and his music. I'm in no way writing a tribute, but this is a lovely cover from (who else?) Amanda Palmer. If you're lazy, the music starts right around the two-minute mark.

pride

It seems totally bizarre to me now, but I didn't consciously know a single gay person until I went to Interlochen in the summer of 2000 and found myself positively surrounded by queer folk. (Dear lord, the Indigo Girls came and I thought there was going to be a riot. I can't imagine being there during an Ani concert.) Or rather, there were gay people around me but I didn't recognize it until years later; the student body president, the angsty trumpet player, my co-worker at Dairy Queen that I had a huge crush on (the last two went to prom together! ha), are all happily out now. I've always had terrible gaydar. I wonder if they knew at the time, or if they were all as clueless as I was--I didn't have more than an inkling until I was about twenty, and I didn't come out more formally until I was almost twenty-two, which is astonishing given the lay of the land now. But I am a perennial late bloomer, running several years behind the rest of the world in most areas of life, so I guess I shouldn't be so shocked. I get there eventually, at least.

I say all the time that life moves in cycles, but it still amuses me to observe it. The seasons, my modes of transportation, and my productivity all spin in these giant circles that end up transcribing my life in the ways they intersect. It also works for somewhat smaller (but not really any less important) things, like the gendering of my clothing (either by choice or force, due to Chicago weather), how much cooking/reading/texting I do, and the frequency with which I crave chocolate. One of the circles I've been thinking about recently is the demographic of my friends. Not the long term ones (those are pretty stable), but the new-ish ones, the people who I actually see and hang out with on a somewhat regular basis. One of the most noticeable cycles for me is the one between queer and straight; it just always seems like either my queer friends are a visible, present part of my life, or they dwindle until they are few and far between.

My last queer cycle was about four years ago, and since then the numbers had been dropping steadily. But now, rather suddenly, I appear to be in the midst of another upswing; even at work, the queer insomniacs are running the show in the shop lately. What's really interesting this time around is that actually seems to make a lot of difference for how I go about life. To be clear, I love my straight friends dearly, but god it's nice to not be the one queer person in the room sometimes. It's good to hang out in queer spaces, talk about gender from a queer perspective, talk about sex without having to be the dyke "expert" to temper all the straight advice being thrown around. (For the record, I mostly adore educating straight men about leather bars and alternative sexualities and sex toys, but sometimes it's nice to be able to assume that at least some of that is common knowledge. I'm generalizing, but that kind of knowledge often seems to be much more prevalent in the average queer outing than the average straight one.) But more than that I just find that things are so much richer when I fit into more communities, and for a while there I didn't feel very immersed in queer life. I missed it.

Now I can have movie night with my straight girl friends on Friday and go to a 1920's drag ball on Tuesday, maybe spend an evening at a gay bar or a queer dance party (no, I didn't dance) in between my generally super straight orchestra rehearsals. It sounds like such a small thing, but it helps me keep track of all the parts of who I am. I love my straight friends, but I love my queer identity just as much.

hot summer nights

So I'm deeply in voice-love with Amanda Palmer, to the point that I follow her on twitter despite (because of?) the fact that she updates a million times a day. Seriously, I check and there will be like fifteen updates from her, pictures and links and funny things she's doing that day. (Ninja party in the park? Check. Drawing all over herself and making a fan video for Regina Spektor? Also check.) The amusement outweighs the possible annoyance enough that I haven't done anything about it, plus it makes me feel better about my own twitter-ness.

A few weeks ago, on a Friday night, she and her gazillion very enthusiastic fans came up with something that they christened LOFNOTC: Losers of Friday Night at Home On Their Computers. Their motto is "Don't stand up for what's right, stay in for what's wrong." They have t-shirts with this hand-drawn picture (the back says, I believe, "That's Amanda Fucking Palmer to you"), and every Friday night my twitter gets spammed out of the water.




Last week there were a million picture updates, through which Ms. Palmer transformed herself from a hot lady in a bathrobe to an extremely made-up person in a hat. (Check out the eyebrows.) Sometimes the internet makes me laugh.

sleepless in chicago

It's 12:42 and I'm not particularly sleepy, but I have a confession to make. (Another one? Always.) I don't really mind my insomnia anymore. I've had problems sleeping all my life; my second-earliest memory is of trying to fall asleep (was I three? four?) and being unable to, staring at my orange crystal nightlight until I finally drifted off. When I was a kid I spent so many nights going crazy in my dark room, trying to fall asleep so I could wake up and be at school at 7:45 the next morning. My father (generally a fairly reasonable person) for unknown reasons refused to let me stay up past 10:30, and so when I was younger and shared a room with my sister I spent years reading under the covers with a flashlight because I was fully aware that sleep was impossible. That claustrophobic stuffy space is still strong in my memory. When I got a little older I'd tack a blanket over my door (I was always paranoid of being found out, because my parents were weirdly strict about bedtime) and stay up far into the night reading with my lamp turned low.

There's something particularly terrible about not being able to sleep when you want to. The more you desire rest, the less likely it is that you'll achieve it and the more likely it is that you will be up until five thinking about how badly you don't want to be awake anymore. I've spent too many nights of my life laying in bed, wide-eyed and restless, trying to relax a brain that just won't shut up for long enough to shut off. My lovers have always been easy sleepers, which has only made it worse; being trapped in a dark room, trying not to wake somebody else, can be a special type of hell on bad nights.

But now, I live alone and I gleefully stay up all night doing whatever I want. I've come to terms with the fact that six hours of sleep (five on the low end, seven on the high) is perfectly acceptable to my body, and I choose to use my time semi-wisely instead of pretending that I'll fall asleep like a normal person. Most of my best writing is done after 11 PM, and I've been baking late-night cookies as the weather gets warmer. I read. I catch up on email, pet my cats, do dishes, listen to music. This time is my favorite part of the day, other than maybe the half hour I spend hitting the snooze button before I get up six hours later.

Speaking of which... Time to give sleep a chance.

in a sense we're all winning

Incidentally, here's one of the poems that was read at the Naked Girls Reading last month. I love the last lines.

Steps
Frank O'Hara

How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left

here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that painting's not so blue

where's Lana Turner
she's out eating
and Garbo's backstage at the Met
everyone's taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the park's full of dancers with their tights and shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we're all winning
we're alive

the apartment was vacated by a gay couple
who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Building's no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)

and the little box is out on the sidewalk
next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining

oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

you say potato

One of the best pieces of food writing I ever read was by MFK Fisher, a food writer (of sorts, anyway) from the 1930's and 1940's, on the joys of a beloved dish: mashed potatoes with ketchup. You might say yuck, but the way she described it--the preparation, the buildup to the first bite, the smell and texture and taste of the food--made it a complete experience for me. It was almost better because she claimed to have only eaten the dish once after years of anticipation, a sort of mashed potato martyrdom that made her vivid recall even more fascinating. It made this somewhat childlike food somewhat transgressive, and therefore more appealing.
And so, in the spirit of MFK Fisher, I have a confession: I adore frozen french fries. With store-bought ranch dressing. I don't eat them that often, but every few months I'll spend a few days eating french fries for dinner, which seems almost like blasphemy in light of how frequently I cook "real" food normally. But they are my comfort food of choice, only recently replacing Amy's Soy Mac'n'Cheeze; they are the food I come back to when I am tired and can't face the thought of chopping anything and it takes me a while to even get up to preheat the stove, the food I want when I'm sick or hungover or just grumpy. So what if they're bad for me? So is heavy cream. I love the crisp outer shell that gives in to the soft grainy interior, the sweet tang of the dressing, the bite of the black pepper and salt I cover them with. Potatoes have long been one of my favorite foods, and frozen french fries (in a mass-produced, unethically grown and processed, and full of extra ingredients sort of way) epitomize what I love about them. For me, potatoes are about texture, warmth, fullness. Comfort.
(I also once compared potatoes to calculus, and I was totally serious. The warm fuzzy feeling I get when eating well-prepared potatoes is very similar to the satisfaction I felt working through a derivative in my high school calculus class.)
I'm in the middle of French Fry Week right now, and I've been getting fancy. Today was a long day at work; I was out too late and too debaucherously last night, and then I spent my afternoon making four bridesmaids bouquets, one corsage, and about a million table centerpieces. When I got home, my feet hurt and my brain was numb, so after a sufficient amount of time decompressing, I got up the energy to turn the oven on. I tossed my Ore Ida Extra Crispy Crinkle Cuts with olive oil, salt, and pepper before baking them, and then I tossed them again with feta cheese (!), and then I ate them with cheap peppercorn ranch. (Next time I'll add basil, and maybe garlic power.) They were fabulous.