Let this be an epitaph for my heart.

Oh, the Shins. I've lost them. They've lost me.
This new album ("Wincing the Night Away") is almost completely devoid of soul, and half the tracks use the same cliche cookie-cutter chords and rhythms that plagued mainstream music back in 1985. Not to mince words or anything. (This is not to say that all or most 80's music was bad; just the scattering of bands that used the same three chords over and over and over, and whose sales and distribution directly correlated with the tightness of the frontwo/man's Calvin Kleins.)
I wonder if the new sound grows on you after a while of listening, as a lot of albums do, but you know, I'm not sure that I really want to give it the opportunity. Maybe I'll just pretend like this whole new-album thing never happened.
I advocate artists' developments and metamorphoses; I mean, I'm not generally one to get out-of-whack about a band whose music undergoes drastic evolutions or regressions or whatever-you-will... but the new Shins is a blood sacrifice of style for the sake of appealing to a (really sorry) mainstream market.
So, like, don't say I didn't warn you.

And now for the pettiest of petty questions: do I remove The Shins from my list of profile music interests? It's like erasing the name of a longterm ex-boyfriend from a phone-list. James, you're just not the same man I used to love.
Sigh.

Tea for the Tillerman, party invitations, and Margot Tenenbaum.

Went to the Brewfest tonight with Andy. It was perhaps a bit of a lost cause for him to bring me along, because I'm really not into beer and I typically avoid drinking it in public, if at all... but the event was a fund-raiser for local public radio, which we listen to constantly and try to support whenever possible, so I went along. Like a good young pup. It turned out that stumbling through crowds of half-drunken hippies and hipsters (to the soundtrack of repetitive jam band music, no less) wasn't a total loss--there was a corner store of one-dollar vinyls in the brewfest auditorium, and Andy bought me a good copy of Cat Stevens' Tea for the Tillerman. Such a small price to pay for an album that makes me want to wrap up in a sweater, drink cocoa, and draw maps of imaginary places like I did when I was twelve.

I am developing a bizarre penchant for all things that can be sent by mail: cards, applications, care packages--anything that requires a stamp and a handwritten address label. I guess it stems from my liking for documentation--the idea that you can seal an idea or a correspondence in an envelope and send it to someone, handwritten, hand to hand (if indirectly). Tangible communication in a world where few things are concrete.
Lately I've begun creating my own college graduation party invitations. On the outside they'll have light, sparkly chartreuse vellum printed with quotations in funky fonts (you can download them for free: "Pharmacy," "Pagan Poetry").
After searching for a while in books and online, these are the quotes I'm considering for the covers...

"Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you, kid. Let's go." --Maya Angelou
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving." --Albert Einstein
"The task of a modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts." --C.S. Lewis (I am somewhat at odds with this quote; a bit colonialist, is it not? And I'm not sure I want C.S. Lewis on my invitations. In general I don't think much of either his writing or his patriarchal Christian connotations. But I like the idea that education should be about cultivating a fertile learning environment that encourages wildness and individuality in students, instead of imposing standards that confine them. Not farming, but fertilizing. And not with bullshit, either.)

The designs are about halfway done right now. I'll post some perfectly marvelous pictures of them when the whole batch is completed.
On the inside of the cards I'm encouraging guests to arrive dressed up (or down) as their favorite character from a book or film... I hope it'll work; I'm offering handmade music mixes as door prizes.
Think I'll be Margot Tenenbaum, if I can just find that elusive striped dress...

And now, back to reality.

"...of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings..."

A few years ago I started collecting other people's abandoned grocery lists.
I covet them and tack up on the bulletin board in my kitchen, eight in all. You can tell a lot about a society from grocery lists, you know, aside from what people are eating and why antacid and Beano commercials are so prominent on the telly. Some trends I've noticed:
- the handwriting is usually feminine.
- presumably it is not always the scribe who does the shopping--specific brand names for canned and household items, and individual names of fruits and vegetables are usually spelled out, which leads me to believe that the lists are made for various market-going minions (housemates, husbands, boyfriends, partners).
- contraceptives are never mentioned. Either are alcoholic products. Maybe these are such a given for most people that they don't even need listing... or maybe I'm just the only unaware individual left who hasn't hopped aboard the Complete-and-Utter Chastity Bandwagon.
- additionally, I've noticed that hotdogs are still surprisingly popular, despite the fact that we all know they're made of assholes and snout tissue.
Ah, Americana. How we adore thee.

  


Speaking of Americana, I'm still planning the trip through the southwest with Andy, and one of the most exciting things I've discovered about Arizona so far is its variety of enormous concrete dinosaur statues. Dinosaurs like these ones clamber alongside some stretches of highway... and as kitschy and ridiculous as it may seem, I really want to see them for myself. They're scrawled at the top of my list in electric red pen.

j, k, l, semi-colon, quotation, returning.

I'll be frank. The fact is that the last two years of school at the University of Oregon have pretty much ransacked and pillaged my personality. I'm largely defined by my experience as an institutionalized student now: what I think, what I do in my (supposedly free) time, what I dream (and nightmare) about, all revolve around school. It's been both positive and negative, and certainly (for better and worse) transformative. Say what you will about the merits of college education, but there's also a lot ot be said for organic, independent discoveries and feeling and writing without constant critical analysis--there's a lot to be said for living in a world outside of academia, in short. It's where, you know, reality happens. And stuff.

There are five weeks left in the term before I graduate and move on, and the time has come ("the walrus said") to pull my independent, creative mind from the ashes and resurrect some sense of who I autonomously am, aside from a student and aspiring language arts teacher. Hence this ridiculous blog, which I told myself I wasn't going to do anymore... yet here we are, here I am, out of necessity--compulsively returning to creative writing, my literary miracle grow. Magic in the making, kids.

If my posts are inane for the next month or so, it's because I'm regrowing an organ that has been amiss for a while. I debate whether it's my heart or my brain. You'll see in the next few weeks as the words come tumbling out.

And now, in an abrupt change of subject,
I present,
Five fabulous things happening in the next few months (aside from graduation):
1. A 2+ week long roadtrip with the man-of-my-heart through the Southwest (including Joshua Tree, CA and Flagstaff, AZ) and into Austin Texas (oohoo! A 10-year pursuit) and New Orleans (which we're especially interested to visit/document, given its current condition).
2. Suddenly acquiring the time to read the following (not in chronological order): the poetry of Derek Walcott, the short stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the novels of Christina Garcia, and the collected works of Joseph Campbell.
3. The emergence of daffodils, my favorite flowers.
4. The arrival of my Demeter order (grass, dirt, and laundromat fragrances).
5. The donning of sandals and skirts and sunglasses, and the attendant multiplication of freckles.
Yesss.