A brief moment of panic.

Oh my GOD.
Graduate school.









That's all I can muster.

Eugene is out in full force.

Eugene is a whole different city after college students leave for the summer. Any pretence of community normalcy goes straight out the window within five days after the graduation commencements. When the U of O populace pours out of town and heads homeward, Eugene's boldest and bizarrest and most colorful characters flock to the streets to parade around conspicuously in cross-dress and talk weird to themselves--and I have to say, I absolutely love it. Sometimes I privately think to myself that they must be wizards trying to act like muggles and totally failing to pull it off, in a most marvelous way.

Just on my five-minute drive to the market yesterday, I saw a man in a short brown women's bathrobe and electric aqua women's dress shoes sauntering down the sidewalk by Euphoria Chocolatiers. And two minutes later, while I was stopped at an intersection, a man wearing nothing but a Utilikilt, who had flaming red hair, a huge bristly beard, and an oversized beer dispenser perched atop his head, bicycled through the crosswalk, beer straw in mouth. So much for brown-bagging it.

Last fall I literally saw a guy biking through town while practicing the tuba. And there's also an old guy who quite regularly cycles through campus in very Gandalfish regalia: he wears a weather-worn cape and a strange hat with a large brim, ala the White Wizard. I'm fairly certain there's a portal somewhere near the Women's Building on campus that leads to Middle-earth.

Three cheers for Eugene, Oregon.

A tech investment.

Since my poor, rather senile laptop has finally become incapable of typing vowels (I use a separate keyboard now), and since its burner doesn't work and its pitiful 30 GB hard drive is stuffed to a breaking point with music and graphics programs, I've decided it's time to invest in a new notebook. Or rather, a refurbished notebook. From (dun dun dunnn) Dell.
I know it's dangerous to order from Dell, and that its service generally sucks, etc., etc.; and I know that Macs are the way to go now, if you're dastardly-rich enough to afford them, anyway--which I am not. Nevertheless, I've had a good personal history will Dell: Irmabelle (my old Dell Inspiron 2650) made it through graphic design school, gaming geekery, and gigabytes upon gigabytes of music madness before finally leaving on longterm mental vacation. May the next one manage to do the same.

This is the model I ordered, very basic:

Inspiron 640m/E1405 Notebook
Intel Pentium dual-core T2080(1MB Cache/1.73GHz/533MHz FSB)
80 GB EIDE SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM)
1 GB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz (2 DIMMs)
9 Cell Primary Battery
14.1 inch WXGA Notebook Screen (probably should have upgraded, hmm...)
24X CD RW/DVD Combo Drive
Internal NIC/56K Modem
Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 950
Windows Vista Home Basic (but I think I'll run XP because of RAM limitations)
1390 Wireless Card

It was about all that I could do on my budget, and I think it'll be fine. The fact is that after using Irmabelle regularly for the past two (precarious) years, anything newer will seem heavenly and will most likely run what I need it to. I made sure that it comes with a warranty, in case it decides to crap out.
It was odd buying a computer without the input of gamer/programmer friends. Now I mostly hang with lit geeks and teacher-people and karate masters, and am quite disconnected from techie things. I probably just bought a rock with a Duracell battery taped to its side, but that's still a step up from Irma.

I am considering sending Irmabelle to a computers-for-schools program, but am uncertain they'd take her, due to keyboard problems.

Jigging in the skivvies.

An incredibly wild week of socialization has kept my hermitish blogging tendencies at bay. Over the last five (rather bewildering and blurry) days I've managed to whiffle my way through an enormous graduation party, closely followed by a myriad of appointments and wedding preparations, and finally (today), rounding off with my aunt's wedding, in which I was the unofficial Maid of Honor/Hapless Decorating Minion. Furthermore, tomorrow at 8:30 AM begins the Middle/Secondary Education orientation, in which I'll groggily shake hands with other education cohort members and schmooze (in what I hope won't seem a lethargically zombie-like manner) about public education with various U of O Big-Wigs. I can't believe it: grad school's here already. Gollygee, hope I can pass as an extrovert.
At least this week's given me practice. Sure.

Time now for a fitful snooze before I awaken at the asscrack of dawn to scurry schoolward. Wish me luck, kids, wish me luck.
I'm going to rock out to some semi-tasteless paddy punk as I dress in the morning. That way, by the time I get to school I'll be so composed (a.k.a. exhausted) that people will never ever suspect I've been shaking my fist in the air and jigging around the kitchen in my skivvies.

An ode to my kind of femininity.

Despite my typical barrage of complaints, there are some things I really relish about being a woman.

I'll readily admit that I enjoy the material aspects of femininity especially well: the clothes, the trillions of shades of fingernail polish, the ritual application of eyeliner and mascara in the morning. I like the fragrances (sweetpea, vanilla, laundry detergent) and the textures (tulle and satin and silk) and the colors that are widely associated with femininity (lemonade pinks, lilac purples, peach, cream, and crimson; the rich, florescent palates of rose gardens and sunsets). I love some of the domestic skills with which women are often associated, as well--constructive, artful and ritualistic activities, like cooking and knitting and nesting and decorating, that form a common, cross-language bond between mothers and sisters and girlfriends around the globe.
And on occasion (although certainly not always) I get a real kick out of the subtle, tight-knit exclusivity of being a chica amongst other chicas. I am endlessly amused by the fact that even the most ostensibly innocent woman invariably holds at least a few of her man's marionette strings close at hand, her moments of puppetry so skillful that he rarely registers her influence or intervention at all. Brava! Encore! On with the show...

It's undeniable that I sometimes bitch about the inequity of living with a female body, so temperamental and tumultuous and desperate for fattening foods at the end of each month. But ultimately, there are really delightful aspects of everyday womanhood that I can't imagine can be equally paralleled in men's lives. Like crooning with Joni Mitchell in pitches a guy couldn't hope to reach, or purring with Cat Power in a timbre no man can ever seem to manage. Or being able to move gracefully in all manner of footwear, including Wellington boots; or murmuring purry silliness into a lover's ear; or privately lusting after a male musician who shreds the fiddle in some local band. Buying matching skivvies just for the satisfaction of matching; or intuitively finding the gifts people have always wanted, and wrapping them with frilly domestic prowess. Writing prettily. And, perhaps best of all, knowing that there'll always be some little old man willing to help me find the ripest cantaloupe or the healthiest head of lettuce in the produce section.

Good stuff, that.

Feathers in her hair.

Today's projects
- creating playlists for this weekend's graduation party and my aunt's upcoming wedding
- buying bobby pins and using some of Andy's fly-tying feathers to create wild hair ornaments like these, which are absolutely exquisite (I'll post a photo later)
- thrifting for a light pink or white belt

06/08 greatest.

Hooray(!) for
1. Red grapefruit halves sprinkled with sugar
2. Old people shuffling down the sidewalks sporting full-body sweatsuits in electric 80s colors
3. Boyfriends who regularly pick wildflowers and cook dinners for their ladies, even after years and years being together (like mine)
4. The newest Wilco album (sub-Yankee Hotel Foxtrot but super-A Ghost Is Born, with upbeat, retro hooks)
5. 1940s-era phrases and exclamations ("Holy mackerel!" "Okay, you mugs!")--and the funny old coots who still use them on a regular basis
6. The silent ferocity of cacti
7. The human-like curiosity of cuttlefish
8. The festivity of blooms in the June sunlight


Additionally, because I'm both strange and verbose and have a penchant for colorful expressions, this month I will attempt to incorporate the following British slang terms into my regular vocabulary. Please join in. Standard American dialect could use a bit of a brush-up.

Sixpence short of a shilling: a term to describe someone who's eccentric. Always useful.
Spitting feathers: thirsty, or fretful/agitated/frantic. (Appropriate for when I begin graduate school this summer term--it will be both hot and stressful, undoubtedly.)
Stonking: impressively large. Also used in place of 'extremely' or 'very,' as in "We had a stonking good time."
Mint and minted: excellent/wonderful, and wealthy, respectively. "The new Woody Allen was mint"; "the guy living up the hill from us is obviously minted..."

Most excellent.

Celebrity look-alike generator: oh, the vanity.

How strange. MyHeritage.com's celebrity look-alike generator seems to think I look really Japanese for some reason.
I'm white as hell though.
Was quite thrilled to be compared to J.K. Rowling (and the comparison to Kiera Knightley wasn't bad either, although I can only dream of being that beautiful).
Funny shit, kids.

Here were the results.

http://www.myheritage.com

Dear you.

Dear Eugene, Oregon Alpha Male Type who honked at me extensively when I didn't leave an opening for you to illegally cut through four lanes of traffic on a one-way:
Please rest assured that when I am a public schoolteacher I will corrupt your children with my liberal values, ensuring that none of them can possibly grow up to be as aggressive and shortsighted and compassionless as yourself. Thanks for the motivation, buddy!
Love,
Nilly

Dear angry young couple downstairs,
Please, for your sanity and the well-being of every other person within auditory range of your apartment, politely refrain from behaving as though every second of your homelife is being taped for an episode of Jerry Springer. Or if it in fact is, at least hire me to make a cameo appearance dressed as a drunken white-trash neighbor who wears a tubetop and sweatpants and shouts winning lines such as "GIVE HIM THE CHAIR! THE CHAIR!" and "OH NO YOU DIT-INT!"
I mean, I could sure use the money and I think I could add an extra dash of trash to your already impressive repertoire, if only you'd give me the chance. But preferably, since I am a drama class dropout and all, I think you should just tone it down: watch some Seinfeld and make smoothies, listen to "All You Need is Love" on repeat, eat fiber regularly, maybe volunteer at an animal shelter together. Or, you know, you could break up your disturbing relationship so all of us could get a little more sleep at night.
Sincerely,
Your neighbor, Nilly

Hearts.

I want to get ahold of the newest album by Bill Callahan of Smog... just because it's called "Woke on a Whaleheart," and that's freaking great.


I have some albums full of music that I don't often listen to or even particularly like, but which I nevertheless can't get rid of because I love the album titles.
It's a real issue, my weirdness about words.
Good night, kids.