look what i found...

I've been playing around with some neat stuff tonight. The internet is so neato. For example, now you can see my record collection. Part of it, at least. I didn't put everything up. Or perhaps you'd like to know where to find a free book. How cool is that?

i know, i know, i don't need to wait for a membership drive.

I just bought tickets to see Sigur Ros at the Hollywood Bowl...in October. I heard they were coming to LA on the radio today and I thought oooh, cool! But, um, I kinda thought it would be...sooner. I'm super psyched about it though. October in LA is pretty and cool and we'll be sitting outside under the stars (okay, so we won't really be able to actually see many stars, but that's beside the point) out in the Hollywood hills, eating fancy-pants sandwiches and listening to amazing music. Makes me all dreamy-eyed just thinking about it.

I'm also really excited about something else I heard on the radio today. (Have I mentioned how much I adore KCRW?) A new Damien Rice song. It's a duet with Lisa Hannigan, the woman whose voice is all over "O." Really nice. It's supposed to be coming out on, like, a sampler CD or something...and I'm not finding a lot about it. Keep your eyes open...

"magnolia in exile" may be the funniest thing I've ever thought. ever.

We're watching King of the Hill, the third episode out of eight showing tonight on FX's "King-sized Friday," which I'm totally devoted to. Except that this happens to be my least favorite episode (the one where Bobby gets a ventriloquist dummy and inadvertently freaks out Dale...and me...because it's just a creepy-looking doll).

I finished Persepolis (by Marjane Satrapi) Wednesday night. Yestday at work I told Anna that I'd read it (she was the reason I wanted it anyway, because she said it was so good) and she said she had just started reading Persepolis 2 on Wednesday. She finished it on her break, brought it to work for me to borrow, and I read the whole thing last night. I read super-crazy-slow, but graphic novels go pretty fast. Even so, I was still pretty surprised to finish two books in a week. I literally could not stop reading them.

That Sarah Vowell book I've been reading keeps, sort of, getting less and less enjoyable. It's weird. I mean, sometimes I really like it. And I just like her style, in general. But the last story I read, about her and her sister traveling down the Trail of Tears to better understand the history of their people, just didn't sit well with me. The idea is great...but she just didn't carry it out very well. There's this one part where she's at a historical landmark near the Tennessee Aquarium and she starts getting angry because the happy kids going to see the pretty fish aren't being told about the landmark by their teacher. And while I do, to a certain degree, see her point, there's something about the way she wrote it that makes it sound like the kids should be made to feel guilty for something that happened before their grandparents were even born. She compares the Trail of Tears to the Holocaust on more than one occasion, which I think is relatively acurate...but I wonder if she begrudges little German kids and wants them to go around feeling guilty on every school fieldtrip they get to take. She even goes to the Hermitage and confronts some poor tour guide. (Andrew Jackson was largely responsible for the Trail of Tears.)

This all makes some sort of sense. I know that. But it's her attitude. Too willing to blame people who really aren't related to the issues.

Later she talks about Pea Ridge National Military Park in Arkansas, a battleground where about 800 Cherokee soldiers fought for the Confederacy. Sarah Vowell has this to say:

I'm making myself sick trying to reconcile the fact that oppressed Indians could live with owning slaves, to die for slavery's cause.

We all know, without question, that slavery is, was, and will always be, horrible. But to act as though that's the only thing the Civil War was about...well...that's just ignorant.

I'm sick of feeling like I'm supposed to be ashamed because I'm Southern. I'm not. At all. Nor am I going to defend the Confederacy. It's just that...I don't deal in absolutes.

I remember going to Shiloh as a kid. Actually, all I remember was part of the film we watched in the visitor center...the nearby creek turned red with blood. The water ran red. That's straight out of Exodus. A plague on Egypt! 150 miles from Nashville! I was terrified.

In my annoyance, I was suddenly filled with the desire to read about the history of the South. To sort of know the truth in a very symbolic, but real way. I would write a book about it. Me living in California, finding my way home metaphorically. Here are some possible titles (mainly, I'm joking):

The Battle of Burbank
A Year Without Rain (Except for a Couple Weeks in December)
Magnolia in Exile

two different places, i tell you!

I've been switching back and forth between Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw (Will Ferguson), Take the Cannolli (Sarah Vowell), Midnight Magic (Bobby Ann Mason), and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

I've chosen these four books to alternate between because they're not in a traditional, linear format. Two are stories, one has chapters that don't really relate to each other, and Persepolis is a graphic novel...which I'll probably finish tonight. This all means that I can sample from book to book and not get confused. Not that I necessarily would, because I'm always doing this, but it makes things easier anyway.

I tried to take a picture of my knee. Yes, for the selfish, self-serving, self-whatever-other-thing purpose of putting it up here and proving that I really did bang my knee hard enough to somehow have bruises in--this is the best part--two different places. Ha! I think that's a record even I haven't set before! I'm almost kinda proud of it.

Oh... Alright. I am proud. Sort of like when I got a "heavy" tag put on my luggage at the airport. Not good either really, but a personal record nonetheless.

The pictures didn't work though. The camera kept focusing on my foot.

typos abound at 2am...how many can you find?

So. The Harry Potter party is over. At last. I kinda wish I'd already read the middle four books so I could've bought one tonight and had it mean something...something like, "Hey, I'm going to go home and be so excited and read and woohoo." Instead, I'm sitting on my bed with one of those cups that has water in the sides (you know, you put it in the freezer and it becomes a "frosty mug" ideal for root beer floats and stuff) on my knee...because we don't have any other form of ice (frozen mug verses frozen chicken breast...no contest, really)...because the store was so crowded that I rammed my knee into one of the shelves. And I'm not completely sure how or why. But my knee is swollen.

We did a countdown. I got to be the one to pull the first book out of the box. Maybe I'll write more later...when I'm not so tired and swollen.

another darn nice day.

You know those instincts that allow you to sort of just know it's raining without having to look outside? I've gotten that feeling lately. Maybe it's the humidity reaching a certain level or the color of the smoggy sky. I'm not sure. Of course, it isn't raining. Hasn't rained for months. It's a very weird sensation.

trivial.

Do other people do this? Sometimes I'll see something and I sort of have to keep looking at it. Like certain color combinations. That's why I'm so crazy about Todd Oldham. Anyway, I bought this book because I just loved looking at it:



I've been in a sort of funk since yesterday morning. I love London. It's weird, but even when I saw the photos of a red double-decker in shreds...all I could think was how much I wanted to go there. Like I wanted to help or something.

Instead I'm sitting around at home playing with eyeshadow because of a book cover.



At least the book sounds good.

from california to the new york island...or the other way around, in my case.

This morning I started reading Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw by Will Ferguson. I'm really liking it. It's funny and covers a lot of ground and time and history, but just sort of feels like it's ambling along, rather than shoving information in my face. So far it's talking about Victoria and its history and neat places...and not-so-neat places.

Isn't that a lovely thing to do on Independence Day? You know, read about the history of another country.

Of course, compared to last year, when John and I saw fireworks from Battery Park in NYC over the Statue of Liberty, nothing is going to sound that great. There's a huge chance that we will, in fact, never do anything that patriotic again. We're not even trying. There's supposed to be fireworks off the pier at this beach we like to go to, but the parking there for an event would be a layer of hell Dante could have never imagined....possibly because he pre-dates cars...no matter, the parking would have been hellish and we're used to the Disneyland fireworks. (How could some dinky Roman candles off a one-ended bridge ever compare to that?)

I did happen to catch Sarah Vowell on Book TV reading from her book Assassination Vacation. She's really funny, in a might-be-my-new-hero kind of way. And her book is about American history (you should really check it out) and is on my list of books I fully intend to read but just haven't gotten around to yet. It's right up there with Dostoyevsky. Don't give up hope Fyodor, I'm still coming for you, my long-winded, Russian darling.

So I felt like I was given a sufficient brush with the American past. Because I watched 45 minutes of Book TV. Whoever said I wasn't easy to please?

We went to see my grandmother today. After Ms. Vowell finished her reading and started signing books for people in some San Francisco bookstore, I started getting ready to go out. As I was brushing my teeth (I frequently do this while brushing, actually), I wandered across the hall into the kitchen, leaned back against the microwave and stared at our refrigerator magnets. I have a collection of those state magnets they sell at big gas station/travel center places that I got on my trip to CA with Sara in '03 and on our trip out last summer. (Incidentally, I've lost Georgia and never bought Nevada because we went through it right before stopping in LA, which meant not seeing any of the places that sell them anymore.)



As I stood there staring at my broken map, listening to the hypnotic swish swash swish swash of the brush across my teeth, I remember a puzzle my grandmother used to have. This was my grandmother in Tennessee, my dad's mom. She had this jigsaw puzzle of the US. (It alone is the main reason I know where any of the states are.) It was the kind of kids' puzzle that has a backing and you have to fit all the pieces inside it. Of course, the states don't really fit together like puzzle pieces, so there was also the outline of the individual states on the backing. I can remember lining up Tennessee and California over their respective outlines so that they looked like the only two states in a vast void of cardboard nothingness. That's how far it is to Grandma and Grandpa. That's how far it is to Fred and Patricia. And Mary Belle and Cliff. And the beach. And Disneyland.

I think Tennessee was green. And West Virginia was blue.