Nevertheless, the word is charm.

thoughts:

- Dad and Uncle Brian are wonderful and are helping me move.
- the rain that was hovering in the air all day finally came down and brought some thunder along too, which I love.
- Patrick was a pretty cute kid...  and I'm using those old family pictures I mentioned as blog-filler while I move to Iowa.  those of you who don't dig nostalgia may be less than thrilled with all these photos, so I promise I'll be back to using words pretty soon. 

momandpatrick

eeyore

boywithdog

dandelionkiss

StevenandPatrick

The plan was to post my favorite picture from the party this week... but Dad (in addition to all the other work he did putting together a wonderful event) made a slide show of Patrick's childhood photos.  I love so many of them, and may post more at some point, but this is a favorite... Uncle Steven, visiting us in Mahomet, Illinois.  I remember this being taken fairly early in the morning, before I went to school.

and thinking they're extra-wonderful, because I just found out...

Un-Scripted was just voted Best Theater Company in the SF Bay Guardian's Best of the Bay 2008 poll!

I need to figure out how I can get back there to catch a performance of the Great Bollywood Puppet Holiday Extravaganza... 

and we may be eating leftover ribs and potato salad for the rest of our lives. 
seriously... if I die mysteriously within the next week, it's because there are strange elements in yellow cupcake frosting and pork products than when combined, in prodigious quantities, are lethal.

also, I'm still in the process of packing for the move and wrote a haiku about it.  I don't even like haiku that much, but it does seem to pop into the blog a lot...   Maybe it's because if you consider yourself only an average poet, it's best to limit yourself to fewer syllables, so as to avoid writing long, bad poetry.  Also, "squeal" doesn't officially have an adjective form, but I think that's unfair, so I'm using it anyway.

Poor, sad, forsaken blog o' mine.  I'm mid-move, stopping over in Menomonie before leaving for Iowa City in exactly 1 week.  Because I'm out of the habit, and because I really dig lists, here's a (less than comprehensive) list of things I've been up to since I last posted...

- cleaned out my cube at the Fed, played password with fed friends
- packed, packed, packed, threw things away, packed some more, left furniture on the curb
- drank close to 2 liters of beer in a German beer hall
- lived for a few days with charming friends in Pacific Heights, realized I was living in the wrong part of San Francisco the whole time
- took a one-way red eye from SFO to MSP, watched the sun rise as I landed
- spent a few nights with Mabel, snoring her little puggle snore, in my bed
- wrote vast quantities of email
- saw and hugged almost every single member of my wonderful family
- lost a game of horse to my brother
- finally, euphorically, went running on the red cedar trail
- laughed a lot, putting up party streamers with Uncle Brian
- ate graduation party cupcakes
- retired the 2007-2008 planner/little-black-book-of-everything, started a brand new, red one for 2008-2009
- used skills acquired at the fed to make a v. attractive table of my first semester law school schedule

I miss the SF friends and love being home and am a little bit overwhelmed but will try to post with a bit more humor and regularity.

Baby

a picture I took in Senegal...  she's just hanging out, chill and comfortable 

chill in the relaxed sense I guess, not the temperature sense as I remember it being extraordinarily hot that day.

five questions and a haiku

with dale mackey

L: how do you feel about nuclear power?

D: I'm all for looking into it.  (ascending the soapbox) because living in the coalfields here in eastern Kentucky, it's pretty damn clear this whole coal thing is not only completely unsustainable, but just horrendous for the communities that are providing us our energy.

L: way to go with the earnest response!

D: it's a hot topic around these parts.

L what, for you, would the perfect saturday entail?

D: wow...  let me think.  I'm closing my eyes and picturing it.  here's what I see:

I'm waking up to someone feeding me grapes.  I'm assuming it's my beau, but I can't make him out because he's standing in front of a really sunny window.

we're in a beach house!

we hike to a waterfall after I'm full of grapes.

then we have a picnic on the beach (and now I can make him out, it is the manfriend).

then we go swimming and walk around the town.

and spend the early evening reading and I write some brilliant things and he takes some brilliant photos and then we eat an amazing meal full of vegetables and fresh fish.

and then we go dancing!  and drink lots of margaritas.

and that is that.

L: daft punk or ratatat?

D: daft punk!   duh!

L: Indiana Jones or James Bond?

D: ugh.  I really don't care.  ummm... James Bond.  he knew how to drink and dress well.  and Harrison Ford’s hair makes me sad in the latest Indiana Jones

L: ok last question.  you are invited to a big costume party on short notice.  it's tonight.  what do you wear?

D: I've been wanting to go as Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe for awhile.

 to dress up like Marilyn, but paint my face and hair and arms and legs and wear a crazy colored dress

L:  fantastic!

ok, haiku time…

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Desk Jobs

we have a blank slate

and a little matchbox car

a pink band of hope

This weekend I read a book called San Francisco Stories, edited by John Miller.  Comprised of fiction and non-fiction, the book includes writings by Jack London, H. L. Mencken, Czeslaw Milosz, Dylan Thomas, Mark Twain, Alice B. Toklas, Herb Caen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others.  I adored it.  It made me laugh and think and wish that I could stay a little longer in San Francisco.  Here is a particularly charming bit of Rudyard Kipling’s In San Francisco from 1889, best read to oneself in a very posh English accent…

“From an English point of view there has not been the least attempt at grading those hills, and indeed you might as well grade the hillocks of Sind.  The cable-cars have for all practical purposes made San Francisco a dead level.  They take no count of rise or fall, but slide equably on their appointed courses from one end to the other of a six-mile street.  They turn corners at almost right angles; cross other lines, and, for aught I know, may run up the sides of houses.  There is no visible agency of their flight; but once in a while you shall pass a five-storied building, humming with machinery that winds up an everlasting wire-cable, and the initiated will tell you that here is the mechanism.  I gave up asking questions.  If it pleases Providence to make a car run up and down a slit in the ground for many miles, and if for two-pence-halfpenny I can ride in that car, why shall I seek the reasons of the miracle?

[…]

It needs no little golden badge swinging from his watch-chain to mark the Native Son of the Golden West – the country-bred of California.  Him I love because he is devoid of fear, carries himself like a man, and has a heart as big as his boots.  I fancy, too, he knows how to enjoy the blessings of life that his world so abundantly bestows upon him.”

I also loved the Mark Twain excerpts and identified a great deal with the significantly less rose-tinted Lewis H. Lapham piece Lost Horizon… but I’ll save those for another day.

Fort

february of senior year we all built a fort in the living room.  I love that there's a tv in the room used only for fort-anchoring, while we do homework... tucked away from the snow and the stress and the rest of the real world.

I was going to just give up and shut down the blog- since I quite clearly fail at blogging regularly or about anything of substance- BUT my Fed coworkers convinced me not to be a quitter.  Or at least not a premature quitter.  So here’s the debut of a feature I’ve had in mind for a little while: five questions and a haiku.  I’m going to do a little informal interview with a person I know, then we’ll make up a haiku together and I’ll post the results.  My buddy Phil, since you already kind of know him, is the first interviewee…

five a series of questions and a haiku

with phil armour

L: how do you feel about nuclear power?

P: seems to have fallen prey to the rampant irrationality of alarmists. *intent look*  I feel like it’s on record so I have to sound smart.

L: what is the coolest thing you own?

P: my triple beam scale.  for non-drug purposes…. for home brewing.  unless hops are drugs… hm.

L: what is the best Daniel Day Lewis film you’ve seen in recent memory?

P: Gangs of New York

L: the best Paul Dano movie you’ve seen?

P: The Girl Next Door

L: have you seen There Will Be Blood?

P: no

L: uh huh.  ok- what’s your favorite craft supply?

P: like- supplier of crafts rather than arts?

L: no- if you were going to make a craft box, of craft supplies- what would you need to put in it?  What would be the best thing in that box?

P: dry macaroni!  You can make so many things with dry macaroni!  Necklaces, faces, those macaroni shakers where you glue two paper plates together with macaroni noodles on the inside!  And hey- did you know where the word macaroni comes from?

L: no…

P: ok- I’m gonna play an expert card here-

L: go for it!

P: it comes from the Macaroni Club.  they were a group of English dandies traveling throughout Italy.  they wore their hair in ringlets and their curls were what inspired the name for the pasta!

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I always liked ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ as a title

interstate system

Kerouac hated I-10

polysyllabic