Vanity and Updike

I'm pretty contented with my life overall. I get to travel between two fantastic cities regularly. I have a good job, and I have lovely family and friends. Also, I have decided to wear a new jacket to work today, thus testing the boundaries of the business-formal dress code. Nevertheless, here are some things that would make me contented-plus this morning.

I really wish my hair had grown about eight inches overnight. I'm totally regretting having cut it all off in the fall. Everything seemed fine at first, when I could blow-dry it straight. But then it grew out an inch or so, and bits of hair started getting curly and cowlicky, no matter how many times I threatened them with the flat-iron. "It's like your hair is saying to you, 'Amanda, you're Jewish, I'm not meant to go totally straight,'" N remarked to me a few weeks ago as I wrestled with various hair products. Indeed.

I also wish that I had stayed up late enough last night to finish Rabbit, Run. There is a Slate "audio book club" podcast about the book that I want very much to be listening to right now, as I get ready for work. But I have about ten or fifteen pages of the book left, and there's no way that I'm going to be spoiler-ed. Not even by Meghan O'Rourke, one of the book club participants and, despite her detractors, one of my favorite internet journalists.

Rabbit, Run, by the by, is literally stunning in many respects. It also contains the best first-date line I have ever read: "O.K. What shall we talk about? What's your weight?" I'm considering having a Laughter Through Tears-sponsored book club to discuss it, particularly the complicated things it has to say about religion and marriage.

Into the Woods

We didn't see any bears on the hike. Matt pointed out what could have been a bear's paw-print, but also the print could have belonged to one of the small-horse-sized mutts we met on the trail. Besides the dogs, here are the various fauna that we encountered: tick, snake(!), squirrel, and pair of ants carrying off a grub. I'd call that a success, no?

Even if a naysayer might be unimpressed by the hike's modest menagerie of critters, no one could help but be charmed by its absolutely beautiful setting. I love DC for many reasons, one of which is that an hour-and-a-half drive can take me far beyond the city and into some lovely mountain town in the Shenandoahs. The area where we hiked was all pale green and soft violet. Most trees had not yet sprouted a full head of leaves, but some intermittently boasted a shower of pinky-purple blossoms.

We hopped our way across streams and traipsed around sparkly waterfalls along what promised to be a moderately easy trail. I checked out the topographic maps and the narrative description of the trail that Erin and Matt had thoughtfully provided. "Yall," I asked, "um, why does it say that the next part of the hike is 'very steep with switchbacks?'"

Indeed, our benign trail soon took a turn towards the promised steepness and switchbacks, and my ensuing light-headedness taught me the important life lesson that one should not indulge in a fair amount of wine-drinking the evening before a substantial trek. But then we had reached the trail's summit and realized that the grueling past half-hour had led us to an outstanding postcard panorama of a view. Hawks dipped above us, and I swear we could see all the way across Virginia.

After the hike, four extremely dirty outdoors-people made their way to Spelunker's Frozen Custard & Cavern Burgers to check out the area's custard scene. Lucky for us, the good folks at Spelunkers weren't put off by our appearance and commenced to serve us some of their delectable "gooey Butterfinger" flavor of the day in homemade waffle cones. Later that afternoon, when N and I had returned to DC, we priced out the cost of starting our own custard store. The store would be located in the U Street area, which is woefully short on dessert-specific enterprises. I'm not sure what its name would be, or when N and I could gather enough start-up cash to finance the operation, but I can promise you that we will be doing lots of market research at Spelunker's so that we can bring the outstandingly good waffle cones of Front Royal, Virginia to the DC metro area.

Oh My

I'm visiting the District this weekend.  Hooray!  Saturday will be spent hiking with friends in Virginia.  This should be an adventure for several reasons.  First, the last time N and I went hiking with these particular friends, neither of us could walk properly for over a week afterwards.  Erin and Matt are experienced outdoors-people, and they do not mess around.  Second, I have not exercised since December.  At all.  Finally, N has expressed some concerns (which I second), that Matt, our trip organizer, "keeps on saying that we'll see lots of bears like that's a good thing."

I'll report back on the trip when we return, provided that I am not bear-mangled.

Sus Scrofa and Other Adventures

Suffice it to say that this weekend I attended two cultural events that featured half-naked men in pig suits running about in front of the audience with insufficient explanation to account for their presence.

As Sasha Frere-Jones predicted, a parade of randoms accompanied Kevin Barnes onstage at the Of Montreal concert I attended on Friday. Besides the pig, I caught glimpses of guys in gas masks, red amoeba-like creatures engaging in some sort of battle, and a keyboardist whom I thought was in drag, but who was actually a woman (sorry, honey), as we grooved around on the mezzanine of the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Jenny and I managed not to get yelled at once at the concert, which is actually a record for us. "That guy at the back of the stage--- is he supposed to be like, a Santa Claus mixed with an exchange student?" I yelled to J over the music. "No idea," she screamed back, handing me the largest rum and diet I've ever seen.

At Saturday's zombie opera (TM "Zopera"), the context provided some clarification about the porcine presence onstage. The pig appeared during Dido and Aeneas' boar hunting expedition, so obviously he was a rough approximation of their intended prey. But this explanation still is unsatisfying, because it does little to elucidate exactly why the pig was wearing a foot-long strap-on phallus.

Along with the lusty faux-boar, other not-so-obvious creatures roamed the stage at the Zopera. By sheer quantity of stage time, the Zopera was really more of a spaceman opera than a zombie opera. Said spacemen were prone to making impressively precise statements about the predicament in which they found themselves (the predicament being, as it were, being sucked by a mysterious gravitational pull onto the zombie-inhabited planet Aura). "We have a three out of ten chance of survival," one might declare. Or, "The ship must have traveled 2.9 parsecs before impact!"

Ridiculousness aside, or rather, because the fantastic ridiculousness was matched only by the talent of the performers and the vision of the stage designer, the Zopera ("La Didone," if we're being formal) was exquisite. I highly recommend it. If for nothing else, go for the electric ukelele recital.

And the Days Are Not Full Enough, Except That's Not Accurate at All

I've been abandoning the blog lately, and this upsets me a bit! This week has definitely been crazy. I flew in from Cleveland, where I spent a lovely Easter weekend, early on Monday morning, went straight to work (do not pass Go, do not drop off your suitcase), and I feel like I have been running ever since. But starting, um, today, that does not mean that I can just neglect writing online. I really feel more centered during the day if I spend a bit of time accomplishing something measurable (alongside my actual job), and writing this blog serves that purpose nicely.

Even if I have nothing really of import to say.

Besides this: check out this lovely gocco print of DC during cherry blossom season! It's available on Etsy, through the seller Artshark Designs, and I think it is absolutely charming. The artist makes similar prints of New York, Paris, San Francisco, etc.

Also this: this weekend will be filled with fantastic alt-cultural adventures in Brooklyn. (Which will take place in between drafting my six-month self-evaluation for work, among other various life maintenance tasks.) Stay tuned for tales about hitting up Of Montreal tonight and then attending the baroque spaceman opera La Didone with two of the most dedicated back-porch denizens of yore.

Tonight We Recline

If Shai and I had ordered Passover dinner and eaten by ourselves at Shai's apartment, it would have been enough (Dayenu), but I'm so very glad that several of our non-Jewish companions decided to join us for Seder! Shai set a lovely table, passed out Haggadahs, and clarified to Faith and Penn that they didn't have to read anything that made them uncomfortable. Although they raised their eyebrows significantly when one of the traditional passages seemed to gloat over-much about the Egyptians' downfall and subsequent loss of riches, my favorite Floridians were soon l'chayim-ing and discussing various of the ten plagues like no one's business. Brian joined us just in time for matzah brownies and sang harmony to a Passover song that depicts a ruckus of animals biting and eating each other until the Angel of Death and the Holy One step in and restore everything to status quo.

The party then retired to the living room and began an impromptu poetry recital. Faith impressed everyone with her fervent interpretive performance of Tool lyrics, which involved shrieking carrots and general cries of terror. A semi-knowledgeable and semi-impassioned discussion of Ezra Pound followed. No one could remember much of "If" except "You'll be a man, my son."

I rebuffed Shai's offer to send me home with leftover brisket, but I realize now what a huge mistake that was. Next year, there is no way that I'll fall prey to that same blunder. Of course next year, I will be hosting the Seder, and thus I will encourage you to please start preparing your post-dinner recitations. It's never too early, and it's a tradition now.

Can We Get Some Silverchair in the House?

Yesterday while mired in several hours of document review at work, I turned my aural attentions to KTCU, Fort Worth's college radio station (now available streaming). While I truly respect those college stations that really push musical boundaries, some of these stations are so committed to the avant garde as to render them unlistenable. No one, however, would accuse KTCU of being oppressively edgy.

Adam and I used to listen to KTCU pretty regularly in the 1997-1999 era, when I would drive him around town in the beloved metallic green Ford Taurus. Yesterday I was pleased to find that the station's line-up has changed minimally in the past decade. First up, Brick, whose lyrics I just learned are not "she's a-breakin' up drowning slowly." I then prepared for some Raconteurs or Feist or whatever, but hearing the unmistakeable saxophone intro of Ants Marching, I quickly realized that the mid-90s hits were going to keep on coming.

The next three hours of KTCU programming basically showcased the soundtrack of my high school experience. The Verve Pipe (the slower, acoustic version of "The Freshmen," a nod to the college radio format), Counting Crows, Better Than Ezra. Has anyone thought about Better Than Ezra in the past ten years? Also, the freaking Wallflowers! Too amazing.

Jakob Dylan has explained that the song "One Headlight" is about "the death of ideas." To me, it has much more literal connotations. I remember driving in the Taurus one afternoon in high school, hearing "One Headlight" for the two hundredth time on the radio, and thinking that the song was still great, but it was just a little too accurate to be listening to it on the same day that I had backed into a random post at a gas station and would have to explain to my parents why one tail light of my car was busted.

Another Borough

Natanyah and I ventured into Queens (well, Queens-lite, Long Island City) on Saturday night to see Catie perform stand-up. The audience was quite small, but I think that's what you get for planning an event at a tiny performance space attached to a burrito shack. Natanyah snagged seats for us, and I ordered drinks and tried to avoid stepping on the huge white cat that wandered about aimlessly and seemingly ownerless-ly. A large and rather scary man named MoFo strolled into the performance halfway through and then proceeded to stare intently at various audience members. After the show, we introduced ourselves to several good-natured, shaggy-haired comedians and the girls who love them.

The comedy itself was universally quite high quality. There were some very good bits, and Catie later told me that several of the guys who performed are poised to make it very big, very soon. So maybe this was the closest to real celebrity-spotting I'll come in New York.

That said, one otherwise very good performer said something onstage that he needs to change immediately if he really hopes to take his show on the road. His act was all spot-on, except, he mentioned during his performance that Iowa is the Buckeye State. Terrible faux pas! This ostensibly nice guy is going to be attacked my an angry mob of Ohioans if he keeps this up! I meant to tell him this after the show in order to stem his eventual assault by Ohio natives (and also Iowans, proud members of the Hawkeye State), but I temporarily lost interest and focus and then he was gone.

On the bright side, I guess it's good that he didn't call Iowa the Lone Star State, or then he would really be headed for some future carnage.

Don Draper Owns Me

Do you know how hard it is to overcome the life inertia that results after realizing that all of the episodes of Mad Men are available, streaming, on surfthechannel.com?  Do you?  Because streaming-tv-related inertia is heavy, and only the very strong and the very bold can best it.

I have intentionally quit Netflix two times to date because I simply cannot handle having television shows available on DVD.  There was an unfortunate episode my first year of law school when I re-subscribed for the second time to Netflix and then lost two weeks of my life to Six Feet Under.  When I actually did manage to tear myself away and make it to torts class, I burst into tears in class while recalling a particularly wrenching episode.  

Even though I eventually weaned myself off Netflix, a similar situation occurred during winter 2007 when I decided to purchase all seven(!) seasons of Gilmore Girls** on DVD.  When Tess stayed in my apartment for a week or so recently, she also fell prey to the siren song of the Gilmore Girls DVDs.  She mentioned foregoing real food and just eating from the convenience store downstairs because she didn't want to take time out of her busy day of Gilmore Girls to go grocery shopping.  Her tale of woe (albeit pretty pleasant woe) was all too familiar.  

Anyway, today I have tons to do!  TurboTax is clamoring for my attention!  Plus there is laundry to sort, hostess gifts to contemplate making, belated "yay your baby was born!" gifts to wrap, general correspondence to write and phone calls to make, basic hygiene and nutrition to attend, and the prettiest day yet of 2009 to enjoy.

For the most part, I have managed to reclaim my life today from the tentacles of the free Mad Men episodes.  I have gone to Sephora and eaten brunch and sent a few emails and showered.  Not that Martha Stewart or Michelle Obama would be all that impressed by the day's labors, but I'm pretty proud of myself.  Someone give this girl a gold star.  

**As an aside, I recently re-subscribed to Netflix, and last week I learned that just because Rory Gilmore recommends a movie does not necessarily mean that it's super-entertaining.  Staying awake through more than one episode of Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth is wicked hard.  I know, it's embarrassing and anti-intellectual to admit that I didn't find two older gentlemen engaging in a free-form discussion about hero figures and the symbolism of dragons around the world riveting.  But is it even more embarrassing and anti-intellectual to confess that I rented a movie solely based on Rory Gilmore's recommendation?

Popular Culture Update

Well it is certainly unfortunate that the week that I finally succeeded, after many fruitless attempts, in talking my way onto Tim** and Tara’s dad’s American Idol listserv, I had nothing to contribute in the way of opinions! Let me assure you that this is not the norm. I firmly believe that AI is a societal pleasure that is best shared with others. Watching a particularly overwrought version of Martina McBride's Independence Day loses much of its appeal if there is no one with whom to exchange thoughts about whether the insufferable McBride catalogue should be nixed from AI for good, or whether Paula understands that this song is actually not a happy song, or whether there will ever again in the history of AI be a performer as enjoyable as Constantine. Maybe I alone hold that last opinion.

In the past several years, I have been lucky to find people who will watch with me, or, more commonly, who will subject themselves to 45-minute phone conversations following AI episodes. My parents have proven especially willing in this regard, which is nice for bonding purposes, even if they don’t spazz out when someone sings a Heart song and don’t especially understand why someone would. Before I had real live AI friends, I dabbled in posting on AI chatboards, but I quit that post-haste because people are just too mean on the internet.

However, this week I could not watch because my colleagues had scheduled a team dinner for Tuesday night. The event itself was quite enjoyable. I ordered a blood orange margarita. We all listened, rapt, to a co-worker’s description of his cousin’s exotic snake business, which operates through the cunningly-named website getsnaked.com. N thoughtfully texted me AI updates throughout the meal. But the next day, I was unquestionably disappointed not to have any first-hand knowledge to protest against ad hominems such as “Anoop is nothing but a WANNABE with no unique talent” that appeared on the listserv. Nevertheless, my buddy Anoop survived another week, and any of his haters should watch it, because next Wednesday morning I shall be prepared with all kinds of verbal ammunition for his defense.

**Dropping the whole “Rafael” thing, I have decided that pseudonyms are exhausting. Sorry, Rafe.