Song O' Day

It seems like cheating, dropping a song and running. But you know what? You're going to be listening to this over and over and not caring about what I say anyways. It's pretty nifty.

Elaborate ways of saying I miss you.

Today already I have run eight miles, eaten a grapefruit, and written some critiques that necessitated me looking up the terms 'allegory' and 'parody,' as well as going on Facebook to look back over the pictures of my life in Asheville.

I miss Asheville so much sometimes that it doesn't make sense. It doesn't help that almost all the reasons (IE people) I miss it for are still there. Miyacowboy is still there, even if she did get married and change her name; she has a wolfdog now so I will grudgingly forgive her that. The Austenate Poet is still there, even if she has changed so much as to look like a different person. I look like a different person. I'm not the same as I was when I lived there. Heck, back then I was The Conservation Biology Major.

What a joke that was. I would never have been a scientist, not then and not now. Thinking something is absorbingly fascinating in a metaphysical how the fuck does this work? kind of way is not the same thing as being a scientist. I don't think there will ever been a career in sometimes being completely thrown by the fact that the world works and even though there are so many places for life to go wrong, somehow it all works out.

I'm not sure I'll ever be the same kind of happy I was in Asheville. I think I'm too old now; I think too much has happened to me to believe in the moment like that again. I can't write the same poetry over again.

I couldn't move to Asheville now. Not even after I finish my degree. The logical, outside-world part of my brain prevents me. It's too expensive to live there. I'm thinking of the idealized mecca of my brain weasels when I left for a reason, and a good one that required medication and twenty-hours-of-sleep days.

But then I think to myself, "Self, you are not that person anymore. You are much better adjusted and you have a clearer idea of who you are. You will not get pushed around. You will possibly even be able to navigate the lesbian ocean there well enough to get laid a few times. You know, more than the zero you did then."

I can't believe I was queer in the lesbian homeland of NC and managed to not get laid. It's like I have to go back to correct this error. I mean, I have a fauxhawk now. Ladies love the fauxhawk.

I was going to try and do some kind of Before and After thing here, with photos side by side, but you might not believe that we're the same person. There's your warning.


May 2007. I'm eighteen. I'm not sure who took this picture. Evan, probably.

There aren't that many pictures of my face and just my face from this time. The original picture I was going to use had my whole body in it, and I changed to this one because this isn't about my weight, then or now. I mean, you can see that I've lost weight. But this is about other things.

I took this in the lab just now. I have my hand over my mouth because for every time my picture is being taken - even if I'm the one taking it - I get this doofy, stressed-looking smile on my face that's masking the fact that I want to giggle like a mental patient.

I can't see the other things. I can see the overall changes, but I don't understand how I can be these two people. Theoretically 2007 is still in here; you don't just get rid of the person you were. But if I went back now, if I did Asheville and Warren Wilson over again, how different would my experience be? What would it be?

Also looking back at those photos made me miss my rats so much.

The world is a hopeless place.

So, as a self-confessed audiophile with a serious addiction to AmazonMP3 Store and YouTube, you might think I would be interested in the Grammys. You would be wrong; I was not this year, because of this article but more specifically, this quote:

“I think people deserve a second chance, you know. If you’ll note, he has not been on the Grammys for the past few years and it may have taken us a while to kind of get over the fact that we were the victim of what happened.”

The Grammys think they were the victim of Rihanna getting hit in the face by Chris Brown. So I don't give a fuck about anything the Grammys did, or did not do, and in fact I'm just going to celebrate all Rihanna all the time today.

Mostly I celebrate all Rihanna all the time anyways, because Rihanna is kind of like cocaine for my ears, if cocaine was actually made out of good things that were healthy for you and made you run faster and watch videos of pretty women dancing and sing lyrically repetitive songs to toddlers.

"We Found Love" is on such heavy rotation in my brain that sometimes I open my mouth to say things and, "We found love in a hoooopeless plaaaaaaace do do do do do do do," comes out instead. It would be a problem if I was habitually around people who cared about such things. Generally speaking the Collective either understands what I meant or wasn't listening anyways.



But that's not the only Rihanna song I love. Oh, no. I was listening to Pon de Replay back when I didn't really understand music that wasn't Sarah McLachlan (maybe I'll talk about that dark period of my life some day). I have a Rihanna Pandora station that I play maybe even more than my Lissie station.

Basically, Rihanna is awesome. I love her. And Chris Brown hit her in the face. She is the same age as me, and if someone hit me in my face so hard I had to go to the hospital and then people had to publicly apologize for supporting me and being angry at the person who hit me in the face, I would never trust anyone ever again.

Rihanna is a stronger person than me. She is still making music, still working within the same industry where people almost unanimously took the side of her face hitting boyfriend over her, and she rocks. Chris Brown wishes he had half of her composure.

In summation: This face. Do not hit it.

Cryptid/Nerves

I'm doing something I've never done before, which is post a blog entry via Kindle Fire. There may be some awkwardness up-ins due to tiny touch keyboard and the browser's inability to understand blogger 100%. It doesn't even understand how to spell blogger. You can almost hear it shouting, "This is not a word! IT IS NOT I KNOW ALL THE WORDS I AM KINDLE!"

I love my Fire. So much. I play Words With Friends, I check email, I read books, I watch Netflix, I stare mesmerized for hours at Gravilux. But typing just isn't something loveable about it.

But I have some time and I wanted to ramble about - what else? - marathon training. I've been markedly lax about talking about running for a blog that was supposed to be 35% about running. (Yes, there's a pie chart.)

It's not that I'm being lax about training, exactly, it's just that I'm not all that worried about it. I'm excited, a little nervous-excited, and ready. Not physically ready, because there's weeks to go and lots of long runs to get done, but all that mental preparedness I had to build up last time is still there. Plus I know for sure that marathon is possible for me. There's precedent.

I am running a lot more this time. More miles per week, more runs above six miles. I did nearly 57 miles last week and finished feeling OK. (There was a stomach related incident during my long run that I don't want to discuss.) This week is not so many miles, so don't worry.

Today is my busy day, and like a boss I left the house without my Garmin or my lunch protein bar. Go me, right? At least I get to have a donut today. If I couldn't have my weekly donut I think my whole world would fall apart.

If anyone reading this would like to leave a comment giving me their opinion of sasquatch, it would be exceedingly helpful.

Also, 'Close to You' is a helluva creepy song. Birds everywhere...

Sometimes I wonder about things that it has become apparent to me no one else wonders about.

Like when I was at the drug store today (in my mind all drug stores are named Revco because when I was learning words for things that's what they were called) buying Playtex, Always, Aquafresh, and an Oral-B Medium Bristle, I wondered not only what kind of vag/tooth crisis the people in the store thought I was undergoing (and if I added a diet vanilla creme soda to the mix what would that imply) but why, if there is no longer such a thing as a hard bristled brush, do they persist in 'soft' and 'medium?'

You can't have a medium without another category. There is no medium of two.

The UberTransFan was not intrigued. Instead I got yet another mild rebuke about how hard bristles are bad for your teeth and gums. To which I say, "Yes, but it feels so good."

In other news, I want to announce that I now have a legitimate reason to watch Bigfoot documentaries. And I'm strongly considering a fauxhawk.

Some days you're cereal free, and some days Earth Fare puts Puffins on sale.

I want to start a band, and I want my band to perform songs that exclusively suggest that we are leading secret double lives. Like Jem. Or Dazzler. Or that vampire huntery girl who that one roommate I had once liked but I didn't because of the amount of men she had detail-oriented sex with.

I almost said, 'Like SClub7,' but they really were a band, even if they were also pretending to be a band in a television show where they pretended to be actors and I pretended to prefer Rachel over Jo.

If you can't read this, click to enlarge. Heh.

I'm just saying that people like superheroes that are pretending to be rock stars. Why not be a rock star pretending to be a superhero?

Well, I think it would be funny, anyways.

This picture of the S Club 7 did not illustrate my point due to size and Jo being, as usual, shoved into the back of the shot, but I really liked it anyways because that's Jo's car and you know what? It's the S Club 7, and if I start defending myself about this then I won't be able to stop.

The little blond in front, by the way, is Hanna, and she was 'the dumb one,' which meant that even though she did sometimes dress like, well, that, I didn't have any patience for her.

Also the other blond on the right is a boy named John.