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A little more Dolly, and a list

September 26, 05 //
2

It occurs to me that in my lengthy post about my particular attachment to Dolly Varden, I didn’t say a whole hell of a lot about what they sound like. That’s partly because their sound is a little bit hard to describe; for a while, they tended to get lumped in with alt-country/Americana, but that’s not really accurate. I really need to come up with a genre term that describes the style of bands like Dolly Varden and Dolorean—not that the two sound alike at all, just that they’re equally hard to describe. In the case of Dolly Varden, there’s a little twang, lots of melody, and the highly distinctive guitar work of Mark Balletto (who has a fine spinoff band of his own, My Record Player), which is capable of being both shimmery and unexpectedly crunchy, though not usually in the same song. Mostly, there are two words that come to mind when I try to describe the Vardens: “joyous” and “beautiful.” Even when the lyrics are downbeat, which they often are, there’s a sheer joy to the sound of the songs that just lifts the heart up and brings a little ache to the throat. Geez, I wish I had a better vocabulary for this kind of thing, rather than standard rock-crit cliches, but…there’s a lyric in the (happy, upbeat, joyous) song “I Come to You,” from “The Dumbest Magnets,” that goes: “And when my chest is open wide/You could pull yourself inside.” When you listen to it, you feel exactly what Steve is singing: your heart feels so big and full that it could just burst from your body. (Okay, now I’m starting to sound like the plot of “Alien.” Maybe I should quit while I’m behind.)

And beautiful: the melodies, the vocals, the arrangements. Beautiful and sometimes delicate, but in no way wispy or ethereal or frail. Just sheer gorgeousness and gorgeosity, to quote that little droogy Alex. Steve and Diane’s first band, Stump the Host, was kind of a punk band, I guess, but Steve says that it didn’t work so well for him and Diane to sing in that style because they’re both “pretty” singers. And it’s true, they are—both of them. Diane’s voice is full of color and timbre, capable of moving from light and sweet to dark and slightly husky in the same song; Steve’s is soulful and strong, but still, well, pretty.

Argh, enough trying to wrestle an adequate description to the ground. Just go listen to them: there are a number of MP3s on this page of their site.

Moving on: today’s NP list:

1. Michael Berube’s blog, because it’s been a while since I mentioned it, but also because the most recent entry (dated September 23) is exceptionally powerful. There are so many great political blogs out there (along with the crappy ones) that it’s hard to definitively say that any one of them is the best, but I will say that Michael’s is my favorite, bar none. (NB: I get to call him Michael because he was at Columbia when I was at Barnard—he was a year behind me—and though I don’t actually know him, we have mutual friends. In case anyone was wondering.)

2. The Brakes, “Give Blood.”* My online friend Ged has been pimping this UK band for months. I respect his taste, so I listened to some samples online. Liked ‘em pretty well, but wasn’t sure I was going to buy the album. But then it was released in the US, and half of the rest of Postcard starting raving about it too, so I caved in to peer pressure and bought it. And I’m very glad I did. It’s a weird little (and I do mean little: it’s less than half an hour long, which I guess is kind of a raw deal when you’re paying full CD price, but is nonetheless fine with me because I think almost every CD that comes out nowadays, including ones that I adore, is just too damn long) record, full of humor and quirks, but they’re not a novelty band by any means. Mostly, what they are is entertaining, in the best sense. Vastly entertaining, and definitely innovative. But perhaps not as innovative as…

3. Malcolm Middleton, “Into the Woods.” I probably wouldn’t even know about this guy if he weren’t on the Delgados’ label, Chemikal Underground, because I wasn’t familiar with the band he was (is?) in, Arab Strap. Fortunately, though, I’ll listen to anything the Delgados tell me to listen to (though I draw the line at Mother and the Addicts), so I checked out Malcolm’s latest. I ended up buying his first record, the brilliantly titled “5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine” (how could you not love a record with a title like that?), and falling in love with it first, because “Into the Woods” was only available on import. When it was released here, though, I bought it right away, and it’s just genius. Maybe it would seem more ordinary if he didn’t have a heavy Scottish (Glaswegian, I think) accent, but I think the accent is only a small part of the whole picture. He takes deeply depressive but also sometimes hysterically funny lyrics and sets them against melodies that are alternately dreamy and just sort of jangly and upbeat, and his voice, which is gruff and talky and not at all sweet, is what ties it all together. Amazing stuff. Sample lyric: “You’re gonnae break my heart and I know it/And if you don’t/You’re gonna break my string of bad luck/And ruin my career.”

4. The first, self-titled David Johansen record, recently discussed here. Hearing a once-beloved record that you haven’t heard in eons is kind of like the reconnection with old friends that I’ve been dwelling on so much here lately: you wonder if memory has put too much of a shiny gloss on reality, and you question whether you’ll still have anything in common. In this case, there was no reason to worry. This is still a great album that doesn’t sound even remotely dated, and I was happy to find that not only do the killer songs that I remember vividly (“Donna,” “Cool Metro,” “Frenchette”) still sound as great as ever, some of the ones I had forgotten (“Pain in My Heart,” “I’m a Lover”) do too. And it’s another blessedly short record, even with the addition of a (totally inessential) bonus track. Of course, it’s probable that I can’t be objective about this record, because of the powerful time-and-place associations with it. But insofar as I can be, I feel comfortable recommending the record.

5. And sticking to following up on that same post, I’ve been treating myself to an episode every few nights of “Butterflies,” and I’m delighted to find that I still love it. It’s odd how much I remembered about it (and some little details that I’d forgotten, or misremembered: for my own satisfaction, I need to correct myself to note that Ria meets Leonard in a restaurant, not in the park—and it’s a very funny scene). I can’t unequivocally recommend it to everyone, I guess, for various reasons: the production values are pretty much nonexistent (I guess the Beeb didn’t have much of a budget for sitcoms in 1978), and it seems kind of stagy at times; you can sort of feel the writing behind the lines as they’re spoken. But they’re often very, very funny lines—I’ve been laughing at the show much more than I expected—as well as incisive and sometimes wistful and heart-tugging. And the acting is marvelous, even if the clothes and hairstyles are comically dated. I haven’t gotten to the more wistful stuff yet; in fact, I don’t think that cropped up much in the first season, which is the only one that’s available so far. But I do still get a little teary when I hear the theme song (a somewhat de-schmaltzed rendition of Dolly Parton’s extra-schmaltzy song “Love is Like a Butterfly”).

Um, I guess I haven’t really gotten the hang of this NP thing yet—these were supposed to be short, simple posts so that I could do them regularly without using up a whole lunch hour. More practice is required, I guess.

*(Lately, I’ve been putting album titles in quotation marks, which makes me a little uneasy, because I’m a Chicago Manual type of girl and at heart I believe that titles should be in italics. But quotes are so much easier to type…So if I decide to go back to italics, I apologize in advance to anyone who is driven crazy by such stylistic inconsistencies. Which pretty much means that I’m apologizing to myself.)

Conjuring

September 24, 05 //
0

I am completely weirded out—in an entirely happy way—by hearing from people from my past as a result of my Speedies/Student Teachers post a few days ago. Like most people, I imagine, I’ve used the Web to look for old familiar names for years now, at least since Yahoo’s people search feature launched (which was probably ten years ago or so). And I’ve turned up plenty of them—some quite easily, especially the ones with unusual names.

Last year, I even, finally, after years of trying, found Marina, the long-lost best friend I mentioned a few posts back. (She had an unusual surname, so it was odd that I couldn’t find her…though as a librarian type, I know that Yahoo and Google are far from omniscient, and as it turned out, she’d gotten married to someone with a much more common name.) I was fascinated and kind of strangely excited to find any details at all about her, sketchy as they were, and to find that she’d ended up kind of exactly as I’d predicted: living in upstate New York, where her family (used to?) own a summer place, and married to the guy she was dating when she and I had our falling out (and their dating and our falling out were not unrelated; the guy was a year behind us in high school and was best friends with a close friend of mine, and in a way, I was crazy about him, but he had this odd hold on Marina—actually, on me too; I took his advice and opinion way more seriously than I should have—and I’d be lying if I said I don’t blame him a little for the death of my friendship with Marina).

I e-mailed her and didn’t hear back, but it was through one of those awful Reunion.com places, and for all I know, my message wound up in her spam folder; that’s where my mail from those places generally turns up, even if I’ve signed up for them. On the other hand, maybe she just didn’t want to hear from me, which I completely understand even if it makes me feel kind of like I just swallowed a knife. Maybe—okay, almost certainly—I’ve romanticized our friendship, though the truth is that I remember the occasional bad parts too. I’ve had more steadfast and loyal and trustworthy friends since then, if I look at it objectively. And though I realize that my behavior was the main cause of our friendship falling apart, she hurt me pretty badly and let me down at a time when I really needed her, so it’s not like I take all the blame. (All of this is getting kind of oblique without the full backstory, isn’t it, and I don’t have the stomach to tell the whole story just now…but the fact that it still causes me a little twinge of occasional pain more than 20 years after it happened should give a sense of how much she mattered to me.) But I’d still give almost anything to hear from her.

Generally, I’ve been happy to follow those people from my past from a distance, through Google, on days when things were quiet at work or when something suddenly reminded me of them. Sure, I could e-mail them; I’ve certainly thought about it, and I have no doubt that it would be nice to be in touch occasionally, the way I am with some of my friends from my Austin days. But mostly, I’m content to have them be a (warmly remembered) part of my past. People change, lives move on, and who knows how much we’d even have to say to each other again. Besides, I’ve become a hopeless slacker about personal e-mail, and once I start e-mailing back and forth with someone, it often becomes just one more opportunity to be a less than adequate friend. It’s good to see how successful some of them have been, and just knowing they’re out there and doing fine is pretty much all I need to know, I guess. Not that I’d be sorry if I suddenly heard from any of them; on the contrary, I’d be delighted, as I have been with the responses to the Speedies/Student Teachers post. When I think about how few people I wouldn’t want to hear from (long-ago ex-boyfriends, mainly), and how many I’d love to hear from, I feel pretty lucky, in fact.

And in a mostly unrelated episode, I stumbled across first an article by and then the blog of another friend from college days, another one with whom I’d had a falling out. That’s a really dumb story, and one which I doubt I’ll ever tell. The falling out was probably both of our faults, who knows, but I held on to the feeling that I was entirely justified in no longer being friends with him for a pretty long time and, if I’m remembering right, rebuffed an indirect attempt by him to get back in touch some years later. I’m only capable of holding a maximum of one grudge at a time, though (and right now I’m not holding any, which is a good position to be in), and the one against him fell out of the queue a really long time ago. Besides, the article was excellent and the blog was a very good read, so on impulse, I put in a little teaser of a comment and lured him into e-mailing me. Spent a good little while yesterday e-mailing back and forth, pleasantly and interestingly, and I hope we’ll stay in touch at least sporadically.

One of my Texas friends once said to me, when visiting me in Mpls., that I shouldn’t feel bad that we only saw/spoke to each other every so often, but rather that, given the physical distance and other practical matters that separated us, I should be glad that we were able to keep any kind of contact going. That’s a healthy way to look at it, I think, and as much as I can be content knowing that people from my past are out there doing well, I think I’d like it even better if I could hear from them just every now and then—even every few years would be okay.

In that spirit, today I e-mailed one of my closest friends from college days, who happens to have quite an unusual last name and is easy to find on the Web because he’s published impressive academic books ‘n’ stuff. I’ve followed his progress with admiration and some amusement (far as I can tell, he’s been working on his doctorate for about 15 years, which means he at least hasn’t changed entirely since we were younger). I think I last saw him not long after my first wedding, in 1990, and I’m not exactly sure when we lost touch, or how or why. I guess I stopped calling him when Eric (my first husband) and I were in NYC for visits because Eric, though a lovely and interesting and intelligent person, is very different from…from most other people on the planet, basically, and it can be hard to integrate him with others. And then I stopped calling when I was home for visits by myself, because I got into this phase where I just wanted to stay close to home and hang out with my parents whenever I went home. (I’m not sorry about that, either, because it meant extra time with my mom, and though I didn’t fully realize it then, every second I had with her was precious.)

I’m also not sure why I didn’t start e-mailing him when people’s e-mail addresses became easier to find, because of all the people from that era, he and my friend Martha (with whom I’ve been in touch far more recently, though not for a few years now) were the ones who knew me best and with whom I spent the most time. I’ve been thinking about this for the past day or so, and I think it has something to do with—this is hard to articulate—the fact that my life has turned out, at least from a surface view, very differently from how I or anyone who knew me back then would have expected. But I don’t know why that would keep me from contacting Andy, exactly; I’m still trying to work that out. I’ve been in touch with people who are just as conspicuously and impressively successful—my beloved friend and former roommate Bill Maxwell, for example, who’s had a fairly stellar academic career—and I didn’t feel self-conscious about letting those people see how I’ve turned out. So I don’t know if that’s quite what’s kept me from getting in touch with Andy.
I don’t know if it isn’t, either; I’m just unsure about the whole thing, though I’m not sorry I e-mailed him (at least not yet! Let’s hope I won’t have cause to be).

Do I feel like I have something to apologize for, maybe? I dunno. I don’t have any regrets about the choices I’ve made (regrets about some individual actions, yeah, but not about the way my life has gone in general, and I’m certainly not embarrassed about any of it; in many ways, I think my life has been much more interesting than it might have been had I followed the expected path, i.e. staying in NYC, going to law school or something equally conventional, maybe marrying a yuppie Jewish guy or whatever (although that last one is highly unlikely; I’ve never even dated a Jewish guy, really—had a fling with one, but that’s it), and generally living the same sort of life as the million other curly-haired Jewish girls from the Upper West Side who are exactly like me. I’m sometimes (actually, very rarely) struck by the fact that I didn’t follow that path, but I’ve truly never been sorry about it. Life’s a funny old thing that takes twists and turns that you can’t predict or expect, and sometimes the results are incredibly cool.

(And yeah, okay, sometimes the results leave you sitting alone in a crappy apartment in Chicago with a job you despise, hundreds of miles from your new boyfriend, the husband you’ve just left, your adored family, and anything else that makes any kind of sense to you. But that’s a story for another day…and it’s also been the exception in my adventures rather than the rule—the only peripatetic episode that really didn’t work.)

Anyway, I’m exhilarated and a little wacked out by this flurry of contacts that I’ve initiated, and I think I’m going to need to take a step back from it after the weekend and just go back to being my boring old self and posting about all the new records I’ve bought lately. But right now, I’m still in conjuring mode. This evening, when I got home from work (and before I took my ritual Friday evening nap), I started Googling one of the few ex-boyfriends that I’d actually like to hear from again. (Generally, my romantic past prior to my first marriage is nothing to write home, or write blog, about, let’s leave it at that.) I was going to go into a long digression (“digression” might be too mild a term, since I could write a whole novel about the guy— he was fascinating, albeit in not entirely positive ways) about him, but then I remembered that I’ve already written about him in the past. I’ve actually been trying, sporadically and half-heartedly, to find him since before the days of the Web; I used to look him up in the NYC phone book every time I went home, but he too has a fairly common name, and it seemed entirely possible to me anyway that he might not even have enough income at the time to have a phone or an apartment in his own name. But tonight, for whatever reason, I had the patience to browse through endless Google results pages, without any real hope of succcess…and bloody hell, I tracked him down. (Sometimes, apparently, having the kind of mind that can’t remember that I’m supposed to be at a meeting five minutes after my online calendar has reminded me of it but can remember things like where ex-boyfriends from the 1980s went to junior high turns out to be useful after all.) I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this newfound information; I’ve always told myself that more than wanting to resume contact with him, I just wanted to know what had become of him, since he was someone who could have easily ended up, well, y’know, dead at a young age, but then again, there was always the chance that he’d grow up, as most of us seem to have, and actually make something of himself. I’m comforted that the truth turns out to be the latter, and maybe I should leave it at that.

Because really, what reason would I have for contacting him? It’s not like there’s a romantic interest; I am very thoroughly married and, honestly, don’t even look at other men (except having crushes on cute actors or musicians, but that doesn’t count, obviously). My attention may have wandered during my first marriage, but that was highly atypical behavior for me and was of course symptomatic of profound problems in the marriage, and enough about that. At every other time in my life, I’ve been almost quaint in my monogamousness (that is too a word, because I say so), and right now is no exception. And the estranged friend mentioned above, the one with whom I exchanged a slew of e-mails yesterday, who happens to also be the person who introduced Kevin and me, just told me something about their last encounter that took quite a bit of the shine off of my already not-so-shiny memories, and it made me slightly less enthusiastic about trying to find him.

Maybe not as much less enthusiastic as I should be, though, because I’m still thinking about contacting him. I think maybe it’s that I hate loose ends and things that were left unresolved (I had a best friend in junior high whom I dumped, basically, in graceless and even rather cruel fashion, when we were about 15, and about once or twice a decade, I think about trying to make amends/peace with her too; these aren’t things I think about very often, but guilt comes naturally to me, and sometimes it comes along and bites me when I least expect it). But it’s equally possible that that’s not it, that it’s more like a bad tooth that you can’t resist poking at with your tongue (I assume I’m not the only person who does that)— you know it could cause even more trouble, but the temptation is still there. That’s why I’m not going to do anything about it for a few days, because I need to think more about whether playing with the past is always such a good idea. And of course, I need to get back to the present, whether or not I continue to travel down this bewilderingly enjoyable detour into my past.

Next entry will be music-related and/or firmly based in 2005, I swear.

On not hating your friends, Internet friendships, and other stupid things I have said

September 14, 05 //
0

That post the other day garnered a little more attention than expected and, I’m afraid, caused some pain to people I truly didn’t intend to cause pain to, so I think some clarification is in order.

One, it was a passing feeling that didn’t pass as quickly as I hoped it would but did, in fact, pass. Turns out I was coming down with a flu on top of all the other bodily damage I did over the weekend, and that can’t have helped. Also turns out that though my depression is being held at bay/controlled more effectively now than at any time in recent memory, it hasn’t actually gone away completely, something I need to keep in mind. I obviously felt strongly enough about what I knew, intellectually, to be a passing feeling that I felt I had to post about it, so I didn’t retract the post. But I do think it’s important to note that it reflected a (longer than anticipated, but still brief) moment in time, not a permanent state of mind.

Two, and perhaps more important, it was very explicitly not my intent to denigrate the very notion of Internet friendships, and if the post came across that way, I’m more sorry than I can say, because most of the important friendships I’ve formed over the last decade have been through the Internet, and I would never for a minute suggest that they are somehow less valid than friendships formed in more conventional ways. (I hesitate to even use the word conventional, because nowadays, the Internet is just as conventional a means of finding friends and lovers as anything else, really.) Sitting in that room on Saturday night, with some of the best friends, Internet or otherwise, that anyone could ask for, I knew that they were people who loved me and cared about me and “got” me; I just couldn’t feel it, not right at that moment. If I’d just gone to bed early and decompressed for a while, I don’t think the feeling would have even occurred to me. But there it was, and the fact that it was happening in a group of people who matter so much to me was what made it especially baffling, and troubling.

Maybe it’s too easy to say I’m over it now…but I’m over it now. It was a feeling that was real, and disconcerting, but it’s gone, and that’s all I’ll say about it. The subject of friendship in general, that’s something I hope/plan to continue talking about, because it’s kind of the great puzzle of my life in many ways (along with more mundane puzzles, like “how do they get those ships into bottles, anyway?”). But I’m afraid I’ve inadvertently made it sound like I don’t value the friends I’ve made through various music lists and through Twangfest in particular, and nothing, really, could be farther from the truth. (Just as a single example, I literally don’t know how I would have gotten through the last, say, seven or so years without my friend Marie, who has been as true and loyal a friend as anyone could ever ask for. And then there’s my husband, who I technically met in person before we started corresponding by e-mail, but who still started out as part of my Internet world, and I wouldn’t trade him for anything in the world—”real” or “virtual”— either. Okay, that’s two examples.)

So, enough about that for now. Onward to some musical stuff: I just recently bought a record by the traditional Aran Isles singer Lasairfhiona Ni Chonaola, and yeah, I admit that I bought it partly because I wanted to own a record by someone with a name as complex and beautiful as that (and learn to pronounce it, which I have), but it’s also one of the more wonderful records I’ve heard in the recent past. I can’t honestly say that my listening habits are tending back toward Celtic and mainstream country lately, because I’m actually listening to just as much indie-ish rock as I have for the last year or two, maybe slightly more. But somehow I’ve found a way to bring the country and Celtic stuff back into my frame of reference, and after volunteering at the local Irish fest a couple of weeks ago, I’ve really been in the mood for the Celtic stuff. So I’ve been on a teeny bit of a buying binge there, and so far I haven’t been disappointed: in addition to Lasairfhiona’s record, I picked up two by Cathie Ryan (one of many former singers for Cherish the Ladies) that I’m loving. Next up, I think I’m going to buy something by the Old Blind Dogs, whom I half-heard at the Irish Fest and was favorably impressed with. And after that? Irish lessons, for real this time.

Hate Your Friends

September 12, 05 //
5

…is the title of the first Lemonheads record,* and any direct relevance it has to this post is a little tricky for me to write about because if anyone still reads this blog—and I have my serious doubts about that—they are my friends, or at least people I know.

But I’m having serious issues with friendship, and specifically with some of my longest-standing friendships, right now. “Longest-standing,” in this case, includes people I’ve known for about eight or nine years, I guess, which for me is practically the equivalent of a lifelong friendship for many people; I’m always amazed by and envious of people who are still friends with folks they’ve known since high school or grade school or whatever, because I’m sure not.

In fact, I’m worse at maintaining friendships for any length of time than anyone I’ve ever met. One of my best friends from high school stays in sporadic touch despite my failure to reciprocate in any sort of timely fashion, and the same goes for some of my friends from my just-post-college days in Austin, TX, but that’s about it. I don’t think I’ve talked to any of my college friends since 1990, the year my first husband and I got married. I have a stalwart friend and former co-worker from my Minneapolis years who refuses to let me drop out of his life entirely, and I’m grateful beyond words for that, especially since the rest of my Mpls. friends** finally gave up on me a year or so ago.

With a couple of notable and still painful exceptions,*** my friendships usually end because of distance or a sort of natural growing apart (at least, I think that kind of thing is natural; I am so bad at friendship and human contact in general that I honestly don’t know), not because of fights or one of us suddenly deciding we hate the other or really any active hostility. And maybe that’s an entirely typical experience, especially for someone who’s changed major aspects of life as frequently as I have; like I said, I don’t really understand the way friendship works for other people, so I don’t know for sure. Maybe it’s just that I take it harder than I should when friendships change or dissolve. But of all my many personality failings—and there are a lot of them—I’ve always considered my inability to sustain/manage/”do” friendships the biggest and most damaging of them.

Sometimes I think it’s because I’m such a loner, but then again, sometimes I wonder if it’s the other way around, if I’m a loner because I avoid human contact because I’m so awful at it. I know that when I’m in social situations for more than an evening, I need to hide for days, sometimes weeks, afterwards. I don’t know if that’s something I should be actively concerned about and trying to change, or if it’s okay that I just need time to myself after time with other people; it’s just another of those things about human contact that I don’t seem to get.

And okay, I’m not saying I hate my current crop of friends. (I wouldn’t say that even if I felt it, because it would be bad manners to say the least.) But this weekend, in the company of several of the ones I’m ostensibly closest to, I had what I sometimes think of as a “Bye Bye Blackbird” moment, because of the lyric “No one here can love or understand me…”: I was talking and laughing and drinking and apparently having fun with all of them throughout the weekend, but by Saturday night, it had gradually started to feel like pretty much none of them understood or even knew or cared about me. (Yes, I know how self-pitying that sounds, and is, and I hate sounding that way; one reason I sometimes think I really do need to become a hermit is that I don’t like myself when I’m self-pitying—does anyone?—and I think it’s a good idea for me to avoid people and things and situations that make me not like myself.)

The feeling subsided some, especially after a totally painless and non-fraught short social encounter with someone not in that crowd later in the weekend, but it didn’t pass entirely, and it hasn’t yet. I don’t think any one thing or person triggered it, and I can’t put my finger on why or when I started feeling that way, but I did, and it wasn’t fun, boy howdy. It didn’t make me not like the people involved, but it threw me, badly. Driving home from St. Louis, I spent most of the 225 miles in tears, because I was suddenly starting to think about tossing my whole life out the window yet again and moving somewhere else and not knowing any of the people I know now.

I’m not going to do that, and even when I was feeling like doing it I knew I wasn’t going to do it or even seriously entertain the idea of doing it, because despite my apparent inability to learn from my previous mistakes, evidently one thing I have successfully learned after doing it one too many times is that just throwing out my current life and moving to a different city is something I can’t do anymore; the fact that I was able to do it successfully twice was just a very lucky fluke, because the plain fact is that is just doesn’t work.

Maybe it was just that I was tired; certainly, a few days of sleep deprivation plus a bunch of Red Bull couldn’t have helped me feel calm and serene. Maybe it’s that I’m a little depressed again. The euphoria created by changing jobs has definitely worn off; I still really love my job and the people I work with are great, but the inevitable realization that making one extremely positive change in life doesn’t make the whole rest of my life all better has hit. Maybe it’s all hormones, who knows. Maybe it’s just that drinking more than a drink or so really doesn’t work for me anymore (actually, it’s definitely that in some small measure; one thing I figured out decisively this weekend is that I really don’t enjoy being drunk or being around people who are drunk). I don’t know, and I’m not going to make any rash pronouncements about anything for a while, till I’ve had some time to process what exactly is bugging me about my friendships at the moment. Except this one pronouncement, which really isn’t all that rash: I definitely need to have some friends whom I didn’t meet through the Internet. I’m not sure how I’m going to go about doing that; as terrible as I am at keeping friendships, I may be even worse at making them in the first place. But it’s something I need to figure out how to do.

————-
*That was when the Lemonheads were a really young little punk rock band and Evan Dando was the drummer rather than the frontman. I like both the pre- and the post-Dando-as-superstar versions of the band, in different ways.

**A particularly fine set of friends, which makes it especially sad that they gave up on me, but geez, it’s not like I can blame them. And not that I go around ranking the groups of friends from various phases of my life or anything, except that I do, and they were among my favorites.

***I think last year was the year I finally completely got over one of those exceptions, a best-friendship (the best friendship I’ll ever have, I think, which isn’t a reflection on later close friendships but just a result of my belief that you don’t form the same sorts of joined-at-the-hip friendships when you’re not a teenager that you do when you are) that ended, badly, in 1982. Marina. Maybe I’ll write about her at some point. I really am over it, but on the other hand, I can’t say I wouldn’t love to talk to her again someday.

Nostalgia, or what?

September 9, 05 //
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I’m not sure if I’m experiencing a bout of unexpected nostalgia or if I’ve simply entered a time warp in which it is suddenly the late 1970s. This morning, I was browsing my regularly delivered bit of permission-based spam from BBCAmerica, and I noted that they were advertising the DVD of the first season of Butterflies. So I bought it. (Being an inveterate spender of money online, I also noted that DeepDiscountDVD.com had it for about $10 less, so I bought it there, of course. BBCAmerica does pretty good spam e-mails, but their shopping site is limited and kind of ludicrously overpriced.) This comes on the heels of my acquiring the CD reissue of David Johansen’s first solo album (which I finally found at a not-too-ridiculous price, after searching for more than a year), not to mention my previously sort-of-mentioned involuntary and frequent plunges into my past courtesy of the Speedies’ song that’s being used in an HP commercial. I’m starting to wonder if this is all one of those Freaky Friday things where I’ve woken up and turned back into a teenager (in spirit, that is; alas, not in body. If I could wake up and fit into my old 26″ waist Trash and Vaudeville black stovepipe jeans, I’d be happy to accept any accompanying weirdness).

Of course, in some sense, I’ve never totally stopped being a teenager. Not having kids makes it easier to feel that way, and remaining a music fanatic at an age when most people, even those who were huge music fans in their younger years, have long since settled into either indifference or just vague interest in music, also makes it easier to maintain that teen feeling. But these recent things refer back to a very specific part of my teeny years—let’s call it 1979, since that would be about the midpoint of the stuf f in question—and they’re aspects of that time that it never occurred to me to be nostalgic for.

I’m not making sense yet, am I? Okay, let me enumerate just a little:

1. Butterflies was a British TV series that started airing on PBS not long after it first aired in the UK, which was 1978. I actually don’t quite remember what year it was when I started watching it, but I know I was still living at home, so it was pre-1981. (And then I watched it again, the whole series, years and years later when PBS re-ran it, but that would skew my whole point here, so let’s ignore it.)

It was a quirky series, the type of series that a lot of guys I know would have hated then, as teenagers, and would hate now, as ostensible grownups, though it wasn’t exactly a girly series. It was about a family, and especially the parent couple, and a little bit about adultery, and suburban life, I guess—none of which were things that had any relevance to me personally when I first watched it. (Well, okay, I had a family, but my two much older brothers were nothing at all like the late-teen sons on the show.) It starred Geoffrey Palmer, who any USian who’s ever watched a second of British TV would recognize (among many, many other things, he starred in the brilliant series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin), and Wendy Craig, who most USians probably wouldn’t recognize, which is their loss because she’s such a lovely actress. It was both very funny and absolutely heart-tearing. Ria, the Wendy Craig character, is a generally happy but vaguely restless and dissatisfied suburban wife and mother, and one day, she meets a charming and extremely wealthy man in the park who becomes utterly smitten with her. The show centers around the family’s daily life, with some very funny running jokes and some sensitively handled plots involving the teenage sons, but the temptation of an affair with Leonard, the rich guy, quietly underlies the whole air of the show. It takes over Ria’s inner life, even though her strong moral code (and her essential conventionality, I guess, though the moral stuff is more obvious, and admirable) means she never gives into the temptation of having an affair. (She comes very close at one point and gets cold feet, in one of the more moving episodes.)

The acting was superb, from Geoffrey Palmer’s likeable if slightly irascible overworked dentist husband to Bruce Montague’s ineffably sad and lonely Leonard, and the young men who played the sons were great too. But that doesn’t quite explain why the series affected me the way it did, and I’m not sure I can explain it even now. I will say, though, that even thinking about certain scenes from it (even now, at least 15 years since the last time I saw an episode of it) can make me cry, and on the other hand, remembering some of the running jokes (there were always issues with moving the family’s three or four cars around their small driveway, and the neighbors in their quiet suburban street were always shaking fists at them or staring at them in bewilderment) can still crack me up. Back when I used to write songs, I even wrote one around a line from the show: Leonard is once again trying to persuade Ria to have a tryst with him, and he comments, quite sardonically, that “everyone is doing it these days.” Ria’s response is adamant and startling and memorable: “I am not a product of ‘these days,’” she says. That affected me profoundly, don’t ask me why. (It still does, in fact; I’m having to fight back tears and will have to plead allergies if anyone walks by.)

2. So that was Butterflies, and I have to say I can’t wait for it to show up in the mail (which, knowing DeepDiscountDVD, should be sometime in late October…but hey, they ship for free, so who am I to complain?). (Season 2 isn’t out on DVD yet, but I’m going to preorder it.) The Speedies thing I’m going to have to get back to later, because it will be long and ruminative, providing my @#%& laptop keyboard doesn’t eat it again. So that leaves the first David Johansen record, which I haven’t listened to yet because I’m just a tiny bit afraid that it won’t sound as wonderful to me as it did in 1978. But I’m pretty sure it will. It’s one of those inescapably time-and-place records for me, and I suspect that when I hear it, I’ll be sitting in the armchair in the living room of the apartment I grew up in, gazing out at the beautiful mess of Broadway, maybe sipping an alcohol-and-Tab concoction that I put together after everyone went to bed, feeling the spring breeze coming in through the window. Maybe my first boyfriend, Richard—he who should forever be known as “that shithead”—will be sitting next to me, and my parents will be out of town and we’ll be staying up all night listening to records on my dad’s stereo. It’s one of those records.

One of my claims to…er, something (not fame) is that I saw the New York Dolls when I was a tiny child. Okay, I was 12, just about to turn 13. I put on makeup and glitter and platform shoes and got myself into Max’s Kansas City (“Are you 18?” the door guy asked. “Yes, I’m 18,” I replied in a world-weary tone. “Yeah, you’re 18,” he said, rolling his eyes. But he let me in anyway.) It wasn’t the first show I ever went to, but it was my first nightclub show, and it was a giant thrill. And growing up in NYC at the time, I was lucky enough to be hip enough to read Creem often enough to know and love the New York Dolls. By the time their various former members started playing in new formations, I was a seasoned CBGB and Max’s denizen, and I saw Johnny Thunders more times than I could count, but David Jo sort of disappeared for a while. And then he put out that first solo record. This is a few years before the Buster Poindexter thing, and eons before the Buster Poindexter thing went from being entertaining to being kind of a bad joke. No one knew quite what to expect from that first record (although he played some shows before it came out, and some of the songs were already becoming familiar, like “Funky But Chic”), and I don’t think anyone expected it to be so damn good. It rocked like crazy, baby, but it was also a breakup record (two breakups, really–the Dolls, plus David’s breakup with his longtime girlfriend Cyrinda Foxe), so it had heartbreak and passion and David’s big, surprising voice tearing you right up.

I sometimes think of it as the record that I lost my virginity to, though that’s factually incorrect; there was no music playing when I was actually losing my virginity, but the last record we listened to that night before the sex part was not the David Johansen record but Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks. But we spent a lot of time listening to music that night (and drinking Canadian Club, and feeling the June breeze coming in off Broadway, and so on), and the David Johansen record was one of our selections. That’s not the only reason it has such meaning for me—it was practically liturgy for me and all of my friends in those last two years of high school—but you have to admit it’s a pretty compelling contribution to my feelings about the record.

Nostalgia isn’t something I’m enormously prone to. Yeah, I love to tell stories about my Twin\Tone days and my following-the-Replacements-around-the-country days, partly because they’re sort of the only things that make me interesting (at least to some people), and partly because I want to tell them while I can still remember them (I’m quite serious about that), and partly just because they’re good stories and happy memories. But after spending a lot of my 20s and even early 30s wishing that it were any other time in my life, I gave up nostalgia somewhere along the line. So many things in my life have gotten steadily better as I’ve aged that nostalgia just doesn’t make that much sense. And maybe that’s why I’m taken aback by this sudden, random resurgence of weird bits of my past. I mean, here I am in 2005, and I really wasn’t particularly expecting to find myself in 1979. And it’s not a bad thing, but it sure as hell is weird.

Whither the Blog?

August 25, 05 //
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“Do you ever think about a life that doesn’t involve the Web?”

That’s a paraphrase of a question a friend of mine asked me a couple of months ago (right around the last time I updated the blog, I guess). We were talking about career stuff—her career more than mine, because she was feeling a little restless and dissatisfied and was contemplating doing something else with her workday. For me, since I’ve just landed in this new career that very much involves the Web, the answer was sort of no, because I love what I’m doing and want to keep doing it for the foreseeable future, at least the immediately foreseeable future. (The unforeseeable future involves me winning the lottery and taking lots of naps with the cats.)

But I know what she means. At the very least, I’d say that the love affair is over for me and the Web. It’s been heading that way for a long time, but it’s really reached a turning point this year, now that I spend my days thinking about the smallest particulars of how we interact with the interface. That’s still fascinating to me…but I’ve kind of separated myself—the observer/analyst—from the regular Web user. Not totally, because I am still a heavy user of the Web, of course. But enough so that I don’t want to spend more time than I have to sitting in front of a computer and looking at Web pages.

Which means that when I get home, the last thing I want to do is go to the basement and spend time with the iMac, even though it is a completely fabulous machine and a pleasure to use. Nor do I want to take my work laptop out of its bag for any longer than is strictly necessary. (Having a work laptop, I’ve discovered, makes it really hard to maintain any sort of boundary between work and home; basically, when it’s busy at work, I just work all the time, regardless of time of day or day of week.) I notice that my friends seem to be tending toward the same conclusion: I get less personal e-mail and mailing list e-mail than ever before. I think there’s a degree of Internet fatigue that has set in for all of us. It’s still an indispensable part of our lives, but the thrill, eet ees gone.

And that makes it tough to keep up a blog. But I don’t want to give this thing up, either. For one thing, I like having a place to talk to myself (other than my car, that is), and for another, I’ve already paid for the next year of Web hosting. :-) And I’m pretty sure the urge to write is going to strike me again one of these years, even if for the moment I’m really enjoying not being a writer or editor for the first time in more than 15 years. Plus, put simply, I just like having a blog. So I don’t think I’m going to scrap the thing, but I need to figure out a way to update it regularly enough to make it an actual blog, rather than a moribund entity that I occasionally visit. If I ever get the stupid wireless access point that I paid a fortune for up and running, my plan is to post something every day, even if it’s just a sentence or two. But knowing me, that’s a pretty lofty goal. I don’t know, I think maybe I like the idea of blogging more than I like the actual practice…which is pretty typically me.

So if anyone has any clever ideas for how to keep the thing going on a more or less consistent basis, please tell me. Otherwise, it will just take work, I guess. And I hate work.

Music in the air, music everywhere…

July 6, 05 //
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(Gah. I ignore the blog for a mere couple of weeks or so, and it gets swamped by nefarious comment spam. Bastards.)

I’d try to count how many CDs I’ve bought in the last two or three weeks, but I’m afraid to. I think it might be more than 15. After months of relative moderation, I’ve gone kind of nuts lately on music purchases. And I’m afraid it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Right now, I’m listening to one of the first purchases in the recent spate: Sleater-Kinney’s “The Woods” (not to be confused with Malcolm Middleton’s “In the Woods,” which I’m probably going to end up downloading from Chemikal Underground, because it’s only available on import here so far). I confess to admiring Sleater-Kinney more than really liking them; I find that I don’t even listen to “Call the Doctor,” my favorite record of theirs, all that often. That may wind up being the case with this record too, I don’t know, but at the moment, it’s exactly what I’m in the mood to hear. Even the eleven-minute song sounds good.

Just before this, I listened to “de nova,” the new record by The Redwalls. It too was superb. They’re deliberately and a little self-consciously retro, yeah, but when your retro-ness includes the best elements of the British Invasion, being retro isn’t a bad thing at all.

Next up: the Greencards, whose second (I think) album I just picked up. They’re new to me, but that’s probably just because I don’t have a reliable source of bluegrass-ish recommendations anymore; checking the archives of a twang-related list that I used to subscribe to, I see that I’m a little late to the party on this one. Haven’t listened to the record yet—it just arrived yesterday—but I loved the MP3s I heard.

And then there’s the first Malcolm Middleton record, Emiliana Torrini’s perfectly wonderful “Fisherman’s Woman,” the Wrights’ “Down This Road,” the new Karan Casey record, Dwight Yoakam’s new one, Richmond Fontaine’s superb “The Fitzgerald”…and that list doesn’t even include my likely top two records of the year—the forthcoming Son Volt record and Robbie Fulks’s “Georgia Hard.” It has emphatically not been a bad year for music.

Yeah, I’m already hypothesizing a best-of list. It is halfway through the year, after all. And the spot for “Best 2004 Record That I Didn’t Hear Until 2005″ is already nailed down: James Yorkston and the Athlete’s “Just Beyond the River.” I liked their first record, “Moving Up Country,” quite well, but the second one is in a whole different league. If James Yorkston had a really great voice, as opposed to just an okay one, it would be in serious contention for Best Record Ever. (Slight exaggeration, but only a slight one.)

From perusing the James Yorkston site, I learned about Anne Briggs, an obscure English trad-folk legend who apparently hated the sound of her recorded voice and so gave up recording, and eventually singing. I listened to all of the available clips, and I have to admit that I didn’t like her voice all that much either. But I was so distressed by the idea that there’s an obscure English trad-folkie out there whom I hadn’t heard of yet that I ended up buying two of her CDs. Music fandom is sometimes a very strange thing.

(But geez, Sandy Denny cited her as an influence. How could I not buy the CDs?)

Kathryn Williams—the Nick Drake-iest of all the singer-songwriters ever to be compared to Nick Drake (except for Alexi Murdoch, who’s almost too Nick Drake-y)—managed to sneak out a new CD without my realizing it, so it’s on order. And to my utter delight, John Doyle has a new CD coming out in two weeks, only four years after his debut. I’ll be ordering that one the day it comes out too.

I’ve also finally started knitting again, after a long hiatus. July is an odd time to start knitting again—holding fuzzy synthetic fibers is not the best thing I can think of to do on a warm summer evening—but I had to start again sometime, and this past weekend was as good as any. I’m finishing the cat bed that I started, um, last fall. The bottom piece is finished; I tried to get the cats to pay attention to it, but other than Liam chewing the loose end that I haven’t woven in yet, no dice. Maybe when it has its nice fuzzy cobalt blue sides assembled…

And yet, with all of this going on, I’m still considering buying a PlayStation2. Because evidently I don’t have enough ways to squander my leisure time.

I was never much of a Donna Fargo fan…

April 22, 05 //
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…but today I must echo her in singing, “I’m the happiest girl in the whole USA.”

That’s because today was my last day at my job. I’ve been bitching and venting about how belittling and soul-destroying and just plain damaging my job was for years now—heck, practically since I started there—but I don’t think I really knew just how bad the job was for me until I walked out of there for the last time today. Driving home, I felt literally like a different person: a person with hope, energy, enthusiasm. (Despite my inescapable optimism, these are not feelings that I’m accustomed to even in good times, because of my ever-present depression—even when it’s at a very low level as it is now, it’s always with me, and energy in particular is something I very rarely feel.) It was as though I had had a makeover and been to a spa and gotten a decade’s worth of birthday presents all in one day. More than anything,what was gone was a pervasive sense of dread that I’m not even sure I was aware of before.

And now that there’s no more jinxing that can be done—at least I hope not!—I can talk a little bit about the new job. (Not too much, because I am the very soul of discretion and I don’t like revealing too many personal details anyway, even though the people who read this blog are all friends of mine as far as I know.) In brief, I’ll be an “experience architect” at an advertising/marketing/branding agency; in my particular case, the work I’ll be doing will be on the information architecture side of things, with a lot of specialization in my favorite parts of IA: what the experts call “little IA,” which is the library-science-based stuff such as taxonomy and metadata creation.

This is exactly what I went to grad school to do, and to get to do it for a successful company fresh out of grad school (or not even—I’ve still got a few weeks to go) is an opportunity that I couldn’t even have dreamed of. I feel incredibly lucky and privileged, especially because I’m already crazy about my boss, and I’ll be working with a former co-worker who’s a great person and a friend (and was instrumental in my getting the job—I’ll be buying her lunch every day for, I dunno, ten years or so), and though I’ve heard stories about super long weeks and crazy schedules, I like everything I’ve heard and observed about the company so far. The benefits are great, the salary is fine, and I never object to working hard and putting in long hours when I’m doing work that interests and challenges me. It’s an incredible opportunity, and I can’t wait to get started (although I wish I’d been able to take a few days off between jobs, but somehow I never seem to get to do that, and it’s really no big deal).

A funny thing happened to me while I was in school: I fell in love with cataloging, somewhat but not entirely to my surprise. It appeals to the same part of my brain that doing crossword puzzles and learning foreign languages do, and those are two of my few genuine talents. I had begun to think seriously about pursuing a job as a cataloger in a public library (an academic library would have been okay too, but I’m a huge fan of public libraries and would have preferred to work in that atmosphere than in the ivy tower), and there’s a tiny little part of me that’s disappointed that I won’t be going in that direction after all. But cataloging is a threatened profession—not by any means a dying one, but one that’s threatened by the ignorance of library administrators and local governments who think that now that we have Google, we don’t need library cataloging anymore. (Don’t even get me started…) And IA is in many ways like cataloging: both are related to the organization of information, which turns out to be my true passion in life. I’m a naturally disorganized person, at least in the visible ways—my house is a mess, I’m drowning in clutter, and some days it’s all I can do to remember where my head is. (It’s that big redheaded blob attached to my shoulders, I think.) But that doesn’t mean I have a disorganized mind, I guess, and for whatever reasons, I love making order out of chaos. So I think my new line of work will suit me well. It will be the first time since 1988 that editing and writing won’t be major parts of my job description, which will be weird, but in a good way.

And with that, I’m officially putting the blog on hiatus for a few weeks, while I attempt to finish my classes and graduate. I might sneak in an entry here or there, but it’s been unofficially on hiatus during the insanity of the last few weeks (illness, schoolwork, and doing almost the equivalent of two full-time jobs because I was consulting for my new employer), and now I’m making it official. I’ll be back in May—master’s degree in hand, I hope.

Worst. News. Ever.

April 8, 05 //
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Okay, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration…but I just learned that the Delgados are calling it quits. I generally respond to news of beloved bands breaking up calmly, but I only started listening to the Delgados a couple of years ago, and only became totally passionate about them last year. So this is hitting me really hard.

It doesn’t help that I’m having the worst week I’ve had in a while…

  • I’ve been battling bronchitis for about a week—feeling steadily better each day, but I had another health problem a few weeks ago, so overall I’m still feeling weak and physically awful. And I’m a real wimp about not feeling well.
  • It’s been a particularly wretched week at work; each day that I’m here seems to add a new layer of people who get to tell me what to do, and subtracts another chunk of my self-esteem. My job is just…demeaning, soul-sucking, belittling. For the past three or four weeks, I’ve been able to mostly ignore that fact because I’ve been doing some consulting work for the company that I fervently hope is going to hire me…but in the past couple of days, they’ve suddenly stopped calling me, and I’m all anxious and worried that the whole job prospect is going to come crashing down. I think I must have jinxed it by talking about it too much to too many people, and by allowing myself to think that it was all but a done deal. Suddenly, I feel very pessimistic about the prospects of it actually happening.
  • Our house, which is always a pigsty, has become almost intolerable to me, which makes it hard to feel like I have a safe haven anywhere. I’m overwhelmed by the mess and the clutter and dirt (and mice! in the garage and in the basement ceiling), not to mention the fact that I estimate it will take at least $30K to make our house liveable and sellable, and I’m disgusted with myself for not having the energy to do more about it. I’ll work on it when I graduate, I keep telling myself.
  • But I’m behind on schoolwork, so who knows if I’ll graduate in May like I’m supposed to?

And that ain’t all, but I’m sick of hearing myself complain; I’m really just mentioning the above to illustrate the fact that the LAST FRIGGIN’ THING I needed to hear today was that the Delgados are breaking up.

I’ll eulogize them when I’m feeling calmer. Right now, I think I need to write a separate post about something positive so that I don’t sink into total musical despair.

Almost forgot…

February 25, 05 //
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…this week’s Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3.

I’ve actually been a pretty good mood all week for no specific reason that I can identify—and hey, why look a gift horse, etc.—so I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to come up with this week’s RTBC. But then, after a restless night (I’ve been sleeping terribly lately), I woke up with a pounding headache…and I can turn that into an RTBC:

1. As I was getting ready for work this morning, the pounding headache made me think, as headaches often do, of my favorite line from “Pounding Pipes,” my favorite Blood Oranges song:* “My head’s all right, not so sure about my liver.” This in turn made me think of Simon Riley, an adorable Irishman who camped out at my apartment for a month or so one summer when I was in college, along with his friend Dave Mulvaney (a true black Irishman–not “black Irish,” as dark-eyed and dark-haired Irish people are sometimes called, but a black man who was also Irish—his Jamaican father had moved to Africa, and Dave was raised in Dublin by his Irish mother). One night, Martha (my best friend through much of college), who practically lived at my apartment that summer too, and the Irish boys and I came back from the bar, a little (okay, more than a little) tipsy, and Simon was complaining about how long his hair was getting, so Martha offered to cut it. She cut it a little shorter than he wanted, and he was a little upset, so then she got upset, and everything was a little more dramatic because we were drunk, and the night ended on a less happy-drunk note than it should have.

Martha and I slept in the next day, but Simon woke up early to head to Pittsburgh, where he was meeting up with some friends. He left us a note on a napkin, a note that I have to this day, tucked safely in my treasured copy (really my mom’s, from her college days) of T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems. The note was very funny and had a little drawing—Simon was, is an artist and illustrator—and among other things, it said “The hair is fine, the head’s a little sore.” (Actually, I think it said “hed” and “soar,” but that’s beside the point.) And he promised to bring us back a stick of Pittsburgh Rock, a joke I had to explain to Martha. I don’t know how or why I’ve kept that note for all these years, except that it reminds me of a very distinct period in my life, when I was quite literally obsessed with a boy (and that’s really a story for another day) and when Martha and I had our Edie Sedgwick summer and were joined at the hip and when the Irish came into my life.

“The Irish” were a group of early twentysomethings, a year or two older than me, whom my friend and next-door neighbor Matthew met in Ireland and invited to come visit him. Three or four of them showed up out of the blue that summer (1982), and gradually they were followed by several more; most of them spent at least their first night in the States sleeping on my floor because they’d used up all their allotted time as guests in the Columbia dorms and I became one of their contact people. They were educated, middle-class kids, but they came over with no plans, not much money, and nowhere permanent to stay, and maybe inevitably, some of them got into trouble. A few got into heroin, horrifyingly; one of them, Derek, an incredibly sweet and shy guy whom I loved to bits even though he was endlessly trying to bum money from me, died in mysterious circumstances, either jumping or being pushed onto the subway tracks as a train was pulling in. Dave ended up getting caught with drugs and deported; he can never come back to the U.S. Others did a little better, finding off-the-books jobs and living in a big shared apartment, and most eventually went home. There was a period of a few months where every other time the phone rang, I’d pick it up and be greeted by someone’s familiar Irish accent saying, invariably, “Amy, can ye do me a favor?” I loved them all, or at least I loved the guys; I didn’t get along quite as well with the women, for various reasons. But eventually, I took to paraphrasing Jesus’s “The poor you have always with ye” as “The Irish you have always with ye.”

But Simon was different. He’d been a fat, shy, unattractive teenager, and when I met him, he was still adjusting to his recent major weight loss that had left him gorgeous and left women chasing after him everywhere he went. He took advantage of the situation sometimes (for which I can’t blame him), and had a few meaningless flings, though alas, never with me. He and I were instant friends, though, and his shyness as well as his creative talent kept him from making a mess of things the way his friends did. He got an off-the-books job in an Irish bar and never asked me for money. :-) He applied to Cooper Union and was accepted with a full scholarship (Cooper Union is free for US citizens, but foreign students have to pay, and I gather it was fairly unusual for them to waive the fees, so they must have really liked Simon), and went back to Dublin to gather enough belongings to get him through the school year. As he was applying for his visa, they asked him if he’d been working while he was in the US, and being an honest and trusting sort, he said he had. It didn’t occur to him, I guess, that the fact that he’d been working illegally would have an adverse effect on his ability to get permission to return to the States. Needless to say, his visa was denied; they told him he could try again in a year, I think, but Cooper Union couldn’t guarantee that funding would still be available, so he gave up and went to Queens in Belfast instead.

So how is this an RTBC, you ask? Well, Simon Riley has always been an emblem for me of all the people from my past who I’m unlikely to ever see again, but whom I still think of fondly and will always wish well—and I imagine that if I ever cross his mind, Simon thinks the same way of me. Maybe he doesn’t; maybe he’s forgotten all about me. I know there are people in my past that I’ve forgotten; that sort of thing just happens sometimes. But I find it enormously comforting to think that there’s a sort of circle of people out there, people I never fell out with, just sort of moved on from because of time or geography or whatever reason, whom I wish well, and who wish me well. There are a lot of failed relationships (I don’t just mean romantic ones; I mean human relationships in general) in my past—more, I sometimes think, than most people have—and I sometimes tend to dwell on those. But when I think of people who will always have a little place in my heart, whom I will always wish good things for, and whom I’d love to see again if the opportunity arose, I feel happy and somehow peaceful. And this happens whenever Simon Riley pops into my head, as he does every few years or so.

Martha’s one of those people too, in a way, except that she and I have always stayed in at least sporadic touch and seen each other semi-regularly over the years. My friendship with her is like a lot of my friendships with people in my more recent past: not quite active, but not completely dormant either.

2. And thinking of Simon Riley made me think, through a series of mental jumps, of someone else from my past whom I almost never think of, even though in some ways I still think he and I were destined for each other: Kevin Cooney, the first boy I dated after I finally got over my obsession. (It’s not necessarily a positive, that destiny thing, and I’m pretty sure the way I felt about him wasn’t healthy, though I am sure it was love, love of the type the poets write about and some people never even experience. The fact that there seems to be an air of destiny about a relationship doesn’t mean that you actually should be together.)

Kevin was a massively troubled person (as I was, am too, of course) in myriad complex ways that I won’t even try to describe; that he was already showing alcoholic tendencies was practically the least of his problems. He was also beautiful, the nearest to the perfect embodiment of “my type” of any guy I’ve ever known. (He’d have had to be a little taller and have brown eyes to be the exact embodiment, but instead he had the most astonishing blue eyes I’ve ever seen, and I don’t usually like blue eyes on people, only on cats. You could have drowned in those eyes, though…) And he was arguably the smartest person I’ve ever met, or more accurately, the person who possessed the most of my type of intelligence (verbal/logical/linguistic rather than mathematical or technical or artistic). His brain was the thing that attracted me most (no, really). With my flair for melodrama, I envisioned us as Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, or some such college-girl vision of the perfect crazy-brilliant couple.

And then he abruptly broke off the relationship after a few months for no good reason except that I was too serious about it, and he was too scared to be that serious—not an unfamiliar setup for me in my younger years. The breakup was notable for me in that I consciously decided not to be traumatized by it and not to become obsessed with him, and I succeeded. I think I was afraid that if I thought too hard about what I was losing, I’d really go over the edge, so I just put it out of my mind. We actually stayed friends—somewhat uneasy friends, but friends nonetheless. A few months later, he decided to move to New Orleans, for no particular reason except that it seemed like a place where he could really ruin his life, since the bars are open all night, and I stopped thinking about him at all; as I remember, I didn’t even ask the mutual friend who’d introduced us about Kevin more than once or twice.

But I thought about Kevin this morning because thinking about Martha and that apartment reminded me of the morning that he called me at 7:30 a.m., after I hadn’t heard from him for months, and weirdly, exactly one year to the day after I’d met him (not that he’d have known that, but I did), and I suddenly found him back in town and back in my life. Martha and I had been to a show at Maxwell’s the night before and had been up till 5AM talking after the long trek home from Hoboken, and yet somehow she graciously decided to go home so that Kevin could come over. He came over, and he said things that sounded like I’d written the script for him: he hadn’t realized what a good thing he’d had with me, he hadn’t found anyone else like me and didn’t think he really would, and this time, he wasn’t going to get scared away—”and you can quote me on that.” When he inevitably did get scared away—inevitably and pretty foolishly, since I was two weeks away from moving to Austin for grad school—I did quote him on it, just to vent my frustration. I wasn’t heartbroken then, either; I was furious, furious at him for not being capable of being what he said he’d be, and even more furious at myself for falling for it.

But I moved on, literally in this case, and I stopped fussing about it pretty quickly as I got caught up in my new life in Austin. He called me there once or twice; I’ll never know why, exactly. And then I never heard from him again. Time passed, and I was able to think of him fondly and to wonder what became of him without any particular pain or passion. For years, I’d check the phone book every time I went home to see if there was a listing for him, but it’s not that uncommon a name, so there were usually several listings. I’ve even Googled him, with the same results. So I don’t know, and will probably never know, who he turned out to be, and I’ll always wonder just a tiny bit, every few years when he crosses my mind. Of my relatively small number of ex-boyfriends, he’s the only one that I’d be truly happy to see again—just to see, just to find out what he’s like and where he is and what he’s doing. But thinking of him, I remember only the good parts, and it makes me oddly happy.

3. A much shorter and more mundane RTBC: since next week is this semester’s on-campus session, I don’t have any homework this week, so I can use the time to catch up a little. I’ve already made good progress on catching up, but getting fully caught up will a) make my step a little lighter and b) give me time to maybe see a movie, or shop, or even clean the house a little bit, all of which would be fine things indeed.

4. (I’m whispering this one so the Fates won’t hear me.) There’s a potential, remote reason to be very cheerful possibly, maybe, just possibly lurking on the horizon…but that’s all I’m going to say about that for fear of jinxing it. (I’m not at all superstitious, except when I am.)

5. Basketball, as noted in my lengthy post about it from earlier in the week—and March Madness is just around the corner. I love, love, love March Madness. For the first four days, I watch basketball till my eyes glaze over; I watch teams from colleges I’ve never heard of; I put money in the office pool and agonize over my brackets; I become familiar with emerging great players I’ve never heard of and remember them in June when the draft comes along. It’s one of my favorite times of year, and it’s only a few short weeks away.

6. And finally, a late-breaking RTBC, courtesy of my friend Jim: he staged a Google fight of his own and found that love does, in fact, conquer awl. Best laugh of the week. I can’t resist a good bad pun.

*Incredible but true: I was listening to the LynxPod at work today to drown out some construction noise that was making my headache even worse, and “Pounding Pipes” came on—for the first time ever. No one will ever convince me that iPods don’t, in fact, have minds of their own.

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