Grimes is a woman named Claire Boucher from Montreal. Her stuff sounds kind of like if Pictureplane and Enya had a baby, and the result makes me want to hold onto a unicorn's silvery mane and ride deep into some Legend-type woods to consort with furry tree-dwelling creatures that speak their own language. My sloppy pastiche of 1980s fantasy movie references does no justice to the genuine imagination present in the entire Halfaxa album.

Grimes - Devon
Grimes - Weregild

Nerd Alert: I See What You Did There, Fringe.

“These were created by my old friend of mine, Dr Jacoby from Washington State.”

1. Fringe has gone from mediocre to good with this season. Finally, having no standards for the sci fi shows I watch pays off!  I'm not just in it for the Pacey anymore. 
2. It's the point of winter in Chicago when it is so cold that I've been watching Hulu in bed all Saturday, which I felt guilty about until I remembered that sports fans spend EVERY Saturday and/or Sunday just sitting and looking. With beer. Ooh, a beer does sound kind of good right now though.
3. The Twin Peaks soundtrack (and by extension Julee Cruise's album) got a lot of play in my parents' house circa 1990. 

Angelo Badalamenti - Dance of the Dream Man 

I like big bones and I cannot lie

A: This is totally not weird at all. Definitely mention the 'bones are the only things left behind when we die' thing on the first date as you take one of her hands, testing its heft and running your fingers over her phalanges to see if they protrude enough. Say it exactly like you said it here.


via Time Out Chicago

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and get them sit ups riiight and

I joined a gym this week because, as I wrote as my reason on the registration form, "it's a real slippery slope to suddenly being full on fat." I have a crippling fear of exercising in front of others. This is why I like jogging, because I can just run right by people so even if they know me they barely have time to realize it before I'm gone. But it's cold, and fears were meant to be conquered, and the fat-slope has gotten slipperier in the past few months. A beefy man with a shaved bald head and beady eyes sold me my membership. He looked like a guy who would get into a fight at a bar. Actually, he looked like that idiotic cop Herc from The Wire.

Tonight I went in for my free training session, in which I explained my aforementioned crippling fear to the nice lady and asked her to show me how to use all of the machines. Even the ones with actual instructional illustrations on them. She was the only employee wearing glasses who didn't have a creepy hard face to go with the hard body, so I lucked out. I saw two coworkers and I'm afraid I'll totally see more people I know basically every time I go. Damn you, Chicago! I did alright, meaning I managed to completely ignore the fat 50 year old man sitting on a weight machine, blatantly staring at all of our squatting and lunging and not even pretending to exercise for 15 minutes.

Oh and when I stood by the front desk, nervously fiddling with my paperwork while waiting for the personal trainer and staring into space, some older dude started asking me to help him sign up. I said I just joined and he was like "Oh I'm sorry, you look like you work here!" I guess I just command an air of authority and have an amazing body. Definitely wasn't because I was standing right at the door holding a form. Yup, 35% body fat according go this weird gadget, jeeealous?

That happened, I knew you, we were there.

My mom's memorial was five days ago. She's in a purple flower patterned porcelain urn and I touched the top of it to make it feel more concrete to me, the whole concept in general. Relatives that I haven't seen in years came and it turned out to be more welcome than nerve wracking. I read, and then her siblings said some stuff, and then a Kenyan priest from my uncle's church in New Rochelle arrived to say some prayers. After he asked who everyone was, he asked if I had any brothers or sisters. I don't have any from my mom, so he said in his South African accent, "Jesus was an only child. You should be the female Jesus." During his prayers and wandering strange homily (my friend Jeff: "You know, I didn't know where he was going for a while but he totally brought it back around, kind of!") I stared at the flowers and checked out. We couldn't bury Mom with her mother that day because the cemetery was closed from the blizzard, so we all drove to an Italian restaurant in a small strip mall and ate a lot. People brought a lot of great photos from family parties decades ago in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and the Bronx.

Standing in front of the podium next to my mother's ashes, with everybody staring at me while I got ready to read my eulogy, was one of the strangest experiences I have ever had. Definite life milestone. Anyway, I wrote it the day before but I think it turned out pretty well, and so I'm posting it for my own posterity: