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:

My New Year's Wish.

I don't know what my plans are yet for New Year's Eve, and I don't really care since it is so often filled with the pressure to have fun due to some weird collective magical thinking about the night's implications for the coming year. My happiest New Year's Eves (was that the right way to say it? It looks funny) were spent in my own damn house. There is one thing that I really want though, and it's GOING TO HAPPEN next year — if not after midnight on 1/1/11 then on some other night. Its something that's been a dream of mine for so many years, gone unfulfilled. And here it is:

Can someone pleeease toast with me so hard that our glasses shatter? In my long-running fantasy it's been two glass steins. But I realize that between the heft, the mess, and my lack of upper body strength it's just not realistic. It can be two flutes. Two delicate flutes, you guys! How satisfying would it be just put all of the mixed bag that's been 2010 into the force of your toast and just SHATTER that bitch. Here's to us!

My ex-boyfriend was willing to do this once a few years ago, but then he started talking about protective eyewear, and tarps, and I got so overwhelmed with logistics I took the whole thing off the table. But I'm older and more mature now, and I know that there's nothing uncool about safety. Does anyone have those steel wool gloves they use at delis to clean the blade?

There is nothing more tragic than an attainable goal, unfulfilled. Don't make me post a Craigslist ad like that one guy who wanted people to come to his garage and pose on his homemade crucifix, which I didn't want to do but wanted to watch someone do or at least ask the guy some questions? ANYWAY, 2011. Toast smash. Let's do this.

I just downloaded A Very Special Christmas because it reminds me of baking cookies with my mother as a little kid. For a caustic, chain-smoking recovering alcoholic who considered her unwillingness to cook a form of feminism, Mom could get pretty domestic around the holidays. Halloween too — for a few years she'd even sew a costume for me and a matching one for my Cabbage Patch Kid.


When I was growing up I spent every Christmas eve at my great aunt Eileen's house in Philadelphia, helping her decorate her giant tree. She had those great giant multicolored bulb lights that they only make in LED now because they were probably enviro-murder, and I had a favorite ornament that I have in my apartment now because I asked for it after she died. It's a beaded velvet faux-Victorian monstrosity of a thing, so heavy it strained even the thickest branches up top. Deep purple in color and covered in pearl pushpins, it's basically Prince in Christmas ornament form, and in my few years on earth I had never seen anything more glamorous in my life.


I'm not sure when I found out that my Mom had made it for Aunt Eileen --from a kit--when she was in her twenties. This added a whole new layer of meaning to My Purple Precious. I'd heard enough from Mom speaking at AA meetings, half listening as I colored in the back of the church multipurpose room, to know that her life before she got married and had me was very different (how strange was it when you first realized your parents had an entire life before you came along?). She'd had a convertible, and an Airedale named Martini that rode shotgun, and her "rock bottom" was when her head nursing teacher at Bellevue found her wandering in traffic blackout drunk. It all sounded as dangerous and as unpredictable as her moods still were. Maybe that's why it blew my tiny mind picturing it: My mother driving to a craft store and buying the materials for the ornament, and then sitting down to push the pearl pins in one at a time. I imagined her furrowed brow, her cursing as she glued on the gold curlicue trim. I have a hard time reconciling the hurricane person with the calm, crafts-inclined person. Both lived in there obviously, just like earlier versions lived inside the woman that raised me.

I don't have a Christmas tree this year but the ornament is hung up in my window. It hangs in tribute as I bake today, listening to our old favorites.

Eurythmics - Winter Wonderland

I'm probably the 800th person to make an 'I'll Tumblr 4 Ya' joke.

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:

I have a Tumblr now because even grandmas are sexting these days and it's time I stepped into the Now. I'm not abandoning this site (any more than I already have), but for pithy statements and random Internet detritus --

http://ghostproofblanket.tumblr.com/