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September 30, 2005
facebook in question
people are questioning the validity of things like facebook...(charlotte's article in the bagpipe) and blogs are part in parcel. intimacy without accountability, the same argument.
you guys should read the thing on Jeremy Huggins blog about whats so great about blogs. facebook seems like a harmless silly thing to me. i signed up because i was asked to be someone's friend. i'm not sacrificing my dignity... not that i know of at least.
come on... everything can be redeemed. i mean gosh.
Posted by tacyjane at 10:44 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 28, 2005
There's no problem i can handle
One of my new favorite Onion articles:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/41001
Posted by tacyjane at 03:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 25, 2005
sufjan in nashville
well... i know there are quite a number who read covblogs who will appreciate a little run-down on the show in nashville, and i'm up to the task! i have to admit the night as a whole was a bit of a disaster, and probably will be remembered not-so-fondly by Sufjan's noisemakers, but for the crowd, it was stunning and redeeming to be in the presence of his band.
for one, the venue's security was disorganized, so sufjan didn't actually play until midnight (two hours late). i stood in humid weather feeling dehydrated, listening to a guy behind our group talk about wine. we eventually asked how he knew so much about wine, and why he was going into such great detail with his friend. he informed us that he wanted to become a wine expert, and his friend was about to get a job as a server and was interested to learn some things. "We just decided to have this conversation now," his friend said. it was a fun thing to overhear. he said the taste of various wines can be affected by anything-- if the grapes grew where strawberries once grew, it might have a hint of strawberry flavor. he said he knew a man who could taste wine and once he guessed, "Was this wine kept in a barrel made of Romanian oak?" They did some research, and lo and behold- it was! "Some people can just taste this stuff."
once we got inside, we had a bit of a wait again. my new philosophy is to strike up conversations with strangers to help the time pass more quickly. i'm working on being friendly with people who i share small space with. i met a journalist originally from Michigan, working in N. Florida, who drove all the way to Nashville to meet his friend and see Sufjan. He used to live in the same town as Sufjan, when Suf was at Hope College. He did music reviews and Sufjan was "a bit of a local hero." He told me stories about how hard it is to become a music critic, which is what he foresaw himself doing back then. He said the people who write for Pitchfork only get about fifty bucks an article- they do it for fun, and their knowledge of music is usually exhaustive.
Sufjan's opener, Liz Janes referred to him as Suf... i liked it. She played the eukelele- brave girl- and she had a lower voice that grew on me. Her rendition of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot was a real crowd pleaser, and Suf came out to play the drums and most of the audience did not notice him. there was a bit of whispering among those that did. he definitely wasn't into self-glory, which was made apparent by his ridiculous and funny stars-and-stripes costume that he played the first few songs in. he looked like a shiny american flag.
the noisemakers were sweaty and hot, but their cheers and quirky humor made the audience come alive in the midst of our series of delays. i was surprised to see Suf play the piano as much as he did, along with the drums, guitar, and banjo. the encore was "All the trees of the fields will clap their hands" and it was beautiful.
Ask me questions.
Posted by tacyjane at 03:46 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 18, 2005
if you don't want to go...
People will be faithful to attend something if it is tradition, even negating the inherent or intrinsic value of the activity. Starting something new might be extremely hard, but getting people to join in something familiar to them, is really never hard.
Today this was proven by a fifth north tea, hosted by Lauren and Bonny Beth and Lynette, in the tower room. Good times were had drinking tea, eating scones, listening to a mix which would be prized by any classic 5N member (Sufjan, Magnetic Fields, Weezer, Aha, The Beach Boys, Infradig, Postal Service, etc), Thomas telling childhood stories about Lowen, Lauren and I revealing a prank our room committed on First Belz last year, writing quotes on the white board.
I made everyone write something on the whiteboard. We filled it with Johnny Cash lyrics, lines from the Simpsons, the Faerie Queene, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, Octavio Paz, you name it.
The funniest part of the afternoon, to me, was hearing Evan's reaction to the prank. "That was the lamest prank ever! That was you??? We laughed at you guys for like a week! And the perfume smelled bad for a week. That was so gay." We showed him photos and everything. Sorry Keri... wish you had been there.
I also enjoyed hearing Max interview Evan about the cross-country coach, and I enjoyed drawing a melodramatic kitty with the words "sassy-bittersweet-frass" underneath it. The kitty was Lowen's idea.
Posted by tacyjane at 05:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 14, 2005
last night, walking in it
now that i've got that confession of my uncool-blog off my chest, i am going to spend the next few minutes doing what i always end up doing by default once school is too overwhelming for me to handle. i'm going to find unassigned reading, movies, ideas, people, food, and pasttimes just because "i want to!" it's amazing how curious you will find yourself at these moments.
two nights ago, i was standing in the bathroom, about to blow-dry my hair. i overhear my housemate, lindsay, start the washing machine. as the first cycle starts to drain, i see that dirty water draining into the toilet before me... except, wait, it isn't draining, it's filling. it was filling, and filling, and i didn't know what to do, and it started spilling onto the floor, and i look in the bathtub and it's filling up with brown water, too.
the funny thing was, we had gotten a note from the house owners that afternoon which warned, "we couldn't help but notice the napkins in the bathroom... hope you didn't put those in the toilet. it would be DEVASTATION to our sewage system." Sewage and devastation in the same word. All we could do, at that point, was laugh.
But at the point when the toilet overflowed with brown emotion, I didn't even say a word. I had no innocent surprise... I had been warned, and I was the one who put the napkins in the bathroom for all to use. As Mr. Paul said later, "Toilet paper is designed to disentegrate immediately. Paper napkins are not."
I did, eventually call out for help, because I didn't really want to stand in sewage alone. I stepped out and yelled for Lindsay, and she yelled, "Pull the chain! Pull the chain!" So I stepped back into it and opened the toilet and pulled. The flow stopped, but the water was about an inch and a half deep. We looked at each other. "This will take forever to mop." So we grabbed the nearest three towels, which happened to be Mara-Diana's, and threw them into the shit. Problem solved!
The next day: "Has anyone seen my towels?" She started to make it a house-announcement, but I was the only one listening, so she asked me. I said, "Uhh.... where were they?.. Oh, right... I mopped up the bathroom floor with them... and they're in a pile on the back porch."
A few minutes later, I couldn't find my toothbrush, and I called from the bathroom, "Has anyone seen my toothbrush?" Mara-Diana immediately chimed in, "Yeah, I just saw it lying there so I used it to scrub that brown ring in the bathtub.. hope that was ok." Her smirk was a relief.
Posted by tacyjane at 01:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 12, 2005
i'll tell you why
I will tell you why I never post. It's because of my darn inferior skills. I want to post pictures, do cool links, make my site unique instead of the same green that fifteen other covblog people have.
I HAVE NO BLOG PRIDE.
It is gone. And I think this is the problem with many un-updated blogs. If someone would do me a favor and give me some SKILLS, maybe you would hear a few more whispers and teasers from my complex and brilliant thought life.
Or maybe actually it's because I lost my laptop to viral infection.
Posted by tacyjane at 01:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack