great novel american

COMDISCO, or: Whose boyfriend are you again?

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 21:20:38 -0400

COMDISCO, or: Whose boyfriend are you again?

—Is this a cult? —No, we’re the International...

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 12:42:40 -0500

—Is this a cult?

—No, we’re the International Friendship Center. :)

homesick for a place that doesn't quite exist

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 07:24:00 -0500

okay i got accepted to grad school here—w00t—but since i’m in, the prerequisite courses i’m in now seem inconsequential and right now i have to write two clinical observation reports by noon and it’s 5am and yet here i am liveblogging my mind on teh cryptojournal and nomnomming starbursts. fucking STARBURSTS!

time for the teej to get kinda real with you guyz, k? throat cleared, knuckles cracked, eyebrows groomed with licked indexed fingers. Amanda and i have been talking about moving in this fall, talking as in idle mutual fantasizing and speccing places for funzies right now, but it looks like this will probably happen. big whoops, you dismiss, but we’ve only been dating for 2.5 months! i practically live at her place now—i have chores there!—and my apartment right now is just a hotel room where i can sleep, shower, change clothes, and charge my electronic devices, so it makes sense.

plus, manda observed that we could consolidate resources and save money—we talked about this on a pier that juts out into lake mendota which was frozen at the time, but the ice and snow were well tolerated by the ducks, especially a fate-tempting handful that stood on precariously thin ice, just tempting that glass sheet to crack in a way that made my bleeding heart skip a beat as i recalled falling through ice into the farm’s pit of liquid cow manure as a young and fearless child, but i wasn’t thinking about that horrifyingly unsanitary thought right then, because manda and i were well past the ducks; we were sitting on a bench looking at the frozen lake, talking playfully and breathlessly about neighborhoods we could live in this year and in future years, about the what it would be like to canoe across a lake to work, and it was cold but nice out so we just sat there for a while all romanticky, picturesque, cherishible, and mentally i was all like, i really really need to save money and consolidate resources with this girl

—which is important because of recent events, like how the n00b governor wants to rob us decent working-to-middle-classish ppl to make rich ppl richer, even though the rich ppl don’t deserve to steal our money or strip our services from us—and i could rant about the shitshow present tense around here, but i can’t: it’s depressing to think about the way an inverted turtle is depressing to think about and it makes me feel despondent to see 100,000 non-rich ppl show up for two weekends in a row and still be thoroughly ignored by the governor and it knots my stomach to see someone be so tone-deaf and heartless.

the fucking future, am i right? i’ve got my professional future very mapped out and i’ve met .-~*´¨¯¨`*·~My_DrEaMgUrL~*´¨¯¨`*·~-., but now the good things in my state are being cannibalized and sold for parts for the benefit of no one. *something* *something* my state plunging thru thin ice into a pool of shit, etc.

ugh i wanted to right about all the blissful domesticities i experience now and anticipate then and how she’s my alarm clock when i sleep at her place because when i don’t, i stay up all nite and procrastinate— BUT NOW I’M ALL BUMMED OUT.

in three weeks me and the ladyfriend will be here! i’m so...

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 01:21:22 -0500

in three weeks me and the ladyfriend will be here! i’m so excited! days of laziness! baking potatoes, baking in the sun! my sister lives there so it’s pretty cheap for us to travel there. (i say this just in case the tumblr’s Privilege Police, of which i am jr journeyperson lieutenant, are going to hound me about having monies for airfare.) i’m sposed to get my grad school decision around that ides-bewaring “mid-march” time. i’m hoping to see that letter the day i get back. no bad vibes!

i’m excited to future-tense march-and-beyond travel and do things with ‘manda. she’s my perfect companion for doing things. she took me iceskating—for the first time in my life!!—a week ago. i only fell twice, and once was during a game of tag i tried playing with her (in which she became the first human to ever WIN tag, i think).

we want to go snorkeling. i’ve never been. have you ever snorkeled? in an ocean? with the sharks and barracuda?

_{have u ever been attacked by me n my friends? im the great barracuda. observe my underbite n piranhalike teeth. a group of me n my friends is called a battery wh is wut u humans also call a series of short diagnostic tests. we will test u teej.}

is snorkeling fun? is it like that pixies song? you know the one from Fight Club. oh you didn’t realize that what’s-his-face is singing about scuba-ing in that song? he is!

The song was written by frontman Black Francis while he attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, inspired by his experiences scuba diving in the Caribbean. He later said he had “this very small fish trying to chase me. I don’t know why—I don’t know too much about fish behavior.”

whoa tangenty tangent time:

With your feet in the air and your head on the ground
Try this trick and spin it, yeah
Your head will collapse
When there’s nothing in it

could this be THE BENDS? Nooooooo! you say? clinical signs of decompression sickness bubble in yr brain, BOOM:

Altered sensation, tingling or numbness paresthesia, increased sensitivity hyperesthesia
Confusion or memory loss (amnesia)
Visual abnormalities
Unexplained mood or behaviour changes
Seizures, unconsciousness

i had dinner with amanda and her parents on friday and her mom was concerned about sharks because she saw on the news that they are really out this year. i was like, maybe it was just one attack that kicked off a media frenzy (LOL) because hey that stock footage won’t play itself. i think amanda said something very funny and aphoristic and kinda sassy like “you swim with all the sharks in the world when you swim in the ocean”. story of my life etc!

relevant: the first blockbuster film of all time Jaws is on netflix instant right now. should i watch it? do you think a battery of barracuda chasing down humans then nom-nomming them would have been more terrifying than a single dumb “great” white shark? can you see their glinting formation, lunging towards you like the spectral swords in castlevania games?

_{ur so fucked. me n my friends r going 2 underbite rite into yr chest… this summer in WAVES OF MUTILATION 3D}

also, you guys remember the single funniest original thought of all time circa two years ago?

If you watch the movie `Jaws’ backwards, it’s a movie about a shark that keeps throwing up people until they have to open a beach.

whoa whoa pal, where is your miiiiiiiiiind?

i feel okay rough-draft-wise about these three paragraphs

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 13:14:00 -0500

i hate this i hate this i hate this plz kill me—last night i had a drink with A and her friends and she asked how i was doing and i answered by performing an elaborate pantomime of me tying a rope into a noose, wrapping it around my neck, pulling the rope taut and then falling and snapping my neck; this spawned a brief but morbid game of charades between me and her: she unscrewed the lid off a pretend bottle of pills and knock it back like a shot—or maybe that was me; i loaded six rounds into a revolver, whirled the chamber around, brought the gun to my head; she turned the key of car’s ignition, put her hands at 10 and 2 of the steering wheel, paused, and her head slowly wilted towards the wheel as she asphyxiated from make-believe carbon monoxide poisoning. that’s my current mood y’all. i am so fucking boring on paper

Why I would like to be speech-language pathologist boils down to two reasons: First, I am incredibly passionate about linguistics and the speech and hearing sciences, and I am a very, very gifted student in these fields. Second, I am idealistic and wish to use my specialized training to assess and treat individuals with speech, language and swallowing disorders as well as professionally advocate for individuals with communication impairments and language differences. In short, speech-language pathology is simply my calling if I want a rewarding career that engages my passions and strengths and allows me to help other people get the most out of their lives.

My undergraduate career has been a rigorous investigation of language at many different levels and across several disciplines. Early on, I discovered I had a preternatural talent for linguistics, especially in the phonetics-phonology side of the field, and I embraced linguistics with an intense and ebullient enthusiasm. I devoured my textbooks, consistently annoyed friends and family by eliciting dialect variables, and used to pass the time by making strange sounds to myself as I experimented with novel vocal tract configurations. I enrolled in any course that seemed at all relevant to a budding language scientist: phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, symbolic logic, formal languages via theory of computation, philosophy of language, descriptive courses in non-English languages, and the offerings of our communicative disorders department. Indeed, ever since my first linguistics course in 2005, I have had language on my mind, and I have been listening and analyzing language nonstop for the past five years.

My thorough yet well-rounded background in linguistics allows me to bring several unique qualities to the graduate program at [—-]. My extensive experience in phonetics gives me very intuitive understanding about the acoustic transfer functions at work in the vocal tract and the auditory system, and this experience makes me a natural speech and hearing scientist. For instance, I can read and suss out the possible clinical implications in the latest literature from phonetics and linguistic theory. Moreover, I possess a very strong understanding of sociolinguistic variability and dialect variation; I keep up with the cutting-edge of English variation and am sensitive to the subtle but deleterious effects of linguistic chauvinism. Since ASHA clinical competencies require practitioners to accurately parse out disordered language from dialectal variation, I will be a very valuable asset to my peers in the graduate program in this respect. Lastly, having studied language from many different perspectives, I can readily communicate across disciplines—an essential skill for practitioners working as part of a interdisciplinary team of specialists.

need to elaborate my ideals, explain my two bad semesters (illness), describe career objectives, end with a sense of how awesome and prepared and driven i am now—then gut out needless words and punch it up and come up with some synonyms for “i am interested in”

Photo

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 09:04:38 -0500

ughhhhh

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:44:00 -0500

realized there is no way i can sex it up so i’ll just fucking spell it out

Why I would like to be speech-language pathologist boils down to two reasons: (1) I am incredibly passionate about linguistics and the speech and hearing sciences, and I am a very, very gifted student in these fields. (2) I am idealistic and wish to use my specialized training to assess and treat individuals with speech, language and swallowing disorders as well as professionally advocate for individuals with communication impairments and language differences. In short, speech-language pathology is simply my calling if I want a rewarding career that engages my passions and strengths and allows me to help other people get the most out of their lives.

circle of death

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 19:17:00 -0500

On Saturday I got to meet a couple of her close friends, and we met them at The Plaza bar where we played a drinking game called Circle of Death, which was pretty fun especially the parts where we would have to go around naming members of a given category, one of which was the devious category Countries of South America, and have to keep going around until someone fucked up and therefore had to drink.

One of her friends is her bff Andrew who is a few years younger than me and well-groomed, witty and gay, and who has Amanda laughing every other minute with some inside joke. Andrew and I talk about his recipe for artichoke dip and he gives me the pro-tip that people always go ape-shit for dips in bread-bowls. Later on when the two ladies excuse themselves from the table, we small-talk briefly about something I can’t remember and after a pause he says to me, “If you hurt her, I will fucking kill you”. I laugh kinda nervously and say “okay” or “that’s fair” or maybe both, and he tells me that it’s his job as bff to say that to me. I nod and he observes that I “seem decent enough” though. Females return. Group continues drinking. I’m glad she has a friend like him.

she asked me to make her a playlist of music. ;)’s...

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 16:53:00 -0500

she asked me to make her a playlist of music. ;)’s galore!!

collateral damage from a tumblr meetup. As mentioned before, I...

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 21:13:57 -0500

collateral damage from a tumblr meetup. As mentioned before, I couldn’t find any legitimate attractions to show lolo in my city so her and I resolved at 2:30pm to do a “power hour” with wine and champagne and it kinda turned into a shitshow for the both of us, but mostly for her, as she lay crumpled up on the ground and I sat beside her quizzing her with flashcards from my child language disorders class—which was funny because she was drunk and goofy but still 100% on the ball and her memory very declarative, and we might have argued about where on the Glasgow Coma Scale she belonged at that particular moment—AND since we first became internet bffs bc of our mutual love of all things linguistic and we right then and there lied on the floor all stupid and silly and arguing about matters linguistic, it was kinda the perfect meetup in many respects.

gaga

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 22:19:19 -0500

Amanda: You need anything?
Tristan: Yr warm embrace, yr bad romance.

it’s not right. she’s almost too cute, my family...

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 15:33:00 -0500

it’s not right. she’s almost too cute, my family reminds me. i’m living a mentos commercial, you’re goddamned right. merry xmas

nanowrimo iv: someone else's date in someone else's door

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 04:11:00 -0400

i’m falling behind i think but i shall not be discouraged.

yo la tengo, “cherry chapstick”

***

ugh so with that last entry i didn’t really set out to mediate on luke and amy and loneliness; i meant to talk about m.t.

so i was feeling really pathetic and losery after those two people knocked on the big glass windows and yelled at me and i wanted to be the kind of social creature we humans are often alleged to be. but luke was a deadend because he spent the drinking nights telepathing with amy.

so m.t. is my next best hope. emtee and i graduated high school together and we’re part of a handful-sized enclave of kids from our hometown at this big state school but we’ve been doing that snotty highschooly thing where you don’t really keep in touch with yr classmates because you are pretending like you are simply too enthralled and consumed by yr new circle of friends. at least, that’s how it felt to me. em acts like she’s such a hardcore partyanimal nowadays that i call her on her bluff and call her on her phone and say hey can i party with you and she says this is unexpected but yes that would be swell.

friday i meet her in her dorm. i am wearing my favorite jeans and shirt and feeling cool enough for loud polite conversation in a dark room. i used to have a crush on her throughout high school. i really liked being friends with her and asked her out once but got friendzoned. maybe i was too mealymouthed and mumbled too much. i don’t like like her anymore.

she’s dressed immodestly which is funny because that’s how she never dressed in high school and she has a lot of cleavage in her black tanktop but i try, consciously try, to keep eye contact. em has dark blonde hair with and it’s done in some complicated way but the general direction is backwards and she has a large expressive and nearly constant teeth-exposing smile. she’s a lot shorter than me, like 5’3” to my 6’0”, but she’s wearing tall shoes tonight. i probably sound awful and misogynistic but i only mention these details because she fucking went through high school wearing the athletic sweatshirts and church-worthy sweaters. she’s changed, or she looks like she’s changed.

i follow emtee and couple of her floorfriends downstairs so she can talk to so-and-so and get party lowdowns. this is before texting so these kind of in-person step-into-my-office exchanges were necessary. anyway following her downstairs i espy her lime green thong hiked up two inches above her low-riding jeans and i blush on her behalf.

cut to the party. a pack of like 15 of us freshmen walk over to some frathouse and it’s fucking horrible in every way you might imagine because frat people are horrible and heartless and shallow and provide zero net social good to the world. but this is just my experience and lo this is where we are, in a large basement, the air damp and smoky. emtee stands next to me for a second, applying pink lip gloss and faintly bouncing her hips to the very loud hip-hop music that is playing. i hate this. i begin to wonder if this shit is horrible for everyone else too but just ingrained in us because of media depictions of what college is. i wonder if someone is going to get date-raped tonight right here in this basement. i tell emtee to be careful and she says durrrrrrr.

i get a little drunk and smoke just enough cigarettes to feel like i’ve smoked just a little too much. i try to dance and socialize but no dice. how is this fun i ask myself. i’m trying so hard to play the part and i’m sweaty and i want to cry from all this bad air in my eyes. i try so hard to do what i think i’m supposed to be doing but i dont like it. is there something wrong with me?

eventually i have a great conversation with a female after i pull the hey-can-i-use-yr-lighter trick. we are both bitter about the 2004 election. i tell her i wish i could’ve voted. she tells me she did and jokes about how she thought she was going to save the world with her ballot. we don’t talk about bush or kerry but just being really young and trying to be engaged with yr civic duty like an adult. “i can’t wait for jury duty someday” she says dryly, and i say “just wait till the schoolboard hears from me!”. :)

in a minute she vanishes into the dark and undulating mass of bodies dancing very very closely and i do not know her name and i feel like i want to extinguish a cigarette on my face because i feel like i blew some important opportunity. i am frustrated and will be basically drunk after i finish this large red partycup of beer. i approach m.t. who is playing beerpong in a different better-lit part of the basement. i tell her i’m going to leave and she asks why and i say because i’m not having much fun.

“oh okay. get home safe.”

“when you think you’re gonna leave?”

“not for a while. i havta play this tournament of beerpong.” she pauses and throws a pingpong ball across a door turned into a table by two inverted garbage cans.

“k well i’ll see you around campus”

“alright”

“ugh” i sigh like a dumb animal. “i thought we were friends.”

“haha what? settle down”

“i don’t know you anymore.”

“stan, did you ever know me?” other team lands a shot and she slams half a plastic cup of beer per the game.

“yeah we were bee effs effs in spanish and math class”

“and did we ever spend time outside of school?”

“what are you getting at?”

“ummm i’m getting at how you never knew me. and here you are writing your little story and trying to paint a portrait of me but you didn’t know me and that’s not fair.”

“but i thought i knew you and can write about the person i knew.”

“hang on”—she shoots her ball and misses and it bounces onto the ground. i think about the wet filth of the floor.—“frickin’ a. okay, you knew some version of me yes but it was a very puppydog version of me but in your story you’re writing right now you’re frickin terrified of me.”

“no i’m not em”

“yes you are. first off ‘em tee’… really stan? also you turned your head when i put on my lip gloss.”

“okay girls intimidate the bejesus outta me, you win”

“no, what is it? my lips? the way i’m coloring myself, painting my portrait, making my own self up? i know, it’s because i’m expressing my sexuality and i’m being the young and attractive person i want to be and that intimidates you because you’re still a reluctant adult. but seriously, just because you’re afraid of parts of me doesn’t give you permission to make me a monster.”

“sorry emily. you’re right. i needed you to say that.”

“it’s okay. wait until you meet clem this semster”

“hey cut it out”

she smiles at me and i notice the glimmer of her rosy lower lip and am reminded of the squiggles that underline misspellings on computer screens.

“i’m gonna head home now. have fun, be safe.”

“you too.”

nanowrimo iii: they say i got brains but they ain't doing me no good

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 01:28:00 -0400

teej says: ugh i don’t want to do exposition. i hate exposition.

the beach boys, “i just wasn’t made for these times”

***

“why do drunk people feel the need to yell at strangers?” i ask my roommate, luke who is the dormitory-equivalent of a homebody, electing to spend his nights talking to his long-distance girlfriend. she’s going to school in michigan. webcams integrated into monitors weren’t quite a thing yet at this point in the ancient past so they talked—on the phone!!

i think it’s weird, the way luke and his gf—oh man i so want to pseudonym her “leia” (gotta protect those identities), but i will go with “amy” (for “amidala”)— anyway, the way luke and amy are in sync and connected is very baffling to me. IMs are telepathy, right? tele+pathos: distant-feeling. i imagine the bundles of telecommunications cables and wiring connecting them and binding them together, like two wooden marionettes, affixed to each other instead of one of those t-shaped controllers. amy jerk her arms and tugs at him and luke does the same. reciprocating action at a distance. for a long time i didn’t get it, and then she visited and they had sex all day long, and it made sense.

“i dunno man. because they are stupid?” luke responds to my question about drunk bullies. this’s funny because he gets really stupid when he’s drunk. unfortunately, he doesn’t discover drunkenness until amy dumps him the following year. she will shitcan him for someone older and taller and more handsome. it will be pretty fucking horrible. that’s not part of our story, except in a sad lurking kind of way when we think about luke and amy in their lovey-dovery present tense of freshman year.

luke and i are friends, by necessity since we don’t share any interests, but it works out and it’s important to me because i know that for at least three nights a week i will not be eating dinner all by myself in cafeteria. i mean, i’m not afraid to be all alone and i’m comfortable spending several hours in my own solitary world, surrounded by others of course, but shielded by my ipod and everyone’s mutual aversion to eye contact. it’s incredibly lonesome admittedly, sometimes feeling like my family tossed me on an ice floe and shoved it out to sea, but it’s tolerable. it has to be tolerable because you cannot talk about being lonely.

now that i think about it, maybe luke and amy’s telepathy is less about fucking and more about not being lonely. i know that when me and clem were tied together in our way, mutual marionettes certainly, push and pull, in sync and connected, we both felt less lonely. indeed we felt more interested in each other than in ourselves and in the existential nauseas we young people feel, i think, when try to be adults (i.e., independent and self-interested and unhappy). ugh i can’t take it. part of me really misses her and the little ice floe we had for ourselves, cast off to sea, her patiently teaching me how to fold a paper flower.

i don't know why she needed to know this but i'm glad she knew that i'd know it

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:39:00 -0400

lolo: whats the name of a sentence that uses all 26 letters?
me: pangram
lolo: danke!
: Sent at 4:26 PM on Monday

nanowrimo ii: no signs point u on yr way

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 15:00:00 -0400

okay teej talking here, so i think i determined the general premise to my nanowrimo story and surprise surprise it’s going to be pretty teejaygraphical. which should be okay but i guess i’m not trying to tell any story about myself but make sense of a few things about who/m i am. anyway, so i’ve got a few scenes i know i want to fit into this story but i have no masterplan about structure or ordering so if thing’s are sloppy and piecemeal, i’m sorry and if things are cleverly nonlinear, i’m none so sorry.

dismemberment plan, “a life of possibilities”

***

i’m trying to find a starting point for my story. i could go back to childhood but i don’t want to give you the idea that i have such a strong continuity of self that i can pinpoint or pinprick specific IMPORTANT moments. then again, the last few months have been such a blur that i’m not even sure what happened to me and clem and how we almost destroyed each other.

i feel like i’m lying on the cushy leather couch before the psychiatrist, the alieniste, trying to “work through things” and they are nodding and asking really open-ended questions, how does that make you feel? and how do you feel about having those feelings? while they diligently jot down notes for the blackmail file. oh fuck— why didn’t i just frame my whole story as a series of conversations of with a psychiatrist? probably because i have no idea how such a conversation would actually proceed.

back in september of my freshman year, first month of school, when i was all go-gettery and still had the hyper-competitive overachieving high-school mindset, an attitude i had cultivated because i literally had nothing else going for me, being too ugly and awkward, or at least feeling like i was too ugly and awkward to have the confidence to assert myself and make many friends :(. i realize that lots of people tell a similar story about their high school selves as we look back in throat-clearing disgust or with that self-charming kind of embarrassment—we were all so awkward then. i guess, i’m not that special and i’m in fact pretty “normal” because i have high-school baggage and it took me a while to internalize the most important lesson of college: high school is over, get over it.

so it’s a september night, and i’m sitting in the big commons study room, chugging away at my math homework. the room sits on the corner of the bottom floor of the dormitory and so two of the walls are just giant panels of windows and the sun is setting and casts a warm lucubratory orangish glow into the room and onto my calc textbook and notes. i am feeling serene and productive and would give myself the livejournal currentmood of “accomplished” at this moment.

i hear a bang on one of the giant windowpanes and some yells. “studying on a friday night?!” and “have fun!”. one girl and one guy from a pack of several students heading out for the night. i pretend not to hear them and i finish my current problem.

“well, how did that make you feel, stan?” is what the imaginary alienist would ask right about now.

“deflating, but but also not surprising. i’d imagined college would be different. but madison was self-fulfilling its party school reputation pretty hard back in 2005. so i tried not to let it bother me.”

“…” waiting for me to continue.

“it did bother me. and i hated those big glass windows then. i felt like i was on display. i felt so exposed and vulnerable, and so i packed up my things, and i went outside and smoked a cigarette. i was all by myself. i remember feeling hurt. one of my favorite songs at the time was called ‘a life of possibilities’ and i played that on my ipod. the song was an anthem for me then. i’d walk up and down university ave between classes blasting the song. it’s a pretty direct song about how being lost and mapless in a new place means you get to the explore and discover a new world and you should embrace the opportunity. i really tried to live up that attitude and not sweat the small stuff or dwell on my adolescent hang-ups, but at that moment, i remember thinking ‘what the hell is wrong with me?’ i needed ‘to get out there’ i thought.”

nanowrimo i: i just can't wait to send you plastic flowers

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:18:00 -0400

so i think i’m going to try to write some kind of nanowrimo thing. i have absolutely no plan or ideas and i’m going to improvise this whole thing and likely use the tvtropes plot generator a lot. it’s going to be densely autobiographical probably, but quantity over quality is the name of the game, so i’m just going to write a bunch.

the wake, “plastic flowers”

***

oh hey there this is my story. i’m 19 years old and living in a new and strange place so this is probably going to be my cumming of age story; see what i did there? that was deliberate. this is will be indulgent and seminal in the seedy burgeoning sense and the uh seedier sticky sense of the word. because i’m a boy, there is going to be a girl in this story. she works at a floral shop but especially likes simulacraceae which is the scientific name for artificial flowers. i shit you not. these flowers don’t sprout from seeds and soil and other seminal conditions. the bad ones are manufactured from plastic and fabric, faithful replicants that never wilt but never smell like flowers. she likes the monochromatic cloth and paper or origami ones that don’t try to fool you, that are more like small tributes to flowerdom.

flowergirl needs a name, i realize, since i have to protect her identity, you know. how about ophelia? that was a joke. that would be horrible. iris, ivy, laurel, rose, tulip, petal, daisy, holly, blancheflour. it doesn’t matter. as i describe her, she’s just as real as origami facsimiles that sit on the desk in her dorm room. i used to fiddle and fuss with them just to annoy her and she’d punch me hard on the shoulder. it’d hurt and it’d sometimes bruise but a couple hours later, i’d rub the sore spot on my shoulder and smile serenely.

i thought about presenting flowergirl as male or me as female or something a little queerer to make this story more interesting and progressive and less creepily and heteronormatively botanical. but that just wouldn’t feel right. it’d feel inauthentic; an indelicate plastic kind of of simulacraceae. so let’s just accept this fact.

her name is clem, yes that’s it. and nettle. both of those will work. what’s that line about a rose by any other name? yes both of these names will suffice. nettle was my best friend.

(屮ﾟДﾟ)屮

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:09:45 -0400

loscheiner: do you ever get to go out?
loscheiner: i mean like, it's the weekend. what do you do for fun?
tristn: i play with my niece and nephew every day for half an hour
loscheiner: that's almost like what i'm talking about
loscheiner: i meant more in the way of socializing with other adults
tristn: no, i guess not

On the one hand, I’m flattered. On the other hand,...

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 18:26:10 -0400

On the one hand, I’m flattered. On the other hand, I’m just an extrapolation of data points; so thank you, Computer. On the third hand, I hate Facebook.

notes

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:33:59 -0400

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I might write when I write about a few songs on tuneage, so I’m going to jot them down before I forget.

Crystal Castles, “Not In Love”: Funny. I was really looking forward to this album, but then I got dumped and unfortunately the best song on the album is called “Not In Love”. You know it’s a cover right? Yeah, it’s a cover of a 1984 song by the Canadian new wave band Platinum Blonde. The song never charted in America, but it did chart in Canada. Crystal Castles are also Canadian. That’s kind of funny; maybe there’s a treasure trove of affecting 80’s singles in Canada. CCs also look awful—like every photo of them makes them look like the worst thing ever. So the original song is like this arena-rocking sing-along kind of a track, but this is compresses and encrypts all those :( emotions.

Casino Music, “The Beat Goes On”: The opening riff reminds me of the pipe theme from Super Mario Bros 3. It’s off a compilation from ZE records, a label that’s been trying a little too hard to seize the postpunk revival of the last decade by dumping off a volumes and volumes of the back catalog in Mutant Disco compilations. But this song is legit. There’s a bit of Ennio Morricone to the guitar and keyboards. It’s a cover of a Sonny and Cher song, and generous cover at that— it makes Sonny and Cher seem like cosmopolitan badasses instead of the epitome of lame. Contrast the Britney Spears version. She doesn’t get it, and the beat goes on.

DJ Kaos, “Love The Night Away” (Tiedye rmx): I’ll never forget that night. I had nearly taken Minute To Win It by storm, walking away with $125,000. There were some close calls—round four’s Extreme Hanky Panky and round six’s Balloon Coin Noodle Challenge were brutal—but I didn’t fall victim to the fatal go-big-or-go-home mindset. Afterwards, Guy Fieri’s invited me and some other contestants back to his place for the after-party. Did you know that Guy Fieri throws an after-party for every episode? And did you know that despite essentially being a male and less evil version of Rachel Ray, he’s quite a cool dude? Yeah, his ipod is stacked with all kinds of Balearic jams. That was a big surprise. I tried talking to him about the music but he got all enthusiastic and obscure, telling me that “you Pitchfork kids don’t get Ibiza”. Pitchfork kids! [all i got]