the sloppy copy

Oh, Lord, is she serious?

I hate New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day – on principle, really. Making resolutions is a wonderful idea, but doing it every year on January 1st makes it seem like we all just deteriorate over the course of a year and must redeem ourselves come a fairly arbitrary day on the calendar.

I mean, if you want to start doing something, just fucking do it already. I get the “I need a little bit of time to prepare myself” stuff – I mean, if you’re going to quit smoking, it usually doesn’t work to just randomly lay down a cigarette at 10:30 on one Tuesday night and never pick one up again – but the “I want to work out more” or the “I want to be a better person” stuff applies all year round, don’t it?

I don't know who these people are but I want to go to their next party.

And yet, there’s a tiny-yet-overpowering obsessive part of my brain that is positively enamored with the lovely evenness* of Saturday’s calendar date: 1. 1. 11. Poetic, no? I love it. I love love love love love it.

So I guess if I’m going to make some sort of resolution, this would be a hypothetically nice time to do so. Right? Right? Damn you for breaking me, you silly binary numbers! Daaaaamn you!

*That same part of my brain dislikes that I used the word “even” to describe the number 1, but you catch mah drift. Right?

So what song shall I choose on this, the most arbitrarily significant of days? What will summarize this year – the ups, the downs, the in-betweens? In short, how will it be remembered?*

“Miss Independent” / Ne-Yo (2008)

*Read: what song is stuck in Julie’s head right now?

Some thoughts not quite long enough to merit their own post.

Get one of these. Immediately. Worth the money. That is all.

Dear Electric Toothbrush:
Thank you. No – seriously: thank you. If not for you, I’m pretty positive that the dentist would have found about 398 cavities in my mouth last week. The hygienist even commented on my good “home care,” but I can’t take all the credit. You do all the heavy lifting while I just eat candy corn all day long. Basically, you are probably magical.
Yours truly,
Julie
P.S. Also thanks to: Floss.

Dear Jessica – I think your name is Jessica – is it Jessica?

So... not quite this beautiful, but you get the idea.

Remember me? You cut off all my hair a few weeks ago. You were really excited. You told everyone else in the Custom Cuts that you were cutting all my hair off. I had brought in pictures of Emma Watson and Alyssa Milano to show you, expecting you to laugh and say “Hahahahahahahahaha. I’m a hairstylist, not a magician!” But you did not laugh. Actually, I did not have to even show you the pictures. You just went to town. You said you were having fun. You did not even charge me for the “style” part of the “cut and style” because you were back behind my head, making merry with the pomade.  A few years ago I got a decidedly heinous short haircut, and regretted it for months afterwards. This one is different. I don’t know what you did, but you went through three razors doing it and it’s fucking magical. Thank you, Jessica, if that’s your name.
Yours truly,
Julie

Dear Mom,
I love you and you are awesome, but I’m not sure how to tell you this. You got me a gift card for Christmas, remember? And I opened it and you almost squealed, saying “I know how much you love that store!” You were pretty pleased with yourself, and I didn’t have it in my heart to explain your mistake. I mean, this is funny more than anything else, I’m not mad. Just amused. But not amused enough to correct you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy myself some stemware. Love, your only daughter

Stores with three-word names that feature an ampersand? Close enough.

That Marty can siiiiiing.

Also, if you watch the video, check out Dude in Blue Shirt at about a minute in. Sorry we’re boring you, sir.

“Devil Woman” / Marty Robbins (1962)

Mmmmm…yeeeeah. Just sit back and listen.

“Soulful Strut” / Young-Holt Unlimited (1968)

Aw, 'T - the pigs got you down again?

A few nights ago I was a superhero. Last night, I was wanted by the po-lice (Ice-T voice).

Why? Beats me. I was living in my parents’ house, but it was only myself and one of my roommates from grad school (I think – her presence was only acknowledged, never seen). We’re going about our daily lives when suddenly I hear a car door slam across the street. I peer out the window to see two uniformed officers exiting a po-lice vehicle and two plainclothes officers exiting a big-ass SUV.

I wish I could remember the backstory here, but as soon as I saw the officers I immediately started freaking out and hid under my bed (which was a gigantic, cavernous hiding place filled with tons of junk. I think I actually might have been able to hide while sitting up, too. Apparently I slept on a massive elevated platform). Seems I had Done Something or Had Something to warrant their presence (ha ha, get it? Warrant their presence?). Uh, moving on.

Aaaanyway, the Reasons for which the police arrived revolved around myself – my roommate was not any kind of Suspect even though I yelled something like “I’m not here!” when I saw the po-lice and dove under the bed.

Roommate lets the officers in, and they promptly begin an incredibly thorough search of the entire house. I’m sitting there, under my Big Bed, waiting for them to leave – it doesn’t look like they’ll be searching my room so I’m about to let my guard down when suuuuddenly – I see Police Feet. They’re here!

I am overwhelmed with the feeling that I. Am. Fucked. I consider just giving myself up when one of them bends down to peer under the bed. Oh, hai guyz.

But no, really, when I see that cop I am PISSED. Completely and totally (and unreasonably, because I know I’ve done wrong) IRATE. I am instantly uncooperative and bitchy, knowing in the back of my head that this is not helping my case, but any desire I’ve ever had to be nice is completely out the window. Stupid po-lice (Ice-T voice again).

Bottlecaps. All over the damn place.

So I get out from under the bed, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do while they are tearing apart my room. What a feeling. Oh, and in walks one of the guys I work with (in Real Life). He’s some kind of Evidence Collector (wtf?) and he’s going around my room wearing gloves and carrying evidence bags. For some reason, the only thing he is bagging are bottle caps. And for some other reason, my room is filled with them. He keeps giving me this tsk tsk look each time he finds another bottle cap and puts it in the bag.

My room is an absolute wreck to start, but the cops are trashing it even more. And they’re going through really weird stuff – like art projects from when I was in kindergarten – even though it has nothing to do with the crime I’ve committed. I start grabbing stuff out of their hands: “Don’t touch that!” This, for some reason, does not please the po-lice and Guy From Work just keeps collecting bottle caps and tsk tsking.

Then my alarm went off.

No more Advil PM before bed.

While gathered around the family kitchen table last night, freakin’ finally celebrating Christmas, my brother, mother and I broke into this song. I can’t remember why, but really: why not?

“Magic Man” / Heart (1976)

When all else fails… (note: audio quality is not the greatest here)

“No Name #3” / Elliott Smith (1994)

Obligatory Christmas entry coming soon. For now, I’m ultra stoked about the…

…Best. Dream. Ever. It was last night, but I can’t remember all of the logistics (or if there were, in fact, any logistics at all) and it’s driving me bonkers.

I vaguely remember that one of my co-crime fighters was a gangly dorky dude, similar in appearance to Andy Samberg. I imagine his superpower was Jewishness. (I kid, I kid).

First, I was a superhero. Awesome, right? I was totally fighting crime and saving the world with all the associated ass-kicking and name-taking one would expect from superheroism. I was part of some sort of superhero team, though I can’t remember the superpowers my teammates possessed. The leader of our team? Portrayed by the One and Only Laurence Fishburne. So yeah, it was pretty fucking magical.

We were fighting against some kind of Band of Evildoers wearing black capes. It was intense. And yes, I can remember more details about my particular super-abilities and backstory, but I’m jazzed enough about this dream that I’m going to try to turn it into an actual written story; I’d hate to ruin the surprise.

Oh, man, my brain is AWESOME sometimes!

While taking a brief mental vacay this evening, I decided to “rate” a random selection of songs in my iTunes library. I’m generally a fan of organization and order, and my original plan was to eventually rate every single song in my collection (about 39 gajillion total) for the sake of, I don’t know, each entry looking nice and complete.

It was easy at first: a Bob Dylan ballad? Four stars, easy. A song I barely know from some emo-punk group I’ve never heard of? We’ll give it two (I decided that the one star rating was to be reserved for the truly awful stuff). My clicking continued like this until I began rating very different songs with the same rating, back-to-back.

I was once OB-sessed with reggae and dancehall groups like The Wailing Souls (above). True story.

Smokey Robinson’s “Going to a Go-Go”? Always a favorite of mine. Let’s say four stars. But Ben Folds’ “Steven’s Last Night in Town”? Also four stars, but for completely different reasons. One is sentimental to me; it’s a 60s classic with which I grew up. The other is just clever, catchy, and wryly humorous. I love them both, but in entirely different ways.

I’m currently reading Nick Hornby’s Songbook, and let me tell ya: it’s fantastic. He takes a selection of his favorite songs, and explains why they are his favorites. Far from being some boringly voyeuristic treatise on Something No One Cares About, it’s engaging and entertaining and something with which I’m sure everyfreakingone can relate. As I was wily-nily-ingly starring songs, I thought about Mr. Hornby’s book, and realized that to use such a one-dimensional ranking system was the ultimate waste of my time. I might give The Flaming Lips’ “The W.A.N.D.” five stars today, but six years from now? I might have outgrown it, or grown beyond it, or simply forgotten that it existed.

I’ve since abandoned this silly categorizing, though I’m still intrigued by the idea of organizing my music this way. But because I can’t come up with a better (or, at least, a better and efficient) system, I’ll put the idea to rest for awhile. After all, I’ve better uses for my (lately limited) free time.

Like blogging about it.