I sometimes have trouble distinguishing between hipsters and construction workers. And hipsters and amish people. I think this is a sign that the ironic facial hair thing has gone entirely too far.

The best of the postmodern IM:
Hester: I'm sorry, Mary Jones, but I just don't think you'll cut it in grad school.
Hester: Just fuckin' with you, man. You better blog up a storm about it--you're going to hate so many of the "theoretical concerns" of the shitheads in that setting. You'll see right through it.
Hester: While still being pulled in enough to warrent the descriptor "hypocrite"...that'll be the exquisite shitiness of it for the loyla CM readers
Hester: Just f'in' with you again, my friend
Hester: Or am I? Be ready for this type of crypic insults disguised as good-natured joshing. Or good natured joshing under the guise of insults. You'll never be able to tell in grad school and everytime you guess you'll be dead wrong. You'll alienate the pleasant jokester and draw the sabatour closer.
Hester: Just f'in with you man. Just benignly f'in with you......

So, as my cell phone has literally disappeared at the worst possible moment in a freak disappearance, I'm going to have to use this forum to tell everyone in the D/FW are that tomorrow (today), friday the 25th we are going to celebrate my early quarter-century birthday and goodbye party. I'm going to hit up the cheesecake factory on Northwest Highway at 7:45 and "Little Miss Sunshine" at Mockingbird Station at 9:45. Allie, Bonnie, et al--sorry for the akward e-invite, but obviously, it's clear I can't function without my phone.

WOW Part I.

There is now a Westlaw citation available for the opinion I wrote this summer.

WOW Part II.

There is now a case that cites to the opinion I wrote.


This is amazing, amazing stuff.

I checked for you Lakshmi--The cloak was, called The Hunteburg Cloak, was found in Germany and dates back to 350 A.D. It was a blue green pattern, and found among the bodies of two dead (rich) male friends who had their throats slashed. I thought the cloak was a hoak at first, it is so well preserved.

Museum #3 was my choice, recommended by the Flynn: The Musuem of Jurassic Technology. Many of you might get the joke already--technology is the study of deliberate human invention to facilitate an action, thus could not in fact have been around in the Jurassive Period. The entire museum is just that--an elaborate, high-brow hoax. Started in the 1980's (but claiming to have started in the 1890's), the Museum of Jurassic Technology is in fact one huge modern art instillation--performance art on a huge scale.

Wikipedia writes it up as the following:
"Its catalog includes a mixture of artistic, scientific exhibits that evokes the "Cabinet of curiosities" that were the 18th centurypredecessors of modern natural history museums. The museum was the subject of a book by Lawrence Weschler in 1995 entitled Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, and the museum's founder David Hildebrand Wilson received a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2003. Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder portrays the museum, and David Hildebrand Wilson's role as curator, as a work of conceptual art. The exhibits are shown to be riddled with factual errors and peculiar attributions. However, many of the exhibits that, initially, seem to Mr. Weschler to be entirely fabricated turn out to have a factual basis. He sees the museum as a commentary on the authoritarian character of most public museums and upon the trust that patrons place in those authorities. But also, the museum itself is a reminder of the turn of the 20th century, when increased world travel and rapid scientific progress resulted in artifacts that blurred the boundaries between what was considered possible and impossible."

Thus, the entire two story building was crammed full of things, (and hipsters--sooooo many hipsters) most of them unture or half-true. There was an entire room of "correspondences" the museum had made over the years (On postcard ended with, "...then one day, we Jews shall rule the world!"). There were micromosaics and sculptures in needles, a tribute to an obscure opera singer, a room devoted to the trash one finds in trailer park garbage cans, a room filled with X-rayed flowers, medical folklores and cures throughout history, and tucked in the very back, a strange room of mirrors and gadgets that played music and spun in near darkness. Upstairs was a gallery devoted to Dogs of the Space Program (all oil on canvas with guilded frames) and a movie theater with velvet seats and long curtains which played the long, strange movie within a movie about the world's smallest sculpter (work in needles and micromosaics downstairs) interwoven with a russian leend about the world's smallest dancing flea getting new shoes and having the nail in those shoes be signed by a hunter. Confused? Good--I was, too. The whole movie was an hour long and all in Russian--I think I made it through 30 minutes before the migraine creeped up on me.

But yes, that was the extent ofour museum fun. The rest of the time was spent in other activities: namely eating. Whenever Mary South would get off of work, we'd meet up at some place for dinner, usually of Margaret's choosing. Margaret, like my father, is a food tourist, and it is very important that she go to whatever place is "the best" in her area. One night we went to a Mexican restaurant off Melrose called Lores or Lares or something which was absolutely delicious (shredded beef! None of this tex mex ground hamburger garbage) and saw scott cahn eating at the table across from us. You know scott caan:
Scott was one of the Mormon twins in Ocean's Eleven (the one on the left--short one). He's short in real life, though he looks exactly the same. His friends are kind of douchy-looking though, and he checks his cell a lot during dinner. But whatever, I just think it's funny, as this is the second (third?) time I have met one of my friend Bonnie's crushes, and it's getting a bit ridiculous. I mean, Scott Caan? How obscure can you be?

Another evening was spent eating In-N-Out Burger and watching "So You Think You Can Dance?" (Congratulations, Mary, on Benji's success. I was so proud). Another evening Margaret took us to Roscoe's chicken and waffles, a FUBU-style restaurant (and I don't mean that in the clothing sense) in a hole-in-the-wall off Sunset that had some of the best buttermilk-battered-fried chicken EVER. I ate across from a painting of Tupac, Biggie, Aaliyah, and Jonnie Cochran in heaven by a rainbow.

Friday Night Mary took us to the Grove to get tickets for Talledega Nights. While waiting we wandered around the Farmer's Market which, I was glad to see, was not in fact a bunch of hippies selling organic leeks, but rather a sprawling food court, outside, selling everything from fish to funnel cakes. Which I had. the fish, not the funnel cake. Was I nauseated? Yes. Did Margaret and Mary look at me with derision? Yes. Did I regret it? No. Also, Talledega Nights was hilarious, and I will fight whoever says otherwise.

Aside: Has anyone else noticed that it's suddenly very hip for indie kids to rip on will ferrell? It was like, a couple of years ago, the man could do no wrong, and every hipster loved him, and now, he's "so overrated" and every movie he's in "he plays the same character" and they have "always felt this way." Good heavens--Will Ferrell has always acted like Will Ferrell as long as Will Ferrell has been famous. This is no revelation. I absolutely DESPISE this mentality that as soon as something is embraced generally the indie community has to reject it AND pretend like they never liked it in the first place. Loud Noises! Insert angry cage rattling comment here!

My sister left Saturday to go hang out with her friends in Long Beach/ Newport, so Mary (hereby known as The South for clarification purposes) and I had the whole day to ourselves. The South an I are both very peculiar women--we're introverted and a bit surly, used to be the smartest person in the room (which brings with it a lot of sensitivity and arrogance, at least on my side), and both struggling for various reasons to stay male-positive. We also have a lot of idiosnycracies, and very odd senses of personal space, so all laws of nature dictate that we should probably not get along with each other for huge amounts of time, but we do. Sunday we went to Melrose Avenue to go Goth shopping. I am having a lot of trouble shopping because I know I will get back to my "ideal" body weight when I get to New York (ideal as in what I realistically am happy with, not what I wish I could be). Still, Melrose has the best goth shops and even better lingerie stores, so I ended up shopping a couple hundred dollars worth. I don't know why I insist on buying lingerie--no one will ever see it, and when I get married, if I get married, I'll be wearing garments, so it'll hardly matter either way. But yeah, I got some good stuff. I can't wait until I can wear it.

The South and I decided to go out to a club, since neither of us had been in a while, as we have turned into homebodies. We gothed up (though I put on a poor showing, given I had no clothes to fit into). I spent some time on IM with Mark before i left saying things I immediatly regretted before heading to the club. The South and I picked CIA--(California Institute for the Abnormalities) a club in North Hollywood with a circus freak theme. The place is decorated with Ripley's Believe-It-or-Not oddities--mummified hands, freemason bones, shrunken heads, all with vearying degrees of authenticity. Half the club was outside, in a treelined alleyway--with lights and alters everywhere. Inside was painted fun-house dayglow, ultraviolet swirls everywhere. We stumbled into a concert for a local goth band--a bit like Tura Satana, but nowhere near as awesome. The defining characteristics of said band were the subtle ways they insulted their fans ""Don't i know you from myspace? You were much hotter on myspace) and the lead singer's cleavage. I mean, wow. I was absolutely transfixed. There were so many things to wonder about--how her skin was so white, how she had managed to push them up so far (she wasn't a small girl), why they didn't pop out. But, since she obviously wasn't trying to be sexy, it wasn't as if she looked slutty--it was just...fascinating. Sorry to get off topic.

The South and I bailed around 11pm, only to get caught in midnight traffic on our way to The Rocky Horror Picture show. What city has midnight traffic? It was absurd. As it was, we barely arrived on time. The showing had a cast of regulars who dressed up and acted along with the movie, a huge amount of effort every week for what was, essentially, a very bad movie. I saw the Rocky Horror Picture show when I was 15, and again when I was 18, and I have to say, I remember it being a lot better than it was at 24. Don't get me wrong, Tim Curry still makes me hard when he sings "Sweet Transvestite", but overall, the movie has no moral, no plot, no point, and no arch. People are thrown in for random reasons, threads are never explored--it's a mess. But the actors made it a fun mess, and I always appreciate seeing Rocky in the gold lamé hot pants, if only for a brief moment.

Sunday, we went back to melrose, as I had left a bag in one of the stores, picked up my bag, and had a lovely italian lunch. we went home, changed, then drove down to Venice Beach. California Beaches are pretty much the greatest beaches ever if you're looking for swimming. They have huge waves you can body surf, and if you're not careful, you can get slammed onto the ground by a single wave (it happened--twice!). We swam, sat in the sun, cleaned up all the filthy mess left by the people around us (only heathens crush up a styrofoam box and leave it right by the water), and generally relaxed. Mary South, for all those who wanted to know, has the perfect bathing suit body--curves in all the right places. You should have seen what the people on the beach did when she walked out of the water--it was the Birth of Venus, shell and four winds included. Afterwards we walked around Venice, had burritos, saw canals, walked into the shops; generally acted like an old married couple.

The South was, in fact, the perfect host, and I wish I could have spent more time with her, and I was pretty depressed to have to leave on Monday. It was so nice to see her, and as she was there for some important parts of my life, and I was there for to witness many of hers, it went a long way to help me gain some perspective.

I had to leave early to go down to Newport and see Margaret and her college friends. They had all rented a house, and one of the girls has a particular jealousy/insecurity streak that manifests itself by being cruel to my sister. It was my job to be the silent support, as many of margaret's friends are into hipster status, and can be very catty. Plus, all of them are mormons, and so are notoriously poorly mannered, especially when it comes to money. It turns out, I was right to come down.

In the vaguest terms possible, this is what happened. Mean Girl, who I'll call Rosemary, has known my sister for a while and has always emulated her. Rosemary and my sister had some classes together, traveled a bit, and became friends. But when they were around boys, Rosemary would get mean, which was odd, as Rosemary is skinny, and my sister is thin/normal and as everyone knows, (most) LDS men love skinny more than anything else. Rosemary's boyfriend told her Margaret was cute one day, and ever since then Rosemary started changing her demeanor. She isolated my sister through various activities, and as Rosemary's boyfriend was higher on the coolness scale than margaret, people followed Rosemary's lead and started ignoring my sister. Rosemary gets married, but has continued to be mean to my sister, while simultanously copying her style and interests.

The night before I came, Margaret had told everyone they should see Talledega Nights. SInce I had all the money, Margaret couldn't afford to go, and being Mormon, everyone shrugged their shoulders and left without her. This is the kind of retarded thing we are dealing with. It isn't as if Margaret's other friends are mean--but they are all status hungry, they are all laid back, and so they tend to follow Rosemary's lead without thinking. In fact, the only people who were really kind and had genuine class were a newlywed, newly-babied couple (Camilla and Jason)--and they grew up poor, he in a trailer park. We ended up spending the biggest amount of time with them, because they were the only one's that seemed uncomfortable with how Rosemary was running the show, and they were the only one's who were polite and sweet.


Margaret, Jason, baby Sullevin, Camilla, Squarehead, Brad

Jason and Camilla took margaret surfing, and taught her how. As was to be expected, Margaret took to it right away. We went down to Huntington Beach, where I nearly drowned getting caught out in the waves. Awesome!


Camilla and Baby Sullevin

I want to keep this positive, so I wont go into the restaurant fiascos or the chain of hipster influence command, but I will reiterate how lovely Camilla and Jason were, and how much fun we all had when Rosemary and her husband were busy. They even volunteered to drive us to the airport at 7:30 in the morning--who does that? Oh, that's right, friends do that.

And the Newport stand was right by the Banana Stand they used in Arrested Development. There's always money in the banana stand.

I went to Los Angeles the first week of August. Los Angeles isn't as terrible as I remember. The traffic, however, is just as bad as I remember, and the people are much ruder. Movie tickets are $12 each. That's 2 meals from any reputable fast food establishment. That is unamerican.

Mary South let my sister and me stay with her for 4 days in her lovely apartment. While she went to work, margaret and I ate her cold cereal, watch scrubs reruns, played with the cats, and tried to figure out LA's elaborate bus route. In an effort to try and regain my sense of culture and delicacy, I forced myself to NOT go to the beach and instead go to museums and try, really try, to enjoy them again. The most obvious place then to go was the Getty.

The Getty has a small but nearly perfect collection. Sadly, their most complete collections were the ones I had the smallest interest in--Dutch 17th century, French 18th century, and British 19th century. Oh yes, blah blah, look at Rembrandt--isnt his pallet so sombre blah blah...oh look, more of the Prix de Rome school! I haven't seen enough primary colors and clean lines with classical scenes! Don't get me wrong, it's lovely, but i wasn't in the mood. I wasted the vast majority of time in the Getty's PERFECT craft and housewares area. I was legitimately excited about the collection of pottery dating from the 13th century to the 18th century--amazing pieces without a hint of damage. And the glassware! I saw etched and painted glass from Bavaria which was better than the Victoria Albert collection. The illuminated manuscripts were also awe-inspiring: I know each one was between $250,000-$1,000,000, a lot considering most of the collection was post-Gutenberg.

There was also a so-so exhibition of the Brueghel-Rubens collaboration. Rubens reminds me too much of myself, and not in a sexy way--it's my figure, flushed and hot looking, with lots of billowing things around it. And then poor Brueghel, bless him, is left to do the fiddly bits around the edges. Still, the severed head of medusa was worth the visit, and margaret and I had coup and brie and ham sandwiches on the terrace while some Japanese visitors watched, mouths agape, as I stuffed my face like a chocking animal.

Museum #2 was Margaret's call--the Musuem of Natural History. Whenever there is a choice between anything and dinosaurs, Margaret chooses dinosaurs. Unless that something is making out--then making out wins. Otherwise: dinosaurs. I had high hopes because there was an exhbition on Bog people. The exhibit, cruelly, turned out to be a huge waste of time, as it was basically watered down to the lowest common denominator so I didn't actually learn anything about the chemistry or the history of the bogs that wasn't obvious from Seamus Heaney's poetry. There were some Roman textiles on display though that were in such perfect condition you'd have thought they just came from Bed Bath and Beyond.

This is the skeleton of the "Terror Bird." Check out the nametag--I kid you not


These are two primitive cats trying to kill each other. And it's ADORABLE.


The room of stuffed North American wildlife. My heart's the bitter buffalo.

I have to put the kids to bed. We will continue talking about this conversation when I get back.

AlexiaIscariot: how did the crew like "snakes on a plane"?
Rocketstar20: and any time this week you wanna hang out before you go lemme know
Rocketstar20: dude that movie was THE WORST not good at all movie i have ever seen
Rocketstar20: but the main problem was this
Rocketstar20: there are only so many uncomfortable places a snake needs to bite in one movie
Rocketstar20: say there were 30 possible places 8-10 would ahve worked
Rocketstar20: i didnt need all 30

oh my oh my. My family was just in town for 5 days and I am totally spent. It's fun being a tourist in Chicago. The food, particularly, rules: hot dogs, pizza, greek town, and tons of booze. Now the fam has made its way back to NY, and I am trying to return to my normal life -- catching up at work, calling Anne(!) and letting my friends know that I'm still alive.

Guess who has skin cancer? Me, baby, and not even 25!

Around the time I got back from one of my trips to oceania, either New Zealand or Bali, I noticed a new mole popped up on my leg. It's no secret I never wear sunscreen, AND both my father and my grandfather had skin cancer, AND I check obsessively for moles and/or lumps, so something was bound to eventually turn up that would send me to the doctor's office.

So this new mole. My father makes an appointment with a top Dallas dermatologist/oncologist, who takes a look at the spots on my back and shoulders, and a look at my leg. Since a) it's new and b) most women get melanomas on their leg, he decides to biopsy it, which i thought was removing a small piece but which is acually taking a flexible raxor blade and sawing off the mole (don't worry, doesn't hurt). Then they put the mole in a jar, and tell me to go home, it's probably normal.

And then I get a call that, oh wait, yes it's 90% normal, and the other 10% is made up of random "abnormal cells" which means the whole area needs to be gouged out. Luckily, because we got it so early (2mm), it's totally not a big deal, but if I had waited, it woud have developed into serious melonoma.

Anyway, thought I'd share

On Sunday, I watched The Shins (the sound was bad. they are too quiet for that big big stage.) Of Montreal (like an adorable dance party freak show) and Broken Social Scene (awesome, awesome, awesome. so awesome, in fact, that they've now been promoted to my lists of favorite music on all social networking sites!).

All in all, well worth the $45 buck ticket price.

I went back to Lollapalooza yesterday to watch The New Pornographers. During 'Sing Me Spanish Techno' I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and this chubby boy who couldn't have been more than 18 asked me to dance. So we danced for the rest of the song. At the end of the song he shook my hand awkwardly. I wanted to say something nice or encouraging or something, but instead I just said "thanks" and then burst into tears as I walked away.

I am gay for Leslie Feist.

Lollapalooza is fun. I don't understand why people hate it so much. I've already seen 6 really good performances: Iron&Wine, Sleater-Kinney, Feist, Built to Spill, Calexico and Sonic Youth.

I love that Built to Spill makes fun of the corporate aspect of Lolla ("budweiser doesn't care about us. adidas doesn't care about us. perry farrell doesn't care about us.") while they're recording and selling their music under the auspices of a Fortune 50 company. Guess, what kids! Time Warner is a BIGGER, MEANER AND MORE CORPORATE conglomerate that Anheuser-Busch and Adidas combined! PUNK ROCK FOREVER! Way to stick it to the man.

Anyway, bullshit like that aside, I'm having fun.

When I started posting aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall the way back in 2001, every post was a testament (more or less) of my own awesomeness. I wrote with the expectation that everyone thought I was as amazing as I thought I was, and everyone was hanging onto everything I said. Of course, that is a ridiculous attitude, but I look back on those pompous and self-indulgent posts and I like them--they're honest, tortured, and egotistical, but dangit, I like reading them. I can tell, at the time, I really, really liked who I was, and the posts show it, if in a perhaps juvenile way.

2006 blogging has been, you may have noticed, less frequent. I can blame a lot of this on traveling and the NYC move, but the truth is, I don't want to blog. For me to be comfortable blogging, I need to share something, feel that I have a point of view to impart, and most importantly, feel I deserve to have others listen. Right now, I don't feel those things.

I don't want to throw a pity party--it's obvious to me that I have a brilliant future, friends who love me, a wonderful family. This dry spell is mostly about my personal failure to heal from the past year with anything approaching dignity or grace. I wanted to leave behind these past two years quickly, cinematically even--spring would come, I would pass by a window full of tulips and realize that the past is past: tear, smile, roll credits. No one told me that healing--real healing--is ugly and grotesque. It is the emotional equivalent of scabbing--open sores crusting over, stitched back together, breaking open in places and oozing serum. It is jerky and jarring, painful and embarrassing. It also takes much longer than you think it will.

I dealt with the past 2 years by putting my head down and trucking on. Because my personality balances a lot of (seeming) paradoxes, it takes an enormous amount of mental attention to keep everything clean and in order. Now I've forgotten where I've kept things, and I seem a mess--I don't know why I support capitalism over socialism, why I support the death penalty but not partial birth abortion, what my precise stance is on homosexuality. I simply don't remember the balance I struck between altruism and selfishness, what my writing is trying to say, what I am looking for. I read the economist and the national review, time and NYT, and yet when people ask me how i feel about a certain issue, or how i justify a certain behavior, I shut down. Things are not where I left them. I feel alienated from my own mind.

All in all, I really don't like myself that much anymore. I don't feel as if I've accomplished anything in the last 2 years, I don't feel as if I'm a success. I don't feel particularly smart or particularly talented because I have nothing to show--no accolades, no publications, no works or sketches or milestones to prove that I've grown in any way these past few years. I feel like a failure. And because my mind is a mess, I don't even feel like I have a consistent point of view to detail to you all the ways in which I am a mess. I mean, I don't even enjoy reading or fine art--I don't enjoy anything that seeks to talk to me on a deeper level. This period of my life isn't fun to watch, this isn't fun for me to blog--it's ugly and violent and horrible. I'd rather emerge clean and shining and healed in a few months time to impart wisdom and compassion.

But sadly, you can't pick and choose what you want people to see--that sort of defeats the purpose of the blog. I just want to apologize for being such a self-indulgent mess. I feel like a 15 year old--all angst and no sense. I guess all I can ask is that you don't comment on the car crash. You can rubberneck all you like; just don't say anything. These emotional outbursts are embarrassing enough.