Dog Days of Summer

One of my favorite things about summer is being able to hang out with my dog all day. Just look at that face. Normally Penny is not the most photogenic of ladies, but I caught her at a good angle. One of these days I'll pull the cat in for a photoshoot. For now, I'm trying to figure out how I should go about turning him into an Internet sensation.

Summer so far has been a lot of lemonade and a lot of job searching. My wallet is grumbling in a "feed-me" sort of way. I'm pretty sure I just scored a freelance reporter gig at a local paper, and my mom is going to be paying me to clean out the basement and garage, but when it comes to making money, I'm afraid I'm becoming a bit addicted to it. I worked the Phonathon at my school this past spring, and getting that check in my mailbox made me feel so euphoric. I want to have that feeling all summer. I think it'll nicely complement the popsicles and books I'll also be savoring.

But I'm also getting in some adventures with other people. This weekend I was in New York City with two old friends from high school and we smoked hookah and ate Asian food and people watched until the wee hours of every morning until it was time to go. Other highlights included gawking at the packs of attractive Marines in town for Fleet Week, and spending an afternoon at The Museum of Sex. It's definitely worth a visit; there's a great exhibit up now about animal sex. Totally ideal for a third date.

So now I'm off to compose a cover letter. But all I really want to do is go on the swings outside and then dance to mashups in my room. Summer, I'm finding, does require some prioritizing.

Peace, Love, and Semicolons,
Lisa

Home?

This is a photo of St. Vincent's Hospital, located on West 12th st. and 7th Ave. in New York. I was born here, which was weird because my parents lived way up in the West 70s. All their friends were having babies at Lenox Hill and Sloan Kettering, but none of those places had a midwife program like St. Vincent's, and my mother absolutely insisted on having a midwife help deliver my precious little baby self. It sort of makes sense that the downtown hospital would have something as decidedly unconventional as a midwife program, come to think of it. So that's where I was born. My dad likes to make jokes about a Jewish mother pushing her Jewish baby out in a bed with a cross hanging over it.

Anyway, I'm not going to tell the story of how I was born, even though it is a good one. I'm going to tell the story of how I was walking in downtown Manhattan the other day, going to my favorite restaurant, Tea and Sympathy at 108-110 Greenwich Ave. I love this place because not only does it have a wide array of teas and pastries and British foods (because say what you will about British cuisine, I adore a good ham and cream cheese sandwich with sticky toffee pudding for dessert) but it's one of the few places I know where a lady can have a meal by herself and not feel like a complete loser doing so. Also, I have a fond appreciation for the waitstaff, who all have authentic British accents, and the decor, which is a bunch of kitschy, British memorabilia. It makes my Anglophile self just chuffed to bits.

But this is all related. As I was walking to Tea and Sympathy, I walked by St. Vincent's Hospital. Feeling like it was just too big a coincidence for my favorite restaurant to be a stone's throw away from my place of birth, I started to walk a little more slowly. I looked around. There were bodegas with flowers being sold under the awnings, smoke shops, boutiques, pharmacies, and above all these places were apartments. Apartments that I suddenly felt I needed to inhabit. Because my perfect home is one that makes me grow. I want Greenwich Avenue to grab my ankles and West 12th street to take my wrists, and I want them to pull me until I'm ten feet tall.

But with my birthplace and favorite place on either side of me, I felt like where I came from finally felt like a part of me. All the gritty particles surrounded me and made the air fit me like a glove, and even though I didn't hold the keys to any of those apartments, I was home.

Peace, Love, and Semicolons,
Lisa

Adventures in Packingland.

Tonight I am packing to go home after my first year of college. It's a bit overwhelming, because I totally underestimated the emotional implications of this task. Deciding where everything will go, what to throw away, what to store, recycle, donate, etc. requires me to really look at everything I own and consider its value to me. But not only that, I have such strong associations with everything in here. Putting them away and leaving this room for some other freaked out first year feels like too much too soon. It feels like I was just getting everything together at this place, and now it's over.

But I don't think it'll really hit me until I take everything off my walls: the picture of my eighth grade idol Kurt Cobain, the Bob Dylan picture with the quote I used in my Common App essay, the Birth of Venus done in pop-art style, modern day Venus Christina Hendricks in a corset on the cover of New York Magazine, Washington Square Park where I will live someday even if it rips a hole in my wallet, the playlist of my life written by one of my best friends from high school, the 500 Days of Summer poster that I got for free because of a series of weird circumstances and because I will marry Joseph Gordon-Levitt someday. There's also a drawing from an old friend that he drew for me one of our first nights here when the whole world was like a party. There are the postcards of Swedish fairytales, the pictures from the National Geographic website that wore out my color ink cartridge...

Those things on my walls have been collected for a year and while the rest of my room has changed and the rest of my things have changed positions, they've stayed put. When they come down, it's over. I'm going to cover my walls at home with every picture I can find, because they look like bare bones now.

So that's one thought I've had while packing up my life here. Or one series of collective thoughts that fall under one category. Others are things like:

"Oh damn that's where that was."
"How the hell do I get honey off of imitation wood?"
"Can this be recycled?"
"Do I really, truly, need these unopened staples and index cards in my life?"
"This rug is like a singles bar for dust bunnies."
"Have I really just packed a whole backpack full of BOOKS? That's kind of awesome."
"What's with all this trash lying around? I disgust myself sometimes."
"Having a lot of stuff really makes life difficult sometimes."
"Oh I am so glad I'm not flying home."

Yeah. Adventures in Packingland is definitely more introspective than I thought. Maybe I should pick a soundtrack for it besides "Lady Gaga Radio" on Pandora.

Peace, Love, and Semicolons,
Lisa

This isn't my study carrel

But these are all my drinks. From left, we have coffee, orange carrot juice, and water with tangerine flavored Emergen-C added to it. That's me in the background, looking a little worse for wear. You can't tell, but Nelly is blasting through those headphones. Southern gangster rap used to make me more productive, but now it seems to make me nostalgic for those impossibly crowded, sweaty dance parties I used to go to before finals happened.

A week ago, I was drinking wine with Kelly and going on ChatRoulette. Then Peter came over and we talked about Tchaikovsky. Tonight I'm just trying to make this paper exist despite my case of the sniffles and clogged head. That's what the beverages are for. Coffee is pretty basic and expected, though I did have to mix the regular dark roast with the hazelnut light roast, because they were all out of dark roast. The carrot orange juice is for the vitamin C, which will hopefully heal me. Same goes for the Emergen-C, although that probably has more stuff in it as well. The box said it's a natural source of energy. I hope that's not a lie. I highly doubt that powdered stuff I just mixed in my water bottle grows on any trees.

Oh and I'm also hiding in someone else's study carrel. Everywhere else is too loud or has too many people. I've been trying to figure out what this person's concentration is based on the books in here. Something about art and gender, perhaps. I hope they're graduating in a few weeks and don't have use for this thing anymore, because I'm all spread out and moving would be really embarrassing and cumbersome and loud.

Peace, Love, and Semicolons,
Lisa

In a Funke.

I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that someone out there thought it was a good idea to have Tobias Funke permanently inked onto his skin for all posterity. If you were a true Tobias fan, I'd say get a pair of jean short shorts tattooed somewhere.

It's certainly hot enough to prance around in nothing but some Tobias Funke cutoffs. The question is, would they effectively hide my thunder?

Okay, done with the Arrested Development references. That show has become my therapy recently. It's like, no matter what weird things my own family does that I'm seeming to become more aware of as I age, at least I've never had to talk my mom into visiting my dad in his prison's conjugal visit trailer (I know I said I was done with the Arrested Development references, but I may have lied a little) I guess that's a perk of having divorced parents? The conjugal visit thing, not the lying thing.

Oh dear, I think the humidity might be going to my head. Or maybe that's the lack of caffeine. Haven't actually felt like making tea yet. All in good time, I suppose.

Peace, Love, and Semicolons
Lisa

Accomplishments

Tonight I will get work done. I'm trying a new trick that my friend Kelly told me about today on the bus back to school from Amherst: "Pretend your essay is due tomorrow, and do it." I replied "That sounds terrifying, but it might be just what I need to finally get something done." So that's the plan. I've got a pretty full plate with finals, and my professors are still assigning work that isn't finals. Also I need to procure a job for the summer. But stressing feels counterproductive now, and I just want to write about things I have accomplished. So here we go, a list of things I've done in recent days that need to be recorded for all posterity.
1. I put on false eyelashes. I went to a party last night as a "Moustached Victorian Pinup" and they seemed essential. At least for the pinup part. Because I've always wondered what it would be like to remotely resemble Brigitte Bardot for a given period of time. As if she needed false eyelashes. Anyway, I picked them up at CVS a while back for a rainy day, and last night was balmy and clear but like I said, they were aesthetically necessary. I stood in front of my mirror for about five minutes, and I kept gluing my eye shut without meaning to and getting white lash glue all up on the fake lashes and beginning to wonder if anyone would even notice if I wore these or not. But I persisted and finally got those buggers to stay on. My level of pride was up there with the time I got into my first choice college. I'm never the girl with all the beauty tricks. I like to play around with makeup but it never goes beyond wearing neon eyeshadow to a dark dance party where no one will see it anyway. I don't even own a hair straightener. So it was nice when I finally made those fake eyelashes stay on my face. I did a little dance after.

2. Crafted a delicious breakfast sandwich that I will very likely crave next year when I'm not on the meal plan. A fried egg, bacon, and Swiss cheese on a croissant. Breakfast sandwiches are the BEST. I will have to be stocked on provisions for them in the mod next year. I will make all the breakfast sandwiches all the time, and will drink coffee with them and read newspapers and be all domestic. Also I will listen to jazz like a proper grownup, and have dinner parties with place cards. But they'll have to be scheduled around VH1 marathons.

3. Discovered a giant used book sale under a tent in Amherst today. Can I just say that I love places that sell books perhaps a little more than I love reading the books themselves? I've always been able to spend inordinate amounts of time in bookstores. This one sucked me in like a literary vacuum cleaner. It had tables with books spread all out over them. Finding ones for me was difficult, because I'm very picky with books. I have such a short attention span, so if something starts slow it ends up collecting dust on my shelf. But the three books I carried home today look like they'll be read by me soon. They passed my test before I bought them. I read the first few pages and wasn't bored. As I walked out from under the tent and into the overwhelming May heat, I chuckled at how incongruous I must have looked buying them. In the crook of my arm, I had "This Side of Paradise" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Decadent social commentary and run on sentences.), "House of Sand and Fog" by Andre Dubus III (a sad book, not to be read in public or strangers will see me crying like that time I watched "He's Just not that Into You" on a plane...) and "And I Don't Want to Live this Life" by Deborah Spungen (Nancy of Sid and Nancy's mother. Should probably avoid reading this one in public too, but because it will make people think I'm one of those women who watches "Nancy Grace")
I must scamper off now in search of sustenance for the coming hours, which will unfortunately not be spent in that lovely looking bedroom in the Shakespeare Bookstore in Paris. Maybe someday I'll be a wandering writer who crashes there, but for now I'm just a student at a small liberal arts college. So basically the gateway drug to being a wandering writer.

Peace, Love, and Semicolons,
Lisa

Thoughts as I watch the days change in the library.

-I'm listening to Irish music as I do research for my independent study on women's public health in Ireland. It takes the edge off of reading about The X-Case. For those who don't know, that involved the Irish government preventing a 14-year-old rape victim from traveling to England to get a legal, safe abortion. It's hard for me to believe that such a beautiful place could function in such a totalitarian manner, but listening to penny whistles and fiddles with keening reminds me that the beauty is still there. I should know, I spent two glorious weeks in Galway this past January. It's hard not to taste Guinness with currant in my mouth when I hear "Fields of Athenry." Bittersweet. We spent so many nights in Taaffes Bar, drinking pints and playing games as music we had never heard live filled the room. I miss it there. Oh Ireland, I may not agree with your politics, but we just won't talk about that. Let's count sheep on the side of the road (literally) and eat roasted potatoes with chowder before we dance with strangers in pubs and fall asleep with Guinness on our breaths and wonder in our hearts. I think I'm falling in love with you.

-I like libraries. Especially during finals week. There's a weird sense of camaraderie. Like we're all stuck in the same rickety boat and it's raining on us and it sucks but we're here. We make sure no one steals each others' laptops when they're in the bathroom or getting more coffee. We sit at tables with strangers because we don't want to sit on the floor.

-Maybe I could have read that whole article in the time it's taken me to write this blog post. I'm tired.

-I wrote a dirty poem today. It felt cathartic, perhaps more so than my depressing poems. I like being someone who writes dirty poems. Now if only I could be someone who has the chutzpah to read them to people.

Peace, Love, and Semicolons,
Lisa