31 July 2006

3 pitchforked

we are officially pitchfork fested out. so much so that kuhryzsteenuh and i could only power through until lame-o 3 p.m. on sunday. but we went. we saw. we used both tickets. and we learned some things.

when you have a music festival for all the non-conformists, everyone looks the same.

there are certain environments where i am not the world's palest person.

80s communist russia is the dominant well-spring of 21st century fugly.

wind pants or hairy legs? without a doubt- wind pants.

watergun fights are ill-advised when your eyebrows are painted on.

the fratsters have arrived. (the tide was a-turning when at a vanderbilt univ. 2004 modest mouse concert, the entire polo-shirted frat population showed up to pump their fists to "black cadillacs," but it has gone too far.)

oh and: man man= fun fun.

28 July 2006

2 this household has no male heads

there is no male head in my household. we've established that already. and the situation has not changed. my household is headed only by my female head- filled with polka-dots, kennedy history, bungalow dreams, pretty words, witty one-liners, bird fears and the confederate army, clown divison. i think it's a pretty good head to have and a pretty good head to be heading a household. so, to my extensive audience of courtesy callers, no more of this pushy "let me speak with the male of head of the household" business. us staunch bombshells, we don't appreciate that.

UPDATE: not five minutes after the above was written, the phone rang. they asked for "the lady of the house." an obvious testament to the scope and power of my courtesy caller readership. well done, my friends.

26 July 2006

3 colouring

i've been a user of hair coloring off and on since high school. and that's been about the most daring thing i've done. no piercings, no tatoos, no smoking, etc, etc. but i am, to an extent, a hair chameleon. (though in the interest of full disclosure even that isn't quite as rebellious as it sounds since it's always of the "28 shampoos" variety and a safety shade has been identified in case things go awry and i wind up green a' la anne.)

as the Decade of Bad Hair (1991-2001) drew to a close, hair dye provided a pleasant reprieve. i was red at senior prom, orange at graduation, mulberry sophomore year of college (the bargain bin is a harsh mistress, my friends. never trust her when it comes to hair colorant). it's why, since the hellaciousness of a particular production experience last year, nearly every deadline after has been commemorated with a new shade of dark brownness.

way back when, there was a summer of a lot of placebo and velvet goldmine and black nail polish and glamness. and i so wanted to dye my hair black, but i didn't. because it would make my mum- who is of the opinion that nice ladies don't color their hair, much less color it unnatural colors- frown. and she would have seen me on a regularish basis at the time so i would have been frowned at regularly and that's no fun. well, today i went- because i got in a mood and the market had only three shades, one blonde, one my safety and then- "midnight noir." it turned out interestingly- part marilyn manson, part monica geller. and really all i ask is to be interesting.

my mum doesn't know about "midnight noir," so the frowning has yet to begin. but i'm impetutous when the "i need hair of a different color" impulse strikes. and while i have sense enough to go for the black instead of the blonde, other things don't get fully thought through. so it wasn't until after a ha ha over having followed the hair path of britney spears that i remembered my mum is coming to town. in a mere 19 shampoos. echoing the moral that would have been drawn from the life of belle watling had craig brewer made gone with the wind: it's hard out here for a dyed haired woman.

24 July 2006

4 what dreams may come

my father always said no one wants to hear your dreams unless they're in them. you were all in this one, so here it is: a dream in three acts.

(bombsy, analyze this.)

[begin dream]

prof. j bought a house in greensboro. a white clapboard bungalow (i heartily approve) with a sunporch. photographs were emailed, which for reasons unknown i decided to view at a red picnic table in the middle of a massive field far from civilization. meaning there was an incredibly long way to run to fetch the parental express to show them. meaning that the lappy and the picnic table were only just coming into view again when an enormous thunderstorm broke out. meaning i watched its destruction without being able to do anything about it.

ESLA and the dread pirate were having a movie night in an abandoned house that we seemed to think we owned, presumably somewhere in chicago and far from the far from everything field. croftie and i needed to be somewhere to do JBB-related things, but everyone else was bundled up in sleeping bags on the floor watching the cutting edge. they begged us not to leave. we love the cutting edge so i don't think we did.

but somehow i wound up alone on a civil war battlefield with the clown division of the confederate army. for good measure, let me repeat that: the confederate army, clown division. so there were clowns. clowns operating cannons, clowns loading other clowns into cannons, clowns shooting out of cannons and presumably clowns flying across the battlefield and making the yankees pee from shock.

[end dream]

fortunately, vieve rolled out one of her trademark dance parties at this point, so i was spared the sight of clown casualties and yankees cramming clown corpses into crowded clown cars and stealing clown shoes and festooning themselves with assorted clown finery.

but i can't quite express the trauma of wandering upon the clown division of the conferederate army in a dream. surely the confederate army clown division are denizens of hell. surely i have breached the infernal borders and been given a glimpse of just how low the devil will stoop to terrorize decent God-fearing, bird-hating people. i have had a vision. damn yankees? damned clowns.

23 July 2006

1 she wore lemon

darling maggot (my junior prom date and forever valentine) came to town. we ate the pizza of our lives, talked tabloids and "whoha," and shopped till we dropped.

despite my own rather random personal aesthetic (ie. camo and plaids, year-round x-mas socks, etc.), i do have a finely tuned appreciation for situational unity. when unpremeditated events unfold as though they were a premeditated cohesive whole. so i must boast a bit about the pleasing balance of my own purchases. it was simply uncanny.

at 9.45, the yellow bag. at 12.10, after a hell of a line, the yellow coat. at 2.30, the perfume- "woman in yellow."

thus, the red period draws to a close and, despite the avian implications, canary here we come.

22 July 2006

3 miss world

i love my street. i hate the international hostel.

in theory, it's very exotic and jet setty and all that jazz. in reality, it's annoying as all get out. i now routinely cross the street to avoid it.

the international hostel is like little europe. and i do like europe. i dance to gogol bordello and went to italy and shopped in kiev and learned latin. i just didn't quite expect to find little europe in the middle of lincoln park.

it's all because of the bleachers. there's a drop between the hostel's yard and the sidewalk that acts as an instant viewing stand. from this vantage point, there are always at least three people, usually men, sitting and smoking and playing checkers. as if the bleachers weren't enough, occasionally three or four chairs materialize as well. so there are sometimes upwards of 15 seated people taking in the view (a tally that doesn't include those milling in doorways and leaning out windows).

having never participated in a beauty pageant, i can only surmise that it must feel something like walking past the hostel at 6 PM on a saturday afternoon. there are shouts of american baby! ummm! hot american stuff! aha! american baby! oooooh! hot american gul! you! hot american gul!

the first time i walked past was a bad hair day so this was midly flattering. after that, not so much. now i'm always armed: sunglasses on, upod cranked up, speedwalking and staring straight ahead.

although they're often wearing wife-beaters from the old world, there are quite frequently some rather attractive people at the hostel. it's a pity the only words they learned in english class were hot, american, baby, girl, stuff. because that makes for one really gross sentance.

21 July 2006

1 for the love of vieve

after months of self-imposed seperation, in the midst of the summer hot and an intense pillboxing session, p. kitty and i resumed our love affair last night.

needless to say, when i stumbled home at 7 PM, covered in blonde hairs and overheated after the walk of shame back up arlington, vieve was not amused. we're going on 21 hours of this face.

19 July 2006

2 marshmallow treasures

my two biggest vices are a massive diet coke addiction and a fondness for sugared breakfast cereals. since somewhere near an embarrassing $15 a week goes to sustaining the DC habit, i try to keep the sugary cereals business in check by settling for whatever is on sale. thus, breakfast veers wildly from bran flakes to fruity pebbles to quaker oats toasted oatmeal squares to cocoa puffs. when captain crunch and lucky charms hit below the $3.99 mark, it's like winning the lottery.

this week, lucky charms were a magical $3.89. this is the ceral that was only ever on very exciting rare occasions available at my grandmother's house. with 12 vitamins and minerals, whole grain and calcium (not to mention MARSHMALLOWS!), it's an overload of delight.

in memphis, i lived in close proximity to a target and was able to enjoy off-brand sugary cereals galore on the cheap. the only discernable difference was that the charms had a harder life. they were deformed masses of colored marshmallow. these were not the lucky charms.

so i'm accustomed to the occasional randomly shaped charms. nonetheless, i was completely mystified when i peered into my cereal bowl this morning and found this:

i thought: oh. it's an ostrich egg. no. a white balloon. no. a cloud. oh please not curdled milk. no. someone's discarded flavor-crystal filled gum. no. ummm. what the hell is that?! and how on earth does it fit into the well-established lucky charms narrative?!

my friends, that is a sparkling magic mirror marshmallow. it will help Lucky (the lucky charms leprechaun, in case you're out of the know) see the future and avoid dangers along the way in his enchanted forest adventure.

according to the box artwork, the mirror marshmallows are splattered with "sparkling magic" a la pollack. but it was apparently a lazy day at General Mills when my box was birthed because there's a shocking shortage of sparkling magic. clearly the person in charge of this gimick didn't quite think things through. for an opaque circle with sprinkle sparkles does not a mirror make.

and what of poor Lucky, on his enchanted forest adventure? marshamallow, marshmallow on the wall, i can't see anything at all.

16 July 2006

2 that guy

so there's this guy, the inevitable friend of a friend, that we kind of know. actually, we don't so much as know him as know random, off-putting tidbits about him.

we know that he came to our mid-may picnic in the park wearing a white linen suit, the cherry handkerchief coordinated to match his cherry shirt. we know that he stood on the opposite end of the blanket tete-a-teting with one of our boyfriend's and accused us of projecting "a wall of unapproachability."

above all, we know that mid-evening he made a costume change, switching from the rather pimpy white linen suit/red shirt combo to an equally sleazy black suit/purple shirt combo. again with a coordinated hankie. again linen. all this to go to a dive bar.

from the friend whose friend he is, we know that he loves women. he doesn't so much want to be loved by a woman as to love women. and he doesn't understand why women don't love him when all he wants to do is love them. we wanted to say dude. the costume change.

he also frequents strip clubs, which leads us to believe he doesn't really know what love is.

this weekend, our friend, whose friend this friend of a friend is, went to this grand birthday party in a huge, ritzy building downtown. it had been talked of as almost the party of the year. very black & white ball. when the bombshell told me that this was the birthday party of the friend of the friend, i snorted. when she said not only was this the birthday bash of the friend of a friend, this was the birthday bash the friend of a friend was throwing for himself, i nearly fell off a bar stool.

i have no desire to be friends with the friend of a friend. between the linen suit, the leering, and the love of women, he's presented himself as quite the lech. but i do have a rather manipulative intrest in him. his life is so desperately begging to be metamorphed into a novella that it would almost be worth putting up with some dirty glances. almost.

he's just so over-the-top, so completely wrong, and so blithely oblivious to it that he becomes mysteriously, ickily fascinating. what with the leering and linen suits and costume changes and audacious birthday bashes. very tom wolfe in a way. i could easily see the friend of a friend writing an 800 page novel on the loins of collegiate girls. which is precisely why, for the rest of his life, he'll always be everyone's friend of a friend.

14 July 2006

2 the bombshell's diabolic scheme

three things. i LOVE u2 (you know me, you know this). i write. so i occasionally write random fluff for a u2 newsite.

as a result, i'm now assigned to interview and profile the u2 cover band that bombsy and i saw at navy pier last month. and from this has sprung bombsy's diabolic scheme: that i must date faux bono.

we know nothing about faux bono, excepting that he likes u2 enough to be faux bono and that he looks creepily young. he could be in community college. he could be a communist. he could be celtic. we have no idea.

BUT- he plays the harmonica and there's nothing quite like a guy who plays the harmonica. and since i've never known a guy who played the harmonica (or at least well enough to indicate that there had been lessons at some point), i'm not immediately nixing this rather fantastical notion.

bombsy, of course, has run away with it, musing on where our first date will be (a pub, obviously). what i should wear to their next show (hair definately down, that red shirt that stopped traffic, the black lace skirt, and oh yeah, the HUGE white sunglasses). at what point in the show i should approach him about the interview (during the break in between sets, so he'll be aware that you're a creature of mystery for the remainder). and how we should introduce him into our friend group (friend group, meet faux bono).

a brown-eyed girl with dark hair and diaphanous skirts, i'm to be perceived as a potential faux ali. because a faux bono would need a faux ali. then we could become decoys for the real bono and the real ali, shadowing them around the globe and making very public, paparazzi distracting departures in bullet-proof SUVs. apparently being faux ali would have an entire lifestyle attached to it, a kind of tom clancy lifestyle at that.

and being faux ali would be an adventure. as bombsy said from high atop her throne in subway, leaning over a ham and turkey on white: "sometimes you have to be faux ali on the way to being real oline." i tore another piece off my turkey on wheat and smiled and said hmmmm...

12 July 2006

8 in which oline tries to rationalize and exorcise the IBF

the time has come for a bit of an explanation.

i hate birds. they are rats with wings. they make me want to cuss.

as far as i can tell, this fear developed when partner and i were in venice. the venitian pidgeons are uncommonly bold and thought nothing of swooping upon us in such a horde that we literally stood in st. mark's square clutching one another. since then, the birds and i have been at extreme odds.

lately, their reign of terror has reached new heights of ridiculousness. north carolina seemed so tranquil. it was only upon returning to chicago that i realized it was because there had been no harrassment from the bird population.

in trying to rationalize the irrational bird fear to people, i've concocted a decent, appropriately irrational, hypothesis. while i will in no way attest to its veracity, it seems mildly plausible. so here's oline's own Irrational Bird Fear (IBF) Theory:

1. eyes are really gross. yeah they're great when you're wild about someone and stare deep into the mirror of their soul. but the minute anything goes remotely wrong they're totally disgusting. with a single stray eyelash, a beautiful eye becomes an inflamed mess, the rubbing of which produces an obscenely gross squishing noise that partner used to torment me with in pre-cal. i wear contacts so am resigned to being up close and personal with my own eyes, but the grossness lingers and an eighth grade shop class warning that you always have to stay awake during the surgery for eye injuries remains seared into my brain.

2. at some point i picked up the aforementioned hatred/fear of birds. this is obviously psychologically linked to the inherent grossness of eyes. for, i ask you, what is a bird but a spastic, flying eye poking out instrument walking on wormy feet and dressed in pretty feathers?

3. i wear huge sunglasses all the time. up until now this habit served three purposes: the hugeness protected my delicate complexion from being brutalized by the sun. the lenses protected my unruly contacts from rebelling. and, obviously, the glasses themselves were a jackie/audrey homage. but now i can't help but see them as some unconscious effort to keep the birds out. my personal anti-eye poking device.

so we wind up with a simple scientific formula:
eyes+birds= oline's nightmare
eyes+birds+sunglasses= oline's rationalization of IBF

but then, maybe my IBF isn't so irrational. they do, after all, make signs. and if they make it a sign, it's gotta have some validity.

08 July 2006

4 "you there! hooligans!"

my oldest, dearest sister-friend libby got married last night in what turned out to be the funnest wedding of all time. growing up we whiled away entire summers sprawled on the cool wood floor before my GPs' television dipping vanilla wafers in chocolate pudding and watching judy garland musicals. a favorite was summer stock, in which a group of actors invade a hicktown farm and crash the historical society's barnyard polka, taking to the dance floor with their wild swing moves as the scandalized townfolk watch from the sidelines fearing for their saftey. it was appropriate then that libby's wedding should climax with a cluster of dancing grad students and bridesmaids singing "livin' on a prayer" at the top of their lungs while the "adults" looked on from a safe distance in wonder. there we were: shoes off, skirts hiked, voices shrill, arms entwined, singing with our eyes closed. magical.

03 July 2006

0 the devil doesn't wait in line

i've always wanted to witness an art riot. not so much like the rioting against the jyllands-posten cartoons, where things are blown up and people get head wounds, but any of the more sedate classical music riots would do: benvenuto cellini, salomé, parade, ballet mécanique, chansons madécasses, the rites of spring. events where people rushed the stage, fists clamped over their offended ears and attacked the performers with handbags and produce. alas rioting is a rarity in modern life, so i had yet to fulfill my dream. until yesterday.

croftie and i went to see the devil wears prada. we went to the theater we've come to love for it's matinee prices and more mature clientele. due to screwy orgazination and the unforseen incredible popularity of this film among the old folks crowd (are they whiling away retirement reading gawker and cursing anna wintour?) there was some line around the block business.

this quickly devolved into a volatile situation when the outside ticket booth was opened and the front-of-the-liners were flanked by the caboose. there was much banging on the manager's door and whining of "this just isn't fair." one older woman berrated her even older female friend (who was rocking an adorable black suit, red purse, black cane combo that made us wish she was our friend) for not getting a ticket earlier. we wanted to hug the immactulately dressed berrated one and ask where she shops.

croftie and i had a backup plan so we were nonplussed. we got tickets and went to the theater, where we were greeted by a haughty, red-faced woman who muttered, "good luck finding seats!" luck must have been with us because we did indeed find seats. we watched previews. the sound flickered off and the film ran silent for a moment and we giggled as the complaining commenced. the film returned and it was a grand little chick flick nothing like the book and that was that.

this is honestly the closest i've ever come to an art riot. and i think it does qualify. it was not so much a riot brought on by art, but a riotous atmosphere created by a dire, frightful need to see art, namely meryl streep and a parade of couture. croftie and i were perfectly willing to settle for the lake house, but nothing but the devil would do for these people. they were going to see the devil or there would be hell to pay. and on a sunday too. for shame.