kdiddy.org

The classics never die.

That is my current attitude. It really does not help that just a day ago I was happily lazing around Tracey‘s house with Angela, reveling in several days spent with good friends, having good conversations.

Today, life is not really up to my standards.

Earlier this week, the husband worked some magic with the Allen wrenches and my house, formerly The Land of Flat Packs, now has some shelving and bins and stuff. When we saw the first patch of floor in my son’s room, we cautiously whispered, “What is that?” Then, when we realized that it was the hideous green speckled carpeting that we had first encountered three years ago before the toy layer was set in place like sediment, there was much rejoicing.

We still have a number of things to do before we can move him into the smaller bedroom that we’ve been remodeling off and on since we bought the place. For your reference, here is what we were faced with when we got here (you’ll have to supply the cat urine smell yourself):

I really wonder why this look was so popular. It’s like living under an oppressive burnt marmalade regime.

And here’s what it looked like when the walls met the business ends our sledgehammers and crowbars:

Work and school and money have slowed the process considerably, but the small room now has insulation and new walls and new trim. I’m really pushing (read: whining) to have this room done by the end of the summer. Then I’ll get to take “after” pictures!

We went to see the new Harry Potter movie last night. It was okay. I was mostly entertained by the previews for 2012, which looks god-awful. Plus, John Cusack is the heroic lead, which is just kind of funny to me, and I think they should have played up this unlikely casting in the script and previews more. “John Cusack saves the world…and mends his broken heart. Unlucky in love but ready to kick some apocalyptic ass!”

We finally joined everyone in 2007 and watched Tropic Thunder last night, which was also okay. It definitely had its moments of brilliance, but I think I was expecting it to be a little more skewering of the movie industry.

On a final, totally unrelated note, when do kids learn how to ask hypothetical questions that…like…make sense? I’m getting really frustrated with my son asking me stuff like, “What if our car was blue?” THEN IT WOULD BE BLUE, DUDE! GAH! I know that I should appreciate his childish wonderment before that fateful day when he first calls me a bitch (you know it’s coming). But how do you explain to someone that hypothetical questions need to pose serious, altering conditions to a situation? Is there some sort of Theory for Tots class I can send him to?

I realize that it’s been over a week since I posted here. That’s mostly because things have been pretty uneventful. The picture above is from last Friday morning/afternoon. Faced with a day off for the holiday, I drank just a few beers (honest!) while we were out on Thursday night and woke up the next morning surprised to find myself feeling rather crap-like. Luckily, my cat provided the necessary head-to-head services that I didn’t even know I needed.

Other than that, I got nothing. We got W. from Netflix and I’ve been trying to watch for, literally, weeks and I keep falling asleep. It’s not a particularly bad movie, per se. There are some funny moments. And Josh Brolin’s performance is actually kind of creepily accurate (though the parts of him as young W. are just laughable). I just kinda…don’t care.

We’ve also been watching Arrested Development upon several emphatic suggestions from friends. I was skeptical because we had watched one episode while at the beach with Tracey and Co. a few years ago, but I think it was some random episode and was out of context and I couldn’t figure out why the Bluths were so fucking odd. Seeing it from the beginning though has really made me appreciate it. I’ve been in tears laughing several times and have gone to bed extremely late every night this week because of that fateful, “Let’s just watch one more…” declaration that has got to be close to being a psychological disorder in the DSM, afflicting adults in the era of DVDs.

Also, this:

That is Honey Bourbon Caramel Peach pie and it’s pretty much an orgasm in a dish. I was excited about this pie, not only because it promised to be amazing, but also because I thought I would be able to keep it in a cake stand that I bought a few months ago. For some reason, I keep thinking cake stands are bell jars, even though I know that’s not the case. However, the handles on the pie dish prevented the dome of the bell jar/cake stand from fitting properly…so I stuck my head in the oven.

Also this week we spent a small fortune at Ikea on shelving and other bins and crap in the name of organizing our house and now our house is cluttered with not-yet-assembled flat packs and Allen wrenches. I can’t win.

Today we’re going to a wedding of some friends of ours, so I think I’m going to go and, like, shower or something.

The baby often accompanies me to the nail shop and has come to develop an appreciation for good manicures. He recently asked me if he could pick out a color and/or airbrush design the next time we went. I agreed, but quickly realized I needed to have some veto power when, while standing at “Nail Polish Station,” the words “sparkles” and “bright yellow” got tossed around.

We compromised. I picked a relatively neutral shade for my fingers and he got to pick the color for my toes, since I decided yesterday that I was in desperate need of a pedicure.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still not very much of a girly girl and my patronage to the nail shop has raised more than a few eyebrows. I feel weird saying this but in my…circle of culture (?), fake nails and the like just aren’t done. They’re too corny and brash. And the hipsters stay far away because they’re too ostentatious to be ironic.

But I like them. I don’t know why. I’ve come to find a little piece of delight in the ritual of my biweekly fill-ins and smiling politely when I’m not included in the Vietnamese conversations. And chuckling when the co-owner, while holding my ballet-abused feet in his hands, tells me that he really doesn’t like doing pedicures.

*Tip of the wide-brimmed hat to Truvy Jones

The beds at the motel that we stay at in Detroit are very old and become instantly U-shaped when you lie down on them. My back and legs have been stiff ever since we came back and it’s making me feel really old.

Also, I’m watching this home improvement show, Moving Up, and losing my shit at this one couple who bought this GORGEOUS old Craftsman house with all of these pristine original fixtures and are like, “This wood is too dark. We’re going to paint it white like a bunch of wack ass landlords so that it can look like we’re renting.”

It’s hitting a sensitive spot because we have a big old Victorian Pittsburgh house with a lot of original wood and while the previous owners were good about keeping the first floor wood fixtures, they painted the second and third floor fixtures when they turned it into an apartment. When we bought the house, we ran out of money for home improvements pretty quickly and have just been making do for the past few years, biding our time until the husband was done with school and able to get a decent job. We’re finally able to do a little bit of finishing work to the third bedroom and in the course of discussing that we were thinking about what we would need to do to get the hideous matte paint off of the trim. Seriously, if you own an old house and the wood is in good condition, LEAVE IT ALONE.

So, through a weird twist of events, I’m attending BlogHer in July and I figure since I’m going to a blogging conference, I should probably do some of that there blogging that I’ve heard so much about. (Aside: I’m obviously going through some pretty serious writer’s block and I’m trying not to freak out about it but…I’m freaking out about it.)

We were in Detroit over the long weekend for the DEMF (Detroit’s Electronic Music Festival for you squares). This was my sixth annual trip there and, as usual, there were many hijinks and good times and a few episodes of drama.

We drove there somewhat early on Thursday with our friends Adam and Carleton. We talked a lot about Pittsburgh and the state of music there currently (nutshell: fucking grim).

When we got to Detroit, our first stop was Archer Record Pressing. Adam had to pick up the latest release from Technoir and the husband was picking up the first release on the label that he recently started, Love What You Feel. The record is by a guy who goes by the name of Disco Nihilist and do you like how I don’t write here regularly for months and then I pop up with this entry about records and Technoirs and disco nihilists? You love me.

Anyway, Archer was a really REALLY neat place. We were too late in the day to see any actual records being pressed but the guy that owns/runs the place gave us a tour and a brief explanation of how records come to be.

That’s the husband checking out one of the records. It may not look like it, but I could tell that he was really excited to finally be holding it in his hands. He had worked really hard on it and it was something that’s he’s been wanting to do forever, so it was cool to capture this moment.

We stopped at this place, Simpson’s Records, which Carleton told us about. It’s been in business for over 40 years. Detroit has a TON of independent businesses. Because it’s so spread out and public transit isn’t very good, these businesses operate in markets/neighborhoods that consist of people of very limited means that need to attend to all of their shopping within walking distance (at least, this is what I could gather just from observing). So, these small businesses usually double or triple up their services. Simpson’s sells gospel records, candy and snacks, and you can get your taxes done there. We also passed a barbershop/barbecue restaurant, which sounds gross but I can assure you that the barbecue was outside, away from flying hair.

Carleton is from the Detroit area, so we drove him to his house before making our way to our motel. His mom is currently kicking cancer’s ass and she and I talked about my dad’s recent struggle. Then I made a cancer joke and I think, uh, it might have been too soon because she just kind of looked at me and I felt like the world’s largest jackass.

After we were settled in our room, we went in search of a place to watch the Penguin game. Weirdly enough, Hockeytown was closed. I don’t know what kind of managerial genius you have to be to decide to be closed during the Stanley Cup playoffs. But I had checked the PG’s list of Steeler bars and already had a back-up place that was likely to be Pittsburgh-friendly. I didn’t see any Steelers paraphernalia there and the bar itself was pretty butt, but they were showing the game and they were nice enough to turn off the Stevie Ray Vaughn garbage that they were blasting so that we could hear what was going on.

Friday was full of record shopping at Melodies and Memories and picking up various characters as they arrived in the city. Frank flew in from NYC, Kenny took the train from Ireland (not really), and another friend…we’ll call him Hot Mess, flew in from Atlanta. Incidentally, the husband had described Kenny to me as his Irish doppelganger and that turned out to be a creepily accurate description. Lookit:

Kenny, by the way, was rarely without a drink in his hand the whole weekend and never appeared to be the slightest bit intoxicated. He’s kind of my hero, especially considering my poor performance later on that evening, which we’ll get to in a bit.

We met up with other various members of the Pittsburgh/Pittsburgh-friendly crew for dinner at some touristy but semi-decent Tex-Mex place in Greektown and then started to prepare for our first night out on the town.

Since we had some time to kill we drove around Detroit for awhile, checking out various parts of the city that we’d never seen despite all of our trips there. You probably know that things in Detroit are not great. We saw a lot of heartbreaking poverty and so much evidence of the glittering Seventh City that Detroit used to be. The population is now around 800,000 which is roughly four times the size of Pittsburgh. So it still seems huge to me. But when you see all of the abandoned buildings, you realize that at some point not that long ago, all of those huge buildings were needed to house and employ all of the residents. And now they just sit there, neglected and unnecessary. It really hit me just how many people left, out of fear or necessity.

We also saw some of the most gorgeous mansions sitting on the most pristine lawns, just a few steps away from burned out houses, which are the playgrounds for children whose parents may or may not be watching over them.

Remnants of wealth and a healthy middle class represent the entire life cycle of capitalism in one city block. It’s heartbreaking and beautiful, because out of this, nothing is left but life and survival and tears and thoughts and joy. And as the festival always teaches us, wonderful music is born from that pain and joy.

Later, Hot Mess showed up at our room wearing a Corona tshirt and swimming trunks and bearing a bottle of cheap champagne. He was soon followed by Kent, our buddy who we hadn’t seen in two years!

The “official” kick-off parties weren’t really tickling our fancies but the husband had heard about a house music night at a club not terribly far from where we were staying. I was already kind of tired before we went out, so Kenny and I went to the party store two doors down where I procured some vodka and Red Bull. The elixir was effective…perhaps too effective. See, the vodka gets you drunk (read: rowdy), while the Red Bull wakes you up (read: hyper). Rowdy and hyper. Really not a good combination.

Since it’s getting late in the day and this post is shaping up to be rather epic, I’m going to slap a “To be continued…” here. But, here’s a preview:

My new photography technique is unstoppable.

Dudes! Double-yoo-tee-eff is up with still not being able to write here on the regular?

Spring semester is officially over and I’m happy to report that I did very well, grades-wise. However, I’m taking a summer class and that started Monday. It’s only six weeks long and it’s the last required course that I have for my MA (just one more elective in the fall!).

The class itself is fine. It’s an organizational behavior course through the business school that is mostly made up of undergrads. I am the sole humanities dork. The rest of those guys are in engineering and chemistry and computer science and iwillmakemoremoneythanyouism.

There are many hilarious bits in this whole thing. Like how someone actually snickered when I stated that I was a professional writing person. And today when we were talking about these principles of human resource management that touted such crazy notions as paying good wages, not treating them like shit, etc. The instructor asked what the overarching philosophy was of the principles and the undergrads were pulling out big words like…uh…”derivative” or something. And I raised my hand and said, “Uh, that employees are people and not batteries?” My classmates got that look of faint recognition on their faces. I hope I didn’t blow their minds too much.

There’s also a vague (so far) anti-union feel to the readings, which isn’t at all surprising. I’m just mostly amused by the language used. Like, “Such-and-such manager was successful because he was able to communicate with the labor people.” I get the impression that these young business students are, perhaps indirectly, taught that people in unions are all barbaric assholes who want nothing more than to harsh your capitalist mellow.

Me, my mom, and my dad, circa 1992

I am not union and, because of my line of work, probably never will be. But many of my family members and friends are and it’s a little troubling to think that their future managers are being brought up with this attitude. I’m not saying that all unions are perfect and I’m not saying that there aren’t plenty of assholes in unions. Just…you know…remember that these are PEOPLE (there’s that word again) that we’re talking about.

ANYWAY, I was going to tell you all about this little confrontation that I had with the manager of this bar that the husband was playing records at on Saturday, but I’m almost over it. And, yes, I wrote angry and vulgar couplets about him and his mother and it made me feel better.

We’re going to Detroit this weekend for the music festival and I kind of agreed to take one of the quizzes online at 10:30 on Friday morning, when I will most likely be hungover from our first night in Detroit and post-Penguins festivities, so that should be cute.

Still here. Still trudging through the last bit of this semester.

My cat sometimes sleeps on my pillow and half the time he accommodates my head, curling himself around it. The other half he somehow manages to push my head off of the pillow.

This morning saw us in the latter configuration. When my alarm started going off, I started hitting the snooze button. This apparently annoyed my cat because not only was I crowding the spot he wanted to sleep on, but my stupid time-telling thing was making noise.

He let me know of his displeasure by putting a paw on my head and lightly digging his claws into my scalp every time that the alarm went off.

All of that is to say: at least one being is looking out for me (kinda). I’ll be back around here soon.

Both my husband and I unintentionally participated in a moronic American St. Patrick’s Day tradition: green or “Irish-themed” garments. He wore a Guinness tshirt and I wore a green sweater. I didn’t think of the significance until someone at work pointed it out, all like, “Oh, of course you’re wearing green because it’s St. Patrick’s Day and you’re Irish!” Grumble.

I did, however, do one corny Irish thing. I made Irish Car Bomb cupcakes, which admittedly have a rather offensive name but are so SO good. I brought some into work yesterday and three people bit into them around the same time and all collectively groaned in delight. I tried one last night but it had been in the fridge and I hadn’t let it warm up enough. The now solid ganache filling fell out and the icing fell off and rolled around on the floor. I had to go searching for it under the couch and that was a proud moment in my life, let me tell ya. “Honey, lift up the couch, my cleavage didn’t catch that mouthful, dammit.”

Anyway, this post is titled “irish kelly” for a reason. Years ago, I was a rather active participant in the “rave scene” (ugh that phrase makes me barf) in Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas. You may be surprised to know that back in the late 90s and early 00s, Pittsburgh had a thriving dance scene, with multiple large events every weekend and plenty of smaller things during the week. I think between 1999 and 2000, I got a total of 15 hours of sleep.

Now, I’m sure I’ve conjured up plenty of frightening images for you. And while I did partake of the “party favors” for a short period, I was not 20/20 special report fodder. I did not wear pounds of plastic kiddie jewelry, my pants did not double as parachutes, and I did not regularly collapse into a puddle with a chattering jaw and dilated pupils to work on catching mono from a guy named Smurf. I mostly just had a blast being young and taking advantage of my total lack of responsibilities and my now non-existent ability to stay up for as long as I like by going to parties and dancing my butt off.

I did, however, have a “rave name.” Rave names, of course, were the nicknames that people gave to each other to enforce this identity that we were part of “the other,” the alternative, the underground, the secretive, none of which was really true by the late 90s when raving was firmly above ground, peppered with the odd renegade party under a bridge or in a cellar somewhere.

Raving’s inextricable relationship with the nascent internet probably aided the creation of rave names. Party information was passed along via email and message boards and I was on an email list called pb-cle-raves (Pittsburgh-Cleveland Raves) for many years. As nearly everyone with an online identity goes by something other than the name that they were born with, these identities bled into raving.

Many people had nauseatingly sweet and sunny rave names like Sunshine and Bumblebee and Rainbow. Others came into raving in the age of Hackers and cyberpunk (see also: my buddy count zer0), and then there were guys like my husband’s crew of friends, who had rave names like “Hector.”

Mine was Irish Kelly. At the time that I subscribed to pb-cle, my email address was CCeallaigh at AOL (ha!). Ceallaigh is Kelly in Gaelic (so I’m told), but of course someone else on AOL already had that handle, so I added an extra C. Nobody, least of all me, could pronounce that name. To add to the confusion, there was another Kelly who was one of the biggest rave promoters in the city. To differentiate between us, she was Kelly Downlow (her promotion company’s name) and I became Irish Kelly, owing to my Irish-themed n00b email address.

My paper is done. The accompanying presentation is done. I just have to look at both with fresh eyes in the morning for any glaring errors, upload them to Blackboard, give the actual presentation and that will be one more struggle under my belt. The other large-ish assignment was moved back a few days so that gives me some time to breathe and then next week is spring break. Of course, that means that I only have to work full-time and be a mom but seriously that seems like a vacation sometimes.

Anyway, with that major assignment pretty much done I will actually be able to hang out here some more! At least until finals start crushing my will to live but for now it’ll be just like old times! Remember when I used to post here more than once a week? Those were the days, eh?

But for now, I think we’ll keep things light and look at some of the notes I’ve scribbled to myself in the margins of my notebook:

“* talk to Heather”

Uh, okay, self. About what?

“* bring HW2 assignment, task analysis”

I totally forgot to do this.

“Pizza Hut”

Uhhhh. Then in the same margin as “Pizza Hut,” it appears as though I do a little word association:

“zone out
streets
fighter
baby
oscar
trailer park
gorgeous
bride
radio
head”

I think that might actually be the mathematical formula for Radiohead’s video for “Street Spirit,” but who knows.

There’s also this doodle that consumes the word association:

It’s like a…maybe a…It’s like my inner child was eaten by a coral reef or something.