kdiddy.org

I must have missed when this got started and I don’t know the rules, so I’m just going to take the prompt and run with it.

Where were you when…?
Our parents’ generation can recall exactly what they were doing when JFK was shot – it’s a Cultural moment that defines a generation. What big cultural event occurred during your childhood/youth that you recall clearly, if juvenile-ly? What was its impact on you?

I feel really corny saying this, but I remember with startlingly vivid clarity finding out that Kurt Cobain died. It was in the early-ish afternoon and I was asleep in the car. My mom was driving me to ballet. The announcement came over the radio and it pierced my sleep. I woke up suddenly and gasped and asked my mom to verify what I had just heard. When we got to ballet, I ran and told my friends.

I didn’t dress in black for days afterward and I didn’t participate in any vigils or listen to In Utero while crying in the dark. I was just really bummed about it and angry that people thought it was okay to mock the situation. I thought a lot about Frances Bean, who was just a baby at the time, and how she would never really know her dad or understand how big of an impact he had.

Mostly, I was sad that a figure like Cobain was gone. I think he managed to come to the spotlight and be an idol for people who weren’t finding life to be all it was cracked up to be as they came of age. He got that and sometimes when you’re really young and don’t understand why you feel different, it’s good to know that someone else feels the same way. And that it’s okay to yell, to scream, to be silent, and to give the middle finger to people you’re supposed to respect for no good goddamned reason.

***

Aside, here are some things that have made me cry and/or barf in the past day or so:

Reach in and touch the inner cow

A trip to the Creationist Museum. I think a field trip to this museum is in order, lubricated with lots of booze. The existence of this place confirms this shocking epiphany I had last night: people are full of shit.

Angela’s story of finding a small turd on the floor of the bathroom at her work. You don’t want to know how long I sat around wondering how that happened.

Last night, I watched some French movies on IFC, namely L’Auberge Espagnole and Les Poupees Russes.

They were mildly entertaining, but I find that if I don’t understand the language, I’m much more easily distracted. All I know is that I want Audrey Tautou’s apartment. And to make sounds from the back of my throat without sounding like I’m gagging.

The baby stayed at the mother-in-law’s house last night since she picked him up from school and watched him while we schooled and worked. He has off today, so instead of taking him home, putting him right to bed, waking him, and then taking him right back to the MIL’s house, we just let him stay put.

I miss him.

My body is also acting very strangely today. I was ravenous and scarfed down my lunch a little after 11 and I’m still kind of hungry. I anticipate foraging for food by 3 p.m. That should be fun.

I’m also simultaneously craving sex and sleep and I can’t do much for either craving at the moment. Argh.

I have about 7 weeks left of this semester.

It might as well be 700 years.

In the fall I’m taking another core course and a seminar, so it’ll be about 1.5 classes. That will be very nice. I had planned on steaming through, taking two courses in spring 09 and two more in fall 09, but honestly I don’t think I can do it. I’m so unhappy. SO unhappy. There’s no point in pushing through this so quick if I don’t have enough time or energy to do quality work and I’m fucking up in all areas of my life.

I think I could probably handle doing one course in spring 09, doing this other required course in summer 09, one course in fall 09, and then one more in spring 10 (010?). So I’ll finish one whole semester later than I planned.

I WANT to finish as soon as possible, but I seriously don’t want to feel like this anymore. I oscillate between wanting to drink, cry, or throw myself off a bridge and sometimes all three. I only took one psychology class in college, but something tells me that’s not healthy.

Plus, the longer I take, the more time I have to figure out what I might possibly want to do with this degree…what I CAN do.

Ugh. Tell me funny stories, guys. I need some cheer.

Completely unrelated, I read the transcript of that speech that Obama gave yesterday. I was really glad that he spoke pretty bluntly about race and privilege and pretty much stated, “Guess what? Slavery fucked things up royally and the situation still hasn’t been rectified and continues to shape our economy and our society to this day,” because people need to hear that shit. But I felt uncomfortable that he kept driving home the point that his pastor was WRONG WRONG WRONG OMG HE’S SO STUPID. I wish he would have said, “I can disagree with my pastor because I have a mind of my own and surprise! You do too! And maybe we should stop making rules and laws based on what a very few religious dudes deem ‘right.'”

Okay, so we ended up celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. It was very special, recreating ancient rituals performed thousands of years ago by my Celtic ancestors.

I’m referring, of course, to going to the McDonald’s drive-thru and getting three Shamrock Shakes.

Hi, there.

So, the good news is that my tooth is fine. The dentist didn’t see any evidence that any of my teeth broke or chipped and thinks that it must have been some excess from one of my white fillings that fell out. The husband speculated that maybe it was someone else’s piece of broken tooth that fell in my food.

I think I’m going to stick with the dentist on this one.

In any case, he better be right because if I have to go have a root canal in three months, I’m not paying for it nor I will pay for the general anesthesia and the huge bottle of Vicodin that I will insist upon. (Read: I really don’t like painful dental work or oral surgery and do what I can to prevent it.)

In other physical malady news, the baby has some nice excema on his face. It’s not too bad; you can’t tell by looking at him that his skin is all gross. I only discovered it the other day when I was grabbing his face to squish it. My exclamation of “Ew!” startled him, but I reassured him and told him the truth about the situation: “Son, you’re turning into a lizard.” Anyway, I’m slathering him with cortisone as much as he’ll let me.

He’s watching Ultraman right now, which is totally educational: he needs to either learn to read much faster to catch the subtitles or figure out how to speak Japanese. I’m practically homeschooling the kid right now, you know?

We went to Incredibly Strange Video last night to take advantage of their liquidation sale. Sadly, Bruce, the owner, has decided to close up shop. We’re all very bummed about it, since the experience of going to the store and finding weird little movies to enjoy is very fun and, I think, very valuable for the baby. I want him to know that whatever is presented and advertised to you isn’t always the best thing available, that sometimes you have to search for the things that really speak to you.

I stocked up on a few campy cult classics because I think I have some deep-seeded desire to open a drive-in. The baby talked to Bruce about Godzilla for awhile and they posed for a picture together.

Of course, none of this ruminating about the loss of an indie gem has been helping my mood as of late. This crap was only the precursor to a few days of emotional fuckery. I feel better today overall. But a lot of times it feels like I’m short-circuiting.

My kid is my favorite person on the planet.

But it’s possible that I will strip him of that title if he doesn’t stop with the bullshit.

How was your day? Aside from a rainforest’s worth of toilet paper down the toilet thanks to my *&@#(# child, mine was alright. We had a staff morale-boosting activity at work today, which isn’t as frightening as it sounds. We got to watch the remake of Hairspray and eat candy. Consider my morale boosted. The movie was cute, but now I really just want to watch the original.

Also, I would like to state for the record that I get highly annoyed when MTV says it’s showing True Life when it’s actually showing Cribs.

I think part of my molar just broke off.

I think.

I’m not in any pain.

I was eating mushy Indian food and felt something hard in my mouth and figured it was perhaps a shriveled lentil and considered swallowing it but decided to investigate. I tried to place the off-white chip among my food and slowly realized that it might not be food.

And then I freaked out a little.

Then I moved my tongue over all of my teeth and felt a difference in the way my back molars felt on right side compared with the left side.

I hate hate hate having tooth problems. This whole thing is making my eye twitch.

The dentist is sick and can’t see me until Thursday. “Uh, am I…like…in any danger if it waits that long?” I asked the receptionist. I’m new to this situation. I don’t know what questions to ask.

I still have half of my lunch left but I’m afraid to eat it lest I one of my fingers falls off or something.

I’m feeling morose today for some reason, so I’m listening to the “Coffee House” station on Sirius. They’re playing “Baby Can I Hold You,” by Tracy Chapman. Ugh. Up next: fetal position and quiet weeping.

But it works because No Country for Old Men comes out on DVD today, so I can revel in the Cormac McCarthyism of it all.

I’ve been extremely productive so far.

That’s me, grabbing my cat’s face. He hates that. Note the wet hair, though. I showered!

That’s him getting up to leave, since he doesn’t really like having his picture taken. Plus, he’s pissed at me because I promised to replace the litter in his box and I haven’t yet.

Not pictured is the baby who, at the time that these pictures were taken, was downstairs in his pajamas at 3 p.m. and watching corny movies about snakes that are not Anaconda (and all star Pat Morita for some reason) on the Sci Fi Channel. Clearly, I’m setting him up for success in life. At the moment, he’s upstairs yelling his argument for wearing the same underwear for the second day in a row.

We’re supposed to go to the record store later to partake in their “grand re-opening festivities,” which I imagine consist of the husband arguing with Arnie in Squirrel Hill as opposed to East Liberty.

Broken in a good way. It’s officially spring break! Ugh, such a relief.

Last night, we watched the first episode of this new show called New Amsterdam that we DVR’ed the other day. It sounded pretty intriguing in the CNN article.

About ten minutes into it, I realized something interesting: I fucking hate that show. It’s just so corny and melodramatic and embodies everything I hate about network TV. And I started ranting about, “What the hell am I going to enjoy watching after Sunday when The Wire ends? Seriously. How will anything ever compare to that show?”

Obviously, nothing ever will. The Wire really is sort of a freak of art and television. Something that monumentally wonderful and tragic and god damned true only comes along maybe once in a lifetime. But it got me thinking, and I was still rolling around some thoughts from an interview I did last night with the guy behind Tiger Lou, Rasmus Kellerman. His music is fairly upbeat but still kind of dark and he noted that some of the things that are inspiring him lately are the soundtrack to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and the movie Wonder Boys, which is one of his favorites.

Think of some of the best movies that came out this past year…There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. Radiohead released In Rainbows. And I’ve been gravitating to art that can only be described as bleak. Nearly everyone I know and read describes feeling a nagging blueness. Even with the upcoming election, which will finally free us from the shameful Bush administration and possibly give us a president who is black or a woman, something I never would have expected to see in my lifetime, there isn’t much optimism to be had. I fear that the change that we all crave is still years away, if it’s there at all.

I think we’re heading into an age that pop-historians might later call The Great Melancholy. Translation: everyone is fucking bummed out and disgusted. And I think we’re starting to see this in the art that we create. The only genuine feelings seem to be those of cynicism, especially since the people chosen to give us hope (memoirists of survival come to mind) turn out to be complete liars. We’re being sold fake hope, fake perseverance. And we’re so congested with bullshit that our resistance is low. Bring it on. We’ll buy it. Then we’ll get pissed for being duped because we’re idiots.

Am I getting too deep and morose for a Friday? Sorry. Here, have some Izzard (who we’re going to see on May 21st! EEEEEE!)