"We can say 'geek' because we are. You can't."

Nerd. Geek. Poindexter. All of these are monikers to which I aspire but seem to fall hopelessly short.

Why? I would like to say that it has something to do with my innate sense of style, or my legions of admirers who turn all of my interests and expressions into the next trucker cap, fedora, or way of wearing one's bangs; but seeing as I never quite got the "don't mix brown with black" memo, in addition to the fact that this blog has only two followers, I don't think really think that either is that likely.

No, what keeps me from truly obtaining and wielding with pride the heavyweight belt of 833k is laziness, impatience, and a decided lack of dedication.

To illustrate my point, I offer the following example:
I am an event planner by profession. Technically, an event manager, but seeing as there are some days where a considerable part of my job comprises answering the age-old question of "Chicken or Fish?" I try not to take titles too seriously. I recently found out that with some of the larger hotel chains, I earn points for planning meetings. By coincidence, we had planned several large-scale events with the same hotel chain. Without trying, I had earned enough of these "points" to set me up for a few night's stay at any hotel I wanted, any place in the country. Seeing as I had previously only experienced "perks" by way of free cheese and steno pad holders, this was a nice surprise.

I knew immediately what I wanted to do and who I wanted to go with: Comic-Con with my brother. At this point you may say that it is promising in terms of my lack-of-cool that this was my first thought when I heard "free trip". Where others would consider areas tropical or scenic and skillyfully choose for company the most impressive specimen with loose morals available, I immediately thought of an overcrowded location devoid of sunlight with the one person that I knew appreciated the "Tremors" ouevre as much as I. ::sigh:: If only it was that easy.

I made my hotel reservations and pulled my brother on my geek train. He planned to meet Stan Lee. I promised to kiss the hem of the robes of Joss Whedon. (Yeah, I am one of those.) I went to the Comic-Con website and saw that the registration was currently closed. Tickets for the three-day passes were quite affordable however, and I planned to check back at the website each day until they were on sale again. In the mean time, I went and priced out a t-shirt that read "There are 10 types of people that understand binary- those that do and those that don't."

Life though, she got in the way. I made this promise to myself that I would attempt to be cultured and watch all of the Academy Award for Best Picture noms, and within a week, I had plans to go out with friends and/or awkward computer-fixing members of the opposite sex a record-breaking FOUR times. A hermit by choice, this type of socialization had been heretofore unheard of since the days when it took me 20 minutes and all my concentration to send a text message ("You send a note with the PHONE????")

When next I logged on to my computer and pulled up Comic-Con's website, I saw that tickets for Wonder-Con in September were available online, but that Comic-Con had already SOLD OUT. Stunned, I sat like a deer in the LCD, Red Vine hanging from my open mouth, furiously clicking the mouse in an attempt to find any link that would explain why 127,000 tickets were no longer available for purchase.

I will not describe to you the fit that followed- only that I am happy that I do not have any roommates to have recorded my reaction with a hidden camera, as I suspect that it would have surely gone beyond Leroy Jenkins-viral and into Star Wars Kid-plague. Suffice it to say that the Biblically-rumored weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth made an appearance, and I had to make a very shamefaced trip to IKEA to replace a lamp.

There followed the phone calls to my brother, and to my best friend in California who had planned to join us. The stunned silence, followed by the catch in each of their throats as they promised sentiments like, "Hey, there's always next year," only added to my feelings of nerd-otence and sent me into a shame spiral of pop music, Panda Express, and favoring Andy Samberg over the amazing comedic genius that is Bill Hader.

My geexistential crisis forced me to examine how something like this could happen. Had I not been on 12,000 "Lost" forums over the last seven years- first to debate what the fuck a polar bear was doing in the jungle and later whether they actually expected us to believe that everyone was dead in the last season? Was I not infuriated at the choice of that kid from "Friday Night Lights" for Gambit in the Wolverine movie? I knew all the words to "Re: Your Brains", and loathed Apple for making Jonathon Hodgman into the PC as well as Bunsen Honeydew on the those stupid "I'm a Mac"/"I'm a PC" commercials. I had read Wil Wheaton's autobiography and forgiven him for Wesley Crusher. How was I still falling short?

What I came to was this: I love what the geeks give me. I love the graphic novels; I love the crazy classic TV series re-made into kickass action/adventure shows (Hawaii Five-O excluding); I love the celebrated careers of people like Bruce Campbell, David Cross, and Judd Apatow; and I love the zombies. My gosh, how I love the ZOMBIES. Here is what I don't love: the absolute devotion entailed in being a member of the fold.

Geeks are monk-like Zen masters who are born for queueing up and giving their entire mind and body to that which they love. They stand in line for midnight showings of event movies while I am at home enjoying actual sleep before work on Friday, completely oblivious to the fact that the new Star Wars movie sucks. They kill upwards of eight pedestrians reading while driving home from the Borders where they bought "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" and then do not eat, drink, poop, or allow others within their home to do the same until they have finished every last word. Most would rather see Felicia Day's wan smile than that of the Mona Lisa, and have tents in the trunk of their car to place on the sidewalk in front of that event's location within five minutes of its announcement.

I simply don't have it in me. I am not saying that I am better than geeks, or even that I have a life that is so much more interesting than theirs that I cannot give my time to the pursuit of that which I love. I just hate lines. I hate waiting. I didn't watch "Battlestar Galactica" until the final season, and even then, I was annoyed at having to wait a week between each episode, the expression of which compromised my personal safety in the presence of those who had endured the wait between Season 3 and the first half of Season 4. I would love to be included in these nerdvents, but would only really be happy if I could go and be allowed to cut the line, and since I do not look like Princess Leia in a gold bikini or Alice from "Resident Evil" in a torn red dress and combat boots, I am pretty much S.O.L. on that desire.

In the weeks since my disappointment, I have come to accept my place as the sucker fish on the skin of the shark that is n34dc0r3. I will never truly be one of the pasty legions, and I am fine with that. I am instead somewhere between Jane Goodall and Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes, going through the motions of assimilation but eventually being called out as a fraud and lead around on a leash by those that have declared themselves my superiors.

So nerds, I thank you for a re-writing history to depict Lady Catherine de Bourgh as a ninja assassin and giving me hope for a future populated with both cowboys AND aliens. Just do me a favor and text me when the line lets up, will ya?

Tell me about the rabbits, George . . .

The hazard in regularly posting to a blog is that if you are not careful, you will let yourself start every blog post like . . . well, a blog post. As I write this introduction to what will eventually be a thesis on my own personal literary evolution and addiction; trite statements are scratching at my screen door, mewling and causing that "thump, thump, thump" vibration against baseboard as they try to get my attention enough to let them slip in. First sentences like, "I have not always been a reader . . . " and "As a child, reading was not easy because of my learning disability . . . " have to be chased off my porch with a straw-bristled broom and yelled epithets so that I can get the peace I need to be able to write my awkward cat metaphor.

To begin, I reference a statement made to a couple of dear friends one night and has since gone on to become legendary in our circle of three: "I am one of the children for whom Hooked on Phonics worked." That's right, I learned how to read using the reading REVOLUTION. For the low, low price of $48.95, my parents bought me a cheesy, 80's music-based reading system guaranteed to get their dyslexic learner cracking Voltaire before she started her first period.

The culturally prolific and widely scorned system that drilled "A-aah-APPLE!! [doo-doo-doo-doo] B! Buh-BALL!" into my head so deep that even today I will sometimes sit and hum the tune at my weekly staff meeting, was effective at getting me to recognize the difference between apples and balls without referring to a diagram. Damn it, it worked. I am still about six Christmases away from forgiving my parents for making me a part of that gigantic national laughing point and not just allowing me to live out my illiteracy in my belltower waxing my humpback, feeding my pigeons, and nursing my dreams of becoming a chorus girl in Atlantic City. (That is the plot to "Hunchback of Notre Dame", right?)

Dyslexia had effects past learning to read though, and they were nothing if not a challenge. I could not read as fast as other kids without the words pretending they were playing Red Rover, and my reading comprehension did not permit me to skim at all. Guess how excited this made me for reading assignments in school? College? More appropriately, guess how many books I actually read when I got to grad school? Give you a hint- we are just barely in the double digits for two full years. (Suck on that, UO College of Ed!)

Remaining effects of my learning disability can still be found in my handwriting where I am constantly transposing letters in anything put down without the intervention of a keyboard. Each day I bless the digital age in which I live and give a mental middle finger to Mrs. Hill who told me that I would never make it anywhere in life if I did not learn to write my letters correctly. I would write her a note and tell her off for real, but I have the feeling it would come back with red ink all over it.

Not being able to read very fast and having to read EVERY WORD of everything I was tasked with reading made reading a chore- and not a fun one, like testing the structural integrity of your older sister's leaf piles. In addition, my sugar-fueled tendency to alight from project/topic/errand to project/topic/errand like a moth in the lamp section of Home Depot would ultimately prove useful to my chosen career of meeting planner aka One Who Keeps the Batons Aloft, but was crap for establishing good reading habits in childhood and adolescence.

This is not to say that I was illiterate- if it was a subject in which I had interest, or if the movie had been good, I would actually take the time to enjoy a book. Of course, by "take the time", I mean that it would take me six months to get through it. There was that glimmer of hope in the late 90's, when a precocious boy-wizard entered my life and made me care about dragons and ghosties and cellulite-hiding robes, but like much of America, most of my good intentions never made it past multiple repetitions of the book about the boy-wizard and the dragons and ghosties and cellulite-hiding robes. By the mid-aughts, it appeared as though I was doomed to a life of illiterate ramblings about the band Coldplay and whether or not Adam Sandler had staying power.

In 2008 though, three things happened that turned me around.

Event #1: I went to my first annual conference for work. The last hired before the event, my status as an office peon was firmly solidified by the staff page of our agenda book which showed my picture in the exact opposite corner as our executive director, who at that point pretty much lived in a cloud with a megaphone at the top of Mt. Vesuvius for as much as he intimidated me.

While tending to the merch table with a girl in my department, we started to talk about books. I referenced my old standbys- "Catcher in the Rye", Sherman Alexie, and the four books I actually DID read while getting an art degree (she seemed to have limited interest in "Elements of Design in Impressionist Brushwork"). When she talked about the books she loved, she described a bedside table overburdened with a scizophrenically arrayed variety of fiction, non-fiction, young adult tragedy, fantasy, sci-fi, and bike repair. Listening to her talk with such passion about the things that she loved to read and the things that she hoped to read made me feel initially literarily impotent, but eventually determined to become more well-rounded and interesting in ways that were actually important.

Event #2: I moved in with some new roommates who were best friends with each other. This turned out to be not. smart. I was not the type to fan the magazines before company came over so I did not fit in with them; and they were not the types to actually HAVE company come over, so they did not fit in with me. I was desperate for a place to live though, and they were desperate not to pay $800 for January, so a devil's bargain was struck. I marked the lightning flashes and rolling thunder that accompanied my signing the lease to a late winter storm.

In an effort to "bond" (note to self: do not live life within quotation marks- it only ends badly), I began reading those teenage girl vampire books that everyone had raved about and for which both of them seemed to be pretty crazy. I read the first and thought, "That vampire is controlling . . . and not in the sexy Dracula way that tells you that you are probably getting laid." I made the mistake of giving the second and third book chances to pull me back in, but I just couldn't get over how DUMB the story was, and MY GOSH, could the woman come up with another type of stone to describe a lover's smooth skin than "marble"? Seriously woman, go to the bathroom section of Lowe's and TAKE NOTES!

By the time I finished the third book, I was determined that I would never again read something this bad unless I had read five or six good books to counteract it. So, to tell the truth, I am not especially sure of whether it has been my love of the good literature or the bad that has compelled me to read so much, but either way, this policy has proven effective volumetrically.

Event #3: I read "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay". If you have read that book, you didn't need to read past that sentence to determine why this comprised a whole event. If you have not read that book, I will say this- the language, the plot, the characters, the bloody, fucking WORDS, were everything that I wanted at that period in time to re-ignite a belief in miracles taking place in 600+ pieces of paper. That book made me weep and weep and smile and gasp out loud. I hugged that book and let it take the right side of the bed. It was writing-you-bad-poems and smiling-about-you-on-the-bus love, and for the first time the object of my affection did not play in a garage band.

These events set in motion subsequent literary feats of which I am somewhat proud- In 2009, I decided that I would read 52 books in a year. Despite a rocky July, I made my count and even read about half of "The Stand" as well. I started a library of texts both familiar and obscure, and have continued to take in lonely paperbacks despite my collection far outstripping my reading speed. Like a matchmaker, I have done reasonably well at pairing friends and family with their best match depending on their current literary needs- my only wild card being my recommendation of "The Road" to everyone, and having two of my best friend accuse me of trying to make them kill themselves from depression caused by post-apocalyptic lack of hope.

I own all of the books that I read, and at the end of each, I write my own review saying when I finished it, what was significant about that day, and what I thought. This is especially fun with things that are truly terrible, as is evidenced by my review of "Why We Suck" by Denis Leary:

"I finished this book on August 3, 2010 on a day that I got 3.5 hours of sleep and yet could somehow manage NOT to pass out. This book sucks. I like Denis Leary, but less so after reading this badly written, meandering, stale piece of inconsequence. I am keeping this book on my shelf in the hopes that it goes forgotten and is eventually urinated upon by a passing animal. His mom was cute though."

Whenever I move, I pull my books down from the shelves and get excited about reading the new and re-visiting old favorites. I re-commit myself to absorbing all of the beauty, silliness, fighting, sex, heroes, villains, talking animals, mothers, fathers, pomegranates, and juniper as I can before I shuffle off into the Great Library Beyond- which is exactly like Belle's library from "Beauty and the Beast" but with more Pablo Neruda and Chuck Pahlaniuk.

And because no blog post on reading is complete without a book list:

• Reservation Blues; The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; and Flight- All by Sherman Alexie
• Fahrenheit 451- Ray Bradburry
• The Mysteries of Pittsburgh- Michael Chabon
• The House on Mango Street- Sandra Cisneros
• One Hundred Years of Solitude- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest- Ken Kesey
• The Stand- Stephen King
• Born Standing Up- Steve Martin
• The Road- Cormac McCarthy
• The Bluest Eye- Toni Morrison
• A Man Without a Country- Kurt Vonnegut
• Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim- David Sedaris
• Yes Man- Danny Wallace
• The Hatchet- Gary Paulsen
• Tiger Eyes- Judy Blume
• Matilda- Roald Dahl

Walkin in the Spiderwebs

Here are the things that I love to do that a lot of other people do:

• Read everything I can get my hands on and purchase more books than I will probably ever read
• Write, both professionally and creatively
• Learn about and implement graphic design and web publishing programs
• Sing in the car, in the shower, with boys who play the guitar, and at sing-alongs for the musical episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" while surrounded by drunk geeks
• Tell dirty jokes with my Portland soul mates and laugh until we all complain about the compressed pain of various innards
• Give scarily appropriate nicknames to new acquaintances. (Latest gem: "Skelly" for a hipster kid with 7 inch thighs that reminds me of the King of Halloween from "Nightmare Before Christmas")

Here is the thing that I love to do that not very many people do:

Create things with my loom.

I love to make things with my hands. I don't need to be the most creative- I have a lot of friends that can, in the space of their morning shower, harness a far greater command of visual symmetry, framing, composition, light, and emotion than I can when I dream. What I love is the ritual of bringing new form out of things that are often small and lonely and forgotten. When I do my work, I make things that keep people warm, that give their feet a place to land, and bring brightness to a once dark room. I create places where you can lay your baby, dust off the day, or warm your voice, and I do it all with my hands, my back, my feet, and a giant awkward contraption that has been my most reliable friend for going on 13 years.

I could tell you our history, but it is the creative equivalent of hearing your parents reveal that "We met in a bar." Right time, right place is all. I was a 16-year old college sophomore, she was a cedar beauty of indeterminate age that I bought from the classified section of the newspaper (when such a thing was actually used as a reference for more than just, "Fluffy, the pee-pee goes HERE.") Having already declared my major to be fine arts (and unknowingly also having condemned myself to a mandatory graduate degree in an actually marketable field), I was thrilled that I would no longer have to spend hours in studio listening to the didgeri-doo heavy mixtapes and idealistic hippy prattle of ridiculously hemp-clothed morons (you must remember that the 90s were pre- organic cotton) whose dreadlocked boyfriends/life partners were constantly stopping by to ask for money. Getting my own loom meant getting to do my work in a place stripped of any bullshit that was not my own.

My first studio was the sun room at the front of this huge old house my family rented when I was a kid. The best thing that can be said for it is that the light was incredible. The worst was the seasonally menopausal symptoms it experienced in the winter and summer, causing me to lose feeling in my toes and dehydrate, respectively. I would stay in there for hours at a time, crashing, beating, and pounding my work into its clumsy place and making all sorts of gorgeous racket while I listened to the Beatles, Ani DiFranco, Barenaked Ladies, Ben Folds Five, and Ben Harper- who I did not really "get" at the time, but was giving my best shot because I was in love with a long-haired hippy boy that played the mandolin and had gone to his concert. My walls were papered in pictures of friends and midnight runs to Taco Bell and magazine clippings of that kid from "Empire of the Sun" that had grown up to be kind of a hotty. A row of dime-store buddhas lined my yarn shelf, and giant sacks of wool provided places for guests to lounge and even take a nap on if they could get used to the whoosh-whoosh-slam-CRASH. It was the perfect space to cut my teeth artistically, and I will always remember that space as light and perfect and pocket-sized for my creative convenience.

Subsequent studios were less glamorous- my graduate school apartment (Cost $395 for two bedrooms!) had an entire bedroom that I could devote to my art, but also had the unfortunate destiny of sharing that space with the computer upon which I spent approximately 300 hours a week writing lesson plans on volcanos followed by in-depth analyses of the toilet training habits of 2-3 year olds. Sadly, I was so tired at that point in my life, I only spotted the grammatical mistakes in such papers and not the irony.

The move to Portland and the accompanying increased cost of living meant that my loom and I were technically a co-habitating couple, as we were jammed so tight into tiny bedrooms that we could roll over in sleep and spoon with one another. Eventually, I started to focus on my career, my friends, and boys that were not. worth. the. effort. and decided that since I was "not really using it anyway", it could find a home in the eaves of my parents' place for a little while.

Fast forward two years and I am living in another new all-my-own place- a beautiful one-bedroom home situated in my own little mini-Shire (okay, fine, Lake Oswego) and I finally have the room for studio space again. Lucy- her given name since the sun room- currently sits in a well lit area and off-sets my addiction to TV on DVD by providing me with a productive end result for eight consecutive hours spent drooling over Agent Sealy Boothe.

Magically though, she has given me the opportunity to get to know those I love just a little bit better. Once they can get over the mystery and moving parts, it seems that the rhythm of woosh-woosh-slam-CRASH seems to create the comfort of a roaring fire and therapist's couch, hypnotizing and prompting awkward revelations at the same time. Some of the most meaningful and surprising interactions that I have had in recent months have taken place while winding warps, fixing tension problems, and taking out color combinations that did not work.

I have only one worry, but it keeps me up some nights: My art form is not sexy. I am not a painter with bare feet and legs covered in blue and orange splashes. I do not draw picture perfect images of clasped hands leaving charcoal smeared across my fingertips and forehead. Oy, there are bits of yarn sticking to my carpet and clothes as if to sublimate the procurement of the legions of cats that it expects I will one day own. Amaranta Buendia from "One Hundred Years of Solitude" wove and unwove her shroud from her middle years until the day she died a spinster virgin. Penelope wove to ward off suitors while she waited for Odysseus' return. There is no historical precedent for weavers being any sort of sexual dynamos, and the fact that the tools of the trade could actually severely injure one who attempts to incorporate them into their R-rated proclivities does give me cause to worry that perhaps I have chosen wrong in my arena of expression. Every artist knows that the first and foremost reason we do the work is this: to get laid- everything else is emotional/intellectual/I-forgive-the-universe-for-not-sending-me-a-pony gravy.

Cock-blocking aside, I must repeat that I remain hopelessly, beautifully, and desperately in love with the work that I get to do. It forced me to put a sign on my light fixture saying, "Food and Water" as a reminder that both are important on a marathon Saturday featuring a new warp and brightly colored wool. It's what keeps me in wedding, Christmas, birthday, and thank you gifts. It's what helps me focus on the things in my life that require my attention, and hide from the things in my life that probably need my attention more.

Thank you Lucy, for being a goddess, a shelter, an out-of-reach branch, and a life-preserver when it was needed. Right place, right time, indeed.

Come Downstairs and Say Hello

The other night I went to my first concert in years.

Okay, that's not true- this summer I went to see The Swell Season at the zoo with some girlfriends, but forgive me if I do not count laying out on a fleece blanket while next to me hipsters are drinking red wine from goblets in the shape of ocelots as an actual concert experience. Subsequent sexual fantasies about being Glenn Hansard's guitar notwithstanding.

I went to see Guster, a band with whom I am celebrating the single longest relationship of my life.

Before moving on, I must bore with brief history. (Yes, I am wearing a satin smoking jacket and sitting in a library in a high-backed leather chair next to a roaring fire. Why do you ask?) I discovered Guster ten years ago while attending my first big arena concert- the Barenaked Ladies at the Rose Garden. Okay, yes, you can go ahead and laugh, but please keep in mind that this was before the song about monkeys when they were still writing songs like "The Wrong Man Was Convicted" and killed their harmonies. So there.

The appeal was immediate- this band had a drummer that played the drums with his hands. Instead of floor toms and bass drums, he rocked bongos and djembes (that's a hand drum, right?), and the rest was a drum kit complete with cymbals and hi-hats and everything. And he slammed them all without the safety of two sticks. I was at that concert with about ten friends, and we all kept turning to each other going, "Is that guy playing with his hands?" "Look, he's playing with his hands!" "I am pretty sure he is playing with his hands." Hey- it was loud and we were excited. You can make fun, but the minute that you see someone slap a symbol with their fingertips and follow it up with a military perfect drumroll played with the sides of his palms, you pretty much lose the capacity for any type of quasi-intellectual thought and become obsessed with your own wooden spoon and stovepot roots.

After that night, my friends and I were hooked. We bought the merch and music and wore and/or listened to it endlessly. We went online and discovered that the drummer was an online journaler- which only made those of us narcissistic enough to also write our thoughts down on LiveJournal love him even more. The fact that most of his posts were scatalogical in nature just further convinced me that he was, in fact, what my mother had been talking about when she told me that someday I would find true love.

Thus came a community-based tango with fanatacism. Guster toured constantly and we saw them every time that they came within 100 miles of our little college town. When they played at home, we dragged noobs and determined their future social interactions with us by whether or not they saw Adam Gardner and Ryan Miller's harmonies as revelatory. When they played far away we dressed in weird clothes and adopted personalities of people who don't care how they appear to strangers-praise be to the closest available deity that this behavior was not accompanied by alcohol consumption because who knows what would have happened. We became these loud people that screamed like teenagers suffering from the after-effects of Lautner-smolder, and who licked tour buses to prove their uniqueness as fans (Thank heavens that last bit does not include me- Tammy still has to get a yearly shot.) I very nearly converted to Judaism after discovering that all the of band members yearly took part in seder.

I owned every album. I had t-shirts for each day of the week. The "Guster is for Lovers" sticker on the bumpers of the two crap cars that I drove in college proclaimed my only love and earned me car honks from people appreciative of my then-alternative tastes. (Oh no, wait, that was my driving the wrong way on a one-way. Bygones.) The boy who broke the copy of "Lost and Gone Forever" that I bought at my first concert became dead to me, and even now, when I see pictures of him at a summer picnic that my sister attended, I think, "That asshole broke my Guster CD."

But then, you know . . . we grow up. The White Stripes happened. Jay-Z closed escrow on my soul. American Idol brought us closer to 2012 and I may or may not have gotten caught up in the hype over "Daughtry"- a musical low which still causes me to wake up in cold sweats. My musical tastes refined and then became unrefined. "Amsterdam" was good, but it took me a while to learn to love "Keep It Together". By the time "Ganging Up On the Sun" came out, I was struggling with a piss-poor job in a worse economy and did not want to hear richer-than-me white guys singing about someone being their satellite. In addition, they became more popular and started playing bigger venues and demanded more money for their tickets. It turns out that I am devoted up to about $25 including surcharge.

My once special-occasion Guster shirts with the felt covered llama and the Animal House lettering became workout clothes. I became less interested in music and more interested in reading dystopian literature and watching television about men that spend their days analyzing blood spatter and their nights feeding their inner Little Shop of Horrors while wearing the hell out of a form-fitting henley. Guster was relegated to Saturday cleaning music and what I sang with Kendall around campfires on church camping trips to impress cute boys.

Which brings me to this week.

I got a call from a sweet friend of mine that I had not seen in a while. She said that she had tickets to the Guster show and wanted me to go with her. I texted back an emphatic, "YES", but then changed my mind about twenty times over the next several days. My book club was meeting that night. There would be too many people. The last time I went to a concert I couldn't hear anything for three days, which just furthers the insecurities I am having about my late twenties that cause me to go fetal. Eventually, though, the day of the concert came, and although I knew that my altogether gorgeous friend would have no problem finding a last minute date, I decided to put on my figurative "I'm still young" panties and actually go out and do something fun.

We got to the concert venue and the place was loaded with hipsters and college students. Oy ye oy. The opening band was a collection of moderately attractive long-haired hippies finishing a cover of "Cecelia", which was promising as it is my favorite Simon & Garfunkel song about a girl that likes giving it away. I stared at the nymphs on the wall of the Crystal Ballroom and begged them to please not make me experience feeling someone's genitals pressed against any part of my person again. (I have horrible luck at concerts.)

And now we are joined by: my boys. They looked older and slightly thicker- just like me- but still good, in that unwashed, on-the-road, "What city am I in? All the Arby's look the same!" kind of way.

Then- they played.

Although the first song was not one of my favorites it was an immediate and semi-traumatic adrenaline shot to the heart of memory and joy in its purest sense. Feeling drumbeats so deep from my shoulders to heels. Singing at the top of my voice with no regard for the guy recording the performance on his cell phone in front of me. Watching two of my good friends' faces as their Guster virginity taken by the musical equivalent of Lloyd Dobler.

I was reminded of the small joys of concerts in general- the stoners that are dancing like they are dying tomorrow, those intensely focused post-college-age grecian columns that refuse to externally manifest that the band is rocking so hard but eye you like you are a Nazi for talking during slower songs. Shouting until your voice is gone. Not giving a damn about activating your long-dormant tonitis.

Amusingly, there are things that had changed. "The Airport Song", once the crowd-pleasing favorite that caused the audience to go into apopleptic fits most aptly described as "batshit", was recognized only by the few old-timers like myself. Unfortunately, nobody had sent us the memo that what we loved was no longer cool, so there were about four people that screamed like a mouse was running up their pant leg while the rest of the crowd backed away as though they were afraid of catching Beiber fever.

I left the evening lightened by the experience and weighted down only by the absolutely pointless but fabulous silver Guster belt buckle that my friend loaned me some green to purchase. Of audiological necessity, we shouted our reviews of the show back and forth to one another all the way home. Insert contented sigh here.

The following evening my sloth caught up with me (The attribute, not the animal. Being unable to outrun a sloth would either speak very poorly of me or very highly of the animal.) and I was forced to attack the giant monolith of dishes that had been forming over the previous week. As this was no small job, I decided that music was necessary for the moment. Still buzzing from the excursion of the previous evening, I popped on the boring-yet-self-explanitorily-named "Guster" mix and sang loud and true and further frustrated my upstairs neighbor and the action he was likely then pursuing from his long-suffering girlfriend.

The moral: You can't reverse your own personal evolution, but you can remember that the point from which you evolved was pretty great and give it its due. Even when you go all the way up to heaven, you gotta go all the way back home.

(For those who would like to enjoy the meanderings of my first true love, visit the link below.)

http://gusterjournal.tumblr.com/

In the beginning, there were parentheses.

I was one of the first bloggers. Really. Okay, back then, it wasn't known so much as "blogging" as it was "online journaling" and I mostly did it to impress a geeky guy who turned out to be WAAAY more into the Lord of the Rings movie-based video games than he was me, but still, I was there on the front lines when it was just figuring itself out. Imagine me in a foxhole wearing an old-timey army helmet draped with that inscrutable beige netting, holding the heaviest laptop known to man, while all around me were the defeaning shouts of "BBS, NOW!", "Hold your ISP!" and "OH NO! Here they come with the forum flaming!" Dark days, I tell ya.

I started back in May 2001. Specifically, the morning after my first Matt Nathanson "concert". Irony used there to indicate that I saw him play his acoustic twelve-string in my campus coffee shop and then bought merch from him out of his guitar case, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world. The fact that he was hilarious and made really funny "pork sword" jokes with my best friend made him that much cooler and thus worthy of the adoration of my first blog entry. I remember using the word "rock" a lot, and it may be possible that I dumped the phrase "there's nothing hotter than a nose ring" in there, just to let people know that I was really into edge culture. ::rolls eyes:: Every once in a while I will go back to read entries from that first year of blogging just to remind myself that I was 19 once, and thus have no right to loathe anyone their youth because I once licked a tour bus to prove how much I loved an independent rock band.

For me, blogging has been essentially this: A nine year series of misadventures with the opposite sex that has been chronicled in painful detail. Sometimes I used their first names, but I found it was much easier (and less incriminating should the evidence be found) to give the guys in my life cleverly disguised pseudonyms that spoke to a trait or experience that I had with them.

* "Ear Crud Boy" for instance was a guy that I went on a few dates in 2001. One night at his friend's house, I watched in horror as he proceeded to clean out his ear with his little finger, and then clear the deposits of that excavation from his fingernail with his teeth.

* "McPELMy" was a guy friend that I crushed on that was far younger than me but absolutely scrumptious. The acronym P.E.L.M. standing for "Pre-Embryonic Love Muffin", of course.

* "Drummer Boy" played the drums and most of my entries regarding him ended with "parum-pum-pum-pum."

* "Thing 1 and Thing 2" came at a time when I actually had two options before me, the results of both seeming to be exactly the same.

* "Twilight" was the beautiful, funny, charming man that moved into my ward and with whom all the Mormon girls I knew became obsessed. I revealed his nickname to him one day, and he mistook its meaning and thought that I was calling him "Edward". I explained that it was not the character but the entire phenomena he was emulating. He gave me that smile you might give someone who tells you they skin kittens for fun.

After a certain point though, I grew weary of nicknames and chose to simply stick with letters chosen to represent the various players: J, B, D, V, and E. My dating life had turned into the final round of Wheel of Fortune and unfortunately, Vanna White didn't turn over enough letters for any of it to make sense, so I was left screaming nonsense phrases "Dowel Lab! Fable Tod! Caring Brat!" (I know that last sentence didn't make sense, but there really aren't enough references to The Wheel being made by people under 70.)

Other things happened during that nine-year period of course: getting my art degree, realizing that my art degree was useless and going back to school, gettting a Masters in teaching, moving to Portland, realizing my Masters in teaching wasn't bringing me squat and leaving education to work in non-profit, various embarrassing incidents, little victories, two annual conferences for work where I nearly died of exhaustion, tiny tragedies, taking the bus home from Idaho at Christmas and getting stuck in Eastern Oregon with a guy named Charlie who said his last name was Manson (to be funny I suppose), and awkward moments of meeting famous people I really admire and not being able to say a word to them (Hello Sherman Alexie, sorry I creeped you out with my stuttering and battered copy of "Reservation Blues"! And Maya Angelou, you remember me, I was the one who just stood in front of you unable to operate the retract button on the lower part of my jaw.)

My blog has been good to me- it really has. From the experience, I have made four really close friends-- one of whom I have met only 3 times in person but who I talk to on the phone constantly and is counted among my MVPs. My blog and I have seen each other through the various world events and political upheavals (9/11, the war on terror, Obama elected president), fads (loving Benji on "So You Think You Can Dance", "Soldja Boy", obsessing over "The Da Vinci Code"), and the evolution of my pop cultural obsessions ("Lost", "Firefly", "Veronica Mars", Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Michael Chabon, Guster, Led Zeppelin, and Jay-Z to name a few.) Now though, I don't know, I guess I want to start fresh. I want to give friends that would like to read some of my writing the opportunity to do so without worrying that they may look at the entries from the fight that we had in 2005 when I wrote bitingly succinct haikus about their personal hygiene and gum-smacking.

So here we are, new day, new opportunity, new blog. Tabula rasa.

Here follows are reasons why I think you should take the time to read this blog:

1. I am funny. Well, I think I am hilarious, and even though my friends are usually laughing at me, I still consider it a win. Won't you take part in this opportunity to laugh at me too?

2. I was raised by conspiracy theorist parents who fall asleep listening to Art Bell. This makes me skeptical of almost everything and I tend to get vocal/verbose about the things that I think are especially suspect. Things I currently do not trust include: donating my organs (partly because a good friend said he would take my eyes if I died and then almost got us into a car accident that would have only hurt me), the popularity of Taylor Swift, two redheads hooking up, and any house pet that is transported from place-to-place in a purse.

3. In case you could not tell already- I write almost the exact same way I speak: parenthetically and tangentially. I like to use big words, but only to enhance the quality of a good fart joke. (Needless to say, learning the word "scatalogical" changed my religion.) There is a heavy emphasis on proofreading in the work that I do, so I try to use good grammar and punctuation where I can. Deviating from this however, I believe that most run-on sentences I write can be forgiven because that is the way I think and I refuse to write differently than I think because I am who I am and that is all I am.

4. I am one of the five most awkward people that I know. Gratefully, God gave me the skills to be able to play off my awkwardness with incredulous, high-pitched, and descriptive recounts of these events-that-do-not-happen-to-normal-people. You all are simply the campfire friends with whom I wish to share these terrifying tales. (Like the time I pants-ed myself in church getting up from a chair.)

5. I have good but not great taste in pop culture. I like "How I Met Your Mother" but not "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia". Love "Raising Arizona", but never seen "Fargo". I read a lot, and most of it good literature ("Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way" excepting), but unfortunately, many of my favorite books are also Oprah's, and that is just something I am going to have to deal with. My point in bringing this up is that I will never exposit a treatise on the need to return to the writing of the early 19th century Victorians, but I will probably let you all know that "The Bluest Eye" is a book that I think every teenage girl should have to read before she graduates high school. While I do aspire to be pretentious, my love of especially bloody zombie movies and Little Caesar's $5 Hot 'n Readys will always get in the way of any success in that arena.

So there you are. If you'd like to join me, I promise to cardigan sweater-up, Mr. Rogers-style, as often as I can so that you get to hop onboard my tiny train to the land of How-I-wish-it-was-make-believe.