“Dude, I swear that one looks like a floating skull.”

Earlier today, I was sitting on the Uprise Bakery patio, nursing a Trops-induced headache with a [non-alcoholic] fruit smoothie and wondering why I thought it would be a good idea to come to Columbia this weekend in the first place. Within about two hours of my arrival last night, I realized that everything was the exact same as it was when I was in college except that all but three of my friends have moved away.

The good news is that in the middle of my angsty scribblings (in a black Moleskine, no less — how collegiate of me!), one of the aforementioned three remaining friends met me for lunch. I remembered that I didn’t come back to this town to go to really boring parties and drink crappy beer and try to engage in conversation with people who were in middle school when I went to college for the first time and pile into a two-door sedan with six other people because somebody forgot to take their car keys out of their pants before jumping in the pond. I came back to see a few good friends and eat a lot of good food and, if I’m lucky, take a really big dump right on the steps of the J-School before leaving this town most likely forever. 

The other good news is that I’m sitting next to a table of three guys with way too much gel in their hair and a girl that looks sort of out place and they’re passing around grainy pictures of “ghosts” and planning some kind of paranormal field trip, honest to God. One of them said he was a “priest of Ra” and the other said he had an eight-year-old kid come up to him a few days ago and ask if he was a demon. One of them (the one wearing all denim, BTW — the “priest of Ra,” in fact) also mentioned that he doesn’t “like people” and that he would be “totally content living on a desert island.”

Awwwww. I really miss all the pseudo-intellectual conversations you get to overhear in a college town!

Banner? I HARDLY KNOW ‘ER!

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HA… ha ha… heh. Wait, what? Okay.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I’ve got some news to share. And maybe it’s a little redundant, because if you’re at this site, that means you’re looking RIGHT AT what I’m about to tell you, but… I got a new banner! And funnily enough, I got it almost a year after I made the original. I know that because this picture (which was used in my old banner) …

… was taken at last year’s Riverfest while we were watching The Nobility. Shannon had just gotten a new 50mm lens and was going insane with it. That was a good time because I paid about $6 for a Miller Lite (in a can), and Shannon and I were really dead set on getting some airbrushed tattoos until we found out how expensive they were, and after making the trek to North Little Rock via the Big Dam Bridge in the blazing heat while wearing really uncomfortable shoes, I thought I was going to die. It was a little sad because James had just started driving to California, and about halfway through the Silverton set, Matthew, Shannon and I got a text from him that said, “I’m standing at the Grand Canyon.” Matthew and I were still riding the high of our band’s one (and only) show with James, and it was a little depressing that someone we had spent countless hours playing music, drinking Heineken (LIGHT!!!) and watching Deadliest Catch with (and in my case, occasionally bawling with) was gone for the summer. It was like losing a limb. Que triste.

Anyway, that was a year ago. 2009 Riverfest begins today, but I think one Riverfest’s enough for me, thanks. Besides, I’m going to the beach!

I finished Go Ask Alice last night. I’ve had a copy of it forever and decided to read it this week, partially out of curiosity, partially out of “hey, I’ve owned this for about four years, maybe I should finally read it” and partially out of knowing that it would be a quick, easy read and thus an easy addition to my list of books I’ve never read. I’ve really had a thing for young adult literature recently; I need to do my obligatory bi-annual Harriet the Spy reading and then upgrade to something a little more sophisticated, I think.

EDIT: I’m an idiot. I didn’t even take a chance to explain where I got the new banner! AND THAT WAS THE WHOLE REASON FOR THIS POST! YIKERS!

This new banner is brought to you courtesy of one Miss Mary Virginia Carmack. I’ve known Mary through Livejournal for a little more than two years and have always been impressed with her kindness, her affinity for finding beauty in the unusual and her ability to basically turn everything she touches — whether it’s a collage she’s making or a photograph she’s taking with that damn Mamiya C220 (SO JEALOUS!) — into gold.

She’s the only person I know that has truly mastered the art of collage and overcome the stigma attached to the artform; namely, not making something that looks like that Mason jar your best friend covered with magazine clippings from Seventeen and gave you for your 12th birthday.

CHECK IT.

Here’s the original photograph.

And here are some of my favorite collages.

Check out more of her stuff at this here link.

Are you there, Judy Blume? It’s me, Elizabeth.

Ever since I realized that I’ve been averaging LESS THAN ONE MEASLY BOOK A MONTH (I’m trying to read 100 total — 50 I’ve read before, 50 I haven’t — before The Project ends), I’m happy to report that I’ve shaken myself out of apathy and into action. I’m up to three previously read and 13 never-read books, bringing myself to a grand total of 16/100. Which, you know, brings me to an average of slightly more than one measly book a month. If I speed up much more, I’ll spin out of control and either wind up dead in a ditch or in the emergency room! *laugh track*

BUT SERIOUSLY. I finished Summer Sisters last night. Apparently, I missed out on some major rite of passage for teenage girls growing up in the late ’90s by not reading this; amazingly, I survived the transgression long enough to read it now, and I’m glad I did, if for no other reason than the fact that the next time I’m at a party discussing the finer points of Judy Blume’s career, I can be honest and say that the last Judy Blume book I read was not Freckle Juice (which, until last night, it was). Not that reading Jessi’s well-worn copy last month didn’t blow my mind, because it totally did, but. Yeah. 

Hey, guess what? I’m going to the beach next weekend.

“As far back as I can remember, I’ve always known I wanted to be a gangster.”

Yesterday afternoon, in the midst of the Kris Allen-induced hysteria (refer here and here for details from mine and Brad’s perspectives, respectively), I was fiddling around on IMDB and looked up Goodfellas on a whim. I like gangster movies / most of Martin Scorsese’s stuff that I’ve seen, but this intersection of the two was something I had heard a lot of good things about and never had the pleasure of viewing.

As soon as I saw the above quote (which, no duh, encapsulates my world view to a T) I knew I had to change that, and last night, I did. At 146 minutes, it was quite the bloody, profanity-peppered odyssey, but I took it like a compare (!) and ended up enjoying myself way more than I thought I would.

Here’s my less-than-100-word “review,” though perhaps “less-than-100-word painfully terse advice based on the film’s main themes” is more accurate (introduced here):

‘Tis far better to grow up an overworked, underpaid and perpetually disgruntled Irishman in New York City like your belt-wielding father than to grow up in the decadent seat of mobsterdom, mark the biggest success of your life by purchasing a TV that hides behind a remote-controlled multi-colored stone wall in your living room and then lose it all because your wife flushed all the coke down the toilet, thus landing you an overworked, underpaid and perpetually disgruntled Irishman in a blue bathrobe in Anytown, U.S.A.

FML, Y’ALL.

This morning, at about 9:15, I was driving on I-40 East toward Little Rock. It doesn’t matter why. What matters is that I encountered bumper-to-bumper traffic at a time and place that usually allows me to drive with great speed and intensity. A trip that typically takes me a solid 20 minutes (pedal to the m-e-t-a-l, y’all) took me FOUR TIMES AS LONG.

Surely, a traffic jam this severe could be chalked up to an accident, right? I mean, accidents happen. But hold on to your butts: This had nothing to do with an accident.* It had everything to do with this sloe-eyed sweetie from Jacksonville playing a free concert in the Rivermarket.

I wouldn’t believe it except that I saw droves of teenage girls and middle-aged women (and the occasional reluctant/not-so-reluctant male companion) trudging through the humidity from President Clinton Avenue with my own two eyes. I even ran into my sister and her family.

I go to Conway on a weekly (if not twice-weekly) basis, and I have to admit that while I take a certain measure of pride in seeing anyone from the Natural State get their moment on the national stage, I’ll be happy when I can drive through that city without seeing his name on a business marquee everywhere I turn.

* Unless your definition of “accident” is the fact that American Idol has been going strong on network television for eight seasons for no other reason than the fact that AMERICANS, BY AND LARGE, HAVE TERRIBLE (by which mean “no”) TASTE.

GUESS THE EFF WHAT.

It’s May Day!

And around here, that means only two things:

1. My dad sent me flowers!
2. It’s the one-year anniversary of this humble blog!

365 days down, 636 days (and a crap-ton of challenges) to go…

Happy May Day, y’all!

 

I’m wearing my new specs (see this post for more information), too!

Played-out ‘do.

I’m kinda sick of my haircut. Is it bad that I want the hair of an eighteen-year-old boy? Supposedly he’s some kind of “musician,” though a thorough examination of Wikipedia and his MySpace page reveal that he has a strong following of junior high and high school-aged girls, which makes me wary.

But look at the hair, y’all.

If that’s wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

I also don’t want to get e-mails from Ticket Alternative anymore as that’s how I found out about this skinny wiener in the first place.

[Good] Etsy Friday.

There’s a twist to this installment of Etsy Friday, perhaps my favorite (by which I mean only) half-hearted and somewhat recurring feature on this lovely slice of blog.

What twist, you might ask? A twist of the two-fold variety, good sirs and ladies. 

1. There’s only one item 

2. And you can’t buy it, because I already did. HA!

You are looking at some vintage, lightly worn Christian Dior eyeglasses, complete with a nice little twisty detail on the arms…

…and full-on bifocal action that I plan on having replaced with my own, no-bifocals-necessary prescription when I go to the optometrist in two weeks.

I do have astigmatism, though.

Listed as “CHRISTIAN DIOR Glasses,” The Great Society, $35.

This is the biggest thing going on in my life right now.

taken from married to the sea

I updated the list of books I’ve read on the master list earlier this week. I’m a little ashamed to say that I’m averaging a pitiful ONE BOOK A MONTH in my quest to read 100 books (50 I’ve already read and 50 that I haven’t) and regrettably, three of those books are from the Twilight series, a.k.a. The Greatest Abomination in the History of Juvenile Literature. On that note, I’m about 100 pages away from being done with Breaking Dawn and have been for about two months. My excuse? I’m bored. I started reading the first book more than a year ago and have been painstakingly trudging through Stephenie Meyer’s hyperbolic, melodramatic vampiric ramblings ever since. I should have just given up, but one thing I won’t do is stop a book (er, or a series, for that matter) halfway through, no matter how bad it is.

Screw you, Stephenie Meyer. Screw you and your 30-something Mormon mother-of-three writing style.

Amazingly, my sister — who just started reading the series nine days ago and has both a 20-month-old and a three-month-old to care for during the day — is almost caught up with me. Just for the record, she’s five years further away from teenager-dom than I am.

What gives?

…

That said, I’m totally, totally, TOTALLY on Team Jacob. Edward is a pansy ass.

Anticon dreams and April schemes.

I’d like to think I’d take dictation from something big and evasive that I’ve yet to see the face of.

Every morning, when the alarm on my clock radio goes off and NPR’s Morning Edition wakes me up, I lay under the covers with my eyes closed and count how many seconds it takes before either Renee Montagne or Steve Inskeep say the words “economic meltdown,” “car manufacturers,” “stock market” or any of several other similarly depressing terms. Usually, the count is under 15 seconds, which guarantees a difficult transition from my bed to the bathroom sink. That’s why 1) I have listened to nothing but In An Aeroplane Over the Sea while getting ready for work in the morning for the last month to counteract the bleak news reports, and 2) last night, I re-programmed my clock radio to the oldies station.

Speaking of difficult mornings and how to make them better, I wish that I could keep all of the artists on Anticon housed in one of my dresser drawers and wear them according to how I feel. I’m not kidding. It’s an idea I came up with yesterday while listening to Alias’ Resurgam, and I think it’s a pretty good one. For instance, on particularly jaunty days, I’d put some Jel in my hair and take precisely one dose (naturally) of Adam Drucker for a little extra bounce in my step. When I wake up feeling isolated, I’d wrap myself up in Odd Nosdam before heading out the door. Subtle is for nights in; Tobacco is for nights out. Alias and Tarsier is the perfect attire for first dates, hundredth dates and falling in love in general; Alias alone is what my great-grandmother called “soft clothes” — what you wear when you want to be in the familiar comfort of your home, just reading a book or thinking about things. And Why?, of course, is the handkerchief you keep with you at all times regardless of how you feel.