disastrous manipulation

I know this blog has already been featured as a blog of note on blogger, but because I couldn't tear my eyes away from it, I simply couldn't help myself. This is for my friends in photography, and this is why I don't manipulate my photos other than simple tricks of noise and color balance.

Enjoy.

one day like this a year would see me right...

Highlights from tonight's ride:

• My 1991 magenta Murray.
• A clashing red bike helmet.

• Scents of barbeque.
• Downhills.
• Soft air.
• Finally putting my new point and shoot to work.
• Its full manual option.



• My ipod on shuffle.
• Ben Lee, Benny Goodman, Ani DiFranco and Duncan Sheik.
• A glance at some spectacular graffiti beneath the Franklin Avenue Bridge--only visible to those on the river road.

• Waving back at two small girls in a second story window.
• Noticing gas was $3.49 at bp, then subsequently noticing my speed was 22mph without gas.
• The Murray's chain disengaging on University Ave.
• My resulting blackened fingers.
• My no longer white brakes.

• Making my way to the house on 3511 NE Main, but not actually passing it.
• Climbing the fence and sitting instead, on the turtle fountain in the empty wading pool in Hi-view park, where Grandpa used to take me as a kid.

• Seeing my grandparents' old deck chairs from my perch in the park, and avoiding nostalgia knowing I've couched enough of it in my writing lately.

• Elbow on my way home.
• Racing beneath the old train bridge on NE Main.

• Orange-Banana-Pineapple juice after 16.62 miles.

More photos here.

Generation gap.

Though my grandmother is one of my best friends, we can't talk about politics.

A few weeks ago our usual pleasantries were exchanged with a furious altercation when she maintained that, "Mr. Bush is a very nice man. We just have to wait for time to tell his legacy," and proceeded to scold me about my own political disposition. It obviously goes without saying that the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States would thereafter induce a crazed socialist regime in our nation. How could I consider voting for him with any other result?

Don't get me wrong, she's an incredibly educated seventy-something. And though we both enjoy painting porcelain and a good margarita on the rocks, we favor different news stations, and of course my generation never had to walk to school barefoot. Through a field in Marshall, Minnesota. Uphill. In the snow.

23 Indications you have an old(er) soul.

1. When you got in the elevator at 4:31 yesterday afternoon, the drunk girls who had fallen over inside apologize for having such low tolerance and call you 'mam in the process.

2. You are incapable of participating in a conversation with the guys in the elevator at 10:12 about what time you started drinking because you haven't started drinking yet.

3. Fishbowls gross you out. You got over grape kool-aid at fifteen. You think of your mother and how much she hates artifical grape flavoring.

4. You loathe places like the Library and Blarney's where they mix the drinks strong and you can't hear a thing above all the damn noise.

5. All the damn noise being shoddy live covers of "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Bennie and the Jets" with too much static and atonal vocals.

6. You yawn at 10:37.

7. The girls in the bathroom are discussing whose tabs on which to place their next drinks.

8. The guy who walks from the bar as you leave the loo leaps at you like a leech. He initiates conversation by complementing your cute hair cut.

9. He wants to introduce you to his friends, who are silent clones of their ring leader.

10. He, a 22 year-old International business major who, wearing an all too tight t-shirt and faux army hat, introduces himself as Anton doesn't impress you when he said he wanted to travel with his degree.

11. In fact, you don't believe him at all, though you're certain he uses his latin complexion to claim he is bilingually impressive in an attempt to impress women like yourself.

12. Except he hasn't been privy to the fact you speak Spanish fluently which therefore places you outside the category of women like yourself.

13. You yawn again at 11:46.

14. Your civility causes you to refrain from punching his face when he puts a hand on the back of your neck to yell over the racket into your ear.

15. You don't offer you are a writer and especially not a dance major because you know his eyes will bug out at the prospect and he'll immediately picture things with you you'd rather he not be picturing with you.

16. These things being the kinds of things that would make you ralph your Blue Moon if you pictured with him.

17. He realizes the possibility you might like books and quickly vacates, saying maybe I'll see you here Thursday night or something.

18. You thank the gods for setting you free and providing shitty music to fill in the gaps of your un-conversation with said Anton.

19. But you still CAN'T HEAR ANYTHING ABOVE THE DAMN MUSIC! as you attempt to recount the sleaze-bucket story to Sharkey.

20. NO, YOU SAID YOU WISH YOU COULD HEAR YOURSELF TALKING ABOVE THE MUSIC!

21. You yawn at 12:32.

22. You drop Bill and Sharkey off at their respective apartments and drive home knowing you would score an A+ on a sobriety test given by any of the five squad cars in your neighborhood.

23. You get up at 8:00 the next morning to write this.

Dame Hillary Clinton: The Black Knight

Today, I received an early morning e-mail from my older brother. "Thought you might be interested in an incredibly accurate, fresh spin on the election..." he wrote.

He then hyperlinked me to this remarkable blog at the Huffington Post. And yes, I just used hyperlink as a verb.

Cheezus Crust

I love NPR. As I don't own a TV, I turn it on in the morning and listen to some of the best reporting in the nation. Additionally, I'm privy to things like this when I make lunch on a Saturday afternoon.

Perhaps I'll have to create my own Gorgonzola Mind Controlla.Though I'm not sure I can induce a Hyper Cheese Brain Freeze like Linda Williamson, and it looks like I'll have to wait until next year to compete, I do have a squash in the fruit basket in my kitchen.

Adventures in Skateville

So, I've been putting off writing this because it's such great material.

I'd planned to allude pieces of my own roller skating adventures with excerpts from Mary Karr's Cherry, which I'm currently reading and love.

However, my life is pretty crazed and aside from organized outings to coffee shops to write manuscripts and papers that refuse to write themselves, I've had few organized outings since my trip to Skateville two weeks ago. Skateville being a dive equivallent to the roller skating rink in which I spent my own childhood and tenth birthday. Being ten and dressed in elastic waisted jeans and my favorite tye-dyed t-shirt (the one I'd actually dyed myself), I toted my purple and electric lime rollerblades to the Skatin' Place where I'd invited ten girls to my party. But when a couple of girls ended up in tears because I apparently didn't skate enough with them, Mom gave me the "I told you ten was too many kids" look. Though I might be manufacturing this detail, I pacified them by opening my birthday presents and cutting the Cinderella cake my mother made. Kids are such jerks, but Cinderella trumped the party anyway. She was standing up and her gown was comprised of marble cake covered in baby blue frosting.

Exacting in detail to the Skatin' Place, Skateville is equipped with enough wheeled shoes for entire populace of Burnsville. Their leather is exactly as you would picture it: far too broken in and containing the essences of the hundreds of feet they had blistered before your own. But you lace up nonetheless and are on your way to the Snack Shack where they sell fun dip for a quarter and blue raspberry slushies that give your friends brain freeze.

You teeter on the immaculately waxed maple floor, praying you don't fall as zillions of prepubescent kids zip by you on skates. One girl who has actually hit puberty seems to be chasing a boy years ahead of her with her midriff. You watch as she skates ahead of him, and glances back letting him pass. She does this repeatedly though he remains in oblivion. Even the forty-something Mom whose teased hair and pants from the 90s flies by you--pom-poms catching the wind with her speed. You push off and recall the side-to-side movement required for momentum, contrary to the forward-backward motion the task would otherwise imply. The swirling disco-ball does nothing to aid your balance.

But when the tubby DJ introduces himself as Mike and floods the speakers with MC Hammer's "Can't Touch This," the tots get bored and head for the snack shack and you and your friends leap for joy (though not literally as you're aware the result would be a heap of orange wheels all over the floor). You spend the rest of the night beneath the ceiling's bulbous, flashing lights and wait for your New Kids On the Block request that never comes. Maybe if you'd tried to write it six times in a row like the kids who wanted to hear "Cyclone" did, you'd have gotten what you wanted. After all, it was repeated twice in a three hour period, each time inducing the kind of shrilly noise from them that NKOTB would have done for you and your friends.

You catch yourself wondering if they really understand the song's raunchy lyrics, and suddenly feel like your mother when she would say, "That's terrible" when Meredith Brooks's "Bitch" came on the radio in the car after school. You begrudgingly changed 104.7 KCLD to another station that didn't play Ace of Base and the like.

There was one time, however, when your older brother permitted you to hang out in his room to listen to the new Matchbox Twenty album. Unlike the kids and "Cyclone" you dared to ask your brother what Rob Thomas meant when he sang about "the hand that touched me" in "Push." Though he could explain the mechanics of any kind of computer and take an entire toaster apart only to immaculately reassemble it, he turned red in the face and said he wasn't going to explain that to you before kicking you out of his room. You didn't understand what the big deal was all about.

Now, as the print of the inline skates on the fluorescent carpet threatens nausea, you realize these kids will eventually figure it out. Though it'll probably happen after T-Pain goes out of style and someone else is coming up with the pop euphemisms for sex, it's safe to say natural disasters spell adolescence more than pop music.



And though I've written an ode to Marry Karr in the second person instead of quoting Cherry, I hope you enjoy the pictures.







Photos by Katherine Lung and Julia Pevan