you will DIE of laughter!

BLAST there only being three!!!







Simon, you and your cat are genius!

pride, envy, envious pride

My dear friend Steven got his "first real article" published in The Stranger this week and he got to spend and hour and a half talking to David Sedaris.

I'm so proud. And so jealous! Pride/envy, envy/pride? See my quandary?! :P

So I'm like 60% proud and 40% jealous, at least I'm supportive in the majority! (Kidding! It's really more like 90-10).

my fave new singer/songwriter/pianist – sara bareilles!

If you want to see the official video (and it's cute) here it is – "Bottle it up"

Then there's this one, which is sad, but really, really beautiful – "Gravity"

he went to how many countries?!?!?!

Possibly the greatest thing ever!!!

musical media overload!!!

OMG! I hate, let me repeat, HATE text talk. I've never been one to spout out "lol"s and "omg"s like they in any way resemble anything close to real words. (I especially hate, HATE, when people use text talk in actual, human to human conversations, like they actually SAY them, like a real word! And they don't just say L-O-L like any other acronym, oh no, they actually say "LOL" pronounced the way a child learning to read would, sounding out the consonants and vowels!). But, this particular subject may call for the kind of bafflingly overwhelming exclamation that only a well-deserved "OMG" could do justice for. (Everything in moderation my friend, because I guarantee who won't witness another "omg" out of my mouth, or in this case, text, for some time).

I have 49.26 gigabytes of music on my computer! ALMOST 50 GIGS! AM I INSANE???

My iTunes music folder easily takes up half of the memory on my laptop, if not more, and I'm not one of those nifty people who puts all their music on some ridiculously mac savvy 500 gigabyte wireless external hard drive, thus backing up all their files and freeing up space on their notebooks. Oh no, not me. I actually carry around all 49.26 gigs in my messenger bag with me.

And guess how much of that superfluous 49.26 gigs I've actually listened to? Perhaps, 18 gigs, maybe? MAAAAAAAYBE... and that's just an estimate. I keep having massive music trades with friends in an effort to stay informed, but I spend all my time collecting artists and listening to my few rotating favorites (the ones with a double, sometimes even triple-digit playcounts).

And so, in a gallant effort to make the little hard drive space I have left not such a useless waste, I shall spend my night going through the untouched music in my library and reading the piles of magazines I also collect, and rarely get to reading. :P

the aristocrats of my ipod playlist :D

Alright, it's time I introduce you to my favorite Brit band Aristocrats (never the Aristocrats).



One of the benefits of my six-month stint in London town was getting to make pals with their lead guitarist Neil (the one not looking at the camera in the middle). About a week before I left I got the lovely pleasure of tagging along to one of their practices and meeting the rest of the guys in Essex. From left to right they are James (drums), Danny (guitar/vocals), Neil (lead guitar), Jonny (bass) and Tommy (vocals).

I was worried when I first met Neil and he told me about the band that they would be terrible and I would forced into a friends' obligatory fan-ship. However, my lack of confidence, luckily, came back to mock me: I just happen to think they're amazing (phew!) and pretty darn good live (and by that I mean, they ain't one of those bands that sounds phenomenal on the album and suck-ass live. It just isn't so!)

See for yourself! They've just released their EP, which you can get on iTunes by the way, and you ALL should buy it! (It's only $4, and Neil tells me if enough people from one place buy the EP, their manager will arrange for the band to travel there to do a show :D)

Also, Danny and Neil were on a radio show promoting the band in the UK's Surface Unsigned Festival. So please, listen up! They've made it to the semi-finals out of thousands of bands, so if you happen to be in London around July 13th, you can go see them compete in the next round. Trust me, they're addictive.

Some parting pics (courtesy of the band) of the last show I went to of theirs, the last round of the competition at the Purple Turtle in Camden on May 13th. Enjoy!

i saw u

Years before I was old enough to appreciate the brilliance of The Stranger content, I habitually turned to the back pages for the "I Saw U" section.

The "I Saw U" is this amazing personals section where people put out ads for people they saw on the street, spoke to at parties, lost numbers for or never even spoke to, but admired from afar and realized they were starstruck right then and there. They're entertaining, modernly, yet hopelessly romantic and no matter how awkward, they say something about the everyday that people often choose to ignore (probably for self preservation purposes) – a whim is nothing to shy away from!

Here are some of the ones from this week that I liked:

You Enjoy My Melodies

Cute Girl In Furniture Store

Hallava Falafel Truck Goddess

Krista. Register 12. Fred Meyer

But seriously?! How great would it be to be sought after on one of these? To have made such a great impression on someone else upon first meeting, first glance even, that they'd go to such lengths to find you knowing full-well you may never read it? Never find it? Never find them back?!! Chivalry is so not dead...yet.

what's in a genre? – truth = patchwork, authenticity = quilt

Today I was flipping through (and consequently getting quite addicted to) Seattle's new (and get this, free!) enthusiastically creative City Arts Magazine. I came upon a nice column on the "vagrant" lifestyle of the freelance writer (a relate-able read)and then a nice collage of excerpts from author and UW Professor of English David Shields' new book The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead cut and pasted next to a series of email back-and-forths between Shields himself and his former MFA student and Associate Editor of City Arts Bond Huberman. I found myself enthralled...

Here are some quotes from the article (taken from Shields' book, words I really liked, regardless of the tone of the linked book review) I unknowingly circled, starred and triple underlined with my pen (an unconscious reaction to an increase of interest in whatever I happen to be reading):

"There is only one kind of memoir I can see to write and that's a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating one, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark."

"I write to say, 'You're not the only one.' I write with the full faith that the reader I envision is hungry for my talk, because I know how hungry I am for reports from the trenches, stories that might help me map my way."

"Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent information."

"An awful lot of fiction is immensely autobiographical, and a lot of nonfiction is highly imagines. We dream ourselves awake every minute of the day. 'Fiction'/'nonfiction' is an utterly useless distinction."

"Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings."

"Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we're in need of at the time we're reading."

"You adulterate the truth as you write. There isn't any pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation when you confess to this flaw is that you are seeking to arrive at poetic truth, which can be reached only through fabrication, imagination, stylization. What I'm striving for is authenticity; none of it is real."