so · dig · this · big · crux

so, this thing. i find it weirdly tempting as a purchase. but it's pretty silly, right? i'm trying to convince myself that if this garment is completely unflattering i'm still going to wear it around the house constantly.

it's been a couple of days now since i got back from my trip. i went to new brunswick, new jersey for work (a book exhibit at a conference) and then i spent a couple of days in nyc. (in case you're wondering, since others did, i don't usually sell books as part of my job. it's just something they need people to do periodically and when the usual suspects are busy i sometimes take a turn.)

new brunswick was fine in every way, but i really didn't get to see much of it or do anything much. i mostly just saw the comfortable but weirdly super-dry inside of a hyatt while i was there. i ordered room service from a woman with the most unusual accent who seemed to get a genuine thrill out of convincing me to get chocolate cake. and the exhibit was fairly slow, but somehow that almost made it more tiring.

finally i was all done with that, and it was time to have what was basically a belated weekend in new york. it was a quick visit, but it was good. i saw two film screenings with my friend t, glen and randa and japanese summer: double suicide. at the second of those i ran into susan's college friend j who i hadn't seen in about 12 years (sounds scarily long ago when i actually count). hung around t & e's lovely apartment with the continuously-mellowing jessie the dog. had some nice meals, including good new york pizza and veselka, where i'd been meaning to go for a long time. went to the strand and fell victim to cheap books, but not that many. put myself through the soho shopping meatgrinder. the new topshop was totally blah and surprisingly pricey, except for the guy's clothes. if it weren't for these pesky hips i might have left with a bunch of button-down shirts. uniqlo yielded a couple of nice, super-practical, and sale-priced things, which redeemed my shopping efforts. most importantly i got to see friends, including vietnamese dinner with j & a, pete's candy store with the other t, lunch with m, and of course quality time with my gracious hosts.

plus i got a lot of train-riding in, which i always enjoy for some reason.

anyway, it's really good to get away from home once in a while. at some point while i was gone i did the math and realized i hadn't left the state in ten months before this, and that's entirely too long.

so, i gathered together my friends jon and joe last night to see the wrath of khan at the south alamo. the idea was that they were showing it along with ten minutes of exclusive new footage from the new star trek movie. we barely made it into the screening (one couple got in behind us, that's it), even though we were almost an hour early.

they did one of those little switcheroo things that people who put on film screenings love to do, and it turns out we saw basically the american premiere of the new star trek movie instead, maybe even the first public screening based on what everybody was saying. also, leonard nimoy was there. he was there, and at one point he bumped into jon and for the rest of the evening jon kept saying he touched leonard nimoy and giggling.

and joe got a poster signed by leonard nimoy and the other dudes.

the new star trek was good. i was expecting a decent, entertaining film (two words i don't use as lightly as some people) and that's what it was. it even got to me in a few pretty awesome ways. they totally manipulated us - they got people who were excited about the real, old, good star trek and made us feel like we were in on something special and then told us to feel free to blog about it. but for whatever reason, it was pretty awesome and i was very happy when it was all over.

meanwhile, the last couple of weeks have included a lot of bad moments and general drama/shittiness, and after a long day at work (i had stayed at the office until 8:30) this really felt like a good omen and a chance to reset. anyway, yay!

p.s. here's harry knowles writing about it.

p.p.s. and here is vulture making fun of us.

and the entry from the alamo blog.

this is my favorite entry from slaughterhouse 90210.

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our party this weekend was, by all accounts, highly successful. the cops came (warning only) and apparently one couple had sex in the bathroom. and there were tons of people there. i had fun much of the time, but i was constantly distracted with trying to figure out who was where and what was happening. here's looking forward to somebody else having a similar party i can enjoy without being neurotic in that special way that i have.

most importantly, everybody i talked to seemed to be having fun and getting along with people, with the exception of a couple of jackasses who were ultimately more or less tolerable.

... and now i've got an early flight on wednesday (followed by an intense several days of selling books in a hotel exhibit hall) and a ton of work to get done before then. wish me luck.

when i was in middle school and for most of high school, i took a sense of identity from the fact that i was small. i was short, flat-chested, and had tiny feet. turns out i was just a tremendous late bloomer - i didn't even stop growing in height until after my first year of college. so i had to make a little adjustment.

i think we're all apt to hold on to things about ourselves that we find (at least relatively) unique as part of our self-concept. (though i suspect i may be slightly more this way than usual, though, due to my lifelong obsession with facts about people - birthdays, ages, etc.)

i am now exceedingly average. i'm on the thin side for an adult woman but i'm far from unusually skinny, i'm a little less than 5'6" so i'm a couple of inches above average but hardly tall, my feet are just under average size, and my bra size is almost dead-on average. so i focus on some more specific things.

i'm pretty nearsighted (more so than most people i know, but less so than others). i have kind of a big butt (not that i'm complaining). i wear a large hat size. my teeth are tiny (something a few guys i've dated have found endearing, something which in turn i find kind of endearing but mostly weird). i have little brown hairs on my second knuckles. i have tiny wrists and rather thick ankles. if i spend enough time in the sun (meaning my skin tans and my hair lightens) i am more or less all the same shade of brown. the fingernails on my right hand are significantly longer, the pink part i mean, than on my left hand.

so i wonder, do other people think this way, and if so, what random physical things do they hold on to as part of their idea of themselves?

i organized my yarn last night (i know, it's exactly the sort of distracting task one convinces oneself is important before a move, but it's not and it is, as i said, distracting). anyway, two things are interesting about this (to me, anyway). one, it's amazing how much green yarn i have. yeah, it's my favorite color, but i didn't realize what i was doing all these years. two, i need to think of interesting ways to use relatively small amounts of yarn and/or to use a variety of yarns, maybe even yarns that vary a bit in gauge, in one scrap project. lucky for me i find the idea of scrap projects terribly exciting, so this mostly makes me happy.

***
vulture interviews mark webber, who's playing stephen stills in the forthcoming scott pilgrim movie. he looks appropriately scruffy. also, somehow i was unaware that jason schwartzman is rumored to be playing gideon. hm.

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trying to avoid feeling blah today. it's good but not especially thrilling that it's finally raining. i'm making an effort to look forward to eating at swad tonight...

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p.s. i spent a really long time with hair too short for me to see in any way except in a mirror. just recently my hair reached a point where it tends to hang in my vision, and i grew out my bangs to a length where they're ever so slightly visible at the top if my vision. it's weird. i think it makes me feel hidier and nestier, which isn't good or bad. but it's like i'm peeking out at the world from a brown curtain.

i keep a constant mental list of songs that should be covered, and in a way i think of it like i'm going to be doing the covering, when in fact the closest thing i've ever been to "in a band" was playing drums with april in frank's garage for a couple of months. i am almost unaware of the fact that i think this way, even though some thought of this type goes through my head approximately once a day.

i suppose there is an extremely slim chance that someday i will have an opportunity to suggest a good cover to somebody who can actually play music. otherwise, this will remain an odd little game that i play in my head.

saw richard thompson last night at the cactus cafe. two main verdicts: richard thompson is awesome live, and the cactus is always a great venue even when it's sold out.

r.t. was incredibly endearing - just a little clever and gently snarky, a tiny bit shy, and generally warm and adorable. of course there were maybe seven other people about my age there and nobody much younger; everybody else was of that particular austiny generation that eats this stuff up (though with good reason, so i'm hardly complaining). there were only a couple of instances of my pet peeve, which is the clapping at the beginning of the song as if to say, "i know this one! i know it! yay me!" and those were fairly low-key. please also note that it's nice to go to a show full of superfans where people aren't constantly trying to take pictures.

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i am still on a big reading jag. i just finished you will know our velocity, an impulsive half-price purchase which i kept accidentally thinking of as "and you will know us by our trail of velocity." i'm neither anti- nor pro-dave eggers, or to be more precise i'm kind of ambivalent. i worry that he may be too pretentious, yet his style of writing works for me and i'm a pretty straightforward, pragmatic reader most of the time.

just started on the unconsoled and it's already really interesting, though i may have to set it aside once it's time to read the next book club book.

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oh, the quietus loves the new trail of dead album by the way, in a review that has a pretty entertaining cut on kings of leon: "confusingly it was kings of leon who fought their way out of this clusterfuck scrum – perhaps because only by the night was a major departure for them, in that it contained more than two and a half listenable songs and didn’t sound like it was recorded in a barn with a family of pigs giving birth to another family of pigs next door."

my new clothes thing, without knowing i was doing it, has been to have as many different shades of blue going on as possible at one time. i just got some new shoes that are three shades of blue.

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question:

does anybody ever actually get away with stealing or demanding large sums of money (and then actually escapes)? i can't think of any such instances, but is that because we don't hear about it/remember it or because it doesn't happen?

(brought on by the taking of pelham 123.)

i had another question, but i forgot what it was.

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okay, despite my twin-related baggage it is sometimes nice when people dress alike.

sassy sartorialist mittens. and they're crocheted, if i'm judging accurately.

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grain edit on an old issue of typographica.

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looks like calvin johnson's and ian svenious's almost identical new bands are playing emo's in may.

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why do i only feel like drawing when i'm at work?

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p.s. mickey rourke wore a pendant depicting his recently-departed chihuahua to the oscars, and dude bought it custom-made off etsy. that makes me happy for some reason.

* i caught up on battlestar galactica last night.
* i bought a wristband today for south by. i feel guilt about the expense but i should do everything i can to see the vaselines. and for some reason i seem to be able to afford it this month.
* in related news, i have "son of a gun" in my head really bad.
* touch and go is closing, only they're not, they're just not distributing anything anymore. which isn't as bad as closing, but it's still pretty bad.
* my migraine from yesterday is still hanging on but i think it's slowly loosening its grip on my nervous system.

apparently jonny greenwood really likes magazine.

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helvetica moleskine. don't be put off by the price; hong kong dollars are worth 1/8-1/7 of an american dollar.

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these are some of the best gig posters i've seen in a while. via mbv.

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otherwise, feeling pretty blah at the moment.

i am happy about this bathing suit on etsy. i should have known this was a pleasant inevitability, but i find the idea of a custom, handmade bathing suit really exciting. plus, i've always liked the idea of vintage bathing suits but between the personal nature of the used bathing suit and the less-practical oldfangled fabric i couldn't quite conceive of wearing one.

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john hodgman on bruce campbell, having once been his literary agent.

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on a slightly less cheery note (though not a bad one), i stayed up late the other night reading a book in one sitting. i hadn't done that in a while. it was kazuo ishiguro's never let me go, and it made me bawl my eyes out. it's really good; you should read it. do yourself a favor, though, and don't find out what it's about ahead of time. i didn't and it unfolded really well that way.

maybe it's just me, but i find myself less tolerant of sad films than sad books. and i find that there are way more sad, morbid, and outright creepy novels than films. or maybe there are just more books, period, and the ones i read happen to be sad, morbid, and outright creepy more so than normal?

does music occasionally make you feel dizzy, or warm, or fuzzy? (not metaphorically.) or has it at some point, maybe when you were younger? i used to get that way more when i was fifteen or sixteen, but it still happens sometimes.