5) Call both my grandma's and ask them what their parent's were like.
4) Learn all the lyrics to Bone Thugz & Harmony's "First of tha Month."
3) Cook more often for myself and J.
2) Take better care of my teeth. My mom paid $10,000 cash for this grill. The least I can do to honor her investment is get them cleaned once a year, brush after I drink coffee and floss. Oh, and use white strips. I love white strips!
1) Make money. Specifically, I want to make more money this year than ever before. That shouldn't be hard, as I've never really made that much. I would love to expand more on this but am hesitant to write too much about my work situation. The walls have ears.
Lastly, I want 2007 to look like this:
Does anyone else miss the former vox main page (the one before the last refresh)? It wasn't until 2 days ago that I even realized we still have a section devoted to neat things found in the neighborhood. I think the old format was aesthetically nicer/cleaner and promoted a healthy competitive spirit amongst vox users to post things worthy of mention in this area. Can we rewind a little bit?
Somewhere nestled in the dusty bundles of my unfired synapses there is a section devoted to college lectures. Deeper in this tangled bundle is a lecture on Existentialism that concerns Jean Paul Sartre's thoughts on food. Specifically, something about the intake of food being the ultimate embrace of life and the denial of food symptomatic of living in the void, coping with our nausea.
Any philosophy students wanna take it from here?
It is not my intention to detail my complicated relationship with food. This endeavor would take far more consideration than I have the time or means to offer. Rather, I wanted to simply announce that I have started cooking again.
As with all things, I discovered cooking falls squarely in the realm of skills that either you "use or lose." It is safe to say I have sufficiently "lost it" in my 5-year hiatus. Should I mention the irony that it was an emotionally abusive philosophy student that stopped my cooking in the first place? Before him, I cooked intuitively and without fear. After him, I was so afraid my flavors were too intense or that I forgot something trivial like blowing out the scented candles, (which he claimed interfered with his ability to enjoy food) that I abandoned cooking entirely.
Cooking again is both motivated by my career and by my relationship with J. In my line of work, I am constantly surrounded by all things cooking/food related. With my coworkers, to admit you do not cook is to admit a deep character flaw that could potentially harm your prospects for advancement. With J, my desire to cook springs forth from an innate predilection to fatten him with my love. It helps that he has enough sense not to criticize what I make, even if he doesn't care for it.
Therefore, rounding out the bottom of my short list of resolutions for the new year: cook stuff.
The others, in order:
1) Get money.
2) Take care of my teeth.
3) Cook stuff.
Both New Orleans and Allison are gone...if you would have told me, seven years ago, while I was road-tripping across the country to Mardi Gras that in less than a decade both the gal in my passenger seat and our destination would be wiped from the earth, I would have spontaneously combusted - exploded into pure energy like in the movie 'Powder.' It would have simply been too much for me to conceive.
And what, exactly, does that say for my own frail mortality if both a city as grand and rich in history as New Orleans can be struck from the earth in an instant, and a similar force can steal my compatriot ..what does that say for my own perishable form?
Now that I am staring down my mortality, watching it snarl at me like a rabid dog, what will I do differently?
What can I do?
Dear Allison,
I just found out this morning that you died on my birthday. I'm at work, trying to keep my shit together because I don't know what else to do with myself. I know that you would probably want me to leave work, go to to the Aveda salon downtown and blow $300 on a mani/pedi/haircut and there still is a chance I may do that in your honor.
I regret that it took Nadia calling from Egypt to tell me the news, when your funeral was just down the street from me this past Sunday. Had I known your mother was in town, you know I would've been there. I also regret deleting my myspace account and disconnecting myself socially from all of our other friends - had I not done that, I would've known sooner.
However, my biggest regret is not taking the time to email you last month when you wanted to mend our friendship and fight it out - cry it out - whatever it took. I am not one to fight, as you know, I am one to walk away and divorce myself from people rather than stay and deal. Your passing will probably change that about me forever.
Right now, I am looking into flying back home because I think Denise is going to have a memorial for you there. As you know, I never liked your friends here and this is especially true now, as I can't help blame them for your untimely death. It is still unclear if you committed suicide or if it was an overdose. I'm guessing it was a combination of both. I love you so much and I never understood why you insisted on keeping your finger so firmly planted on the self-destruct button.
Your 'Tribe' friends are soliciting stories like this for your memorial site but I'm sure you'll understand why I won't be putting this on there. I know you would probably disagree with me on this point but I have to say, none of those people really knew you. I know the side of you that they were attracted to and that side has nothing to do with the best of you.
I would like to thank you for introducing me to activism, Eldridge Cleaver, Mumia Abu Jamal, the Black Panthers, clove cigarettes, volunteering, gutter punks and Black Starr in 10th grade. For staying single with me during the long Michigan winters, spent drinking in snowbanks and raising hell. For dropping out of college and road tripping with me around the country in the Subaru (although fuck you for falling asleep on me and losing your license right before the trip). Thank you for all the rides to school in the morning. Thank you for loving Ani Difranco as much as I do and thank you for giving me a place to stay when I first moved to San Francisco. I will miss the fuck out of you, girl.
~k
I can now officially claim to be 27-years-old. A big mahalo to everyone that helped me bring it in right.
These are my favorite shots of the night:
...or as I know him, MG. I finally got the bastard to come over to Vox from myvampire and although it pains me greatly to admit, he's probably the best fucking writer I've ever met. This is me, green with envy, but my conscience will not allow his work to go unrecognized.
For a good time, read: MG
In college I had a great course in feminism & economics that taught me about banks that offer microfinance loans to women in small 3rd world villages and the incredible difference these loans can make in their lives. I just stumbled across a really great, user-friendly website that allows individuals to become lenders: kiva. The smallest increment is $25 and you can pledge to a specific woman who, say - has a basket weaving business out of her house in Uganda and could use the money to buy more reeds. I haven't done it yet but I'm guessing you can probably give loans in someone else's honor...nudge, nudge, nudge, wink.. seems like there may be some gift-giving holidays just around the corner. Also, if you happen to be someone struggling to find me a birthday or Christmas gift, this would make me very happy!
Last night I watched an incredibly beautiful young woman sing and play acoustic guitar on stage. Despite her diminutive stature she immediately commanded the attention of the room with a voice that rumbled like thunder. She sounded feminine, strong and warbly like that of a Beth Orton or Lucinda Williams.
As I sipped my drink, stage right, I was enamored with her innate ability to use the voice as an instrument and to transfix the crowded bar. At first I was saddened by the murky reminder I cannot carry a tune to save my life, when it occurred to me, simply, that I should write the beautiful things I would sing if I were able.
Close your eyes and hold my hand. I want you to walk with me through the memory of the greatest beauty I have ever known. No, change that. I want you to jump inside me and I will carry you, so you can see it through my eyes.
You will see a playground. Elementary school. Oak trees dropping red and orange leaves on the ground. You will feel small and stunted, pained by your inability to speak with the adults as a peer. Simultaneously, the world around you will reverberate in hyper color. Never again will you smell rain seared on the sidewalk, evaporating up into your nostrils like this. You will change scenes. School principal, impossibly tall, at least 6'5 or more. He is taking your class on a field trip to the cemetery - but you don't know that yet. He doesn't tell the teachers, he doesn't tell your parents. He claims that he is taking your class out "for a color tour" to enjoy the leaves. As soon as you leave the school grounds, he smiles at you and you know you will keep the secret - that he's a kid just like you but pretending to be an adult. This impossibly tall, giant of a man, with the smile and mussy hair of a little boy, leads your class down the road and you cut through a forest of maple and oak trees, crushing acorns into the damp ground beneath your little boots.
Suddenly, you reach a cemetery. Not like one of the sanitized new ones (not like the one your grandpa was buried in the year before). No this one is waaay old and the headstones are breaking apart, rejoining the earth with the bodies interred there. You look around at the other kids and wonder why you've stopped in this place. Maybe someone has to tie a shoelace? Then you notice for the first time that your principal is carrying a large backpack with him. He pulls out sheets of white paper and colored pencils for everyone. You get handed a blue one with a sheet of paper and he shows you how to press the paper against the tombstone and color against it until a stencil of someone named "Grace" who died in 1856 appears on the page.
You won't think about this again until your late 20's.
.. but then one day you will realize, he was trying to teach you a lesson about life that no teacher, parent, professor, or friend will ever replicate.
There is no way I have time to be telling you this - things at my office have been blowing up since the moment I walked through the door but I simply cannot resist. I responded to a craigslist posting looking for a gal to walk around a private party Saturday night (held at a rented-out bar in the Financial District ), taking polaroids & socializing and I got the job! Oh, and I have to wear a Santa hat! 4 hours. Free drinks. Could be the best $100 I've ever made. Oh and you know I will be posting photos on here.
Anyone looking for a little extra cash, I would say check out craigslist.org in the "gigs" section. Good stuff. Although, Neil's suggestion to test drugs not yet approved by the FDA gets an honorable mention.
