i flew into LAX on september 11th.

last year, when that day came around, i remember spontaneously sobbing while driving home on the pali. i was listening to some NPR story told from the point of view of a taxi driver whose first customers were driving to the one year anniversary of the attack on the towers. the story wasn't especially heart wrenching, but i had this sudden sweeping realization six years ago, someone had tried to destroy something that i felt a part of in 2007.

i won't claim to be a new yorker. i'm going to the city for only the fifth time next month, but it has come to represent something unequivocal in my mind. maybe it has something to do with the theatre or curry hill or fashion week or the fact that the new york times contains the words "new york", but that city has developed into the undoubted setting for my personal consummation. i feel dumb and may regret saying this, but through all my travels around the country and the world, there is no other place where i can see myself making a life.

to me, l.a. is the anti- new york. though i have come to appreciate certain parts of the greater los angeles area (namely malibu and the fairfax district), i could never imagine living in a place where rush hour constitutes 7 hours of the waking day, you can't drink the water, the clouds are brown with dirt, people want to be celebrities, and you can't walk anywhere. it is sprawling while new york is compact, ethnically white and hispanic while new york has a million faces, and bitchy where new york is... upfront(?)

if anything, the two things l.a. DOES have are Disneyland, and four of the best people in the world.

it's huckleberry season

i probably stock you on facebook...

in other news, i drove to crater lake today with my grandma jeannine. it's something like the 6th or 7th largest lake in the world, the clearest lake in the world (i guess they test these things), and it also is in the middle of a mountain. aml burns painted a picture of it that i found on google. here it is.

i've always hated spending time with my grandma. she's the woman who made me rewrite my entire math homework on a new sheet of paper when i was seven because the first copy had too many eraser marks on it. when i was ten and wanted to go on the east coast trip, she sent me a check for 15 dollars to spend for valentines day. i ended up not going, so the next time she visited, she tore up the check because "i didn't need it." she also likes spending time at cemetaries (geneology) and walking through old churches. we fight about everything.

that said, this week has been unexpectedly pleasent. one thing alaska HAS taught me is to shut up and just go with the flow even if the flow leads you to a three hour trip to jc penny (i didn't know they still existed) or a drive to look at wheat mills. i've discovered that when i just take those trips to Food for Less like a man, life goes smoothly, just like my bm's after a week of non stop berry eating. sorry, you didn't have to know that...

felines

i can't stand cats.

no plot, just spandex.

i am also allergic to cat hair. coincidence? i think not.

cabbage patch kids and everything unladylike

so i arrived at my grandma jeannine's house last night to discover a dirty dirty family secret...

my grandmother sleeps with a cabbage patch kid.

what.

the.

hell.

there's the pictures of the wretched thing. okay, maybe it's not as weird as finding out that she collects her dead friend's teeth, but it's pretty freaky.

these days, whenever i do something terribly unlady like or rough, i simply say, "Alaska," because, chances are i picked the habit up there

burping ... "Alaska"

passing gass ... "Alaska"

sitting with my legs wide apart ... "Alaska"

shoving food into my mouth like my nana shoving toilet paper into her cart at costco before a hurricane ... "Alaska"

not showering for 72 hours ... "Alaska"

Alaska has added so much to my character

things that don't work

now include my computer. i'm going to try to get it fixed while i'm in medford, oregon for the shakespeare festival from the 4-11th.

meanwhile...

saw neko case at bumbershoot festival in seattle. with the release of conor oberst's first solo album last month, i've been getting into americana music. neko (a member of the new pornogrpahers when not working solo) and her band, which included a banjo, were simply astounding. her voice was firm and smoky in her chest voice but sweet in the higher registers she used for her lullaby like ballads.

later at the festival while walking to reefer maddness the musical (http://www.reefermadness.org/), i heard someone shout "kalei" and turned to find lindsey bailey with whom i met up with at university of washington at midnight that night and tried, unsuccesfully, to find cool people in her dorm who were down to get drank on the first night of a three day weekend, got drank by ourselves until i had to leave at 2:00. went to the airport at 4:00 and flew from seattle to portland.

i'm staying at a hostel for the first time (above). so surprizingly clean that i called home about it. ferreal. that was, until i met the smelly lady who sleeps 10 feet away from me and the forty something indian woman on the bunk bellow me who always looks surprized...

will try to get my computer fixed so i don't have to walk 40 minutes to use the internet. yayo!

is this horrible or wonderful?

We've all heard it, "wikipedia is not a source," not that this has stopped any of us from actually using the site and then just omitting it from the bibliography of whatever we are researching.

And yet, today while reading an article blurb on The New York Time's blog "Ideas" http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/ I clicked a link to John Rawl's biography onto to find myself on... his Wikipedia page? Is this a vindication of a formally dubious source or reason to discredit a well-established source? In other words, what the fuck?

"but AA shirts are soooo comfy!"

Went to a Mirah show. Walking around Capitol Hill in Seattle was like walking around some outdoor American apparel playground. Also a lot of lesbians and boys who weigh way about as much as my left thigh.

Realizing what a douche bag you must have been at the show/movie/party/family dinner/ large lecture section/ school function/bon dance last night is always a shitty feeling. I stood behind the blackout girls at the Mirah concert. Hipsters are notoriously judgmental and I could just feel the hate from the crowd being magnified by their rimless glasses and boring into these girls like rainbow colored laser guns. Thank god for the blow and 12 corona lights the two girls probably shared before showing up at the club, or else they might have noticed the hatin’. During their freak dance session to the opening act’s ukulele cover of Cher’s “do you believe in life after love?” One fell over and the other walked away into the crowd. no one helped the one on the ground get up, and when she finally managed to stumble to her feet, she had this puppy eyed look of blackout abandonment and squeaked out a confused, “Lauren?” before faltering off to find her friend. People giggled and I got a better view.

The neighborhood that my cousins live in is similar to the hipster scene. their house alone has all the right ingredients to be stunning; high ceilings, marble counters and floors, long mirrors, 20 foot windows, and multiple plasma TVs, but when nuzzled 10 feet on each side by identical looking faux-mansions, it just looks plain tacky. I got lost for 40 minutes today driving through different communities named “the pinnacle”, “the woodlands”, and “china creek” because every house, street, driveway, BMW SUVs looked exactly the same. sure, side bangs compliment nearly every face shape; skinny jeans are hot if you weight under 120 lbs; plaid is cute and Raybans are classic, but Jesus Christ when you get into a room and 1 in 3 people are wearing one of those no one looks cool.

Yes, I have had side bangs and I probably will have them again, so I guess I’m guilty too. Sacrificing live music just to avoid fashion suffocation is too large a price to pay, so I guess I’ll just have to keep on trucking.

don't worry, i won't start wearing mom jeans

out of sitka into seattle

i looked like a meth addicted hobo getting onto the plane. i had mosqueeto bites all over and wet hair. i had 1o0 lbs of crap allocated into two rolling luggage bags, and, thanks to gas price fueled airline restrictions, had to wear everything else. this means that my handbag included 4 books, a scale, my teddybear, a tuxedo shirt, a wool sweater, 4 longs bags full of pictures, a polaroid, my fisheye etc. and that i wore my ipod and bose headphones, digital camera, a scarf, an ukelele with two eagle feathers and another book inside the case, and my muscratt hunting hat. people stared.

for some reason, i've been thinking a lot about visage and attractiveness. in sitka, anything with legs is considered sexy. i blame this on the long woman-less weeks of hard labor in the middle of the ocean. cool in sitka doesn't really exist. there simply aren't enough people to have a social heirarchy, at least in my experience.

today i ran errands and waded through the infinte strip malls that comprise the greater seattle area with my aunty and cousin. the vastness and diversity of the people was startling after crunchy, vanilla alaska. i saw so many shapes and colors and faces and proportions that i couldn't tell what was beautiful from what was ugly, what was cool from what was stupid, what was desirable from what was repulsive. in my shell shock, i just saw. skinny people were skinny. some people put gell in their hair. what's the difference?