Life stuff is totally in the way right now

Hey blog-readers,

I've been falling down on the blog front lately. It's all right, you can say it. I haven't posted much written material in a week or so. There are many contributing factors to this blog-writing malaise. First, I just got a twitter, ostensibly for the purpose of getting people to read the blog, but of course I became semi-obsessed with it and I find that every time I mean to go write on the blog I end up looking at pictures Danny DeVito has put in his feed. Second, I am about to have a holiday party at my apartment on friday. It's our first party and I'm pretty obsessed with making it cute. I spent much of this evening taping more shit to our walls and making snowflake decorations. Third, I haven't had a temp job since the last one ended on Wednesday of last week, so I think I'm going stir crazy. That usually just turns my mind to mush instead of making me into a productive blogger. Luckily I spent most of this evening running around the apartment trying to make it all fancy, so I'm hoping this energy carries me forward into the weekend. And therefore, the holiday party. HOLLER.

Ah, such is life. SO difficult. So....precious (why is gollum always in my head at this time of year! Damn you weird association between Lord of the Rings and Christmastime!).

Oh, and also? It's FUCKING COLD AS BALLS IN CHICAGO!

I'll be back this weekend with more to offer. Love and candy canes.

popcorn purring

plant watering day

So every saturday in our apartment it's plant watering day. My roommate and I made this pact because in our previous apartment in college, we managed to kill all of our plants through the perseverance of sheer neglect. When we got here, we knew things would be different. We decided to take better care of our plants and our pets and so far it's going smashingly.

Somewhere along the way plant watering day became a phrase that we sang to this David Shrigley poem that is performed by John Shankie on David Shrigley's worried noodles album. It's called "A Song" and I've linked it below. (BTW if you don't know who david shrigley is, he is a god. Links to the worried noodles site and his website).



Today at work I decided to write the full parody to this song, about plant watering day. I give you the full parody below (it would help if you sang it with the tune of the song):

Plant watering day
Watering the plants
Break out the water
Do a little dance

Each plant is special
In its unique way
If you forget that
I'll punch you in the face

Plants are so great
Changing the air
We should always water them
It is only fair

When our plants die
Let's not have regrets
About how we care for them
We are in their debt

They give us flowers
and lots of growth
When we bought them from the shop
We took an oath

They reduce noise
and lower our stress
We still want our plants
to look their very best

So don't forget the day
Remember the plan
Plants needs their water
To increase their life span

DON'T FORGET TO WATER YOUR PLANTS

Moving on and Moving Out: observations

While I was getting off the train today I walked behind two noteworthy people that I felt I had to share with someone. My roommate is at work (for once! uh guh guh guh, please don't take this personally dear roommate oh god what have I done will the home environment be the same PLEASE SOMEONE THINK OF THE CAT). So I turn to you, my readers. Because that's what everybody wants out of a blog they read. For their blogger to needless tell them details about their day. Hey, if you're single and petting a cat right now: I'm here for you. I try to do what I can for the little people.

To continue on my train of snarkathon 2009, I decided to dub this a moving and moving out post because I recently switched the formatting on the way tags are displayed (didja notice?) and every time I tag something with consistency, it makes the word BIGGER. Oh my god this is meta, what I'm writing about right now, which is me writing about the blog that I am writing, did you see what I did there?

(btw honest to god this is normally what I'm like when I get home from work because I have to be mostly silent all day).

So, some shit that I experienced today (oh hell, shit I experienced recently):

1) Three Douchey McDouchersons in the corporate cafeteria (Yes I work for a big ass building downtown for a big ass corporation, and NO please do NOT post the name of my Corp in the comments if you know what it is...oh yeah I quit that other job I had. Kthxbai.) were talking about some test that they had to take. This may have been the SAT writing portion for all I know. Then this one guy, he gets all excited about what he wrote in his essay. "OH MY GOD," he tells his friends, "I WROTE ABOUT VONNEGUT ON THE ESSAY." OMG sez his friends. "YES I KNOW! I FELT SO AWESOME, DROPPING ALL THAT KNOWLEDGE. SO WHEN I WAS WRITING, IT WAS LIKE ABOUT THAT BOOK THAT HAD THE BOYS ON THE ISLAND AND ONE WAS A BAD BOY AND ONE WAS A GOOD BOY AND EVERYBODY LIKED THE BAD BOY." Beat...one of his friends meekly says "isn't that lord of the flies?" Douche goes on "AND THE BEST PART IS THAT UNDERPAID GRAD STUDENTS ARE GRADING THIS SHIT SO I'M SURE THEY JUST ATE IT UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111"

William Golding, dude, and, uh, your friend was RIGHT. Who the hell thinks lord of the flies is vonnegut anyway? Uh guh guh guh, god, corporate financial types, they are the shit that the flies from lord of the flies are buzzing around. Or, as is the case in lord of the flies, dead pig heads on stick. Zing!

2) Today in the corporate cafeteria (never get tired of sayin' that), I heard this table of women talking about how this 60 year old woman had married someone's 95 year old rich relative and OH MY GAWD was she doing it for the money? Who was this woman? What are her motives? Surely she can't be sexually satisfied by this man! (Well perhaps if she's gone through menopause and lost all of her libido then she don't give a shit! Bring on the $$!)

This whole conversation led to a text conversation where I told my roommate that where I work is "so rich" and she said "you oscillate back and forth so much on your feelings for this place" and then I said "yeah i'm either foaming at the mouth about how much I hate it or silently weeping in the corner at the thought of leaving. It's the money." To which you ask: What's the money? The cause of your hate or your weeping? And to that I say: Yes.

3) The two people worth mentioning when I got off my train stop today:
a) A tall, very fine black man with shaved sides of his head and a stylish swept about faux hawk wearing the sweetest jacket and walkin' with a swagger.
b) A tall, not quite as fine, white man with red hair and a red beard (sometimes they are different, ok) who walked like he had knock-knees and pigeon toes. That is to say, his ankles were rolled inwards when he walked. It looked very strange.

4) I caught the 84 bus today to the red line stop which was amazing. I've discovered that if I'm running a couple of minutes late, I can catch the light to cross the street and then catch the bus in 2 minutes, which puts me at the train stop at about the normal time if I had left on time and walked the distance. Let me tell you guys, this is a miracle on ridge street. I have the morning commute down to a semi-exact science and yet the mother-effing evening commute is still a mystery to me. My stop in the morning is washington and wells but if I use that in the evening, then I have to ride around the entire loop and it adds about 15 minutes to my trip. Since I generally can't stand the commute home anyway, this is a lot. I try to assuage myself by playing mario but really I need to figure it out.

Additionally, I love that when you have your morning commute down to a science you can actually start noticing who's doing that shit with you on the regular. The only people I see pretty much every day (so far) are the bald-headed man and his wife walking down the street when I leave the apartment. I miss them on the days I catch the bus.

5) This temp job is about to leave me and I it at the end of this month, but because of Thanksgiving that means I'm probably only working 4 or 5 more days at best. I'm going to miss the stability of having a job but no more brown line for me for a while, yes thanks! Ah, temp jobs. I love thee more than I loved that permanent job I had for two days (NO JUDGING)

Moving on and Moving out

Man, this week has been intense on the Moving on and Moving out front. I finally got a job (yay!) but the pay in peanuts and it's in retail--which means no thanksgiving. That's right. I have no time off for Thanksgiving except Thanksgiving day, so I'm not going home to NC. That news hit me harder than I thought it was going to, especially since I spent Halloween throwing up, so I guess it's just a no-holidays fall for me. I'm hoping that I'll get at least 3 days to go home for Christmas because if I don't, well, I might just have to quit. We'll see how it goes though.

I also have worked three temp jobs this week, which was cool and all, but man, commuting to downtown is a BITCH. I always hit rush hour and it's just like....I can feel everyone's collective stress building up in my spine. I love riding trains, and I love living in a city with a river, but damn, commuters! Everyone CALM DOWN. I hate finding that I'm practically running while I'm walking in order to keep pace with everyone, just because people aren't willing to have a moment of their precious time slowed down.

But I digress. I just wanted to check in today and link to this sculptor named Mari Kasurinen who makes My Little Pony sculptures. Apparently I'm just really into people who remake dolls and other toys...probably because I want those skills myself. These sculptures she makes are absolutely amazing, no question, and she sells that shit for 600 bucks a pop! Awesome!

I'm about to undertake a really big ANTM-related listicle for the blog, so be on the look out for that.

Love to all.

pumpkin party!

DON'T BE TARDY FOR THE PARTY

So I don't what it is about this year but halloween feels really new and special to me again. Maybe it's because I carved two (count 'em TWO) pumpkins this year and have eaten a much larger quantity of pumpkin seeds than I have in the past, but it felt so special that I made a mask from scratch and everything for the occasion. This year we're rocking shark telegrams, my roomie and I, and I hope to confuse and delight everybody just.enough. through this costume. I'm so hyped...I could...I could...CHOMP.

I mean, let's be real here, this is the first Halloween I've ever had in a major American city, so I'm definitely excited for that. The thought of rolling around on public transportation with my own crazy costume on, while hopefully running into people with even crazier costumes, and hopefully everybody will be boozy enough to take random pictures with strangers--well, it all sounds too good to be true. Call me an optimist.

(A random aside--my people and I spent a good deal of one night talking about how we wanted people to start asking "how's the boozness going?" at parties and for people to say incredibly nerdy things in reply like "there have been high returns this quarter." So, check it. Make boozness happen, my ten readers!)

So in the spirit of this All Hallow's Eve, some links!

Extreme Pumpkins
The Monster Mash
A Strange Website whose url is barackobamamask.com (not my original find but i had to pass it on--and why is the face on the right NOTHING LIKE OBAMA)
This image of Lady Gaga, which would be a good costume in retrospect. CHOMP
The opening scene from Scream
....And an eyeball tattoo.

Moving on and Moving Out entails Moving IN

The run down of the entire experience: yet again, I made the trek from North Carolina to Oberlin to Chicago. We left on Wednesday, stayed over in Oberlin for a day, and then came to Chicago and moved all of my stuff into the apartment Friday afternoon. The day I moved in was when I hit my first big roadblock as a novice apartment-finder: it turned out there was no door to the room I had claimed as my bedroom. My mom and I were looking through the apartment and she turns to me and says "There's no door to your room!" I thought my cheeks were going to catch on fire on the spot--I couldn't believe that I had missed such a key detail when I checked out the apartment TWICE before signing the lease. When I talked to the landlord about it he played extremely dumb--"This is a one bedroom apartment. That room is the living room. If you want a door you have to install it yourself and then take it with you when you leave." Ugh, I couldn't believe it. The apartment, first off, is HUGE for a one-bedroom apartment. Secondly, the layout of the apartment says that my room is the second bedroom--duh. It has a bedroom closet and everything. Granted, the room and the closet are a bit BIG (like maybe they were more intended for storage space) but still, I feel like this was all very shady dealings because I had specifically only looked at craigslist ads for 2-bedroom apartments. I also mentioned my roommate maybe like 1 million times to the dude and had probably said, WOW ISN'T THIS A NICE BEDROOM before signing a TWO PERSON lease for the apartment. Oh, god.

But anyway, my mom and I went Xena on that shit and bought a door from Home Depot and installed it in the doorway to the "Living Room." I now have the equivalent of a closet door as the door to my bedroom but it's good enough.

The other funny thing about the apartment (which I think might be the place's saving grace in the winter) is that it is above a pizza delivery place. It's called Pizza Mania (pizza by the slice, pick up or delivery) and apparently you can only get two pizzas for the price of one, unless you're ordering a slice of course. I think that's the funniest part of it--you're like, noooo, i just want one pizza, and they insist on giving you two.

Yesterday my mom and I went to this amazing resale shop called the Brown Elephant, where I found some amazing furniture for cheap. For 80 bucks I got a nightstand, a coffee table, and a rocking chair. I love all three of these things so much I feel like the pictures above are so necessary.

So now it's on to the job hunt, and my desperation in the face of sincerely wanting a temp job, and somehow hating myself for wanting that.

Moving on and Moving Out

Ugh, I've been horribly belated with posting on the blog lately. Maybe it's because of the absolute inundation of pop culture in my life recently (VMAs, Emmys, ANTM, Top Chef, Project Runway AND How i met your mother), but I can't seem to focus long enough to choose anything in particular to write about. Additionally, I have been packing, trying to find jobs, and generally stressin' about the Big Move to Chicago, so I've had less focus about the blog on the whole.

I want to point you all in the direction of the Rich Juzwiak's blog fourfour.typepad.com (also in my links list on the right) if you are interested in America's Next Top Model recaps. He's really a pop culture genius when it comes down to it, and the insights he has to relate about a show that sometimes makes me feel like I'm losing brain cells allows me to feel smug, and overall makes me enjoy my reality television watching experience THAT.MUCH.MORE. So, if you need an example of his awesomeness, I've done a little "reblog" as they say of his post about the first episode of this season, in which the contestants were given makeovers (although Tyra dubbed them "Tyovers").

From Four Four:

Oh, but they weren't makeovers, they were "Tyovers," since if there's one thing this show doesn't have enough of, it's Tyra's ego. I am not surprised that she found a way to make other people's changing appearance about her -- the only thing I'm surprised about is that it took her this long to think of what to call it. I wonder if she was inspired by the name change in the same way she was when the name of this show just came to her as she looked out of her window that gentle New York morning so many years ago. I wonder what else that window holds? America's Next Top Tyra? America's Tyra Top Tyra? America's Tyra Tyra Tyra? The possibilities are endless, but more importantly, the possibilities are Tyra.


I hope this tidbit is enough to hold you over for the next week or so. I will try to post again before the big move, but right now my brain is mainly consumed with worrying about the fact that I have too much crap to move it.

Oh, and also: my picks for the reality shows I'm watching--

America's Next Top Model:
Nicole (aka Bloody Eyeball)
Laura (Kentucky light of my life)

Top Chef:
I couldn't really give a fuck, I just hope Ashley the Oberlin Lesbian doesn't get cut too soon.

Project Runway:
Ra'mon (who just got cut) so now, Chris and Epperson.

Models of the Runway:
That irish model, Koji (sp?)

wise decisions and colorful apartments

I don't want to catch any flak for not exactly updating everybody on the whole Move To Chicago portion of S&K so I'm here!

So I drove about 1500 miles total over the last week and a half (10 days to be exact). It was a huge step for me as an American human being. I spent a lot of time thinking Deep Thoughts but also thinking about furniture, so I think it all balanced out to neutral on the Shallow-Not Shallow spectrum.

I don't know if any of you have ever driven a far distance to try to find an apartment in a city you only know moderately well, but it is a bit difficult. I found that the overwhelming number of ads on craigslist that I had to digest was the hardest part; it's like, you have a few criteria, you weed out things based on your maximum rent, and then you find yourself viewing an apartment in real life that is being rehabbed by a shirtless man who is insisting that you call the owner because the realtor you've been dealing with hasn't shown up yet.

So I saw 6 apartments total in the course of 3 days and 3 of them were absolute crap. So I guess I'll just give the run down of the apartment hunting process:

Apartment 1)
In a high-rise building that was nice enough, with the man who lived on site and did all of the management work. He showed me an 1100/month apartment that he had knocked down from 1300/month, and it was the kind of apartment that would have cost about 5000/month in New York. So the apartments in the building were nice but the building itself was essentially a hotel and filled with Loyola students. I picked up some applications but the bottom line, however, is that you really can't go for the first apartment you see...especially when it's more than you were really hoping to pay.

Apartment 2)
Oh god...it was horrible...the kind of thing that would give me nightmares. Its one redeeming quality was that it was on Clark Street in Andersonville, which is a nice street to live on with lots of stuff, including this great bar called the Hopleaf that has tons of fancy pants beers. However, the carpets were blue and horrible (any of you who are reading this from Oberlin, they were exactly like the apartments in East dorm), some aspects of the apartment were being rehabbed, there was little natural light and no windows that looked out on Clark Street. No.

Apartment 3)
This apartment I never went inside. In fact, I never even looked at the right building. I hate to admit this, but I actually had the wrong address. The thing was, when I made the phone call, the woman would not speak clearly to save her life. Part of it was that she had an accent, but for real, I can understand accents--it was just that when I asked her to repeat things she never slowed down the way she was talking, so I ended up writing down the wrong address. Regardless, once I got to the general area in which the apartment building was located, I knew it wasn't right. It was just too far away and everything looked a bit too grim. So, no.

Apartment 4)
Ended up being the first apartment I looked at by myself. The landlord was funny, odd, but nice. Once again I had written down the wrong address (how does that happen so frequently?) so I took the train one stop down and then ended up having to walk to the entire distance back when I realized where the apartment was supposed to be. When I showed up, sweaty and stressed out and severely regretting wearing skinny jeans, the man was like "omg you should have told me I would have picked you up in my car!!" The building had an indoor bike rack and a typical Chicago back courtyard with lots of wooden staircases. Chicago is the city of wood, brick, ivy, and revolving doors, IMO. The apartment itself was wonderful and the right amount of strange: blue, green, and purplish grey walls with the best bathroom I saw in any place. I was sort of in love instantly but only filled out an application and paid for the credit check and agreed to come back the next day.

Apartment 5)
Was across the street from the apartment I had just seen and the entire experience was a debacle. I was dealing with a realtor named Jack who had even called to confirm the time for the viewing an hour beforehand; when I got to the apartment, he was nowhere to be seen and his phone was off (always a bad sign). There was a shirtless man inside the apartment painting the walls and generally looking sweaty. My brother and I debated just leaving; the apartment was on the first floor and had some very robbable windows--besides the fact that the entire place looked like crap because it was being rehabbed. However, when we were in the middle of the decision, the shirtless man came out INSISTING that we call the owners of the building. So, I called them, and the woman who answered was just as confused as I was. She kept insisting her husband, Tony, was supposed to show us the place and that he thought the appointment was tomorrow (NO I'M DEALING WITH A MAN NAMED JACK, i told her over and over) and then proceeded to describe the entire apartment to me in excruciating detail even though I was standing on the front porch and looking at it. Finally, out of the blue, Jack shows up while I'm still on the floor with this woman and I can barely get her off the phone. We look around the place and I find myself saying bull shit things like "wow these are nice windows" because I am painfully aware you couldn't pay me to live in that particular place. What is it about the apartment hunting experience that always reduces me to paying obvious compliments to the owner about the apartment? Like, heaven forbid I don't agree that the windows are nice.

Apartment 6)
The last apartment I was supposed to see was in the morning before returning to the colorful apartment I really liked. Apartment 6 was in Lakeview, a neighborhood that, on the whole, has a bit more going on then Edgewater in terms of the proximity of residences to shops, but the apartment was on the ground floor and yet again I was faced with rob-able windows (robbable? robb-able? likely to be robbed?), so though some tortured decision making in the course of an hour, I went with my gut and got the colorful apartment.

So now it's final--I'm moving to Chicago at the end of the month (leaving NC on the 29/30 most likely) and then my roommate will be coming along in another week. And then the job hunt begins, as does getting to know Chicago as a city-entity.

To top all of this off, I dyed my hair back to my original color (or tried to anyway). It's now brown (was blonde before). For those of you who know me, it is a shocker.

Moving on and Moving Out: The Musical Tribute

What is a road trip without its signifier playlist? I got the idea for this list the other night when I was listening to my New Order compilation...the second song came on (at the time I had no idea what it was called) and I found myself so enraptured that I knew I wanted to make a playlist to go with it. I call this grouping of songs The Reawakening.



It's Over Roy Orbison


Long Forgotten Fairy Tale Magnetic Fields


Feel the Love Cut Copy


Deadbeat Summer Neon Indian


French Navy Camera Obscura


Skinny Love Bon Iver


Evaporar Little Joy

*for the song below, I couldn't find a video of Luna the band actually playing, so instead I found a weird shortened version with Dean Wareham...It's better than nothing I suppose (see the absent Replacements video below for a fully formed sense of disappointment).

Moon Palace Luna


On Call Kings of Leon

*For the life of me I couldn't find this song on youtube--I guess the Replacements were too early for this youtube crap. Either way, I did find a Hole cover. So if you're interested in hearing Courtney Love sing a Replacements song...well, I didn't deign to include it. But now you know the key words for a youtube search.
Unsatisfied The Replacements


Skeletons Yeah Yeah Yeahs

...and the coup de grace....

Dreams Never End New Order

and something else to think about: today I was driving to meet a friend and I was on a very popular street that has lots of crosswalks that aren't at actual intersections. One of the cardinal rules of driving, I have found, is to be decisive--because indecisiveness is often what causes accidents. So if you're going to stop, stop. If you're going to drive, drive. Never decide to stop for a yellow light in the middle of an intersection or momentarily hesitate in taking a left turn that could potentially cut someone off.

Okay, now that I've rationalized my driving philosophy, I can relate the rest of this episode guilt free. Basically, on this pedestrian-heavy street, there are signs at the non-intersection cross walks that say "Yield to Pedestrians--it's state law." So I was driving along, a couple of minutes late, and saw that a girl was beginning to cross the street, but she bailed out. Right before I was at the intersection I realized some other guy I hadn't seen before was beginning to cross the street but I was committed to driving through and I knew I wouldn't hit him so I kept going. He stopped in the middle of the intersection when he realized I wasn't slowing down and yelled out "Hey look at the sign" in a very angry voice. And, forgetting my windows were open and that I was only going about 20 mph, I retaliated with "yeah yeah yeah fuck you." Oh, you think that you're living in the kind and gracious South, but ya ain't.

Moving on and moving out

When I started this blog I was imagining something that wasn't explicitly personal. It was definitely not a vision of "Are you there blog? It's me, margaret," but I did think that perhaps from time to time I would have to mention details of my life, if only because one person can only post on a blog so much if life isn't allowed to get in the way.

I'm sticking to my guns in that I'm not going to mention names or put in photographs of myself, but I've decided to start a new segment. As you can read in my blog description, I'm an unemployed college student who isn't satisfied. However, living your life in a constant state of dissatisfaction with EVERYTHING simply isn't sustainable. Sure, I'll never be totally satisfied (which is why you, blog, will always exist), but I still have to takes steps to make sure that I can move forward.

The next step is the Big Move from North Carolina to Chicago with my BFFer from college. I'm driving up north this Thursday to check out apartments and sign leases and do other such "School of Real Life" type things; however, I got to thinking today that maybe I shouldn't leave this out of the blog. Everybody I know from school is adjusting to life after college; why shouldn't my exploits in trying to become a real adult stay hidden away in the non-media-blog portion of my life? The new segment for the blog, therefore, is Moving on and Moving out--anything with this tag will be about trying to make a new life after college.

So I'm starting with a road trip to Oberlin and then to Chicago this Thursday. To give you a visual, I will be driving this map route:



(I also like the fact that this particular map of the United States makes it look like pre-Revolutionary war America)

And looking at craiglist entries along these lines.
(Although with more pictures and more detail than that particular entry. Sorry! I don't want any of you bitches stealing my future home).

Change is in the air...appropos to the 70 degree weather in NC today.

On and Out.