Elly

I wanna tell you about my friend Elly. She moved to Laramie when we were 10, and she was the weirdest kid I'd ever met. She had this super long blonde hair that flowed down her back and she was hyper and read during recess. We didn't get along all the time, and I was a little too dark to see it right away but she had a light that seemed like it flowed out of her. Not to mention a killer singing voice.

Last April, just shy of her 24th birthday, Elly was diagnosed with cancer. It was agressive and scary, we didn't think she would lsat the week. But Elly never did back down from a fight. Six months later she was running a 5K and basically giving the middle finger to her doctors. When I saw her over Christmas she was thin, and a little weaker but the light was still there. She still wanted to talk about Supernatural and Leverage. She wanted to know if I'd run into any cool famous people in LA. She wanted to hear what music I was listening to and she was showing off her new leather jacket. We talked and caught up. I listened to her talk about all the traveling she wanted to do and the places she wanted to see. We ate a few Reeses (she always had some with her) and then I hugged her and told her how much I loved her before letting her go get ready for Christmas mass with her family. 

Elly died last night. The details seem to interest everyone else a lot more than they interest me. I care only that I lost a friend. I care that she'll never see 25, or go to Spain or Alaska, that she has all these days that she should have had that got stolen. And I care that I am a better person for having know her. She was a blessing in the purest sense of the word. 

I love you Elly. I will miss you so much. I'm about to put on Pirates of the Carribean and eat a whole bag of Reeses. Cuz I know you would like that. Thank you for every choir concert, every field trip, every lazy day watching tv in my basement. I love you. I love you. 

You're gonna get sick of me ranting about Noah Gundersen

But his album came out on Tuesday and I have been letting it soak into me slowly like healing waters. Oof. Near perfection which I totally saw coming but it still gave me those unexpected moments where the music swells like a tide and I get to let myself wash away for a minute. I am sitting in my dining room right now with the track Boathouse ringing in my ears. The violin is pulling in an almost painful way and Noah is singing a song about a broken man with a broken family and when the chorus kicks in I feel as broken as the man in the song does. 

Noah is playing a sold out show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood this week. I will be there, and I'm dragging my sister Christy along with me. So far I've only managed to talk my best friend into being as obsessed as I am, but by Friday night I know I will have Christy on board. Because she has emotions and the Gundersen family is spectacularly good at manipulating emotions and playing them with the same talent that drives their voices and words. 

Christy brought up an interesting story last night. She pointed out that when we discovered Mumford and Sons it was because a friend of hers made a point to play them for her and she wrote down to look them up. This is significant because when we fell head first into the world of music that the Mumfies opened up we gained some of our favorite artists. Without those boys there would be no Laura Marling when I feel like I need another jaded woman to sympathize with. There would be no Avetts to help me feel grounded, and no Johnny Flynn to make me feel like rereading a Shakespeare play to find all the meanings I missed the first time round. Yes, the odds are that we would have stumbled into this music eventually, but it's so woven into the time in which I discovered it that I can't imagine what those days would look like without those songs. 

These are songs that I freely allow to transport me to different places, or change my mood up or down because they are worthy of that right. They vibrate at the same frequencies as my mind and heart and wholy belong in my world. They have been pulled into my identity like twigs into a birds nest. There is no way to dislodge them without undoing a huge chunk of me. 

So I am grateful that Christy chose to spend that day with her friend. I am grateful that he knew that Christy would enjoy that music. I'm grateful that she was listening and turned around to share that music with me. My world is richer for the music I have in it. 

With that in mind I will continue my one woman quest to push Noah Gundersen, and Justified, and Keats, and anything else I can find beauty and value in. I hope people will do me the same courtesy even when it does feel like a political campaign. Because our lives are improved when we connect to something, and my life in this respect gets a little better every day.

My imperfect reactions

So I want to share an experience I had at my job tonight, but I'm hoping you will all hold back your judgement till the end of the story. This is not me bitching about my job. Most days I really like what I do. My theater is old and tiny and full of history. Working there is not super difficult or intellectually stimulating but it gets me in a social setting talking about things I love or reading or just hanging out with friends in a place that's not my house for 40 hours a week. I don't want you to take this story as a complaint so much as a meditation on an ongoing problem I have with people. 

My theater has a lot of old customers. More than most because generally the people willing to sit through three hours of French film are either film students or the elder population. I love most of our little old people. They're some of the most interesting and accepting people I meet. And today was senior day at the theater which meant we had a rush on the over 62 crowd wanting to see said French film because tickets are less than $5. At one point in the afternoon a woman came in. She had missed the last show of her film and the next one didn't start for an hour. She was fairly grumpy about it because the later show didn't have what she called the special price ( I always find complaints like this funny because people seem to think I can create shows and theaters out of thin air) and said she was going to dinner and might come back. The other manager who was sitting with me remarked on how negative this woman's attitude was but I didn't really give it much thought. 

Then two hours later she returned. I asked her how her dinner was. She complained that it was both overpriced and not very good. I gave a small half smile and rang up her ticket while she yelled at the people standing behind her for being too close. I rang her up for the senior price. It turns out that this woman was not a senior and the special price she had mentioned was the matinee price. She was livid. I admitted my mistake, fixed the transaction on her card and stayed as quiet as I could while she railed at me for being so rude. Then she went to the other manager and started shouting insults at me across the lobby. Here's where I want to start the discussion. The insults that she chose were about my weight and physical attractiveness. This had probably close to nothing to do with how I actually appear to her. If I had to guess I would say that her real goal was to make me as visibly upset as she felt (a losing battle as it was based on the false assumption that I give two shits what any customer thinks of me or the way that I look) and since my insult to her had been based on appearance, that's where she decided to hit. Because what girl living in our society who isn't a size two doesn't worry about their weight a little? What girl anywhere in this country doesn't worry that they aren't pretty enough?

I worry that I live in a world where my first instinct on hearing these was to justify my appearance. To tell her that I may be a little overweight but I am by no means "grossly obese" as she annunciated quite clearly several times. I worry that my next instinct was to comment that I thought she was a senior because of her aged face and tatty wig. I worry that even though I could tell this woman was unstable and clearly I had hit a nerve that I never intended on, my first thoughts jumped to defense and offense and not to understanding. 

So here I am, post work, sitting next to a hot bath that I ran while I typed out my thoughts. I have the next two days off to recover from this and all the other little strains that the last week of work has pushed on me. I have promised to spend time thanking my mother tomorrow for instilling me with enough self restraint not to lash out at someone without thinking it through first. I have promised to spend a little time thinking about ways to push myself to reacting with compassion before I react with anger. And I have promised to cut myself a little slack when I fail at that. I am only human after all. 

"I don't  know any perfect people. Just very flawed people who are still worth loving" john green

This is what drama is for

So as my sister and I were flipping through Netflix we had the following conversation.

CT:If someone had a gun to your head and said you either had to watch the first three episodes of the Carrie Diaries or Olympus Has Fallen, which would you choose?

Me:Death. Shoot me.

CT: That's a little dramatic.

Me:I'm dramatic? You put a gun to my head over a TV show.

CT:Mine was hypothetical. You chose to end your life.

Me:I chose to HYPOTHETICALLY end my life. You stuck me in a room with a gun toting terrorist with a Sex and the City fetish and a thing for Aaron Eckhart.

CT:...

Point for me. 

On the edge of the ledges I have made

Have you ever had one of those times where you're listening to a song and you feel like the lyrics have taken a part of you that you've never shared with anyone and shown a big spotlight on it? Like the singer is speaking from that place inside you where you lock all the bits of yourself that you don't want anyone to see because they're too ugly to be loved or even accepted? I love those times. I feel validated when someone else is brave enough to stand up and shout about the monster that lives inside them and I realize it's the same one I have locked away.

I know I should be posting about a more diverse group of artists, but Noah Gundersen has been on my mind a lot lately. He's got his first full length album coming out in February, and this week he released his first single from that album. I've been into Noah's music for a while and I foolishly thought I had a grip on who he was as an artist. The song isn't a stylistic jump for him. It's similar guitar and violin that he used on his EP Family. But the words are a whole nother level. And he gave me one of those moments where I felt like his lyrics were projecting all of my insecurities and faults for all to see.

"I've got a lot of loose ends, I've done some damage. I've cut the ropes so they fray" From that opening line I'm done. It's common for those of us who grow up fearing that we won't turn into good people, but at the same time not really understanding how to keep that from happening. We see every person we've hurt, every time we've been wrong. For me these moments stay with me. Noah expresses these failings that he has with sorrowful acceptance.

The chorus is just as poignant. "Here I stand on the edge of the ledges I have made, looking for a steady hand" It's the cold hard truth that most of the time the truly massive obsticles in our lives are of our own making. The way Noah sings it sounds like a call for help, a plea to the people he loves to help him be a better man.

The second verse is what really kills me though. "I drink a little too much, it makes me nervous. I've got my grandfathers blood. I take a little too much without giving back. If blessed are the meek then I'm cursed" This is such a part of me that I could feel it echoing in my head for days after I first listened to this song. What a stunning way to articulate a deep fear of the pieces of your ancestry that you know are dangerous. It amazes me that he's only 24 and able to have these profound moments of clear wisdom. Bravo.

I'll stop ranting about the song now. If you want to watch the music video you can find it here. 

Tis the season

I don't like Christmas. There, I said it. Bring on the hordes of people telling me how much of a elf-hating holly-crushing kill-joy I am. Most of the time I try to take my feelings for Christmas and bottle them up or at least pour them sneakily into some eggnog so I can consume them while still appearing Jolly.

The thing is, I have a perfectly valid reason for hating Christmas time. And that is that I actually love 99% of this stupid season. I like the lights and the gift giving and the seasonal food. I could leave the claymation specials but I enjoy a cheesy made for TV movie about discovering the true meaning of the Holidays just as much as the next girl.

The issue, I've found, lies in my family. Like clockwork, every year since I was small, there has been a major knock down drag out fight within a week of Christmas. Someone always cries. Someone always feels belittled and unloved. It's unavoidable for no real reason other than the closeness and planning brings out the ugliest part of all of us. This year will be no different. So while I am surrounded by messages of peace and giving that I want to believe in, I am forced to see the worst sides of the people I care the most about. And that'll kill the spirit pretty fast. Every time.

So in a week and a half (God save me) I will get on a plane. I will spend a week getting yelled at and watching people I love be intentionally nasty to other people I love, all while the same ten songs play relentlessly in the background. I will hate it every bit as much this year as I have all the years before and so the cycle will continue. So forgive me for not joining in with the caroling or the revelry. This season of peace and love has never meant anything other than a broken heart where I am concerned. Fala-fucking-la lalalala

This is why I stopped having cable

I know that a big part of American culture is irrational nostalgia for things that were actually shit back in the day. But having said that I think commercials are getting stupider.

I just watched a commercial for Little Caesars where a couple celebrated the great deal they got on the yoga mat covered in cheese that they plan to consume (sober which must be a change from the normal Little Caesars demographic) by giving each other a "high 85". This entails them jumping into the air and smacking their feet together as they slap hands.

Congrats guys. You have answered the question "What's the quickest way to get someone who is payed $8 an hour to sling shitty pizza to pitty me in less than 30 seconds?"