Dead veterans happy to rock again for Obama

"How can they rock if they're d-- oh."

Last night, as I watched news clips of Robert Mugabe vowing to uphold Zimbabwe's scheduled election runoff, despite political violence that allegedly includes the deaths of some of his opponent's supporters, it suddenly dawned on me: the man has a toothbrush mustache.

Holy crap.

It's been a slow week. Why don't you vote for JDiggity's submission to someone else's blog?


more fail, owned and pwned pics and videos

It was a coincidence that we were in the vicinity of the Garden today; an office birthday, a trip to the Fours on Canal St. Still, we expected to feel the charge in the air, perhaps spotting Kobe chowing down on a taco salad at the bar, or Stuart Scott leveling his searing teleprompter gaze on a menu in the back corner.
Instead, there were usual North Station scrubs; a man and woman picking up spare change scattered on the ground in front of a doorway; the ubiquitous sleeper outside Dunks; cab drivers racing through yellow lights, nearly mowing down anything in sight.
Still, we popped over to the box office, just in case. Sold out.

Recently, my mom told me that she sometimes pictures my sister and me sitting together as old ladies in a nursing home. In her hopeful imagination, we've both outlived our (optional) husbands and are still enjoying each other's company, well into our 80s or 90s.

Since the moment that LBC and I have started planning a summer trip out west, my parents have updated their perception of us, to Thelma and Louise, despite my efforts to remind them that those ladies were not related.

However, after seeing the Breeders on Thursday night, I hope that instead, LBC and I wind up more like Kelley and Kim, with their good-natured ribbing and genuine encouragement of one another (but minus the drug problems).

• In the parking lot for the new Greenwise Publix (the local supermarket chain's answer to the Whole Foods down the street), a teenager driving a gas-powered golf cart asks us if we need a lift to the door, 50 yards away.


• The mall is sleepy on a Friday afternoon, but at the Saks Fifth Avenue shoe sale rack, ladies are buzzing like worker bees; $345 is a bargain, after all, for a pair of Prada flip-flops.


• At a 7:20 p.m. screening of The Visitor, I am the youngest person there by 20 years, and the key facts of the film are repeated in whispered stereo around me.


• It's 10:45 a.m., and I've already sweated through my shirt on the tennis court, but sending aces whizzing by my father's head, followed by lunch and a pedicure with mom, make it totally worth the trip.

At my first job, I sat in a cubicle adjacent to the sales department. Perhaps by design, they were all women, headed by a Diet-Coke-chugging mother hen type who would yell, “sell like hell, girls!” from her office. She had a hyphenated name, but for some reason, I remember her as a divorcee; perhaps it was her take-no-prisoners attitude towards selling ad space that made me think she possessed an equal level of animus towards an ex-husband.

Regardless, I occasionally would hear her harem of sales reps refer to her as “SGV”*, the acronym formed by her initials. Every few hours I would hear SGV toss another Diet Coke can into the garbage; I had it on good authority from the janitor that she went through a case a week.

I sat close enough to hear most of their conversations, but the high cubicle walls (and my department’s relative silence, by comparison) made me feel invisible, and I’m pretty sure that SGV and I had never even had a conversation until the afternoon when she appeared in my cubicle.

It was late in the day, and most people had left the office. She greeted me like we were old friends and, in her sweetest, albeit husky, voice asked me if I had a tampon. Girl Scout that I am, I fished one out of my bag and went back to work.

Two minutes later, SGV appeared again, saying, “You’re not going to believe this, but I dropped it.” I paused, confused for a moment, but she didn’t have to spell it out for me; the janitor, God bless him, was no match for the nastiness of that ladies’ room floor. Plus, I really didn’t want to know how a grown woman manages to drop a tampon in between unwrapping it and using it.

Lucky for SGV (and me), I had another, and I handed it over with some bewilderment. I’m not sure SGV and I ever spoke again (let alone about this), but for some reason I am reminded of this exchange every so often.

*name changed

I'm starting to get concerned about Facebook's role in popularizing the third person. "What are you doing right now?" is asks when I log in. It wasn't so long ago that the third person was reserved for the truly eccentric or arrogant (Rickey Henderson, anyone?), but now, it's become the preferred tense of the everyman.
I even hear it in my own inner dialog ("Katie is burning her toast." "Katie needs to buy milk." "Katie is not qualified to answer that question.") and find myself wondering if these qualify as status updates, or if they are (like most of the ones I read) another example of oversharing on the Internet.

CommunityWalk Map - Sunday Walk
(Zoom out to view the full route; start and end points are approximate)

With no where in particular to be on a Sunday afternoon, I went for a walk with no particular destination. I headed for the river, and since I hadn't in a while, I turned to walk away from the city. I walked past a man teaching a woman to ride a gleaming new bicycle; the road was closed to Sunday traffic as it is all summer, but on this chilly mid-spring day, not too many people were taking advantage of the vast expanse of pavement. I spotted a lone, twisted carcass of a bike on an MDC bikerack, near where a man tossed a tennis ball to a over-stimulated black lab. Geese picked at the grass, unmolested under blossoming trees.
Farther down, I glanced the road where, in a fading memory, there was an aging liquor storefront from another era (perfect to photograph, I once thought), so I turned that way, only to find that on foot, it was too far away. Still, I walked, with just a vague internal map to guide me. Passing buses reassured me that I could find my way home if I got tired.
Just when my interest in spring blooms and new, unchartered streets started to wane, and hunger pangs began to announce their presence, I spotted a familiar street name, and then another, and I headed for home.

It looked too well coordinated to be a simple mess; inside a busy Harvard Square ATM, trash was pouring out of every receptacle, and lining the walls save for a well-cleared path to the cash machines and doors. It could be just a neglected ATM, somehow left off the usual custodial rounds, but the trash was overwhelmingly comprised of uniformly half-crumpled ATM receipts. Sure, there was a food wrapper here or milkshake cup there, but it was mostly a sea of white, a foot or more deep in any direction.
It appeared more to be an art installation than community carelessness, and I wondered if there was a single hand behind it, or if the foot traffic to this ATM had collectively created the display, each individual gleefully tossing his or her receipt to the mess and feeling part of the whole.

At a busy intersection not far from touristy Pike Place, the Nurse Log sits in a specially designed greenhouse. Plucked from the forest floor somewhere in the northwest woods, the log now lies in a climate-controlled environment, kept company by the foliage that came with it and the sculpture park visitors who venture inside. Back in the woods, a tarp collects new items that fall where the nurse log once laid, and weather sensors send signals back to the shed, so that the log’s original home is never too far away.
Night and day, the nurse log sits, and grows, and I passed it numerous times during my brief stay in Seattle. Once I knew of its existence, it framed each memory, a silent friend transported from far away, without a say in the matter.

There was a bit of "what am I doing here?" at last night's Lemonheads show, during which Evan and the boys were to play It's a Shame About Ray in its entirety. "How old are they?" "How old does that make me?" But, there's a new album to promote, and for those of us who never saw these guys during their alterna-rock heyday, it was a chance to hear some old favorites, live.

Evan Dando is the one true constant from dozens of Lemonheads lineups, and as soon as the trio took the stage, it was if the whole crowd angled itself for a better view of his spot on the left side. Strikingly, Dando still sports his trademark shag, and his voice is still a resonating mix of cute-boy shrug and marquee swoon. To borrow a cliche, he had us at "Hi, we're here to play our record."

He sings about wanting a bit part in your life, a walk on would be fine. He wonders if he was a booger, would you blow your nose? He might have once been voted one of People magazine's 50 most beautiful people, but on Tuesday night, Dando was just a songwriter with a guitar, rattling off song after song in hopes of selling a record.

Towards the end of the set, the people in front of us appeared to be looking towards the floor. I thought someone had fallen over, but after one guy started using his cell phone as a flashlight, I heard that someone had lost her wedding ring. "Yep," I thought, "that's what happens when Evan Dando is in the house."

Last night, I dreamt that my Dad and I went to an Obama concert. Since Barack was going to perform rather than speak, it was kind of on the down-low, so it wasn't very crowded. As the moment of the show neared, Barack sat down at our cocktail table and made small talk ("yeah," I said, "my sister and I tried to see you a the Boston rally, but we couldn't get in, so it's nice for me to get a chance to see you again") but we soon ran out of things to say. Barack just sat there. It was weird that no one else wanted to come over and chat with him.
I was curious to see how Barack would dress for this more casual occasion, and he didn't disappoint; he wore a multi-colored houndstooth blazer with khaki pants, and as he walked away from us and towards the stage, I saw that he was wearing high-top sneakers, unlaced. A woman nearby remarked that he was so much more handsome in person, and I had to agree.

on his awesome new project, allowing me to capture the moment of my own journey to Colorado: