jennsylvania

Can You Tell I Finally Figured Out How To Download Photos From The New Camera?

Last month my friend Poppy's post-BlogHer party, Fletch and I had the opportunity to sit down and drink nine hundred glasses of wine with musician Chris Mann. 

I am Chris Mann.  (And you are not.)

For those of you who don't know him, he's a classically trained opera singer who's since moved into the whole modern pop singer/songwriter genre.  Combining his talent, charm, looks, and sincere fan interaction, my prediction is he's going to be the Next Big Thing. 

I also predict that in five years he'll win a Grammy and break Jennifer Aniston's heart and the whole sordid mess will play out on the pages of Star magazine, but that's not important right now. 

What IS important is that his EP drops today.  You can check it out here, or you can give him a shout on Twitter here.

Of course, Fletch thinks what's important is that Chris took his vacant seat at the party. 

"Win all the awards you want, Mr. Music.  I can still kick you in the throat."

It's High Time For A Fluffy Post

My last two posts have been unintentionally serious, so it's time to lighten things up around here.

My friend Shayla tagged me with a Thirty Random Songs on Your iPod note.  Normally I don't do these but A) it's Shayla who's asking and B) there's so much unpleasant stuff I need to accomplish around here (e.g. clean the basement, starting by picking up all Maisy's 100 soup bones because the floor looks like an archaeological dig site and, also, the cats are protesting something - the loss of pineapple maybe? - and have taken to pooping in the general vicinity of the box rather than inside) that I sort of can't resist. 

Plus, at the end you guys can participate.  Everyone wins.

Here goes...

New Order/Bizarre Love Triangle - This song makes me happy because every time I hear it, I'm suddenly twenty years old in the middle of a crowded basement at a fraternity party, trying to dance while also attempting to keep my plastic cup of keg beer from sloshing onto my pristine Keds.

Avril Lavigne/Girlfriend - Huh.  I didn't expect SHAME to show up so quickly on this list.   I have no excuse for this song being here except that it's great to run to on the treadmill.  (Possibly because subconsciously my brain wants to move my body away from it?) 

Andrea Bocelli/Time to Say Goodbye - This played at the end of The Sopranos on a Sunday night and I thought it was the most beautiful song I ever heard.  The first thing that Monday morning, I was at my desk at the dot com ripping it from Napster.  The idiot Joshes mocked me at first, but by mid-afternoon, I could hear each one of them playing it at their own desks.  They all started the songs at different times, so it was like the Italian version of Row, Row, Row Your Boat every time I walked to the printer.

The Escape Club/Wild, Wild West - More college dance music, but I particularly loved this one because it referenced Ronald Reagan having nuclear arms.  Don't forget, the Berlin wall was up and we were still cold warriors at the time.  This song gave me great comfort knowing we had superior American fire power.  (I'm pretty sure this isn't the reaction The Escape Club anticipated.)

Guns 'N Roses/Sweet Child O Mine- When this song came out, I didn't care for GNR, ironic because not only were some of the guys from my college town, but my boss was married to Izzy's brother.  So I could have actually hung out with the band when they were home, but I thought they were "icky" and I was holding out for George Michael.  Yeah, that worked out nicely for me.

The Cure/Just Like Heaven - I carried this cassette in my purse for months when it was released.  So anytime I was around a jam box, I'd insist on playing it over and over and over.  I'm sure that couldn't have been annoying. 

Crowded House/Don't Dream It's Over - We listened to this tape on a continuous loop one day when a bunch of my fraternity friends and I were participating in a philanthropic endeavor, riding a go-kart from Lafayette to Indianapolis.  Somehow I never had to take my turn pedaling, opting instead for the warmth of the pace car. 

Beastie Boys/Fight for Your Right - This one didn't do anything for me until a couple of my guy work friends at the insurance company played it all afternoon in anticipation of the concert that night.  The next day they came back complaining about having been the only people there over the age of 15.  And that's just funny.

The B-52s/Rock Lobster - This song is the only reason the 4:30 aerobics class at Purdue's Co-Rec was bearable, largely due to choreography involving gatoring.

Ice Cube/It Was a Good Day - You know what's more gangsta than an insurance company service rep driving to appointments in her Dodge Stratus listening to Ice Cube with the windows open?  Nothing, that's what.

Guns 'N Roses/Live and Let Die - The winter before Such a Pretty Fat came out I wanted to change the title of the book because I didn't like it.  Originally, it was supposed to be Pretty Fat but we found out that this phrase linked to a fat fetish site and I was all, "People are going to think those women are me!"  I wanted to call the book Live and Let Diet but it was too late.  I'm not quite sure how the song and the book title are related but I began to associate them in my head, hence its presence on my playlist.  (Hey, I can't swing for the fences with every story.)

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones/The Impression that I Get - Dear Paul Rudd, the only reason Fletch didn't dump me when I dragged him to see you in Clueless back in 1995 is because the Bosstones were in the film, too.  You might not have had anything to do with the decision to cast them, but if you did, thanks!

The Police/Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic - A little anorexic girl with ridiculous implants sang this song so badly on American Idol a few weeks ago that it's erased all the nice memories of this music.  Whore. 

Biz Markie/Just a Friend- My BFF Joanna and I roadtripped to Virginia Beach for senior week when she was about to graduate and we sang this loudly and badly at least 400 times during the course of the trip.  Now my reaction is pretty much Pavlovian and I can't hear it without singing along, loudly and badly.  (P.S.  I miss using "roadtrip" as a verb.)

* * *

So... huh.

This list only contains fourteen songs. 

You know what?  With a playlist like this, thirty is probably sixteen too many.

Anyway, consider yourselves tagged if you want to do this on your blog, or you can give me your five-song condensed version in the comments.

Play on.

The Book (And Record) Cellar

Shit!  I almost forgot to post this!  Tomorrow night (July 16) a group of authors are doing an event at The Book Cellar at 4736 N. Lincoln Ave at 7:00.  They include my buddy Jess Riley, Margot Justes, Libby Fischer Hellmann, and Francine Friedman.  Stacey and I plan to be there in the audience, so why not come out and support local authors at this amazing indie book seller?

Did I mention the bookstore has its own bar?  Books!  Drinks!  How could you not come?

What else?  Oh, yeah, I wrote more than 3,500 words yesterday.  (That's about fifteen book-typeset pages.)  Not sure what kind of roll I was on, but I hope to keep it up. 

Part of what's getting me/keeping me going is music.  I'm writing stories from childhood on up, so I've been listening to stuff that reminds me of those time periods.  It's amazing how one little hook or chorus can bring back so much imagery, like how Celebrate puts me right on the floor of the West Park Roller Rink, awkwardly navigating over spangled skate-laces or how Man in the Moon places me and my flannel/Birk/longjohn-clad self (shameful) at the end of the bar at Harry's, singing along with all the other patrons because we secretly believe REM should have put US in that video instead.

This is all a roundabout way of explaining why Fletch found me watching George Michael's Freedom '90 over and over again yesterday on YouTube.  "I'm working!" I told him. 

While I was thinking about the video later, it occured to me that some of my readers are practically babies (or I'm a dinosaur) and weren't even born until the '80s.  That means some of you were in grade school when this song/video came out.  Thus, some of you may have never even seen what is surely the greatest music video ever made. 

Seriously?  Naomi?  Linda?  Christy?  Cindy?  ELAINE IRWIN, MY VERY FAVORITE?

Your assignment for today is to watch it here on YouTube.  (Sony's disabled the ability to embed or I'd have posted it.)

Appreciate not only the video, but also George's enormous lyrical fuck-you to MTV and the record company.  Discuss.  Enjoy!

 

"You've Found A Kindred Spirit In Crap Music"*

I've been off the grid lately.  Between real vacation, accidental vacation, deadlines, and living in a house that has suddenly gone from three baths to one, the blog's gotten lost in the shuffle. 

Plus, I didn't think I had anything to write about but apparently each of the above topics could stand to be addressed, so here goes.

Part One, Real Vacation

It was, in a word, lovely  (if for no reason other than not having to share a bathroom with Fletch.  More on that in Part Four.)  Our hotel was all resort-y and they did stuff like bring personal pitchers of iced lemon water the second anyone sat down by the pool.  And the staff would come by and spritz guests with Evian water and every hour or so they'd distribute Popsicles or Dippin' Dots or frozen fruit or chilled washcloths. 

We had a giant dish of little-bitty wrapped Italian candies on the coffee table in our room.  I told Fletch that if he thought I wasn't going to turn into my grandmother and dump every last one of them into my purse before we left, he was sadly mistaken.  (Then he mentioned possibly discovering 500 $1 line-item charges on our room bill and I thought better of it.)

One of the highlights was getting to hang out with my friend Amy in person.  We've known each other ever since the early days of my "All About Jen" website but we've never met.  We drank vats of wine and ate seafood I've never heard of before (scorpion fish? mullet fish?) and generally had a fantastic time.  The bonus is she let me have a CD one of her friends made when they took a girls-only road trip to Sedona because she'd already burned it onto her iPod.  I listened to her CD all the way up to my accidental vacation (Part Two) and it was like unwrapping nineteen separate Easter eggs.

The CD is a perfect blend of cheese and sing-out-loud stuff.  It's called Three AGDs and a DG (the road trip participants respective sororities) and contains the following:

Gwen Stefani - The Sweet Escape

Rihanna - Pon De Replay

J Lo - Jenny from the Block

Stacey Q - Two of Hearts (remember her??)

Justin Timberlake - Sexy Back

Nelly Furtado - Promiscuous Girl

Rihanna - SOS (Rescue Me)

Coolio - Gangster's Paradise

Natasha Bedingfield - Unwritten

Fergie - Fergalicious

Britney Spears - Hit Me Baby One More Time

Beyonce - Irreplaceable

Shannon - Let the Music Play

LL Cool J - Going Back to Cali

Lisa Love - I Wonder If I Take You Home

Gwen Stefani - Hollaback Girl

Beyonce - Crazy in Love

Pink - Get the Party Started

Nelly Furtado - Say It Right

Enjoy!

*Fletch's quote when I told him what was on the play list

The first night in Vegas (after my traditional Fourth of July pool-wallow) I started getting ready to go to dinner.  I took a bath and was drying my hair when I felt a huge knot form in my throat.  While I put on my makeup and got dressed, I noticed my palms were sweating and my pulse raced.  I couldn't figure out why I was anxious until I realized I was going through all the exact same motions of being in a hotel room, getting ready for a book event.  As much as I enjoyed my tour, it was nice to just be able to put on a dress without the added pressure of having to give a speech. 

(I also recognize if it weren't for you guys, I wouldn't have been on my first vacation in six years, so THANK YOU ALL!)

* * *

Part Two, Accidental Vacation

We were only in Vegas for three days, but that's all it took to ruin me for regular life.  I'm all, "I'm hot!  Spritz me!" but no one does.  Remember those old cruise line commercials?  They featured a bunch of people wandering around their dank gray offices, drinking crappy coffee and fighting with janky mini-blinds.  The actors kept referencing their magnificent trip, saying stuff like, "I was a king and my butler knew just how I liked my tea," and "Every day my room was filled with fresh flowers."  For me?  That commercial finally makes sense.

At the moment, my life is filled with non-functional toilets in odd places and missing walls and a thick coating of drywall dust that just won't go away with vigorous dusting.  So when my friend Stacey invited me to visit her at her family's vacation place, I grabbed a beach bag and ran to my car. 

I'm on my way and I'm happily tooling along at both a safe distance from other cars and a sensible speed (nerd alert) when I notice a box fly off the pickup truck fifty yards ahead of me.  I was far enough back that it didn't come crashing through my windshield, thank God, but there was so much traffic in the right lane that I had no where to go but forward.  I ended up hitting the box which contained a very heavy piece of furniture.

You guys? 

I got into a head-on collision with an Adirondack chair.

The pickup driver and I both pulled over.  And when the driver got out of the other car, I was gearing up to yell like I've never yelled before when he introduced himself as Reverend So-and-so. 

Perhaps you all can shout at God's emissary, but I can't.  So while he went back to his car to call the police, I was stuck muttering to myself about Reverend TossyBox from the Church of the Flying Lawn Furniture.  I was already shaken up by the time I got to Stacey's house and when the biblical-type big storm hit that evening, the only rational choice was to stay over. 

Perhaps it wasn't as big a treat to her, as I mentioned, "I hit a box of chair," at least 900 times.  Also, while we were in her pool (which is on the lip of some deep woods) I got to say one of the greatest sentences of all time:

"Dude, there's a mini-frog on your neck."

* * *

Part Three, Deadlines

Deadlines still suck.  And they're keeping me from posting blogs more frequently.  But I figure I can do a bunch of half-assed blogs, or concentrate on a whole-ass book.

I choose whole-ass.

* * *

Part Four, The Bathroom Situation

A leaking shower pan has led to the utter destruction of almost every place to relieve oneself in this house.  We've lost a bunch of walls and ceilings and there's studs and plywood everywhere.  We're now down two bathrooms and I'm all, "Hey, why not take out the third, too?  I can just whiz in a pail."

In Bitter (I think) I talk about looking at apartments and telling leasing agents that we need at least two baths or else I will get divorced. 

Apparently I wasn't kidding.

Don't get me wrong; Fletch is an excellent roommate and he's quite tidy in the bathroom.  He never does stuff like leaving a sink full of whiskers and always wipes off the counter when he's done.  He's actually neater than me.  My bathroom is in no way suffering from his presence and yet I HATE having him in there because I'm ridiculously territorial.  He's none too thrilled with me, either, especially every time I suggest he'd be happier using the washroom at Target or the mop sink in the basement.

So he doesn't divorce me - or possibly beat me with one of many flanges laying around here - he's taken to staying home from work until the contractor arrives.  I'd been in charge of making Important Renovation Decisions but it turns out I don't speak Contractor and the guy doing all the work thinks I'm a dingbat when I say stuff like, "you know, those drip-ity things." 

The good news is ever since Fletch took over managing communication, the work has been going swimmingly (get it?  water pun) and I hope to have him out of my bath within the week.

* * *

Now I've sufficiently screwed around enough that I have no choice but to get back to my manuscript, thus I do not have time to come up with an ending that would have neatly tied all these unrelated topics together.  'Tis a pity. 

And because it can't be said enough:

"Dude, there's a mini-frog on your neck." 

Star Sighting

The cute little kid laughing at Fletch and me while we bickered outside the spa at the hotel?

David Archuletta!

Team by Team Reporters, Baffled, Trumped, Tethered Cropped

According to the Rush & Molloy column in today's NY Daily News:

More paparazzi are dropping out of the pack following Britney Spears because of the risk — to them.

The legion of lensmen has been infiltrated by L.A. gang members — Crips and Bloods, according to some photo-agency heads. They claim rival agencies are arming the thugs with cameras and sending them out to do battle with the dozens of paps who rubberneck around Hollywood's favorite train wreck.

Um, wow.  Won't someone PLEASE send this girl a copy of Guitar Hero already?

(Can she spend some time alone?) 

(And give yourself ten points if you caught the reference.)

Updating the Shame

Good news - our bad taste has been recognized and rewarded! 

The folks at MusicSpace.com ran across my last entry and asked me if my readers would be interested in a discount.  Since I assume the only thing more shameful than buying the stuff we've discussed is paying for it full price, I said yes.

From now until February 8, put in the code JENNSYL15 at checkout and you'll recive 15% off your whole order, plus they offer free shipping on two or more items.

And the best part?  They directed me to this YouTube video:

If you think I'm not going to re-buy this collection specifically to be able to sneak an I BRAKE FOR MONSTER BOOTY bumper-sticker on Fletch's car, you haven't been paying attention.

Shame (Not the Evelyn Champagne King Version)

While cruising MusicSpace.com for iTune download ideas, I ran across a collection called Monster Booty Platinum: BADONKADONK EDITION.

And I laughed at it until I realized I already owned 95% of the playlist.

Humpty Dance?

Wiggle It?

Rump Shaker?

SHAMEFUL.

Share your own iTunes shame in the comments section.  I'll even start you off with some of last night's (sober) purchases:  Twisted Sister - We're Not Gonna Take It, Nancy Sinatra - These Boots Were Made for Walking, Ratt - Round and Round, John Parr - St. Elmo's Fire, and Starland Vocal Band - Afternoon Delight

Frankly, I'm embarrassed I even know me right now.