Holy Crap

As most of you know, I'm in NYC this week for work. So I get back from the office a little while ago after a long day of meetings, and I stop at the hotel bar for a beer to take to my room. I'm staying in Times Square, so maybe this shouldn't actually shock me, but the result of my bar visit? One Corona: $8.13. Thankfully, I didn't pay for it myself--thanks, Corporation!

Choices, choices

Still working on the SXSW recap . . . O.K., I'm lying. I haven't started it yet. But, I am planning on writing the whole thing this weekend. Right now, I'm still working on the mental recap, and spending a lot of time listening to some of the music we heard to trigger the creative juices. (A little glimpse into the writing process there, people.)

Anyway, one thing SXSW did for me this year was to plant the idea that I need to start going to more shows. Contrary to what some people think, Columbus is an actual city, and we get a lot of good acts coming through, and I almost never go. And there's just no excuse for that. I can afford it, I don't have to worry about finding a babysitter, and it's something I love--so what the hell is wrong with me? So, as much as I generally hate resolutions, I am resolving to go to more shows this year.

In that spirit, I just spent some time on the website of one of my favorite local venues, the Lifestyle_Communities_Pavilion. I know, the name sucks. It used to be called the PromoWest Pavilion, until, for some mysterious corporate branding-driven reason, they decided to name it after a condom instead. Still, it's a good place to see a show. They've got this cool rotating stage that can be set up for the inside venue during the winter and the outside venue during the summer. The inside venue has good acoustics, and the outside venue is a small, sloping hill, so that you can see the stage pretty well no matter where you're sitting. It's a nice size, too--not too big, not too small--and they get some great acts at times.

Anyway, I haven't been there in a while, so I decided to check out who's coming through in the next few weeks. And I gotta say, after looking at the lineup, I can kind of see why they named it "Lifestyle Communities"--they're pretty much all over the place in terms of audience appeal. Here, for example, is a slice of what they've got going on in the near future:

4/20: Lucinda Williams
4/21: Upper Arlington High School Prom
4/24: Taylor Hicks
4/28: Dublin Coffman High School Prom
5/2: Ziggy Marley
5/5: Bo Kimly's Extreme Fighting Challenge 17
5/12: Hilliard Davidson High School Prom
5/21: Mastodon--Against Me!--Cursive
5/28: Damien Rice
6/1: Insane Clown Posse

So, we've got three great shows, two really sucky shows, one show I've never heard of, three proms, and one bizarre rednecky event. (Like the color coding, there? Editors are big on that.) Apparently, they really are trying to cover all the lifestyle bases (as well as pull in some serious cash, with the proms and all). I'll be going to Lucinda Williams for sure, and I might try to catch Damien Rice. Ziggy Marley I'll pass on--I heard enough of his dad when I was in Africa to last a lifetime, and they sound pretty similar. (Seriously, in Botswana, you can't go a day without hearing Bob Marley blasting out of some store or bar or bus. I like him and all, but geesh. There are other reggae artists out there, people of Botswana!)

Bo Kimly's Extreme Fighting Challenge 17? I'll probably pass on that one too. I have managed to live my life without seeing the first 16 Extreme Fighting Challenges, after all.

What's in a Name?

O.K., here's something new--for the first time, I'm going to mention my real name (not my Blogger name) in my blog. It's necessary for this little story. You'll see.

So, my name is Heather, in case there's anyone out there reading this who doesn't know. I've always liked my name, and I think it suits me. It doesn't even bother me that all the famous Heathers--Heather Locklear, Heather Thomas, Heather Mills--tend to be blond and a little . . . bimboesque. Nor did it bother me when the movie "Heathers" came out, depicting all of us as evil, conniving social climbers. Doesn't matter. I am my own Heather.

I've always been aware, of course, that my name is also a flower and a color--kind of a pretty, greyish purple. In fact, I own a few heather-colored items of clothing. I can live with my name being a color, but now things have gone too far. Now, apparently, my name is also an adjective. Walking through Target yesterday, I noticed a display of shirts labeled "heathered tees."

Of course, I had to stop and check this out. The shirts were not all a pretty, greyish purple--they came in a wide variety of colors. So what, exactly, made them "heathered," and more importantly, who decided this was even a word? What did it mean? I examined the shirts. The only thing different about them that I could see was that they were all kind of pre-faded out. Was that it? Great. Apparently, if something comes pre-faded, it is now referred to as "heathered." This makes no sense to me, and I feel kind of strangely, personally offended.

Advertisers are ruining the language, people. This must stop.

Predawn Surreal Dumpster Diver

O.K., so blogging from the Treo in Austin didn't exactly work out. When I devised this ambitious plan, I failed to take two factors into account:

1) We were way too busy and/or drunk most of the time for me to be able to blog; and
2) Unless you have fingers the size of rice grains, it's really difficult and annoying to type much on those tiny Treo keyboards.

So, I am working on my SXSW recap, but it probably won't be ready until this weekend. Sorry to keep everyone in suspense! (By "everyone," I mean the two or three people who actually care about which bands they've never heard of we saw when.)

In the meantime, it's 6:00 in the morning, and here I am blogging. Why, you might ask? As most of you know, I'm not exactly a morning person. This particular morning, though, I woke up around 4:00 (after going to bed at 12:30) and just could not go back to sleep. I tossed around for about half an hour, then finally gave up and got up. Not sure what made me wake up so early, but I will admit that I was thinking about work and couldn't get it out of my head. Despite how it sounds, this is not a bad thing. I've woken up early before thinking about work, but it's always been due to stress. This time, it was due to something else--excitement, I guess. Great things happening there! But I don't want to write about work right now. What I want to write about is what waking up so early led me to witness outside my back door a short while ago.

So, I'm in the kitchen making coffee, and while I'm waiting for it to brew, I decide I might as well take the garbage out. I take the bag out of the can, slip on some shoes, and open the back door. Of course, the dog has to come with me. I walk out, and Josie rushes past me, sniffing around in the yard to the right. I head to the left toward the dumpster . . . and stop dead as I notice something climbing quickly out of it, apparently startled by my sudden appearance. At first I think it's a freakishly large cat, but the thought pops into my head that cats don't generally eat out of dumpsters. (They tend to be much more discerning than that.) Then I think--I kid you not--that it's a bear cub. That's what it looks like, all huge and hunched over. As it leaps to the ground, I suddenly realize what it is--the biggest fucking raccoon I've ever seen in my life (and I've seen me some raccoons).

Panic sets in. I have something of a phobia about raccoons. I won't deny that they're kind of cute, but they also tend to be mean, preternaturally smart, and frequently rabid. (O.K., I doubt that they are frequently rabid, but I have this irrational idea in my head that they are all just riddled with rabies.) And this one was huge--I'm not kidding, it must have been 25 or 30 pounds, maybe more? Apparently, these city dumpsters make for some good eating. (Frankly, I'm surprised it was even able to jump up into the dumpster.) But I wasn't afraid for myself--I was terrified for my dog. As this freakishly humongous raccoon waddled away, I had visions in my head of Josie catching sight of it and taking off after it, and then I thought about the awful, bloody battle that would ensue, a la Where the Red Fern Grows. (All right, so it was actually a cougar, not a raccoon, that killed Old Dan in that story, but a raccoon started the whole thing . . . I'm sorry, this is just how my mind works.)

Of course, all of my freaking out was completely ridiculous. The raccoon was long gone almost immediately (being a pretty fast waddler, as raccoons tend to be), and Josie didn't even notice it anyway. Still, I frantically called her name and herded her back into the house as fast as I could, keeping my body between her and the general departure direction of the raccoon; all the while, she's looking at me like I'm completely nuts. And I guess I was, a little--still thinking that we had barely escaped death by rabid dumpster diver.

See, I'm really not a morning person.

[Update: Upon leaving for work this morning, I realized that the raccoon was eating the old, stale pizza that I threw out myself last night. So, it was my own actions that summoned the huge, rabid beast. Must be more careful.]

blog on the run

this is a test. I am on the road--well, ok, on the tarmack--on my way to sxsw in austin, and i'm attempting to blog from my treo. i've never done this before, but it would be cool if it works and I can give play by play updates during the course of the festival. pardon the lack of proper capitalization--haven't figured that out yet. let's see if this works!

It's All About Me

Quiz: Are You a Woman Who Is Afraid to Commit?

Anyone even vaguely familiar with the Internet has seen those teaser article titles that inhabit the home screens of various service web sites--including the Hotmail home page, where my eye fell on the above article title the other day. Many of the articles, like this one, originate from the MSN Dating & Personals section. I'd like to say that I usually ignore these teaser titles, but, like American Idol and Deal or No Deal, they are a guilty pleasure time-suck that I sometimes indulge in. Inevitably, they are stupid and pointless, the Internet equivalent of the Cosmo articles and quizzes my friends and I would read in high school and college. You know the ones--10 Signs He's Into You, New Ways to Surprise Him in Bed, Is It Time to Dump Him? There was, and still is, an endless stream of such articles, often with the same material recycled over and over with different titles. And every single one of them--every one!--should, in reality, have the same title: Common Sense "Advice" You Should Be Able to Figure Out for Yourself if You Have Half a Brain. So, he won't return your calls and your friend saw him making out with another woman at the bar? Probably time to break up. Stuff like that.

The sex tips articles are the worst, and so insidious, because they still suck me in sometimes, when I should know so much better. I'll be standing in line at the grocery store, and there's Cosmo or Mademoiselle sitting on the rack, claiming to have new, exclusive sex info, and I'll find myself reaching for the magazine and checking out the article on the off chance that someone really has come up with something new. You know what? They haven't. Surprising him with lingerie is not "new." Changing positions is not "new." A lot of other things aren't "new" either, although for certain reasons*, I won't get into them here.

The quizzes still suck me in sometimes too, which is equally stupid, especially if you're not 14. At the end of these quizzes, they always list categories of personalities/tendencies/whatever, and you fall into one of these categories based on your answers to the quiz questions. And I can go straight to these categories, read them, and know instantly which one I fall into without ever answering the questions because, you know, I pretty much know myself. But I will sometimes take the quiz anyway, just to see if I'm right. I always am. (Another thing--the quizzes are designed in such a way that it is so obvious which answers are going to put you in which categories. If you wanted, you could totally manipulate your answers to put yourself in a different category from whom you really are. Of course, that would be pointless and a little sad, wouldn't it?)

Anyway. Case in point--I saw the quiz title above, Are You a Woman Who Is Afraid to Commit?, and I immediately thought, Yes! I am such a woman! No need to take this quiz! But of course, I took it anyway. Here are the statements one is required to contemplate to figure out one's committment-phobia level, along with my responses:

*Once the excitement of first romance has passed, you get bored in most of your relationships.
Oh, yes.
*You have a habit of dating unavailable men (married, involved with someone else, geographically or emotionally distant, etc.). ·
Um, yes.
*You have a long and elaborate list of requirements for your ideal mate.
Oh, most definitely.
*You consider your married friends’ relationships boring and feel that many of them have settled for too little.
Not so much. I like most of my friends' significant others, and most of them seem pretty happy--the ones who have made it, that is. But they're not me.
*You cultivate larger networks of friends and acquaintances at the expense of romantic relationships. ·
Again, not so much. I don't think I have more friends now than when I was married--in fact, I have fewer, since his friends pretty much blew me off. I do spend more time with my remaining friends, though, which is not a bad thing!
*You date more than one man at a time to prevent becoming dependent. ·
Well, I definitely date more than one man at a time, but is it to prevent becoming dependent? I don't think so--I don't tend to become "dependent" anyway. I think it's to prevent becoming bored.
*You have a difficult time getting over past boyfriends.
Um, definitely not. If anything, I get over them too quickly.

The really funny part of this quiz is the "advice" they give you if, in fact, you are afraid to commit. I won't regurgitate it all here, as it's a bunch of boring psycho-babble, but what it boils down to is, basically--lower your expectations. That's right! Just don't expect so much, suck it up, and be happy with . . . well, whomever! So simple!

Grrr. How about this advice? If you're afraid to commit, don't commit! At least, not until you're really ready to! Be happy with yourself, cherish your friends and family, be productive, live an active life, and don't worry about focusing all your energy on coupling up! Why, why is this idea so far out of the mainstream? Why does everything about society and women's magazines and T.V. shows and movies push us so consistently toward couplehood? At any cost? I just don't get it. Oh, I suppose there is some subconscious biological imperative at work, but really, isn't it time to move beyond that, people? Evolve already!

O.K., enough ranting. (Sorry, got a little carried away there.) I'm not saying I want to be single forever. My plan is, when I'm around 60 or so, I'll find a nice, interesting widower who has a dog and loves to travel and has enough money to be comfortable, and maybe we'll move to Costa Rica or something. In the meantime, there's no need to rush, to lower my expectations, or to read these stupid articles anymore.

*Main reason: my dad reads this blog.