秋学期

So last time I was around here I had intentions of blogging soon after, but yet again months have passed. Alas, I've started graduate school in the CLE and have been living on my own (with 3 crazy art students) in the Heights. So the summer was good and the last few weeks have promised a busy fall semester as I'm still working a bunch with a heavy load of reading piled on.

In saying that, my two classes are pretty crazy polar opposites. My first class is absolutely wonderful and exhibits all of the qualities of the English classes I had Junior year when I decided to switch my major. The teacher is great, the reading list is great, and the two hours fly by. My second class is a sheer torturous two hours of boredom wherein two people raise their hands and ask a simple stupid question about a placement of a comma or an editors word choice and our entire class then is made up of talking about just that. Killlll me. I miss Japanese and a lot of my friends from Kansai are taking over the old Nihon right now in the Jet Programme and torturing me about it via their pictures and such on Facebook. I'd kill just to walk through Shinsaibashi and Namba and eat a good, cheap bowl of katsudon.

But other than that I've been spending too much time at Aladdin's thinking about how I need a job that gives me some sort of teaching/tutoring experience, so today I'm working on my resume and a cover letter. Get me out of that nepotist environment. Someone! PLZ!

And that's just about all I got after two months of no blogging. I read some good books over the summer, the early of which I wrote about HERE, and I even have winter break reading lined up (Zeitoun!). My Birthday was great and I'm officially old (22) and have been called ma'am a handful of times since. The weather is cooling down, my tomatoes are still growing, and Ryan & I have been gearing up for the winter by making some delish brunchy's and dinny's from market & garden food. My grilled cheeses with tomato and basil were amazing and I could live off of Ohio City Pasta and the Souper Market. So good.

In a couple weeks we're jaunting off to Montreal so maybe I'll have pictures for once. After that, Cedar Point, then hibernation.

Letterboxing?

What?

Well, while perusing Lake View Cemetery today I saw something blue peeking out from a pile of rocks at the bottom of a tree stump. I asked Ryan to open this thing up afraid of what would pop out. I figured it was drugs or condoms but then seeing a notebook figured it might be a diary or secret notes (!!!). What it ended up being was a little notebook that had been there for 2 years and was completely filled with stamps and writing from tons of different people. On the inside of the lid it said to go to Letterboxing.org if found accidentally and to please put it back in its original spot. How odd.

Anyways, I don't really know what to think of this. It's quite strange that I saw the box within the tree/rocks to begin with especially after reading the long instructions on how to find this specific box on the website. It's like a little time capsule I found. Worst of all the notebook was full. Should I go put a new one in the box? Am I getting sucked into this weird cult? THIS is the page for the specific letterbox. Maybe I'll "contact the placer." Regardless, I'm off to a hockey game and will have to continue these thoughts later...

スカンクツロニクス

(Update: iTunes updated yet again and all of my problems are gone. I must have not been the only one.)

Thanks to the iTunes update I'm now incapable of plugging in my iPod or putting a CD in without my computer freezing. This led me to my old CD cases and the millions of burned discs with pink bubbly teenage letters all over them. I feel like I'll be telling my grandkids one day, "One time there was this thing called Napster and you could get whatever you wanted on the Internets for free and then we put the stuff on CD and called it burning!" Because of all of the free time I had back then (oh, those teenage years) and all of the crappy punk rock I listened to (everything imaginable), I have about 5 versions of every song ever written by bands such as, Yellowcard, Thursday, The Early November, and of course Blink-182. I'm super weird about demos and usually like them tons more than the real thing. Lo-fi non-polished music is just a lot easier for my ears to adore.

Anyways, along this nostalgic journey I ran across some local stuff from when I was in middle school and early high school. It's hard for me to even fathom all of those bands and let alone shows that were around the area back then. So I put the CD's into my record player and listened to a lot of shitty stuff but stuff that makes you want to smile, dance and get rowdy. Rubber Cement, Howaboutno, Imperfect, Katty Whompus... Anyways, to make a long story short I ended up listening to the whole Skanktronics album and then remembering their video for Circuit to the Sun. Low and behold, I find the thing on youtube. It's a real masterpiece, let me tell you. So here it is:

雪！

Derbyshire:

My car:


Bundles:

春ブレク？

On spring break I went bowling, spent hours in bookstores and bought nothing, saw a French film and another that was good but a little mediocre, ate a brat, read an extremely little amount of a big book, slept and snuggled, licked cannoli filling off my hands, and pushed my boyfriend into the snow. And now it's almost over just in time for me to work three days and have a paper to write for Monday. What a joke this is John Carroll! Reschedule this for next year, please.

In other news, voting is next week and I still have no idea what I'm going to do. I figure the decision will be made at the very moment I go to pull the lever or whatever you do nowadays. I have absolutely nothing interesting to say anymore. I blame it on this snow and it's ability to wrap a cardigan around me and force girl scout cookies in my mouth which in turn weigh me down to this bed.

ヌズ

It's Radiothon, and yes, that is Sean Penn and Dennis Kucinich. They just happened to stop by the WJCU metal benefit concert last Friday night at the Beachland Ballroom. What? Yes, metal. Why? I have absolutely no idea, but there's the picture to prove it!

In other WJCU news, I returned from my week hiatus and now have both a backpack and a mail crate full of CD's. I hung fresh posters in the studio on Monday covering up old things like Linkin Park with new things like Polysics. And last but not least, tomorrow is the Radiothon show where me and my co-host Mark will be begging for money after every song. 8-10pm.

So I'm alive. Sore and flushing with saltwater. Five pounds lighter. Crazy in love. Next week: Spring Break in beautiful 20 degree Cleveland. I will return with a tan.

ラジオですか？ はい！

I'm back on air this semester at WJCU, this time with my fellow friend in music Mark. Angsty, unprofessional and nostalgic banter, ticket giveaways, and mostly music of the Indie genre, or so we're told (and the occasional pop/punk slip up). If you were uninformed, here's the info:

Something to Write Home About
Wednesday nights
8-10pm (with possible interruptions by John Carroll basketball, but I won't go into that now)
88.7fm Cleveland/Streaming @ WJCU.org

Also, our playlists are available here at radioactivity.fm.

♪

♪Photo's courtesy of Mr. RydeBi, the apple of my eye.

♪

♪I figured I should start making use of my camera and not just quit using it when the batteries die. This is the result; a smattering of images dating all the way back to last August. Ah, innocence.

小のイタリア

I've always had sort of a love/hate relationship with Cleveland. Throughout my younger years I lived miles and miles away in the secluded Fairport Harbor where it was painful just to venture across the dirty river into Painesville. (I don't think I ever came into direct contact with the water, and how disgusting to think that it flows into the lake.) Going back to these places now is like some strange time warp. Everything looks strange, skewed, and just plain filthy. I've always been frolicking about the Heights for as long as I can remember, especially after I triumphantly escaped Fairport in mere hours back in the summer of '02 (throwing every personal belonging into garbage bags and out of a second story window into a truck bed.*). Around the age of fourteen I was damning the renovation of Coventry along with the abolishment of the Green Tomato and blaming it on the Bush administration. Out of it all though, the biggest part of this love/hate relationship was showcased in my tour of Little Italy.

When I entered college I found myself spending nearly all of my time in an apartment above Corbo's bakery. This place was infested with anime wall hangings, dirty dishes (so dirty they were moldy), and ferrets of all things. The place more or less reminded me of the song "I love living in the city" by Fear (watch SLC Punk). I think that's what did it for me at first. Somewhat of a dream was fulfilled by that place that had always been in my mind even in my Fairport-locked youth. After a short time the euphoria suddenly vanished after it too began to look filthy and strange.

I can remember a specific night when I lay awake at around two in the morning singing along to the Dean Martin songs playing outside. I had memorized all of the words subconsciously and probably in my sleep. I'm sure no one would believe that the music at Patrizia's plays full blast throughout the night. It was demented, and after this night it was all down hill. I got sick of the same men sitting across the street at the unnamed bar obviously not letting any outsiders in. They stopped selling Orangina at Presti's. I made a movie called "The Real World Cleveland Season 173 'The Last Resort'" and submitted it to one of my Freshman English classes. Although my character is nothing like myself ("If prayers were pudding, would you eat well?"), I now see that I also had somewhat of a struggle and eventually "left the house" just as she did.



*I took a test on poverty in one of my Education classes last semester (constructed by Ruby Payne, I believe) and one of the point boosters was knowing how to move out of a house in an hour, as well as other things I learned back then and wouldn't have attributed to being impoverished if not for this test.



♪I reflected on all of this when I ventured to the Heights City Hall last Monday to pay off my pile of parking tickets. I guess that was my New Years Resolution. No more parking tickets! Hint to anyone paying parking tickets in the Heights: they hand out so many they don't even record some of them so go to city hall, give them your license plate number and be as surprised as I was. $65 poorer, I cursed Severance for well, being Severance, and cursed my car for being yet another medium for this love/hate relationship.

ベーシェヅ

Two girls, sick and passed out in the back seat, were unable to go on. Earlier they had smoked something out of a plastic bottle and so they decided to end the night there. They made the escape the rest should have. The escape they should have all made months before when this Sunday tradition started. A couple girls and a boy were the few that remained, and at this point there was no turning back. They snorted a Vicodin in one of the stalls of the girls bathroom. Boys in the girls bathroom were the norm, as they often borrowed eye liner from girls who wore far too much of it. While fixing their hair with one hand in front of the large filthy mirror, they struggled to keep their cigarette stable in the other. Girls in the boys bathroom was the norm too, of course. They were pushed up against the wall by boys in torn up jeans and whatever else would follow they would quickly regret the next morning, even though they could barely remember anything. Maybe they would say it was rape and stick to their story after even they realized it was a lie.

One of the girls had a hand stamp that was still wet from the door where she got through as 21 with her fake ID regardless of her french braid pigtails and lack of makeup. She pressed it up against the others after they washed the thick black X's off. They all went to the bar and started double fisting PBR and Sparks tallboy's, sharing drinks, kissing each other, and big red hickeys that wouldn't fully blacken until they had to attend class early the next morning... early being 10am, of course. The rest of the night would be a blur as it always was. A few girls would scream "mozoltov" and break light bulbs in the middle of the dance floor. Glass shards would embed themselves into soles of Chuck Taylors where they would stay for years; a reminder of the mess they were once in. Lights, dancing, music, tongues, hearts, fists pumping, some chick trying to sell everyone cocaine, all right there, all so routine by then. Every week, every single sunday, all night long. Yelling "I wish i could buy back the woman you stole," they would all fall into each other's arms, completely oblivious to anything else. The music stopped at 2am and yet they wouldn't leave.

None of them knew who they were.

英文学！！

Most of my days at school are spent hiding somewhere amongst the top floor of the O'Malley Center. We call it "The OC."

The big, comfy, low chairs are surrounded by little tables covered with old Carroll Reviews, Carroll News, or anything else that may end up there, literary or not, throughout the course of the day. I scroll through old Reviews from 2002 and look at my pictures that made it on the cover and within Spring 2007 edition. I join in on conversations such as how ridiculous the editorials are in the new Carroll News that week.

The writing center is filled with the vast contrast between grad students and naive freshman, or upperclassmen who are required by their Professors to submit to the embarrassment of having their papers ripped apart. Some are just stopping by to check their Facebook between classes or talk to people who care about things like how Langston Hughes exactly felt about Walt Whitman.

In the hallway of offices, there are numerous bicycles propped up against walls and papers strewn about boxes on the floor. Posters are up on doors with millions of quotes. Everyone is there all the time, I swear. Babies are sometimes heard crying and Professor's children spend the day at the college rather than at school sometimes. The Decemberists plays from a corner office and NPR from another.

So today there was hail (or snow or something) pounding down on the skylights and I was in the iMac classroom up there quickly typing up a feature story for Journalism. Listening to others talk, I decided to finally send the e-mail to my academic advisor that I've been meaning to send for a while now. "I'm changing my major!" Not much else to say and no need to give reasons, because i could give a million.* It's just all exciting and I'm now anxious for what is to come. Relieved, rejuventated, hopeful, determined... well, as determined as I will ever be.



*Here's some... my Education classes suck majorly and I've realized that there is no way I want to go through this for nothing and no personal gain, I want to study Japanese again, I want to study more than this stupid shtuff again and graduate on time without the fuss of student teaching the fall after I graduate, and it's just the right thing. I just propped a Banana Yoshimoto novel under my door to keep it closed, okay?

六月十五日、二千七

June 15, 2007.
I woke up early by the sound of an alarm, equipped with puffy eyes from crying silently the night before as you were sleeping. I was purposely trying to wake you up actually, but even if you had, you didn't say anything. At this point we were separated by pillows. I gave in to what had become more of a chore than anything. I can't remember one detail from it, just that you were behind me. A mumble of a "bye" got no reply and I tried to go back to sleep.

I don't know what went through my head at this point, but there was some kind of revelation. I got up and started rummaging through piles of clothes and things to find everything that was mine. For the month or so before this I had slowly been collecting things around that were mine in hopes of this very moment, so I was probably a little ahead of my game. I began stuffing things into my huge tote bag. Miscellaneous socks, underwear, shirts, and even a sake set and a stuffed animal. I left the stuffed animal behind with a drawing and a note. "Take care of me," it said. Is that symbolic? I happen to think so.

And so we talked and called it quits after nearly 4 years, or at least I did. Sooner or later you would agree. Of course, we couldn't talk face to face or even with spoken words so it was nothing but little fragments of text messages we sent back and forth. I filled my car with things and ran into Mike on the way out. "Hey, do you know where my DVD is?," I asked and he just said "Uhoh." But we laughed and I was so excited. I cried after I left, turning onto Clark, looking at the graffiti that wasn't so fresh anymore. I cried up until dead man's curve, then that was it. I put on Dude Ranch and turned over a new leaf. I wrote down in words that filled an entire page, "Constants aren't so constant anymore."

Work started at 5pm and I told everyone what had happened and they all congratulated me. For the past few months Holly, Anthony, and just about everyone else I worked with had listened to my fairly hidden complaints and had given me advice that I finally followed. The puffiness went down, I got invited to a party after work*, I drank my first official single beer ever, and it was all scary and new and even though I had lost the majority of my "friends" in a single day, I had made new ones just then. I drove home at 2 or 3am and listened to the play list "home."



*...by Ryan, whom I've been dating now for a while.



♪ I just felt like getting this all down as my life has completely flipped around since this day and is now completely wonderful and pretty much amazing, to tell you the truth. Also, this is a very old picture of my feet. Looks like a corpse.

海遊館

The sky shone blacker than it ever had before, and so in turn the lake did too. Not one thing sat around for it to try to reflect, so it just decided to give in to the nothingness. The rain fell so hard that the tops of the waves blended into the whole mess of the night making it impossible to make sense of much. Feeling safe in a car equipped with fake grapes hanging from the mirror and birds velcroed to the ceiling, I shivered with a chill, and yet the armpits of my sweater seeped with sweat. Treble, muffled tones from The Forbidden Love EP remained somewhere hidden beneath the pounding of the rain. Staring into the nothingness of the night, we waited for a fish, a log, or something to come along with one of the waves, as that dent would have told the story forever. But alas, no picture would turn out, nor a dent, but the waves quickly began to overtake the break wall, and then the car. We were but fish in a tank, and the waves nothing more than the kid at the aquarium who bangs on the glass.

We are always taught that tapping on the glass is not friendly, but in reality maybe it is all the buzz in the tank. You know, it starts a bit of gossip and excitement. Shakes things up a little. Without a little smack, tap, and shake or two of the tank every once and a while, maybe the creatures inside would get so bored, and then so depressed, that something bad would happen. I don't know what, but maybe they would just give up on life or something. Anyways, everyone complains about Ohio weather, but in all reality, what would we do without a tap of the tank every now and then? Maybe I'm a crazy fish, but I think I need it to stay sane in this town.



♪ I just came across all of these ridiculous pictures I used to take when I was in high school. About 100 were of sunsets and about another 100 were of nothing more than average trees or the view out of my apartment window. All very mediocre. I thought how strange it was that I had taken all of these pictures. Maybe they were just to validate my emoness? Whatever the case, the one above made me laugh and think back to the hours (upon hours upon hours) spent at the CEI break wall in Eastlake. In rain storms, ice storms, or just plain fishing season, I constantly found myself there staring into the lake.



*Japanese can only have a word like 海遊館, or かいゆかん, or kaiyukan. "Playing in the sea pavilion"

クリブランドが大好き！

waking up at 9am by the obnoxious sound of a cell phone alarm clock, slightly hung over, i realized that the night before verified a prediction i have held in my mind for years now: cleveland is amazing in every aspect if and only if one is not even close to being sober.
also,
time: midnight-5am
place: the shoreway.
if anyone else has been in the passenger seat, preferably listening to wonderful music, in these conditions, you know what i mean. otherwise, get on this asap. you're missing out on one of the few great things to do in this city.
ever since i can remember, i've been venturing out to cleveland for some reason or another. when i was little my mom and i would skip school and work and she would take me to coventry where she (no doubt) blew through my child support in the green tomato and the old, cluttered, but amazing big fun. when i was in middle school it was my obsession with the local scene that took me out to cleveland. the skanktronics, rubber cement, so ricki, one short a dozen, etc. sneaking out to go to shows at the pit cleveland and knowing, in one way or another, just about everyone there. spending way too much time just to put on the blue dickies, orange get up kids shirt, rainbow belt, and black chucks that i could never seem to get off. although the scene died out ridiculously fast, high school came and so did fall out boy, the rxbandits, and a bunch of other bands i saw more times than i can remember. the grog shop moved after one of the most memorable (and sweaty) nights of my life, and coventry took on a transformation that would not only repave the sidewalks and street, but my perception and love of cleveland as well.
even though i still venture out to cleveland for shows (battle of the bands, minus the bear, and regina spektor within the last week), it will never be the same as it was when i was younger. i go to school, work and have just about a million other reasons to be in cleveland nowadays, but for some reason i am tied to the suburbs! (probably the worst of them all, at that. our downtown? the mall.) this brings me to next summer and my plan to rough it on my own for the first time in my life!* in the end, i can only hope that my friends will never cease in filling my gut with liquor so that i'll be able to see cleveland in the light where i can see it best.


*aside from japan, of course, where i was shoveled money by not only my john carroll tuition (mostly via loans), but also my family and who knows where else i got those thousands of dollars from exactly. this is a whole other story. i have no idea where that money went other than the most part had to of been blown on 1. alcohol 2. transportation 3. food... in that order, of course.


♪ a smattering of thoughts thanks to last week