There Was A Time....

....when Modest Mouse was awesome:

The Great Minnesota Get Together

It's that time of year again. Time for the Minnesota State Fair. The greatest State Fair in all the land. Of course, I've only ever been to this one, but I just assume it's the greatest.

The company I work for has a booth there. An excellent booth. The best booth. So I get to work there. I just got back from my opening day morning shift. The fair is a glorious place at 8am on opening day. The grass is lush and green. The bathrooms are clean and inviting. The overall fair smell has not kicked in yet. The vendors are happy.

I can't believe it's already here. The fair also marks the end of summer for me. It ends on Labor Day. The kids all go back to school. The days get shorter. It's dark out by 8:30.

Even with that, I still love the fair. I dislike all other mass outings. Crowds of sweaty people eating greasy food does not normally appeal to me. But the fair...the Minnesota State Fair makes me happy.

Ziggy Stardust

So, I'm 30 now. Yep. That happened. I had a great birthday. A wonderful dinner was prepared by my husband. That was followed by a night out singing karaoke with friends. It was a good turn out and everyone seemed to have a blast. I was in quite the "ziggy" mode most of the night. You know Ziggy...this guy:



So, all went well. I was hungover the next day. Very much so. But I'm not going to get into that. I just want to remember what a wonderful night I had.

Also, Happy Birthday To....

Hayden Panettiere
Paris Bennett
Brody Jenner
Kelis
Kimberly Stewart
Alicia Witt
Amy Fisher
Carrie-Ann Moss
Kim Cattral
Peter Weir
Kenny Rogers

And my nephew Kieran, who is living it up at Disney World.

Happy 7th birthday, Kieran!

Happy Birthday To Me!

Today is the day. My 30th birthday. And though I'm not nearly as depressed about it as the following may lead you to believe...I just really liked this poem.

Turning Thirty

This spring, you’d swear it actually gets dark earlier.
At the elegant new restaurants downtown
your married friends lock glances over the walnut torte:
it’s ten o’clock. The have important jobs
and go to bed before midnight. Only you
walking alone up the dazzling avenue
still feel a girl’s excitement, for the thousandth time
you enter your life as though for the first time,
as an immigrant enters a huge, mysterious capital:
Paris, New York. So many wide plazas, so many marble addresses!
Home, you write feverishly
in all five notebooks at once, then faint into bed
dazed with ambition and too many cigarettes.

Well, what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except
really you don’t believe wrinkles mean character
and know it’s an ominous note
that the Indian skirts flapping on the sidewalk racks
last summer looked so gay you wanted them all
but now are marked clearer than price tags: not for you.
Oh, what were you doing, why weren’t you paying attention
that piercingly blue day, not a cloud in the sky,
when suddenly “choices”
ceased to mean “infinite possibilities”
and became instead “deciding what to do without”?
No wonder you’re happiest now
riding on trains from one lover to the next.
In those black, night-mirrored windows
a wild white face, operatic, still enthralls you:
a romantic heroine,
suspended between lives, suspended between destinations.

-- Katha Pollitt

Hi-Ho!

I just need to say that I really like where I work. It generally feels good to come in everyday. Sure, like everyone, sleeping in always seems like the better option at 6am and I, too, have bad days here. But 90% of the time I'm happy to be here. I feel proud to work for the company that I do. I have some of the most amazingly talented, creative, and interesting coworkers.

And I can wear jeans everyday!

Headaches And Happiness

Every once in a while - I would say once a month or once every 6 weeks - I get these terrible headaches. But they aren't the kind of headaches where you can pinpoint one spot on your head and say 'ow'. I can't just rub the right temple or the space between my eyebrows. This headache is more of a pressure that starts at the back of my head/top of my neck and runs upward until the pressure is sitting atop my head like a pressure hat. It makes it hard to focus, hard to think and it usually lasts for a couple of days. No pills work. Caffeine, sugar, nothing seems to help. It used to scare me. I thought for sure that one of these times I would pass out. But now, I think it's just a migraine. I think I get migraines.

It also seems that there is always something physically wrong with me. Before this headache happened, I had some odd leg pain on some random place on my thigh. No bruise. Just a weird feeling on my leg. But then it went away and my headache happened. I'm sure that when the headache goes, something else will take it's place. It's just the way things seem to happen.

On a happier note, my 30th birthday is on Friday and I'm suddenly super excited. I've taken the afternoon off of work. My husband is going to make me my favorite dinner (tacos) and then we are going out to a local bar to sing some karaoke. I sent an invite out via Facebook to friends and it appears there will be a good turnout. Nothing sounds better than drinks and karaoke on my birthday with friends.

Turn Into

Just one week left and then I will turn 30. I was reading a blog article online about aging and turning 30 and how people say you "turn 30" like milk turns sour. I thought that was very fitting.

Not that I think I'm souring. But there is an expiration date that comes with 30. There are a lot of things that you just don't/shouldn't do anymore. It really is the official age of adulthood. When I was 18, I was nowhere near an adult. But now, I can't physically stay out past 2am drinking and living it up. My body can't handle it.

I haven't stayed up all night to watch the sun rise in years.

There's also more serious issues. I've never wanted a baby. But now that I'm "turning" 30, I beginning to really ponder the idea of motherhood as the years that I will be able to have a baby are slipping by so very quickly. I don't want to be a new mother when I'm 40. But, do I want to be a mother at all?

I'm turning 30 and I don't have a good retirement plan. I have no 401(k) or 403(b). I have $40 in my savings account.

I'm still living with the idea that I have all the time in the world. I can always go back to school, right? I still have time to be a rock star, right? I'm not going to be an administrative assistant forever, right?

Everyone keeps telling me that being in your 30s is the best time of your life. But, growing up, everyone told me high school was the greatest time of your life. They were wrong about that. Then it was your 20s are the most wonderful. Yes, they've been good, but they've also been really difficult.

So, maybe I should trust my over 30 friends and know that 30 is where it's at. They all seem happy and very sure of themselves.

But, at the same time, not one of them let's me complain about turning 30. They all give me the stank eye and tell me I'm still so young. So, is it really that great?

Harder Now With Higher Speeds

I'm in a Damien Rice mood today. A gloomy Irish backdrop way. A start singing with a whisper and end it with a roar kind of day. An overly romantic and drastically dramatic sort of way. I'm Delicate, a Rootless Tree, an Eskimo and a Volcano. A Blower's Daughter in a Grey Room. A Lonely Soldier and a Fool.

10

....I'm 30.

Because She Rocks...

Sunday Always Comes Too Late

What a crazy weekend.

I saw some great live music. First, Dropkick Murphys at the Irish Festival. I'm not a huge fan of theirs. Okay, I only know the one song from The Departed. But there was a time when I was into this kind of music. We got right in the middle of the crowd, just a couple of rows from the mosh pit. It was fun to get pushed around and a little muddy from the rain that fell all day. It was like I was 17 again.

We followed that with a trip to the Turf Club to see my friend's band, The Fuk Knights. Don't let the name fool you. They are actually really good. A sort of throw back to the Rockabilly/Stray Cats style. Also playing was Strut and Shock, a band containing one of my co-workers. They sound like Babes In Toyland with a little more of a pop sound. Really awesome. I mean, really awesome. It helps that I have been all about this kind of girl scream rock lately. I highly suggest you check both these bands out.

Saturday was the crazy day. In between wild thunderstorms and tornado warnings, I managed to make it to the Carver County fair. I group in Carver County and attended this fair all through my childhood, but it has been a good 15 years since I last been, and well, things change. It just seemed so dumpy. It didn't help that it was 90 and humid and cloudy.

I did run into my best friend from high school, which was my main goal of attending. She looked great. She has four kids. We exchanged numbers. Though, I wish she would get on the internet already. I'm not one for phone conversations and playing a 6 year catch up game over the phone just sounds exhausting.

After a bad idea pit stop at a local bar where I ran into a cousin I barely know and my niece got into a fight with her mom/my sister, we left Carver County behind and spent the next couple of hours playing Scene It on the Xbox which is so much fun. I won two out of the three games. All the more fun.

We got home about 10:30. Around midnight, my husband's cousin called. He was in town for a wedding. He was wasted. He wanted us to come downtown to see him. So, we did. We spent the next couple of hours playing tour guides to a drunken wedding party, culminating at Brit's Pub. We got home about 2:30am.

So, to sum it up: Great music, bad weather, long lost friends, and drunken relatives.

Oh, and there was a full moon on Saturday. That seems appropriate.

Social, Demented and Sad, But Social

In honor of the passing of John Hughes yesterday, a question was poised in the office to name your top 10 John Hughes movies.

So here's mine:

1. The Breakfast Club
2. Pretty In Pink
3. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
4. Uncle Buck
5. Sixteen Candles
6. Vacation
7. Some Kind of Wonderful
8. Christmas Vacation
9. Weird Science
10. She's Having a Baby

What are yours?

In A Coffee Shop, In A City

On the way into work this morning, my husband mentioned how he might need the car tomorrow for a volunteer gig so I will be unable to make my Saturday morning Starbucks run. He then suggested that I could bike there and just drink my cocoa and eat my donut there.

I gasped. Never! This is one thing I have never understood: Why do people go to coffee shops and sit there by themselves? You wouldn't do that at a bar.

What is relaxing about lugging your laptop or work materials or even a book to some noisy coffee shop that may or may not include obnoxious children being ignored by their parents? I don't get it.

If I want to read, I either a) read on the bus. It helps to pass the time. b) read at home in my living room. c) read outside in my backyard.

I can't imagine it is easy to do work on those tiny little tables, your papers lying in a mess around your laptop while you carefully set your steaming coffee next to them.

Maybe it's because I just don't generally care for the general public. Maybe it's because I don't understand doing something at a noisy coffee shop that you could do in the privacy and comfort of your own home.

My husband says people like to get out of the house. I agree. I do, too. But I like to DO something. Go out, be social, see sights. Not sit in a cramped coffee shop sipping my turtle mocha frappacino and playing on my macbook.

I know I'm the odd one out here. But you might as well go hang out in your local mall food court. I see no difference.

August, I'm On Your Side

Or...I was on your side. I feel like I had big plans for this month. I know I had some kind internal list of things to do or get started on before I turn 30 (which is happening in 16 days). Unfortunately this illness has rendered me useless for the month.

I was sick for over a week. Now, though I no longer have a cold, my ears are stilled clogged. My right might as well not be attached to my head anymore. There was a brief moment on the bus ride in this morning that it cleared up a bit. I sat frozen, not wanting to ruin what was such a beautiful moment. But within 10 seconds, it clogged up again.

My friend has the same illness as me. She is about 3 days ahead of me in the sickness cycle. Her doctor told her it would be at least another 3 weeks before she can hear again.

Well, I can't wait that long. I will not have my 30th birthday destroyed by this affliction. I am going to the real doctor tomorrow (not just some urgent care doc) who will then, hopefully, recommend an ENT to take a look at me. There must be a way to fix this.

I can't listen to music because the audio sounds off. It's like only one speaker works and someone turned the rpm high. Everyone's voices sound super high pitched. Even people I'm talking to directly. It's so weird.

I was having a conversation with Husband and he kept telling me to speak up. To me, it sounds like I'm shouting, but I guess I'm just whispering.

I miss playing my guitar. I miss my headphones on the bus. I miss singing.

I miss music.

Happy Anniversary!

Seven years ago today I married my husband. We were married outside at my sister's house. There was a horrific thunderstorm. We ended up being married in the garage next to the bar. I believe that wedding laid the groundwork for our life together. Things have not always been easy, but we have always been there for each other. I love my husband with all my heart. He has made me so happy.

Here's to him: