Strange Pulse

Do you ever make up stories about people you see in public places? I do when I’m bored. Nothing too elaborate. But it can be a good way to pass time. Keeps your brain busy, anyway.

At lunch today I was in a semi-crowded restaurant. People were coming and going, standing around waiting for their food orders, etc. I was waiting for mine, but I was too tired to do the make-up-a-whole-background for someone thing. So I started just labelling various people, quickly and off-the-cuff.

Let me say before I go any further that I’m not a judgmental person, I was just having fun labelling people based on their appearance and what they were doing. Not taking it seriously at all.

It started when a woman came by dressed in exercise pants that were kind of clingy in the behind-region, and I thought, “baby got back.” Then I noticed a man walk up behind her, and he didn’t even give her, or her “back,” a glance. I thought, “Satisfied with life? or preoccupied?”

The other people inhabiting space with me today at lunch time:

“Hungover”
“Film student”
“Born with money”
“Investor”
“Retail sales”
“Likes sucky indie bands”
“Sophisticated magazine writer”

The fun comes when someone trips you up. It’s usually along the lines of, “Is that a man or a woman?” Today it was a woman who looked a lot like a man. I could only tell she was a she by her chest. She got a

“Retired gym teacher”

I mentioned awhile ago that I’d try to post some of my favorite poems, which I’ve been meaning to do. But Adam’s thread on T&S of favorite phrases found in the Book of Mormon has me in a quote mood. Here are some random favorites from various writers.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.
I do not wish to go below now.
- Henry David Thoreau

Hey there mister
With two cars
Why do I have
Only one shoe?
— Anonymous (from a book of poems written by inner-city children)

I have been in a storm of the sun
Basking, senseless to what I’ve become
A fool, to worship just light
When after all, it follows night
— K. D. Lang

We all have religions.
God only has people.
— Buddy Hacket

wholly to be a fool
while spring is in the world
— e.e. cummings

I have one request: may I never use my reason against truth.
— Elie Wiesel, quoting from a Hasidic rabbi’s prayer

Silence’s most eloquent contradiction is music–not because music breaks silence with its sounds but because it interrupts its motion. All the arts do this: books freeze events between two covers, pictures pin them against a wall. But music goes viscerally to the source of our mortality. It stops time in its tracks and reinvents it. What a supernatural act it is to command a tempo and rhythm, to set time in motion and bring it to a halt. In a life of temporal endlessness, the musician who makes time start and stop plays at being God. This is music’s comfort and its triumph: that somewhere there exists an anecdote for decay.
— Bernard Holland

Out of darkness, hope is born.
— Angela, “My So-Called Life”

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
— Henry David Thoreau

Now she walks in fresh fields
Her tracks are on the land
She is everywhere and noplace
Her church not made with hands
— Waterboys

If you have any favorite quotes, post ‘em! I’m a dork–I collect stuff like this.

I’ll post the two songs I quoted to the radio.blog.

I was going to post this picture at some point, and now have a reason to–The Queen is running a contest for photos of love. (I heard about it via Jen.)

This is Daniel and me in the early 90’s. Not sure exactly when, but going by our appearance, I’d guess after baby #1 but before baby #2. We’re in my parents’ living room. Note the big gulp cup in between us.

In honor of Valentine’s, I’ll post our song to the radio.blog as well–Madness, “It Must Be Love.” (I’ll have to post it tomorrow, don’t have access to my music today.)

Riley and Catherine, my father’s parents. They were an interesting pair. They were opposites in some ways–my grandfather had an 8th grade education. My grandmother skipped two grades, graduated when she was 16, went to a teacher’s college (which eventually became Western Washington University), graduating when she was 18, and taught school in a two-room schoolhouse, before she married my grandpa.

Later in life, my grandfather went deaf, and my grandmother went blind. Not competely deaf and completely blind, just enough so that the idea of one being hard of hearing and the other with impaired eyesight was kinda funny.

The dog you see in the picture was Tippy. She was extremely shy and timid. You can see it in her posture–she always kind of hunched over like that. Whenever anyone came into the house she’d run and hide behind my grandpa’s armchair.

My grandpa worked as a truck driver, and my grandma was a cook in a restaurant. I don’t ever remember them working, though–by the time I came along, they were retired. When I was very small they ran a U-Pick strawberry field, with the help of my parents. My parents later did it on their own, with the help of us kids (when we were kids).

Before they were married, my grandma sang in a vocal group that would travel somewhat to put on performances. Her dream was to be an opera singer, which I didn’t find out until I was in my 20’s. I found it kind of weird, since I can’t recall ever in my life hearing her sing.

There’s a picture of my grandpa when he was a young man with some of his friends. They’re standing on a sidewalk, cigarettes dangling, and the sidewalk is littered with alcohol bottles. He looks like a hoodlum. I think my grandma went for bad boys!

When my kids were in diapers, my dad liked to tell me how his mom had 4 boys all in diapers at the same time. In the 30’s. Before washing machines. Can you imagine?

I never considered before that my grandma had a house full of boys, with no daughters. No wonder she was so thrilled when we had a baby girl, and named our daughter after her.

There’s a bit of a big jump between this and the last entry (Indigo Girls), but I really didn’t listen to much music in the 90’s. I was into the Indigo Girls, Jackson Browne, Tori Amos, Everything But The Girl when we lived in Sequim, a small town on the Olympic Peninsula. It was like living in a postcard. But Daniel lost his job and we had to move back to the Seattle area. I got a job working fulltime in downtown Seattle as a web developer while he went back to school for a mechanical engineering degree.

At my job I discovered a lot of music I hadn’t been exposed to before, including Brit pop. I never listened to the radio before that, but we often had the radio on all day at work. And when the radio wasn’t on, we had my boss’s 250 cd changer playing. An old penpal got ahold of me and we exchanged some music–he sent me a mix with a lot of Brit pop on it. In my mind, Coldplay is the best of the bunch, although a lot of people consider them “Radiohead lite” rather than Brit pop. I’ve never gotten into Radiohead–the vocalist annoys me–but I absolutely love Coldplay, and A Rush of Blood to the Head is one of my all-time favorite albums. We listened to that thing everyday for weeks and I never got sick of it.

I’ll post my favorite song from it on the radio.blog, top right.

Vegas just isn’t my scene. The lights seemed so ridiculous–so much electricity being wasted. The crazy buildings were so tacky. The naked people on billboards everywhere, redundant–the funniest, though, was a billboard advertising a mall of clothing outlet stores, and the only thing the model was wearing was a hat. It was an ugly hat, too.

Gambling seems like a sin to me, not because it’s addictive or dangerous (one of my kids told me Las Vegas has the highest suicide rate of any city), but because it’s so wasteful. You’re just handing your money over to some rich casino owner.

I don’t have the pics I took the first day, I had to unload them onto Daniel’s boss’s laptop so I had room for more on my camera. Not sure when I can get them from him, hopefully tomorrow though.

Here are a couple from the second day. I didn’t take many on the strip, I didn’t spend much time there.

Here’s the fake Eifel Tower. I didn’t go up it.

Here’s the Bellagio, where Cirque du Soleil performs O (we didn’t go) and I think this is where there’s a big pirate boat thing they enact. Didn’t see it.

We stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel.

I spent a few minutes wandering around, taking pictures of everything they had displayed there that was *not* Hard Rock. Like Britney Spears’ outfit.

And the Ginger Spice display.

There was a Nirvana display that was kinda creepy. They had his old worn out flannel jacket and stuff. Weird memories.

Every room had a band photo in it. Ours was the Monkees.

Spongebob was happy.

We had internet access in the room but our ancient laptop is incredibly slow. But we could check in with the kids via IM.

I got bored waiting for Daniel to get back from the trade show and took some pictures of myself waiting in the hotel room.

Three Inches of Blood have to be the funnest band around. They’re all super nice, too. They played this little cafe and the stage was about 5 inches off the ground. It was all ages and all the kids knew all the words to every song. In between songs they’d start chanting, “Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood!” It was awesome.

The show was sponsored by Daniel’s company, Third Drawer Snowboards, as well as Rock Star energy drinks.

It was a tight squeeze on the stage, but these guys are used to that–there’s 6 members in the band. Here’s the two singers with an audience member in the background:

I love getting shots of other people taking pictures.

Superfun.

Seeing the show was the main reason I went, had a blast. I think the band’s going to post some of the pictures on their website.

Oh, and I got them all to autograph a poster for Elijah. He was stoked.

My boss told me it’s like Disneyland for adults, and he’s totally right. Sleazy adults, anyway.

It all just seems so weird.

Last night there was a Rail Jam in front of our hotel (the Hard Rock Hotel)–that’s a snowboard competition where they go down stair rails and do tricks. We purposely asked for a room on the side of the hotel that would have a view of it, and we had a great vantage point, 7th floor. I took some pictures that I’ll post when I get home. We went outside to check it out from the ground and couldn’t really see anything, the crowd was too big. But almost every room on our side of the hotel had people hanging out their windows to watch.

An old acquaintance of Daniel’s, he’s now a business associate/client, a former pro-snowboarder who now has his own snowboard company, came by our room. He was laughing because he’d just come from a room down the hall that was packed full of people, super loud party going on, then came to our room and it was all quiet and cozy–we had the heat blaring to make up for the cold coming in through the open french doors. What can I say, we’re not partyers.

Vegas is for partyers.

Did I mention that room service will deliver loungerie and (rabbit-fur-lined) handcuffs and whips? Uh huh.

I’m the baby. The lone brunette in a family of tow-headed kids. My mom told me she thought maybe I’d been switched at the hospital. Where’d this dark-headed “Indian baby” come from?

I was born at a pretty stressful time in our family. Can you tell by this picture? My oldest sister Barb was 15 when I was born, my other sister, Jenny, about 13, my oldest brother, Darryl, was 14, and my other brother, William, was 2. I have another brother, Dan, who is 4 years younger than me. (Six kids is a lot! And my parents aren’t even Mormon.)

I showed this picture to my kids the other night and asked who they thought everyone in it was. They recognized their grandparents right away, and Barb. They guessed I was the baby, and figured out William was the toddler. But they’ve never known Jenny or Darryl–they both died when Nathaniel was small and before Catherine was born. They’ve seen a handful of pictures but none when Darryl and Jenny were this young.

When Nathaniel saw the picture, he asked why everyone looked so unhappy, and then commented on the lighting–”Were there two flashes?”

I love how a photograph can capture a moment in time. I can just hear Barb complaining, “Do we have to do this?” and Darryl saying, “Whatever, let’s just get it over with.” Jenny’s spacing out. Willy, with his hair all sticking up in back, is pouting and just wants to go play with his cars sitting off frame. My dad’s thinking, “This will be a nice family portrait,” and my mom’s thinking, “You’d better hurry up and snap this thing quick.” Because I’m about to spit up all over my mom’s skirt.

Or I should say, doooooooooooom!

Being a fan of doom metal, as well as having fans of the videogame called Doom in our household, we have a lot of fun with that word.

For instance, my husband took a break from cleaning the bathroom, and before he continued, he said, “Alright. Time to go back into the lair….of DOOOOOOOOM!”

Our youngest son likes to write stories. My favorite so far has been “The Candy Machine of Doom.” Or as we like to say, “The Candy Machine….of DOOOOOOOOM!”

Now you try it. Take any old phrase ending in a noun and tack on, “….of DOOOOOOOOM!” It works best if you use something truly grody, such as, “It’s time to take out the trash cans….of DOOOOOOOOM!” Or, conversely, something sweet and harmless. Like, “Susan sure has a cool blog….of DOOOOOOOOM!”

We’re going to Vegas Tue-Thurs of next week. My husband’s going for a ski industry tradeshow, and I’m going along because 1) I’ve never been, 2) I need some time alone (he’ll be tied up most of the day at the tradeshow), 3) I need some time alone with him (it’s at least a four-hour drive) and 4) one of our favorite metal bands, Three Inches of Blood, are playing a promotional show for his company. That’s the main reason I’m going. Three Inches are playing a free show for you guys? I’m there!

They’re also playing in Corona tonight and LA on Monday but I’m gonna skip those. I just missed a show with a couple of my favorite live bands last night–weeknight shows are so hard–I hate missing good shows. And with the way LA is for shows, I’m always missing good shows. But we’re catching Fu Manchu tomorrow night, and I’ll be seeing Three Inches in Vegas.

Anyway, what should I do/see while I’m in Vegas? Daniel loves the Liberace Museum, so I might check that out. What else?

Any bloggers live in Vegas and want to say hi?

Daniel’s boss called us to find out what hotel we wanted to stay at. I asked Daniel, since I’ve never been to Vegas, and he said, “Anything, as long as it doesn’t have a vibrating bed.” I was thinking a vibrating bed could be interesting, but I told his boss, “Anything, as long as it’s clean.” Daniel’s boss, knowing us well, said, “The Hard Rock Hotel it is!”

I need to burn some mixes for the roadtrip. I’ve already got a Calexico mix I just made for BTD_Greg and Allison which I’ll be taking a copy of–perfect desert music. I’m thinking I may burn a mix that alternates between doom and thrash metal, but it may end up just being frustrating for both my husband and me, I’m not sure. I’ll probably burn a mix of songs we both really love, which will include stuff by Prince, Sade, the Police, Madness and George Michael. And I’ll for sure bring my wake-up-and-sing mix, which is full of songs I HAVE to sing along with when I hear them–good for staying alert while driving long distances. Any other ideas for music I should bring?