i say magick.

i hope that at some point during my career as a famed female vocalist with a bewitching stage prescence, my producers convince me to break away from my rocking band and record a solo album.

furthermore, i hope my stylist straightens my hair and cuts a fierce top layer for the photo shoot.

yes, i hope to be thrown into the weird genre of female rock singers eternalized in their solo careers as edgy wiccanesque sirens with a studio band and an arbitrary album title.  it’s odd, you know, cause weren’t these chicks kind of rocking before we had this

and this

for all those concerned, i understand that levitation can also be attributed to psychokinesis. so, grace slick may be displaying her abilities in Extrasensory Perception.

stevie nicks could also be displaying either

a) her love of falconry

or

b) her knowledge of the iconography of medieval courtly love.

i think the idea of bewitchery was way more cutting edge at the time, and probably has some level of sex appeal. cause, really, what doesn’t?

and these albums covers do have an edge of mystique. they do make their viewer a little bit frightened of

a) the beautiful woman whose singing may cast a spell over them

and/or

b) the future career of the beautiful woman on the album cover.

cause what happened to stevie nicks after “the edge of seventeen”?

i say: magick.

while conducting searches for material, i came across many images of Lindsay Lohan’s new album with quotes reading “new album by the lil’ witch”. yes, it all comes full circle.

i think i’ve been wearing too much blush

in my recent quest to adulthood (because being 18+ doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a grown-up) i picked up the habit of wearing blush. i would be lying if i said i haven’t tried this before; for a breif period during my senior year of high school i was wearing this bronze-brownish blush to look tan in the winter months. my latina girlfriend did and she looked great. then one day in my graphic design class i caught my friend Rob staring at the side of my face. finally he asked me, “yo, you got crayon on your face or something? like, did you draw on yourself?” and i’ve always thought of that everytime i’ve considered putting blush on again.

but recently, this container of pink blush resurfaced in my girl-things bag a few weeks ago (i remembered a few days later that my convict boyfriend in high school bought it for me, or stole it for me, from sephora right before the aforementioned blush phase I) and i thought “let’s do this.” cause all the mature women that come into the shitty coffee shop i work at-the women who wear the clothes that are on the mannequins at Anthropologie, not the knock-offs on the sale racks at Urban Outfitters-they wear blush that’s probably from the Mac store, not from their spoon-burning shitty exboyfriend who used to call them from jail.

so i started going real light, and even kind of wiped it off a little to make sure i didn’t have crayon face. but every week i’ve gotten a little bolder. and then today, shortly after i got out of work and got my bike fixed, i rode by a parked car and saw my reflection in a window and i looked like this

awful.

so my quest to adulthood hit a speed bump. no big deal, right?

another problem i’ve been having that i feel at liberty to discuss openly here is my place of living. renting sucks, hands down. especially when you live in a glorified garage in an old yarn and asbestos mill that would be a death trap if there was ever a fire. the same building called The Cracker Factory by my Puerto Rican neighbors, the same building that can be blamed (partially) for all the outrageously priced “lofts” refurbished within tie factories and other old buildings of similarly glamourous industry. and honestly, i don’t even know if i want to stay in this damn city or not, but i hate answering to people and being asked for thousands of dollars in deposits for even thinking about moving into a different house. like most people in this part of the city, i live paycheck to paycheck. do they think i have some cash stash somewhere? that sale rack at Urban Outfitters? i only hit that once when i was given a gift card to that store for my birthday. but i know i’m better off than a lot of people in Rock-Bottom America, so sometimes i think about taking this adulthood thing a step further and buying a house.

i think i can afford this

and after i complete my degree in preservation, it will look like this

home-owning excites me more and more each day.

oh, and step three of my pursuit of adulthood:

the pantsuit. the day i put this thing on, you can say good bye to the underacheiving derelict you once knew me as. i’ll be too professional to even look in your general direction. party mode will be off, imperialistic money making mode will be on. and, once i finally succeed at JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF BLUSH, i’ll be a self-made ambitious adult woman, not the freeloading hourly-paid chick that your mother would cringe at. really, i don’t think anyone’s mom wants their son to marry me now.

but they will soon.

a plug for CRAFTIVITY

Looking Forward with Tunnel Vision

yes, i have been absent from the blogosphere for about a month. time goes by fast. we didn’t have internet for a few of those weeks. after that, i have no excuse.

i had a post all ready for “A Week of Horrors, A Week of Hope” Part Deux but now it seems irrelevant and outdated. and besides, enough people blogged about the Phillies trash causing flat tires at Critical Mass and Obama becoming President Elect. the only real change i wanted at the time was for him to ride a Critical Mass and bring a sense of decency to Philadelphia’s failing monthly “group” ride.

oh yeah but now the economy sucks.

and it’s fucking christmas. i don’t even want to talk about christmas. i went to a Borders a few weeks ago with my sister and we saw this

and almost threw up.

i’m not a “scrooge” (i hate even using that term because it reminds me of the facist anti-semites at Disney) but Christmas just gives everyone anxiety and everyone’s already broke and homeless so someone should make one of those “The Year There Almost Wasn’t Christmas” Specials and instead of some asshole saving the whole thing they could end the movie early and all the pensionless people can come on screen and say “Really kids, you’re parents are broke. Give them a break. Don’t you want to eat next month without indebting your family?”

i’d like to just have a Christmas where it actually snows (temporary earmuffs to the ubiquitous shouts of GLOBAL WARMING) and everyone just hangs out by a woodstove and drinks hot drinks and eats hot food and no one cares if everyone got each other gifts. maybe that’s what the word WASSLE really means! and we just threw that word away like it was dirty laundary from the late nineteenth century.

so skip to new years day in Philadelphia. that’s right. MUMMERS! i am a Mummer this year. i kid you not. we are Mummers on the Eve of the Nukuler Winter or something like that. but there are budget cuts, and the parade is shortened and apparently there’s no Two Street party. but the final decisions are coming in Thursday of this week so i’m not going to jump the gun here. i really wanted to dress as a Cyborg but our costumes have to be consistent. we could be a lizard, slug or robot and i picked the psychedelic slug.

maybe if we strut hard enough we can convince the people of Philadelphia to throw money at us. or pay the Police Department’s overtime wages. technically, we are from the future. as all alien/time travel movies go, the commonfolk should be awestruck and give us their complete subordination for at least 12 hours before they begin to devise a plan against us.

wouldn’t you, if these guys were playing banjo in the string band?

which brings me to my continual thoughts on the year 2009. what the fuck is going to be up with 2009? 2008 was way crazier than we all thought. no joke, like ANYTHING can happen in ‘09.

it’s always a lovely time to compare headlines of today with those of a century ago. like, wow, they were just going to the north pole then! and now it’s melting. there were no noise shows or rusty tandem bikes or money-hungry landlords occupying my building then, either, just some textile and asbestos manufacturers. oh how things change.

SELF-INDENTITY CRISIS

sometimes i hear older women saying “hhahaha Idon’tthinkI’vefoundmySTYLEyethahahaha” when they talk about modern fashion or want their peers to accept them wearing something not from Macys. lately i’ve been eavesdropping a lot on older women’s convo hoping to hear one of them say that so i can jump in with my new counter totally-not-what-you’d-expect-a-girl-my-age-to-say line “HahahaYEAHwellapparentlyeveryoneelseHASMYFACE  andIwantitBACKnow!”

this is one facet of my on-going self-identity crisis. maybe crisis is an overstatement. maybe it’s more like a self-identity conundrum. part of this problem comes from people randomly telling me i look like celebrities. or someone they know. or the sister of someone they know. or someone they may have seen in passing when they were in college.

what the fuck. don’t tell me i look like someone else. that would be great if i was a fugitive of the law or a spy. but not if i’m going to die one day and you’re going to eventually confuse me with someone else.

I WANT TO KNOW WHO INITIATED DARK HAIR AND THICK GLASSES INTO THE SELF-CONSUMING VOID OF POPULAR FASHION.

this is part of the problem. my look is as old as i am. sometimes people call me a jew, or THE JEW as one husky-voiced cleavage-flaunting woman repeatedly referred to me as during a Christmas party last year. so my apparent jewish-academe look, which i have worked so hard not to work on, lends itself to other women in the public eye, or other girls you went to high school with or someone who sat behind you in college math 55.

list of most frequent comparisons of my look/face to people in the pop culture black  hole

1. winona ryder but i’ve heard mostly only when she was lydia in beetlejuice

2. tina fey (which terrifies me because yes, this leads to sarah palin FUUCKKKKK)

3. edith piaf, but “just the eyes really and the hair”

SO. if you’re wondering what i look like, here’s a portrait:

seriously though, i am flattered that anyone would think of winona when they look at me because she is beautiful.

i actually really look more like this:

oh wait,

NOT REALLY.