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.

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.

that was so much fun. i’m all the way on camera right, cut of most of the time, but i don’t care. it was worth it anyway.

that’s right. what did (does) my mom know about Bush, anyway? i mean seriously, that arrangement is completely illogical for them to play during a five-minute slot on national television.

although i guess they managed it without the strings at some performances:

it’s funny, the things i concerned myself with when i wrote about music. like i was really annoyed when some pretentious ReQuest magazine columnist repeatedly made jokes about how young the Silverchair boys were.

however, as i page through my journal more, i become rather sad at the proportion of entries that are about boys and how stupid my drama queen friend Tiffany was acting and not about what i want to be when i grow up and music. but i guess it all makes sense, seeing where i am now.

encourage your daughters to keep better journals! limit them to one entry per month about boys! IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO SAVE THEIR BRAINS.

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.

and her with the kittens!

the first one to pass was Mittens the Sheep. Unfortunatly, i don’t have a digital photo of her (but i have many prints, and there is even-yes-a painted portrait of her at my mother’s house).
Her mother, Madeline the Sheep, is still alive-she was a teenage mother, just one year older than Mittens. Mittens’ father Flash the Ram is long passed, may he rest in peace. I have fond memories of Flash’s statuesque nature; sometimes you could catch him standing with his two front hooves on a small rock, perfectly still, staring off into the distance, as if he was thinking “YES, I OWN ALL OF YOU.” Mittens looked more like her dad than her mom, and had a slight overbite–you had to mind your fingers when you hand-fed her grain.

Mittens the Sheep was euthanized today because of health complications due to a meningeal worm infection. I don’t want to humiliate her here with the details, but, as she was an old sheep (14!), my mother and the vet thought it best to let her leave this earth before the pain was too great.

I had never heard of a meningeal worm before. Apparently, if you don’t have a minute to read the link, it’s kind of like spinal meningitis in humans. Here is a diagram showing the life cycle of the worm:

and, i couldn’t find one of these for a sheep, but it affects llamas in the same way:

the numbered parts are all the organs and other bodily functions the worm seriously damages. apparently, from what they could tell, Mittens’ entire nervous system was ravaged by this worm, which comes from white-tail deer. and if you know anything about hunterdon county, nj, them bitches is everywhere.

I was talking to my mother on the phone about what happened to Mittens while taking a break at work when my manager came in from the back garden and told us that she went to pet Tuna, the cafe’s cat, and Tuna was dead.

We had taken Tuna in as a stray; she had appeared one day in the back garden, small and cute and friendly as can be. My boss loves cats, and decided to keep her. We soon after discovered that Tuna was pregnant (she couldn’t have been older than nine months!) She had her kittens, four of them, which I helped her to deliver because one was stuck in the placenta. Tuna had given birth on the concrete, and being able to dry off newborn kittens and help calm Tuna down and make them all comfortable in a kitten nest together was such a special experience.

The kittens were immediately spoken for. We told all the adopters to wait until the kittens were off nursing and Tuna got to spend some time with them; it was a real Discovery Channel-touching-moment to see how Tuna instantly knew just how to be a mom.

This past week, some of the kittens started going home with their new human parents. Tuna got spayed a few weeks ago, had an infection, but my manager and my boss both took care of her with medicine and paid the vet bills (along with help from all the generous donors at the cafe to the Tuna Health Fund) and Tuna seemed good as new.

Until today, when she was found laying under a bench on her side, stiff with rigor mortis, a small pool of blood on the concrete under her mouth. Tuna had no wounds or external signs of physical trauma. After my manager and I bagged her up and put her in a box and called our boss (who is devastated) a customer told us that she saw Tuna no more than two hours earlier, strolling around in front of the cafe, looking and acting like the usual Tuna.

I think she may have had a brain hemmorage or an aneurysm or, this is something else I found which may explain what happened.
Whatever it was, it was obviously quick and not diagnosable, since she had just gotten a vet checkup not even a month ago.

i’ve lost a lot of animals in my time, and it’s difficult to deal with, but it’s always much harder when the animal is young. there is no feeling of relief when they die, because they had a long life ahead of them and you expected to see them everyday.

i also don’t have any photos of Tuna–if anyone does, please send them to me. i know my boss would love to have them, she got very attached to Tuna. the sound of her voice when i told her the news broke my heart.

now, you should all learn about the Rainbow Bridge. apparently, it really helps you deal with situations such as these.

first, michael crichton died. i thought back to my favorite book of his, SPHERE, with fond memories of the endless beautiful imagery provoked by the story. i remember sitting in my room and seeing a thousand tiny glowing orbs floating through deep aquatic darkness; looking through small glass portals embedded in steel and Jerry wrapping his strange presence around my dreams.

note: apparently the movie ruins all of this. i’ve avoided seeing it for this very reason; it is rare that a movie does a book any justice when you have an active imagination coupled with a habit of creating specific environments and characters to go along with every chapter.

moving on, today is the anniversary of Krystallnacht. you know, i’m not going to make any jokes here, cause when it comes to the Holocaust it will always be “TOO SOON” until the Earth turns upside down and we perish in the fiery combustion of all our wrong-doings and escalating filth. but, i just finished reading WATCHMEN last night, and there is a page that alludes to Krystallnacht during the “alien invasion” that kills half of New York City (if i ruined something for you there, sorry, but there’s a lot more to the book than just that part) and it got me thinking of urban destruction in general.

like, last week there were small riots in philly because the Phillies won the world series.

(don’t you love how cute they made it, with the late nineties ska/punk and everything?)

everyone saw how well the Phillies were doing, and knew that there was a 99.99% chance that there would be a riot, but no one could do anything about it.

of course, the riots weren’t anywhere near as severe  as the alien invasion in Watchmen, or obviously as Krystallnacht, but nothing is ever as extreme in Philly as the rest of the world. we are constantly crawling like sloths in the shadow of New York; the Phillies riots were the biggest city-wide disasters in years and ironically, they were instigated by city natives and inconsiderate suburbians, not aliens or terrorists or a facist regime. and, relatively speaking, nothing really bad happened; there were no reported deaths or rapes or hostage situations. just a lot of damage. pointless, mob-encouraged damage.

when the alien invasion happened in Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan should have/could have been able to prevent it, but several factors got in the way. he has a sense of the past, present and future simulatenously; he can use telekinesis, telepathy, and has all other sorts of God-like qualities. the rest of the Watchmen and a few of the featured New Yorkers had an idea something was up, as did Philadelphians and the Police sector.

so what if Philly had a Dr. Manhattan? he wouldn’t be a global asset, of course, but maybe he could help us out with overly drunk and desctructive sports fans, gun violence, domestic disputes, cop killings, etc. he wouldn’t be as streamlined as Dr. Manahattan but he would still have a fantastic presence. he would look like an amalgamate of

a mummer,

a yeti,

a Communist soldier,

an injured bicycle courier,

and boba fett.

but who knows, a lot of people seem to think Barack Obama is the nation’s new miracle worker, or, the New Dr. Manahattan, DR. USA. some think that he already is a Cyborg.

Who knows.

And, to go back to the Phillies riots, were they the riots to end all future hope of the Phillies winning a world series again? were they a curse to the lift of THE PHILLIES CURSE? can that happen? i mean, Philadelphians acted like the city has been reanimated, risen from the dead, all because of one victory. like this was THE END of being the biggest losers on the east coast. i don’t know. i’ll leave you with a related excerpt from Watchmen, and you decide for yourself.

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.