hey sarah, hope you feel better

so i went to a show tonight at dante's. it was pretty fashionable.
going out:
- fauxhawks
- their bastard brother, the rattail
- gwen stefani up-in-front do
- hooray!
coming up:
- pigtails (long and curly, short and nubby)
- mini bangs
next show:
- bring scissors
- cut off all pigtails in sight
- glue them to foreheads of people with mini bangs

i saw the hunches open for the black lips. thankfully, we missed the set of the opening-opening band, local retards reptilian civilian. they are pretty terrible. actually, the bassist is pretty good, but the whole band is dominated by this terrible frontman who thinks his shitty band is so awesome that they should be locally famous. they're obviously never going to get there on any kind of musical merit, so every show he takes his clothes off and tries to pull some stunt. but then the hunches played.

let me tell you what i know about the hunches. well, actually, i don't know that much about the hunches. but my roommates have some pretty terrific impressions of their frontman, hart. at the mention of his name, stephen cocks his head at a slightly retarded angle and says, over and over again, "i'm so fucked up, guys. guys, i'm so fucked up." andy says that hart claims it's his birthday every time andy sees him, and jake tells a story about hart shouting "what do you want? what's wrong with you?!" to repel unwanted advances. i was pretty excited to see him onstage, and he didn't disappoint. onstage, he was like a retarded three-year-old. i realize i've used the word "retarded" a lot so far today. first, it's really the only way to describe hart in person. second, i want to use it all the time and i'm tired of holding it in to be politically correct. anyway, i spent a lot of their set debating whether he was actually extremely fucked up, and that was why he was practically a dead ringer for an inebriated keith richards, or whether it was just his stage presence. i decided it was probably an act because there's no way he could be that fucked up and make it through a 45-minute set. also, there's this unspoken hierarchy in portland; who can be coolest by acting like they don't care at all about being cool. by acting retarded, hart had bested us all. the set included a mournful application to voltron, an impromptu standup but about "portland bee-ands, everybody loves ;em" and an extended metaphor about how portland bands are like restaurants and want to serve their audiences, which ended with hart's announcement that he didn't want any food, and then about thirty seconds of him shouting "bunny" into the microphone. but it wasn't a weird performance thing or anything - the band was great, but also hilarious.

the black lips were great, too. i mean, i really love them, and was excited to see them again, but their show did seem a little routine. but terrific. one of the guitarists had a grill. it was awesome and everyone had a great time. but it didn't end there. here is what happened while jake and i were in line for the merch table:

heart falls over, pushes his friend into me. his friend says, "sorry, don't mind him." and i said, "its okay, i don't." then heart says to this friend: "sorry. do you want a hug? DO YOU WANT ONE?!" and the guy is like "uhhh . . . no thank you," so he offers one to the guy on the other side of his friend by yelling "DO YOU WANT ONE?! DO YOU?! IT"S A TRAIN" and the guy was like "uhhh . . . no" and got out of there. then heart turns to me, and i thought he was going to ask me if i wanted a hug, which i probably would have agreed to, but instead he just yelled "DO YOU SEE ME?!" and i said "ummm . . . " and then he said, in a regular voice, "noooo, you like the black LIPS." i said back, using my voice i usually use on small, unreasonable children, "yeah, i do like the black lips, but i saw you too." "noooo," he said. "you like the black LIPS." "i do," i repeated, "but i saw you too. you were great." "TERRIBLE!" he shouted. "no!" i said. "i thought you were great! everyone did!" "TERRIBLE!" he shouted again. then he went on to say something to the effect of "you should get into the black lips before they get big. they're going to be the next best thing." "it's too late," i said. "i already like them." "NEVER!" he screamed. he actually reminded me a little of jack sparrow. "THEY'LL NEVER GET BIG! And then you can tell everyone that you liked the black lips before they NEVER GOT BIG!" "okay," i said. "i . . . i'll do that." "But NEVER tell anyone you knew the hunches. never admit it!" at this point, he straightened up and became dead sober. in a normal business voice, he said, "my name's heart, by the way. pleased to meet you" and shook my hand. i told him my name, and he repeated it, and then he spun around and walked away. as i stared after him, he turned back around, squinted, and pointed prophetically at me with one shaky hand, mouthing the word "NEVER." it was amazing. then on my way out he pretended to collapse on someone else and poured a drink all over me. at first i was like "aw crap, i'm going to smell like booze and be all sticky" but as it turns out, it was only water. i want to be just like him. AMAZING.

i've hit 1,000, most of which were me refreshing a couple times because i only like nice, round numbers, or at least multiples of five

i think the other themes have gone as far as they can go, so now it's on to animals just doing anything remotely human.

thank you for reading this, arya. in the future i will try harder to be in public places and report on those around me.

for now, i can report on jake or the cat. i try really hard not to be one of those people who talks about his or her cats on the internet, so i will stick to jake. it's freezing in our house, so we are watching jim lehrer and looking at the internet in front of the space heater. i think he's actually reading my blog as we speak. he didn't seem to be interested in any of the videos, nor did he seem to read very closely. that's fine, i like to tease him about not reading my blog, but i don't really care whether he does or not. my gums hurt from all of the cookies we just ate; i assume he feels the same way. wow, now he's using html to do something new to his blog. that's pretty impressive, and i have no idea where he learned how to do that. i feel like i've been taught that stuff about eight times and it just never sunk in.

today it snowed. i drove in snow for the first time, and it was pretty hairy. i have all-wheel-drive, so i was fine, but of course there were a bunch of yahoos on the road driving around like it was a regular morning, a bunch of buses with their ass ends swinging around when they tried to get up small inclines, and dozens of accidents on the radio. but i got to work just fine. in fact, i gave a ride to some individuals whose bus couldn't get up onto the bridge. they didn't look dressed for the winter; they looked cold and downtrodden at the prospect of a snowy walk across the river, no matter how MAGICAL everything looked (that is, totally magical). my new year's resolution was to try to do more nice things for strangers, like giving someone who is lost directions about what bus to take, what stop to get off at, and where to go from there (i did this on new year's day and it made me feel like a great person, so i resolved to do it). also, i have a pretty good idea of how much it sucks to walk in the snow in sneakers, having fallen on my ass on the way to the car. i also resolved, sort of seperately but kind of attached, not to lie to strangers so much. i lie to strangers a lot - sometimes because i feel uncomfortable sharing personal details, which is completely understandable and okay, sometimes because i want that person to think i'm a good person, which is understandable but it would be better if i was just honest, and sometimes just because, which is unacceptable. i did not tell any lies today.

at work i got really nervous that it would snow really hard, or warm up enough to rain but stay cold enough that the roads would freeze, and i wouldn't be able to drive home. so on my lunch, i went and got some boots so i could walk home if i had to. the boots i got are awesome, and were $5. i can't find a picture of them, but they are bright red and RAD. well, they're a little big so i scuffle around in them like a shy five-year-old with a runny nose, but when i'm standing still they're rad. as it turned out, i did not have to walk home, and then when i got home we went and played in the snow (which did NOT end with me pushed into the snowbank, crying, as jake predicted) and got some italian sodas. at the coffee shop, i read this book called "sole survivor", which is about the phenomenon of children murdering their parents for apparently no real reason and showing no real remorse but also not appearing insane. it made me want to have kids even less than i do now, which is not that much. i mean, i'm not going to lie, my body always wants me to stop and look in the window of baby gap at all the tiny little t-shirts, but my mind knows that a lot of cool stuff could still happen to me and doesn't want my body to ruin it. and now, i'm at home in front of the space heater watching bush bomb his interview with lehrer and the cat is snoring.