what's your dad like?

my last impression was that i should get a real digital camera instead of relying on my phone

okay, so i will probably catch some flak for this one for a few reasons; having "feelings," being "crunchy," liking that song when i had it on cd from a cd that i had that you could order from commercials (i bought mine in a jewelry shop on cape cod, and then when it wore out i bought another copy at the mall) but which i don't remember the name of anymore. it was pretty crunchy, it had some enya on it and the theme songs from the exorcist and twin peaks, a lot of chimes and stuff, you know. i think the word "sounds" was in the title . . . man, what i would not give for another copy of that, as well as my copy of the 2nd spice girls album. my high school boyfriend's little sister gave it to me and we used to just ROCK OUT to it even though we knew it was totally silly. maybe i will look for those when i go home. anyway, i posted this video because at first it made me laugh and then it made me jealous of all the places that guy has been and then it made me think, what is the whole point of this blogging thing anyway? to get in touch with other people. the internet is a great way to downplay the negative effects of globalization and really concentrate on the possibility that you could have a penpal from another country, just like that internet commercial where everyone in the world watches a boy dancing in a video that someone, one can only assume a parent, took on their cell phone.

ps - this was my favorite song. i hated the enya one, and the exorcist one terrified me, and i can't remember any of the other ones, but i used to just listen to this on repeat. i had a lot of patience as a kid. not anymore.

you win, ana punye!

here is the rest of my story.

so we got to the shanghai tunnel, and as soon as we sat down he was again complaining about the dark and the smoke. i ordered a beer, he ordered a vodka cran (another red feminine drink), and we got some noodle dishes. i probably do not even need to say this, but he complained that his was too spicy. then when it was time to pay and walk to the movie theater, he offered me cash if i would pay with my card. i'm not really one to get my meals paid for by boys all the time, by which i mean i never expect it, but i'm also not really one to drive some dude across town to pick up a computer he had bought on a date. so it threw me for a loop when i took a closer look and the amount of cash he had handed me was way short of the cost of his dinner.

at this point, i had completely checked out of the entire thing. it may have been before dinner, when he spent the ten-minute walk between the first bar and the second complaining about smokers. not just smokers in general, but one or two friends he had who were smokers. he implied that by smoking socially, they were throwing their lives away, and appeared to come to the decision to burn those bridges while we were walking. i never suspected that he was trying to take me in any way - that he had needed a ride, and now he was paying for like half his dinner and getting a free movie and a ride home out of the deal. this guy was not slick, not even a little bit. i'd like to think that if he was slick enough to play the not slick role and get away with it, something i have encountered before, i would be able to tell. my grocery-store peek into his current lifestyle (overweight, fooling himself) is proof positive of this conclusion. had he actually been slick, i would have been extremely upset but playing the naive fool and plotting some volleys of my own. as it was, i couldn't wait for the whole thing to be over so i could ask jake to take me back because i had realized that other people are terrible and not for me.

so we walked to the movie theater, where we sat down to watch "kontroll," which was playing as part of the portland international film festival at the independent theater. it was the perfect date movie. a little spooky, a little magical, a little romantic - it's a great movie. i couldn't wait for it to come out on video. when you go to an independent film in portland, it's mostly an aging hippie crowd, and the entire theater is talking and really into it. it's sort of an experience, and you really can't be a codger about it. at first, when my date stopped shushing the people behind us, i thought he had just given up - actually, he had fallen asleep. when he woke up at the end of the movie, he said it had been "too dark." i dropped him off and never, ever talked to him again. and then i saw him in the grocery store yesterday and felt good that he was fat, and now i've completely ridiculed him on the internet.

not lame

lame

i saw a guy i went on a date with once at trader joe's today, and he was fat. like, in the way where he's pretending he isn't, and squeezing himself into jeans with the same designs on the back pockets as the ones the hipsters wear, but really his are stretchy and have an elastic waist and he is fooling nobody. this made me feel great. this makes me a terrible person.

to be fair, the date went terribly. jake and i had broken up for a little while and i met him through this online thing i joined just so i could look at anna forsher and maria galindo's profiles. i didn't even have a picture up, and everyone knows that if you don't have a picture up you are a. ugly or b. not taking it seriously. i will leave it up to you to decide which one of these i was. anyway, he "messaged" me and sounded nice enough and had read some things that i had read and i had some free tickets to a movie i wanted to see and i desperately wanted to stop drinking and crying to anna forsher, so i "messaged" him back and we agreed to meet. first, he didn't have a car. that is no crime, certainly not it portland. however, it is a crime of love to ask someone to drive you around on an errand on a first date. he had bought a computer from a girl at reed college, all the way across town from him, and asked me to drive him over to pick him up. i might have thought that he was using the mercury's lovelab personal service to bum rides from lonely girls except he was pretty unattractive, at least by portland standards, and so devoid of any ability to interpret social signals that i'm sure he thought this was ok. well, anyway, i did it because he asked me like twenty minutes before i was supposed to pick him up and what was i going to do, say no and crawl back into the bath to cry? no, i am way stronger than that. strong enough not to be able to refuse an extensive favor (it involved a lot of waiting around, pulling around to the back and carrying) for a guy i didn't know. so we got his computer and then went to this bar i liked at the time, with greasy food and good, strong drink specials. the second we get in there, he complains about how smoky it is, then how dark. when the waitress comes, i order a whiskey & ginger and take a look at the menu. he doesn't know what to order - i tell him the mixed drinks are pretty cheap, figuring he knows the basic combinations that will not make a person look like they would rather be eating a popsicle. when the waitress comes around again, he looks frantic, and practically shouts what is obviously the first thing that came into his head - "a sloe gin fizz!" when it came it was redder than my shoes. then he decided he didn't want to eat there because all the food was too greasy, so we finished our drinks and went to another bar i like where the beer is cheap and the noodle dishes are delicious.

i have to go watch heroes now. i trust no one will be disappointed if i continue this story later or fail to do so at all.