blah blah blah-ler

view master ...

2008-05-15T03:28:00.003-05:00

i built my day around three events: 1) the bachelor and shayne on ellen; 2) making three pepper hummus; 3. an air show over lake superior.

what you can expect to see here:

1) 45 seconds of me dinging around with cuts and fades;
2) a minute and a half of your favorite kenny loggins song;
3) my assessment of what has taken place;
4) the finale.

what you won't see here:
1. swearing;
2. nudity;
3. steady camera work;
4. a clear plot.

unfortunately, my shooting and editing have not caught up to the scenes i see in my head. when they do, oh when they do ...

danger zone from christa pista on Vimeo.

hopped up on kava ...

2008-05-14T01:13:00.003-05:00

over the weekend, my friend the punk rock girl went amway on me about kava tea -- made from a legal medicinal herb that will numb your crazies one sasparilla-flavored sip at a time.

"it's supposed to be like taking a valium," she said.

up until that point i was interested in it. but i'm not really one of those people squirreling away leftover codiene from when i had my wisdom teeth removed. that percocet for your chronic back pain that you have hidden behind the tums in your medicine cabinent? i won't be lifting it when i sneak off to the bathroom to dump a napkin of mushrooms down the toilet during your dinner party. i will throw back a shot of nyquil, or pop a soy sleep II very rarely if i am still awake when the "today show" starts. but the great benedryl overdose of 2007 kind of put the kabosh on even that. i prefer to alter my moods with beer, or on special occasions, tequila.

so valium wasn't really a selling point. the selling point came 15 minutes later when i saw the look of pure sunbathed relaxation cross her face. it was like morrissey himself had taken his index finger and pushed her bangs aside, cooing "there, there, punk rock girl."

i jumped in my car and raced to whole foods.

a few months ago we were watching the travel channel and it featured these men doing a variation of bungee jumping involving a platform, rope made from tree limbs, a strategically placed tube sock and absolutely no bungee effect. they would jump and then sort of hit the dirt and bounce -- making sure their head hits the ground first. then they jump up, cheer, climb higher. [video of these men here].

"they were drinking kava," chuck reminded me when i told him about the tea.

chuck tried it first. his voice sounded like it was wrapped in a designer robe and plush slippers. i expected him to be ordering an ascot from some web site dedicated to gentlemen of leisure. "walden" laying open on his chest. then i tried it. the first sip, very subtly and not uncomfortably, numbs your tongue, then throat. within about six minutes i was squashed lower into the couch, lulled, pleasant and agreeable. i wasn't sure if i had just unwound or if it really affected me until i realized we had been talking about cavemen for about a half hour.

good stuff.

everything i can tell you about my junior prom date ...

2008-05-13T03:01:00.001-05:00

i met my junior prom date in first grade, but i don't recall any interactions with him until sixth grade. colleen, who would fail to popularize wearing shaker sweaters backward, and i sat in front of him in history class. in a moment of pure comedic inspiration, colleen and i both wiped a slime trail of snot onto a piece of wide ruled notebook paper and passed it back to him. like it was just a common note. he opened it. saw the boogers. and immediately walked it up to mr. h's desk and handed it to our teacher while pointing back at us. we were crippled with laughter.

surely mr. h would find this crude gesture funny. gum chewers in his class were forced to stick the wad of hubba bubba to the blackboard. if you passed gas in his classroom, like my junior homecoming date, mr. h made you wear a diaper for the rest of the period.

mr. h called colleen and me to his desk, pointed at the matching snot arts and said: this is disgusting. no. really. this is seriously gross and weird and i think you both need psychological help.

in junior high we called colleen "pig in a pink mini skirt" behind her back. she introduced me to aretha franklin. and told me she had a huge crush on this super hot guy. this singer named "tracy chapman." eventually colleen moved to colorado springs.

***

in eighth grade i broke up my 10-month relationship with the skateboarder, but only when i knew that my junior prom date was going to ask me out. my junior prom date and i both were on the lourdes' cross country team. early into our eight-day courtship, we were running 800 meter intervals at twinkie field: 100 meters out and a dogleg to the right into some trees not visible to coach g, who was holding a stopwatch at the finish line.

a few laps into the workout, some of us lazily followed the lead of some upperclassmen, and stopped running all the way to the end. we ran until coach g couldn't see us. waited an appropriate amount of time. turned around and jogged back.

my junior prom date told on us. from then on, we called him "the narc."

***

in my head, our breakup was borne of my junior prom date's fear of kissing me: i was a worldly 13 year old boasting a 10-month resume of dexterous tongue kissing with the skateboarder. he had gone out with two or three people max for about 15 minute increments.

my friends and i were gathered in dong's basement playing a game we invented, called "ripfest."

boys versus girls, shouting out such scathing character jabs as "oh yeah?! well, your perm makes your head look like a stalk of broccoli!" or "oh yeah? well you're flatter than a four year old boy!" which eventually led to "oh yeah? well the only reason you broke up with me is because you are afraid to kiss a girl!" i accused my junior prom date.

that unleashed a frenzy. ripfest was in full force. no zit, no bad hair day, no fashion faux pas, no pit stain, no dyslexia went unmentioned. we were a squaking frenzy of coke-drinking, cheeto-eating teen on teen hate crimes.

fannie and i slugged back to her house, defeated by ripfest. i picked up a red folder with the words "never tear us apart" written on the cover. it was my novel about my relationship with the skateboarder, the title homage to "our" inxs song. i stared dumbly at the ground and eventually tipped over, weeping into fannie's bedspread. i'd broken up with the skateboarder for this? a prudish narc who didn't like snot jokes? this novel was going to be so good ...

fannie's mom knocked on the door, and came into the room.
"you okay?" she asked us.
we nodded.
"we're just talkng about my novel," i said, showing the folder to mrs. fannster.

***

sophomore year, my junior prom date came over to my house. while he was genuinely a nice kid, self-depreciating and cute in his lanky awkwardness, i believe his intentions were naughty. we were leaned against the fireplace hearth, eating stale popcorn and watching a movie and barely talking when i noticed he had made a horrifying wardrobe adjustment.

i sent him home. but since he'd driven all the way across town, i conceded to kissing him. later, telling the story to my friends, it was so surreal i couldn't even believe that this was an actual scene out of my actual life.

***

it was understood i'd not be going to my junior prom with the train, my on-again-off-again boyfriend. he was going with the holder of a division I basketball scholarship, wrapped in obnoxious blonde waif: his other girlfriend. the one whose friends were dating his friends and so was more convenient and socially acceptible and didn't have a curfew.

i spent a lot of time that winter wondering why my enemy, the woman i hated most in the world, was also the loudest person in the hallways, commons, parking lot. even the ponytail she wore on top of her head was irritating, mocking me with its stupid bounce.

i don't remember my junior prom date asking me to go with him. i do remember that it was a relief to have a date who was easy on the eyes, one of my good friends, and who i could -- in a pinch -- consider romantically.

i found an embarrassingly floofy purple dress and i got my hair done by a woman who thought i said "elizabethian, please." fannie's hair looked better: a take on a 1980s housewife, as seen in the st. pius church directory. my junior prom date got to my house before i'd slipped into my formal wear.

i spent the night sending longing looks at the train. my dress slipped down around my waist while dancing, giving one math teacher, a grateful dead fan, and my date a poor excuse for a peep show. for whatever reason, this did not embarrass me at all.

"it just looked like any other boy's chest," my junior prom date shrugged.

***

lourdes fielded a decent boys basketball team in the 1993-94 season, my senior year. a pack of mid-sized, above average athletes: overachievers who spent summers and weekends shooting freethrows and playing pickup games in the gym. in those days it was safe to entrust the keys to the school to a dopey 6'4 post player stuffed into the drivers' seat of a festiva.

the first round of the Section 1A playoffs pitted the eagles against pine island -- a far inferior team. our boys got off to a slow start, were down at the half, and seemed en rout to a loss.

my junior prom date was the sixth man. the first one off the bench. not a star, but tall. for the entire second half, everytime he touched the ball, it went in the hoop. he could shoot from half court. he stole the ball, then raced in alone for a layup. he made free throws when he was fouled. he was en fuego. the game of his life. i can picture him bounding down the court with a huge smile, knobby knees and fist pumping, flailing a bit and unsteady.

our boys lost, but man, my junior prom date had a heck of a game.

***

we all went off to college. and then we all graduated and moved back home to rochester for lack of more creative options. fannie and i picked up my junior prom date for a night in altura, minnesota. he came bounding out of his parents house, hawaiian shirt and jabby elbows. he took an awkward and angular leap over his parents shrubs -- like a deer competing in the steeple chase -- and jumped into the car breathless. i'm not sure what it will take to erase that memory from my brain.

my junior prom date had met a girl that none of us liked, for all the reasons you don't like your guy friend$'s silly attempts at finding girlfriends. it could be anything from her name, which sounded like the name of a cartoon animal, to her tongue ring -- which we were too vanilla and judgey to see as anything other than the decorative decisions of a low rent stripper. she also wore a lot of blue eyeshadow. my junior prom date had a poster-size photo of this woman dressed as a rabid cavewoman. that loin cloth she was wearing didn't help our opinion.

they would date. they would break up. they would date some more. during one break, my junior prom date seemed interested in fannie.

"go for it," i hissed to her. "take one for the team."
this became my mantra everytime she expressed doubts in actually becoming romantic with my junior prom date. "you get in there and take one for the team!"

my junior prom date and fannie dated for about the length of a work week. not consecutive, mind you, but a work week none the less. in fact, we refer to that time period as "the work week."

my junior prom date bought a six thousand dollar engagement ring, proposed to the ol' cartoon animal cave woman and i fell down the steps at their wedding. three months later and one curious hacking into her email account and they were divorced.

***

the last time i saw my junior prom date was on new year's eve -- sometime between 1999 and 2004 -- i honestly cannot remember. we were gathered for a party at the elks lodge or vfw in hopkins. fannie and my junior prom date fell into a liplock at midnight. then he got distracted by a cute blonde he vaguely remembered from college.

he got her phone number, but told us he didn't get her phone number. then he told us he got her phone number, but said he wasn't going to call her. then he got remarried to her.

then he fell off the planet. or at least my radar.

'let's go get sushi' decoded ...

2008-05-12T02:59:00.001-05:00

this past week i decided that i like tyra banks, veggie chips, and "this american life," the tv version.

I LIKE TV SO MUCH
"the hills" :

* for lo, "let's go get sushi" is code for "i hate" a) local music; b) audrina; c) sharing lauren's air space. she pulled the same code phrase back on laguna beach when she got stuck at that hippie benefit concert. personally, i use the phrase "i should have worn my other shoes."
* heidi seems to be experiencing something akin to personal growth. possible that the reward for extricating oneself from the toxic hills living arrangement, is a promotion and the thinly veiled sexual advances of an ogre looking boss?

"the bachelor, london calling:" i loathe these catty castoff episodes where they bill it using the word "dish." next week, on the bachelor, the women dish on matt. i forced myself to watch it anyway, and am more confused than ever that he did not pick amanda.

in case you're wondering, i CANNOT WAIT for the bachelorette season, starring deanna.

"gossip girl"
* i need to stop reading spoilers before i watch episodes so that when serena says "i killed someone" i don't laugh.

"the paper": the first issues has issues. adam throws the temper tantrum of a thousand mariah careys, then ditches out jazz-handing all over "high school musical" on ice; alex takes over, and leaves amanda standing her rapid blinking saying volumes; alex's facebook page reveals to amanda that he is "in a relationship." amanda multitasks: yoga, reprimanding her dog and talking on the phone simultaneously.

"the real world, hollywood": joey tells his roommates to cut him off after one beer, and reminds them that he is an alcoholic. but after one beer and some cartoonish muscle-flexing, he's ready for more! more! more! he drinks every liquid in the house, including an entire bottle of white zin -- cackling and referring to himself as a wino -- and seemingly at least a six-pack of something else. by 9 a.m. he is channeling the apex of "the shining," threatening to move out, packing his bags, pounding on doors. meanwhile, in PA, the stripper has learned that hootchie shorts are not proper attire for court.

"battlestar galactica": just when the show had taken a boring downward spiral, and i'd conceded that i have no business watching the sci-fi network anyway, starbuck manually removes a bullet from a crew members shin, her finger mining the wound for schrapnel while he screams. mutiny, we hardly knew ye. she takes a handful of cylons -- some known, some not -- to meet with the "good cylon" faction. the seven makes out with herself; one of the boomers dies. the president -- bald -- is one crinkly forehead from turning this show into star trek. she is slowly finding the cylon god.

MEALS TAKEN IN PUBLIC
valentini's: we started with suppli di rosi, rosotto balls filled with moz and prusciutto and served with sauce. tasted like it came from one of those booths at the county fair that serve their foods with cloth napkins. and i mean that in a really good way. i had penne ala vodka, which was described as having a creamy red sauce.

aside: when i worked at an italian restaurant, a few of us modified two different pastas -- the four cheese pasta and the chicken and sausage pasta -- to create a creamy pink sauce one penne with a whole mess of sausage. this is what i was hoping to get. instead, i just got large chunks of tomatoes. good, but not what i was envisioning. it made a terrific leftover. chuck had carbonara ala valentini which was very rich and very good and means that, hands down, prusciutto is my new favorite food.

MOVIE PROJECT MOVIES
"king of kong: a fistful of quarters" 2007: holy geeky goodness. billy mitchell, the reigning donkey kong champion of the world could only be a better foil with a camero and a 17 year old girlfriend who works at the dairy queen. this documentary about the quest to claim ownership of the donkey kong title made me a little weepy: the bad guy, cheesey tie, amply mulleted mitchell verses the all-american science teacher, musician, dad who plays donkey kong in the garage. it is awesome.

NON MOVIE PROJECT MOVIES
"a history of violence" 2005: i like david cronenberg because he makes throbbing bullet wounds, isn't shy about brain debris stuck to a t'shirt, and turned jeffrey goldblum into a very realistic looking fly. he seems to have no boundaries for gapes and oozes. in this movie, a small cafe's owner kills would-be robbers and the following publicity tips off the mafia to a made-man-gone AWOL. starts strong and creepy, but quickly turns hokey.

"eXistanZ" 1999: real versus reality in the world series of love. what happens when gamers become involved in a game that makes it difficult to tell what is real and what is not. this involves an orifice-like port that is pierced into the small of one's back and is attached to a fetus-looking blob with an intestiney cord.

READING THE INTERNET SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO
been there done that, well not all of that -- yet this still made my stomach wretch. kudos -- i don't have that response often. very graphic description of one woman's medical emergency -- and by medical emergency, consider this a warning.

hey internet!

2008-05-11T03:03:00.003-05:00

look who i met!

"i almost didn't recognize her because she wasn't dressed like a mime," chuck said.

and bam! i'm an eagle scout ...

2008-05-08T23:31:00.005-05:00

chuck pointed at a super high rock and said "do you want to go up there?" and i thought he was kidding. that rock looked like it would require a carabiner, if not at least seven other things from one of those stores with the word "adventure" in the title.

but here we were at 123rd avenue west, and what else were we going to do? chuck was wearing a pair of chuck taylors, notorious for their lack of spikey soles. i'd left my water bottle in the car. our plan to cover 39 miles of the superior hiking trail was derailed last year -- like a lot of good ideas that are hatched at 3 a.m. on chuck's couch. anyway, we found a path and elevated to here -- something called ely's peak:

stay tuned for my photo show entitled: blurry bar shots and pictures of chuck taking pictures of stuff.

there were dozens of turkey buzzards, who seemed to be performing a danceline routine to technotronic's "pump up the jam."

we wandered further along, probably three miles or so, and then had to make a decision:

* do we turn back?
* come out on the other end of this path at skyline. spare ourselves the boredom of backtracking past the same old bear paw prints and the dozens of alien messages in the form of cairns? i mean i'd already used what i learned yesterday from the bristol stool chart to determine these here woods are filled with constipated animals.
* or do we freakin' bushwhack through this mess -- do exactly what you aren't supposed to do and jump path and head straight downward where hopefully we'll hit the munger trail or at least get close enough to it that i can carry chuck if he twists his ankle?

we went with the third option. chuck scoped it out in front of me, disappearing into twigs and trees and grass. finally i decided to follow him, but he was already out of sight. everytime i heard a crackle, i looked for a flash of black t'shirt, and it was usually just a bird. i yelled for him: nada.

i spent about 7 minutes imagining night fall, gnawing off my own thumb then staying hydrated by drinking leaffulls of my own saliva. then i wonder what if chuck fell off of something and how will they get the helicopters in here? not to mention the sociopaths and train robbers hiding in the hills.

"you've been watching too many tori spelling movies," chuck tells me when i find him four seconds later.

we continued our very unpractical drop and by the time we get to the bottom i was being given an auditition as the host body for a young tick. hello, summer!

then we ended up in this cavey tunnel thing that was super cool and dark and exactly where the satanists would spend their time painting anarchy signs on the rocks and pounding sugar free red bull -- if this tunnel was in rochester.

if chuck ever comes out with a poetry chapbook, i hope he uses this shot for the cover.

in the air ... from christa pista on Vimeo.

here is 19 seconds of us on ely's peak.

holding steady at level four ...

2008-05-08T00:01:00.001-05:00

me and jcrew on night seven of homegrown. see that smile? that is the smile of a woman who will wake refreshed and happy and not at all hung over.

i barely dared to hint at my good fortune last week. once when i almost kind of casually gave it a nod of acknowledgement, i did so while knocking on -- well, plastic -- covering my own ears and trilling "lalalalala."

only sunday, once homegrown was over, did i finally spit out the truth: i wasn't hung over once. not at all. nuh uh. i woke easily each day, fleet of foot, and aside from a clutch of nerves that maybe this would be the last day of eluding a demon hangover, by the time i went out again each night i felt fine cracking into another silo.

the standard beer can as a conduit of evil? maybe i've been too harsh.

escaping a hangover takes a certain amount of luck. it also require a combination of factors -- a scientific mix of elements that i've been spent the past three weeks weighing. unfortunately, my week involved mixing my control subjects, so i will never be able to determine the specific force behind my good health.

* perhaps pbr is my power beer. the one that mingles perfectly with my body chemistry and actually repairs my sacrificial organs.
* maybe 14 hours of sleep per night is enough to mend anything.
* possible that my pre-drink meals -- gouda mac, french fries, a chicken gyro and the like -- were unpenetrateable by mere alcohol.
* the harnessing of momentum and adrenaline. maybe my body knew on experimental tuesday that i still had to trudge along through acoustic wednesday toward saturday's 2 a.m. crew jones set.
* there is a chance i didn't drink as much as i thought during homegrown. by the time things ramped up during the weekend, scavenging an actual beer from an actual beer vendor took quick thinking, sharp elbows, ability to navigate crowds, a bladder of stone and a well-maintained buzz.

regardless, this boost of fortune remains a mystery. as much of a mystery as why today -- after a modest birthday celebration on tuesday night -- i feel like complete ass. i mean, i was only out for an hour and twenty minutes last night. much of that time was spent in transit: from mr. d's, to the rustic, closing the night at the gopher. and okay, there was a nightcap, a can and a half of swill while i proved via guitar hero that leaving my car at mr. d's was an outstanding idea.

i obviously didn't prepare and follow the tenets established during homegrown. for instance, i ate a tuna fish sandwich, a tomato and yogurt for dinner. there's no grease in that. and i was chugging honey weiss rather than my power beer. as for adrenaline? adrenaline be damned. i firmly intended to not drink at all, until i got to mr. d's, saw the look on jcrew's sober face, and realized i didn't want to look like that.

* i had a weird dream about a toilet bowl. then, as soon as the sun hit the tin foil, i was wide awake. i crawled to the refrigerator for the last medicinal 32 ounces of gatorade. gone.
* then i barfed three weak little pansy pukes of what i'm assuming was stomach lining and saliva.
* turns out that dream about the toilet bowl was prophetic: despite how felt, i was registering a four which means i'm healthy and normal. it also means i have a new socially unacceptible hobby.

one sleeve of crackers, an episode of "one tree hill," a gatorade and "gossip girl," six glasses of water, "the real world," pizza, "the paper," a coke and "grey's anatomy" later and i'm feeling fine.

but not like i felt during homegrown, man.

why i am not at an afterbar ...

2008-05-07T03:02:00.005-05:00

tonight is my friend bubbles' birthday party. we celebrated in west duluth and for much of the night thought we would end up on chuck's dad's couch -- too drunk to drive home. his dad two blocks away.

"i don't want him to shoot us when we walk in," i said, thinking of that rude 2 a.m. wake up.
"he won't shoot us," chuck assured.
"i don't want him to throw tomatillos at us," i adjusted. chuck's dad is the original hipster: bikes, hoodies, laid back, prolific gardener who grows salsa ingregdients ... "and we can sleep together ... he has extra bedrooms!" chuck added. two extra beds.

eventually seadawg drove us home. we received some hard pressure from horno to go to an afterbar at the greeter's house. i was nonresponsive and here is why:

when you are single, or hate your boyfriend, or your boyfriend lives far away, you don't want nights to end. you want tequila shots and a snake named gus wrapped around your neck. you want to see who you might hook up with or at least have a story of chaos. but me? we'd already decided to compete at guitar hero -- the song 'when you were young' -- when we got hom.

so if i'm picking an afterbar with 8 people sitting around on a couch ... perhaps a snake ... maybe a totinos pizza and some gin ... or us. home alone. no walking in the rain when we're wasteder than now ... chuck inventing a new pasta recipe based on ingredients in the fridge -- like yogurt, chickpeas and soy butter -- i'd rather have that.

chuck understood it already, but i explained it further when i got home: say you're in high school and there are two afterbars going on. one with everyone. one with the person you have a crush on. which one do you go to?

easy peasy. chuck just beat me at guitar hero, told me i'm going to fall in love with this pasta he invented, and this is easily the best afterbar ever.

that doesn't mean i may not post my "bubbles birthday" documentary later, though. the night was and still is fun.

early onset internet ...

2008-05-06T01:16:00.002-05:00

my mom had two full walls of chalkboards in her third-floor classroom, and bookcases teeming with titles like: "tales of the fourth-grade nothing," "nothing's fair in fifth grade," "bridge to terabithia," and "superfudge." but the greatest perk of having my mom be an elementary school teacher was that every summer she got to take home one of the macintoshes from the school's computer lab.

she would set up this clunky box of technology in our den with some rules about making sure to always turn off the monitor and to ground myself before touching anything so that i didn't static school's property into a sizzling mess. i'd spend the summer saddling my friends with dysentery and syphilis and fjording shit. i opened a simulated lemonade-selling business where i negotiated pricing according to weather conditions and the cost of supplies. i formatted floppy discs, then coded them with passwords to keep anyone from finding the equivilent of cave-drawing: flashing boxes and robotic stick figures.

the computers evolved, eventually we had a color screen. then came the internet. we were subscribers to a service called "prodigy" which divvied out complicated screen names like, username: wxzzy061. i'm not sure that anyone ever explained to me what this internet was, or its place in this world. i just knew that it was the preferred haven of 47 year old perverts going by the name "betsi" who would try to extract your home address so they could -- at their leisure -- hide in your closet, drug your chocolate milk, throw you into the back of a nondescript van and whisk you away to cleveland.

to me, the internet was a place to meet likeminded fans of the song "OPP," and "humpty dance." it was a spot where i could defend the acting skills of the woman who plays crickett on "the young and the restless" [i was labeled a troll on this bulletin board.] and on the internet, i could browse forums about "depeche mode," missives by people with names like "bondage angel." [mine was lil' girl ... a name i was proud of and that totally revealed me as a true fan. i spent many hours declaring my loyalty to black celebration, music for the masses and violator.]

of my friends, just princess linda also had "the internet" and together we used it to get around my 10 p.m. phone curfew and midnight car curfew. we would stay up late sending messages back and forth:

"and so then alex goes ... and i was like ..."
versus
"but do you think he like-likes her or just likes her?"

once we went to AOL i found lots of those creepy men to IM with at 3 a.m. it was all very innocent, and only once did i drive to a truck stop in the middle of the night to meet some guy with a 1970s hot rod who had billed himself as much taller. i let him watch me eat an omelette, and then went back to rochester.

it's probably not surprising that i met my boyfriend on myspace. ... i mean at subway.

sometimes i wonder what it would have been like to always have access to the entire world. what if i'd had a blog when i was a teenager, chronicalling unrequited love and the haunting sounds of the song "little 15." how my favorite food is the maid-rite and how i hate playing the saxophone.

i know one thing: there would be archives filled with poetry. oh yes. there would be poetry.

grounded ...

2008-05-05T01:47:00.001-05:00

this past week was a complete mess of restaurant food, live music, aimless flinging of $20 bills, and long walks home at 2 a.m. i am grounding myself from fun until further notice.

MEALS TAKEN IN PUBLIC
pizza luce's gouda mac: my favorite kind of cheese served at liquid temperatures, huge chunks of tomatoes, and reimagined bacon that probably doesn't come from a pig at all. excellent. chuck had a philly cheese steak with cheez whiz -- my favorite kind of cheese from something akin to an aqua net bottle.

fitger's brewhouse tuna steak sandwich: sandwich needed some zip. but oh the fries. best in the world.

india palace, matar paneer and garlic naan: whatever. so i always eat the same thing here ...
perkins, eggs benedict, breakfast fries and jcrew's pancakes: this little greasy montage got me over the final homegrown hump and made it possible for me to still be able to face sunlight on sunday. thank you, grease trap.

va bene, spinach salad with prescutto wrapped moz: a handful of spinach with vinegarette and topped with bacon wrapped cheese. would it kill you to throw in a tomato and four onions, i am paying for this meal, not just grazing on the front lawn. chuck compared his pasta to something a college student would make himself.

on the plus side, save for a badly placed beam you have the best view in town and that woman on the first date a table away provided better entertainment than a thousand strolling violinists. i felt great satisfaction in predicting her response to her date's question: "so, you're a foodie. do you watch 'top chef?'" with: "oh, i don't watch tv." that was like dessert.

PUBLIC MEALS TAKEN PRIVATELY
pizza luce's veggie nuggets and tuna caliente: why? because this is what i eat on sundays.

niko's chicken gyros with cheese sticks: a fine substitute for an gyro gyro.

PROJECT MOVIES
"silent hill," 2006: oh holy plotless wonder. it took me 45 minutes to realize i was watching a video game. worst movie ever. seriously. on a positive note, we are almost done with this here movie project.

THINGS WATCHED FEATURING TORI SPELLING
"scary movie II" : tori has high praise for her own performance in her autobiography. she mistakes the sexual advances of a ghost for true love and goes a bit loco. unfortunately, i watched this on TBS so i could see she was saying very naughty things, but the lack of actual words made it sound like my hearing aid was on the fritz. this is a very silly movie. some might say stupid. some might say stupid, say, during every commercial break. luckily i like fart jokes, so stupid was fine with me.

TV FOR YOU AND ME
"the bachelor: the intercourse episode":

* today's bachelor buzzword is 'vulnerable.' if i took a tug off a bottle of tequila everytime i heard the word 'vulnerable' tonight, i'd be typing this in spanish.
* probably among the worst responses to 'i love you' is 'oh shayne, you never cease to amaze me.'
* i can never decide if it is good to be the first date on the sleepover date or the last date on the sleepover date ... but being the middle date on the sleepover date means the bachelor doesn't like you.
* amanda's overuse of the word 'like' is beginning to make me really uncomfortable.
* i think chelsea is a smoker. that is the only explanation for her weird distant jittery behavior. but it doesn't explain why she went cross-eyed loco during dinner.
* chelsea's rhinestone underwear was ... classy? especially when she ditched it before showing matt the bachelor her 'romantic side.' [romantic? so that's what the kids are calling it these days.]
* dude. the bachelor sent meeps home? i'm glad she said something bleep-worthy. what the what? he must think subscribe to the theory that america is a whitesnake video. i'm stunned.
* go shayne?

"the hills" :

* so audrina gets the guest house, which is like saying: here. you're still pretty enough to hang out with us, but we don't want to look at your little bohemian stoner friends.
* i like to think this 'guest house' is a sort of 'concubine hut' for when lauren and lo inevitably disagree on something and lo gets sentenced to relationship vacation. then audrina can move in, and lo can move to the concubine hut.
* when lc says she never stopped liking stephen, does that mean she liked him when she was moving into a beach house with ole rehab and while stephen was dating the regenerater from heroes?
* stephen coletti is like 'dude. now i'm on one tree hill ... heard of it?'
* stephanie pratt doesn't know who stephen coletti is? she didn't watch laguna beach?! she doesn't watch 'one tree hill'? who is this pop culture flunkie!? and how does she expect to run with this crowd? someone better introduce her to brody jenner before she makes an ass of herself.
* wait? is stephen coletti gay?

"one tree hill": three episodes ago brooke decided she wanted to adopt a baby. one episode ago, she got one in the mail. this past episode she complained about upkeep on that rascally dependant. brooke should have gotten a tattoo. tattoos don't cry.

and that thing with the clown was a clever deviation from hollywood's standard take on the floppy footed balloonists.

"battlestar galactica": aside from mutiny scene, this show has had two pretty boring episodes in a row.

"real world: hollywood": is it just me, or is mtv angling for its first on-screen suicide?

TV MARATHON
"the wire" season four: this is the greatest show of all time. when bubs didn't die i knew the writers at least had a semblence of soul. i will be wishing away my summer waiting for season five to come out on dvd.

homegrown day seven: the stage is surrounded by a rind of drunk ...

2008-05-04T15:09:00.007-05:00

lookee loo. my funshackle totally faded to white over the course of the week. like a mood ring or some other who-do voodoo.

8:30 p.m. -- jcrew, the rockstar and i dine at india palace. my goal is to either coat my stomach with matar paneer: something that i assume will soak up one dollar water glasses filled with coors, or at least look interesting at 3 a.m. when i pollack it all over the curb outside of pizza luce.

9:15 p.m. -- i'm seriously cramming forkloads of peas and cheese into my body like some sort of animal with a second stomach. the one i have has grown freakishly distended. next to me, jcrew is moaning through her similar mission.

10 p.m. -- we get to quinlan's, where i have a pavlovian desire to not enter, still a bit skittish from the way the place was raining breath and body odor during cars & trucks' show the previous night. when a droplet fell from a vent onto the rockstar on friday night, she convinced me that it was raining sweat and called the place a rainforest.

i quickly drink a beer with the intent of catching up to chuck, who has about a six-hour head-start on me having attended a house party in the afternoon where it was non unusual to find a homegrown hero mixing A1 steak sauce with his vodka, mayonaise and coke. god. homegrown is disgusting.

10:45 p.m. -- our trolley driver must have taken drivers' ed with the teenaged minivan driver who spirited us home on tuesday night. i'm sliding all over the wooden bench. the driver announces that it is okay to swear on the trolley, unlike on the DTA. we exit; amble up the hill.

photo by chuck.

11 p.m. -- jamie ness is playing a southern rock cover. his brother, the mayor, struts in and receives handshakes and pats on the back. this would make a fantastic lifetime original movie: [in a deep movie trailer voice] one brother is in a rock n roll band; the other is the gatekeeper to the city's rental ordinances. brother two tries to skirt into brother one's show unnoticed, but he's the mayor and people want to touch him. brother one gets louder. rocks harder. the skuttle around brother two reaches a fever pitch. brother one throw's his guitar down on the stage and screams: "i'm the rocker! this is my show! you have your show on cable access! just let me rock for my fans!"

unfortunately, this did not happen. [and i seem to have taken a lot of pleasure out of writing ness family fan fiction, which is ... weird?]

after shooting photos of jamie ness, chuck meanders back and says: um. i just sat on the floor of the kozy bar.
11:15 p.m. -- we parade southwest, back toward luce. jcrew limping along in a pair of impractical 3-inch heels; chuck photographing a woman in a knit cap who will, in return, belch in my ear as she skips past.

as we near the bar, the sweet sounds of 1991 is thicker than the smell of pizza dough.

mighty shock tower is revisiting REM's greatest hits, while their parents beam from the sidelines, clapping awkwardly and surprisingly unfettered by the liberal use of the "f" word being spit into the microphone.

i suggested to a former acquaintance that olive garden was his favorite restaurant and watched his pupils burn with hell-fire. i had to promptly extricate myself from this dangerous situation.

midnight -- it was during father hennepin's show that i noticed that duluth began to unfurl. it wasn't just the rain of granny panties parachuting onto the stage, it was a sort of drunken rind of fans that became deeper and deeper as the set went on. first it was just the photographer who eluded security, weaving his way across the stage, sticking his camera two inches from his subjects' faces. then i noticed the whole front row had turned pbr into a living, breathing thing. i turned around and saw a wall of sobriety become increasingly less so, like a drunken shadow force touching 20 people at a time until the duluth entity was officially schnockered.

12:30 a.m. -- i take a breather at a corner table. make friends. drink things. babble on and on until my own voice has taken on the piercing static of the most offensive alarm clock.

2 a.m. -- we stumble back into the main room for week's finale, crew jones, which even jcrew can get behind. it's sweaty. it's loud. it's animated. it is, per usual, pretty amazing.

3 a.m. -- jcrew says that since she has been to new york twice and has seen every episode of sex and the city at least once, she will hail us a cab. she stands in the street, arm in the air like the smartest kid in a third-grade math class. and sure enough, she snags one very efficiently. we go to perkins.

4 a.m. -- we cram our bodies with breakfast food and offend -- or perhaps educate? -- anyone withing a three-table radius. jcrew has left the contents of her meal in the toilet and splattered on her fancy red coat before she has even paid for it. me? when my meal bungees, i just reswallow it. this time when the cab arrives, we are uncertain if it is our's or another group's. the cab driver doesn't seem to care either way, and so we take it and are whisked away, back to our normal lives: meals made in kitchens out of ingredients found in nature; liquid in the form of water; conversations i remember. weeeee! oh normal life. i've missed you so.

homegrown day six: where i wake up and think 'is this over yet?' ...

2008-05-03T15:26:00.005-05:00

* at fitgers we run into the woman i suggested was having hot flashes all over her cello.
* i dig my fingernails into chuck's arm and giggle like someone pooted in church.
* thankfully, it seems she hasn't read my tiny little blip of a blog.

* the college boys sitting across from us on the bus keep talking about "an adventure" and "we should do this more often." they ditch into fonduluth cascino, sprinting like its disneyworld.
* our bus drops us at the orpheum nightclub before things have started.
* the members of bone appetite are having a having preshow drinks. offstage they look like friendly men who could fix your cell phone plan or hook you up with a roth ira.
* a man jumps off his bar stool and tells us that he is going to go try to wake up fred tyson, the first performer.
* upstairs, in the strip club, it sounds like a woman auction. a bingo-caller is reeling off the dimensions and resume highlights of a stripper who saw 1/4 a ball of black yarn and thought it would make a stunning evening dress.
* apparently professional celebrity strippers have been brought in for the night. "i'm already bored," one band guy says pushing past us. meawhile, the topless professional celebrity stripper on stage is skipping from dull-eyed male to dull-eyed male, selling motorboats for a buck a piece.

* the orpheum is filling with an unlikely crowd of people, stuffing into booths and reorganizing chair configurations. i'm not sure if we should tell them this ain't the olive garden now, or if we should let fred tyson's shiny boxer shorts, satin half-shirt and boxing gloves key them into the fact that there will be no bread sticks and salad refills.
* i'm in the lobby buying my 85th pbr of the week when chuck comes in the lobby to tell me the show has started. that fred tyson was helped onstage and someone is holding him in front of the microphone.
* this little man with a big presense shuffles around in a pair of tube socks, and white tennies that make his feet look like he's having perma puberty. he's chanting his personal catch phrase: freddy gonna do what he wanna do, fuck you.
* i realize that this is the unofficial kickoff to homegrown. anything i've seen before, anything i'll see later, is just strofoam packing peanuts wrapped around this act.
* when the show is over, freddy continues to greet fans holding the dead, unplugged microphone under his chin.

freddy gonna do what he wanna do ... from christa pista on Vimeo.

* we board the free trolley and head to rt quinlan's for cars & trucks.
* the trolley is great fun, with people chanting the obvious: trol-ley, trol-ley. and singing various bus-themed songs. it kinda feels like that moment senior year where the social infrastructure has been sanded down and everyone just likes each other and thinks everyone is wicked hilarious.

* quinlan's is packed. i tuck myself in by the popcorn machine instead of pushing to the front row. i already know i like cars & trucks, so i don't need to be in the front row. i can see tony bennett's hair from here.
* back on the trolley, destination luce for greg cougar conley's show. this is good stuff, but we have to get back to the orpheum to see bone appetite.

* our plan is to then return to luce for giljunko. but i'm slowly realizing that this band is going to suck the life out of me. that guy who was going to upgrade my cell phone package? he's changed into a pair of women's jeans and drawn on a mustache with a sharpie. roth ira is wearing a sweatband.
* fans are screaming along to "drive away." chuck's face is registering pure glee. if he could glow, he would.
* some kid is crowd surfing and dives from the stage.
* this makes me envious of all the bone appetite shows i didn't see, and the people who did.
* most homegrown acts last a half hour, forty five minutes. when bone appetite segues into a cover of "california dreamin'" i turn to chuck quizzically.
* "oh," he says. "they won't leave the stage until they're forced off."
* meanwhile, i have two bladderfuls, but i don't want to miss a thing.
* "they'll still be playing when you get back," he says.

sharpie mustaches ... from christa pista on Vimeo.

* i'm not a skittish bathroom person. my favorite bathrooms in the world are the one-stall wonders tucked into gas stations between here and rochester. the bathroom at the orpheum makes my uvula shiver with pre-barf anticipation. i'm wading through six inches of water, where most of the toilet paper in this room has landed. none of the stalls lock. i have no where to hang my coat. this is the most rudifying thing i've ever seen. maybe its the pbr, maybe its the rock and roll. i decide to become a bathroom rights activist and immediately begin searching for management.
* instead i find chuck, who nods compassionately, but senses i've lost my mind. "you missed paul lundgren singing with the band," he says.
* the show is over.

* we head back to luce to see trampled by turtles.
* there is a line outside of luce, filled with a pack of 21-year-olds whose enthusiasm for this week cannot match mine or chuck's. we take their drunkenness as an excuse to cut in front of them. they don't seem to notice.
* still, there is a bouncer to get past. he's eking people in one at a time as other's leave.
* "look," i tell him. "we're wearing wrist bands. we were already here tonight."
* shrug.
* "honestly! just a few hours ago we were booing greg cougar conley!" i add.
* he chuckles and lets us in.
* we beeline for the pizza-by-the-slice and leave after coating our throats in a bacon-chicken slice.

* we begin to walk home in the cold rain.
* we ask bone appetite for a ride, but they've crammed about seven people into a matchbox car. they seem open to it.
* we continue east by foot.
* for the second consecutive night, we try to watch the movie "trading places." "i think this is how we should end every night of homegrown," chuck says. eddie murphy. dan ackroid.
* i wake up sore. i think from the venue hopping and singalongs.

homegrown night five: i'm holding out for a gyro ...

2008-05-02T15:12:00.006-05:00

* chuck cooed a magic word on wednesday: gyro.
* visions of plucky little spiced lambs danced in my head. gyro, gyro, gyro.
* i called niko's in superior to make sure they were still open, assuming from the nonanswer that they were getting slammed. why would they be closed at 8:30 p.m. on a wednesday? gyros know no quitting time. gyro, gyro, gyro ...
* he called me 25 minutes later from the walgreen's parking lot. closed.
* just like the game big buck hunter, my craving lay bloody and bleeting on simulated grass.
* he came home with butter burgers and cheese curds from culvers. culvers should never finish second place in a taste-off. no one puts culvers in the corner.
* thursday we went to the mall, home depot, and through all the 3 dollar sale shirts and potted herb plants, all i could think about was a world coated in tzatziki sauce and that i am a life-sized tongue, lapping paths of its saucy goodness.
* this time i crossed the bridge to superior, winds strong enough to flip my civic into the lake. fortunately, i have at least an added 75 pounds of debris in my back seat to keep me safe.
* the dude in front of me at niko's gets the last gyro. honestly. they ran out of gyro meat one construction worker too soon.
* "i'm as surprised as you," the woman working the cash register said. she seemed pleased to disappoint me, and didn't find my story about how we had been holding out for an gyro for two nights.
* "huh," she responded emotionless.
* turns out the chicken version is a fine substitute.

* the night starts at burrito union. my first experience watching the lake superior cacophonic choir, a group that includes chuck when he doesn't a) have pneumonia, b) have to work.
* i snuggle in next to the rockstar, who recently had a new eardrum installed, rendering her unable to play on wednesday's acoustic night. between niko's being closed and not getting to hear my favorite singer, wednesday would have been a complete failure had we not finished season four of 'the wire.'
* the lake superior cacophonic choir's performance exceded its billing.
* then s'fire took over djing, playing greatest hits by bands performing this week.
* the rockstar drove us to the twins bar for hip hop night. rumor had it: it was a rough crowd.
* before we can get out of the minivan, the rockstar says: "wait. i have to put on some lipstick."
* for some reason chuck and i cackle, watching her from outside her van.
* i think it may have something to do with the chester creek pale ale we've been bathing in.

* hip hop night is not a rough crowd. in a notoriously rough bar on a notoriously rough street -- a street i live on, incidentally -- the "rough" status must have come from someone who fears crowds. it is packed. between the baggie jeans, faux camoflague hoodies and cocked hats, it looks like the parking lot of teen night.
* i start to crave sprite.
* it takes approximately a half hour to order a beer, so i order six.
* die(ode) is playing when we get there, and for some reason i'm surrounded by people who understand that this music is not so hot. i'm hardly a great hip hop mind, but they sound fine to me.
* kritical kontact follows, and i'm surrounded by people who understand that THIS music is hot.

* i'm in the bathroom when a woman walks in. "show us your ass!" the other girls yell, and she tugs down the back of her jeans to reveal a new tattoo.

* the image has something to do with her last name.
* she allows me to photograph it and put it on my web site.

* we walk home and eat burritos, which chuck has stocked the freezer with for a moment just like this.

homegrown night five: this is hip hop? ...

2008-05-01T20:39:00.003-05:00

well. i've had a few drinks. and i know that a) i love the rockstar amy abts -- who has a stunning new eardrum and had to reapply her lipstick outside the twins bar. photos tomorrow. mid afternoon at the latest. or maybe seven p.m. when i get up. I LOVE DULUTH!!!! and cork1? I'M NOT RUNNING!

meanwhile, a year and a half later ...

2008-05-01T04:34:00.001-05:00

chuck: "i'm starting to think that you think you're pretty funny."

homegrown day three: teenagers with minivans ...

2008-04-30T02:15:00.008-05:00

so tonight was 'experimental tuesday' at the blue crab.
'can you actually eat crabs there?" jcrew asked, when i tried to coax her to go.
'you can probably get crabs there,' i said. [three's company theme song ensues to representing double entrendre.]

the thing with the blue crab is that it used to be a west end bar that closed at 1 a.m., let you take a to-go bloody mary, and was called 'the midway.' now it is a bar in the same location, that has a host of regulars who want to watch tv land, drink mich golden lite and segue into some cribbage. they don't want to watch some woman in mom jeans have hot flashes all over a cello. and they definitley expressed this to the 21 year old florence henderson lookalike who was bouncing at the door.

"what are you, like 120 pounds?" i asked dave mehling, who is unfortunately performing friday night at the twins bar while a lot of people will be at luce. luckily, he's bouncing at the main club thursday if you really want to see him. and you should. he's one of those young smarties who make you wish you read in high school.
"130," he said and went on to talk a lot about testosterone build up and how it makes you want to punch assholes who refuse to pay a cover at their neighborhood bar.

"i always come here," the guy said. "i never have to pay a cover. i didn't even know there was a band?"
his friends heckled him from the street: "so you go to a strip club and the girls are ugly ... do you ask for a refund?"

inside, things were remarkable. after i've decided whether or not i like something i like to give it jcrew treatment. would my favorite friend like it? or would she die laughing in the ladies room, cavorting and snorting, and demand we move on to curly's? here, the latter rings true. lights reflecting blue and red and shadows. everyone in the first three rows has their head bowed reverantly. it's like a prayer vigil or a coma. they are too similar.

"blah blah blah whales humping," chuck's fannie says. "remind me of that phrase [for when i write about this.]"

me? i'm thinking of musical interludes between depeche mode songs. i don't not like it. i do wonder if, based on the bobbing heads and dull-eyed fans, i'm going to wake up with a desire to sell amway or march in a scientology parade. this music should come out of a machine sold by sharper image. but it is very relaxing. and it's makers are pretty passionate. i feel my own face going slack and move out of the first row just as a line of drool snakes down the front of my shirt.

i like to start the night with this statement to my bartender: hi. i plan to drink too much tonight. is it okay for me to leave my car in your parking lot over night?

on this occasion she says yes. encourages me to drink until my liver slides out of my left pant leg. we get a ride home from some guy in a minivan, who i assume is sober. we take corners on two wheels. i'm clutching chuck, his pants are as filled as with shit as they could be if he actally soiled himself but didn't. we skim his block, but our ride drives six more out of the way.

"we could have gotten out there," terrified chuck says pointing.
"i feel like starbuck," i reference battlestar galactica. "the further away from earth, the bigger headache i get."

we get home safely with four days and one brunch to go of my favorite duluth holiday.
"i feel like i'm a drunk on buggs bunny," chuck said. he has the hiccups.

homegrown days one and two: the fun shackle ...

2008-04-29T02:46:00.005-05:00

so it is the end of day two of homegrown, and all i have to show for it is an orange wristband that suggests a level of fun i've not yet acheived. my social secretary did a piss-poor job of clearing my calendar, and so these early days of the festival have me catching blanched out pieces here and there.

i got to luce for new band night late on sunday, tired, hungry, spent from regenerating the internal organs i'd sacrificed on saturday night. i was so distracted by being at the holy birth-place of tuna caliente and veggie nuggets that i could hardly look at the dreadlocked bass player rocking in celebratory circles on stage.

i took one of those inane cell phone photos to prove to myself later that i'd been there. ordered my food, avoided eye contact with other humans, and finished the night at walgreens in the crayola aisle.

today i skulked the outskirts of a room at the playground, where photos of homegrowns past are hanging. this was a lot like attending burly burlesque's graduation party -- minus the sheet cake and letter jacket -- as this local artist was easily the most-photographed person from the 2007 tour.

i got my wrist band, though. or my fun shackle. this neon orange accessory promises to bring me a lot of laughs as the week goes on. at first i balked at wearing it for a consecutive week. that can't be hygenic, right? my dirty arm, touching that pristine plastic product? then i remember that last year after homegrown i refused to take it off until i had a night that matched saturday's finale on my personal funometer. i think it ended up disintegrating before i was forced to tear into the sucker with my teeth. a week should be no problem.

so i missed open mic night. i got to carmody as haus meeting was loading an accordian into the trunk of a car.

nights in: 2
bands appreciated: .5
meals originating from pizza luce: 2
times i've stood outside a film fest that i was not able to attend: 1
drinks consumed: 1
times chuck has had enough homegrown fun that he finds it acceptible for me to watch both 'the bachelor' and 'the hills' without headphones while he is on the same couch: 2, but i only took him up on it once
days left in my fun shackle: 5

its not unbearable ...

2008-04-28T02:16:00.003-05:00

this past week i tapped into my inner stephen king movie-watcher, found that with the right combination of bike helmet and sunglasses i can ride undetected among people who don't know me anyway, and i began shooting videos of things. this week is homegrown, so expect a week of asdklja;kj posts time-stamped at about 4 a.m.

FOODS I MAKE
pork tenderloin: ha! open package. be careful not to get pork goo on fingers. dump pork in shallow cooking pan. scrub hands until at least chaffe, if not bleed. make meat be 160 degrees, like it says on the package. ENJOY with foccacia from great harvest bread store and leftover asiago cheese from when you made foccacia!

FOODS I WATCH SOMEONE ELSE MAKE
homemade mashed potatos: respond "with skins." "no such thing as too much garlic" and "the more butter the better."
dramatically seared green beans: this is one chuck gleaned from vegetarian times. so crunchy. sometime spicy. so good, and the whole house smells like peanut oil.

LISTENING TO
colin meloy sings morrissey: in a crowded burrito union, after a few chester creek pale ales, you can mistake this american-singer-who-sounds-irish as morrissey. particularly if you haven't listened to morrissey lately. i'm in love with colin meloy's version of "everyday is like sunday." as for my friend the punk rock girl, the consumate morrissey fan, she laughed during the first song and handed my ipod back to me with this take: "it's not unbearable."

MOVIE PROJECT MOVIES
"cache" 2005: a family begins receiving anonymous video tapes: two hours of surveillence from in front of their house; the man's childhood home; an apartment in a different part of town. the man ties the intrusion to someone he wronged when he was six. long stretches of unchanging scenary and infuriating conversations that last too long and say the wrong thing. just when you're lulled to drooling boredom, something horrible happens. like "funny games," the end is a sort of punchline. and like "funny games" it's much better in retrospect than while you are watching it.

NONMOVIE PROJECT MOVIES
"the dead zone" 1983: stephen king, david cronenberg and christopher walken collide in this creepy movie about a man who has the power to predict fires, find long lost mothers and sniff out dirty politicians after he rams his VW bug into a milk truck and goes into a 5-year coma -- during which his randy girlfriend 'cleaves to another man' according to comatose's mother. this movie's most titilating death-scene involves a serial killer impaling himself, via throat, on an opened scissors. eventually old comatose saves the world.

"pet semetary" 1989: know what is terrifying? psychotic toddlers who cut into an achilles tendon with dr. dad's scalpal with the ease of breaking into a baked potato.

READING THE INTERNET SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO
"get drunk and date": this is a post by georgia hardstark about why it is important to drink on first dates was a fun read and became relevant later in the day when fannie and i talked about the exact same thing in reference to the fact that she has a first date on a sunday, which makes the words mimosa and bloody mary very, very important.

"frenemy territory": because i cannot not link to mentions of "the hills" in actual leee-turature, here is an essay from the new yorker by nancy franklin. "i think people watch it mostly to figure out why they're watching it," she writes. i'm not sure why i watch it, so maybe she's right.

battlestar galactica recap: every saturday ian spiegelman of gawker recaps the previous night's episode of battlestar galactica. i never think it's not funny when he refers to adama as "miami vice." my favorite snippit from this week: Chief Fatty Q. Workingstiff: "I settled! I settled for that freak! Those dull fracking eyes!" You are a mechanic with a studio apartment and you want to get the hotties? It's space, fatboy. Not Long Island.

TV WARTCHIN'
"the hills: a new roommate":

* when heidi refers to audrina's ex as justin bobby during the awkward 'girls night' at the bar, does that mean she watches episodes of 'the hills' ? because that nickname was borne long after heidi had been banished to relationship vacation from lauren? oh heidi, its like you just wore a dave matthew's band t'shirt to a dave matthew's band concert. what's next? singing your own song on some upcoming karaoke night?

* audrina goes to dinner with justin, gives him the old flirty flirty ... i guess time heals all 'oh-my-boyfriend-is-making-out-with-another-woman-at-a-party-i-invited-him-to-again-this-week' wounds. as long as audrina is alive, there will be lifetime movie fodder. in five years she's going to be calling herself ginny and working as a waitress in some small town pie shoppe in nevada.

* so stephen returns next episode. lauren treats boys like boxes of old clothes, pulling them out of the closet when she's bored and wondering if they now, finally, the laguna surfer boy goes with these shoes.

"the paper: change is necessary:"

* does amanda have a hickey?
* i firmly believe that amanda and alex will end up at prom together -- their night plotted on color coded post it notes months in advance. ackward negotiations of second base will ensue.
* giana, who's eye rolls should have their own reality show, will be in her second trimester by the second semester.
* i've never wanted a waffle cone so bad in my life.

"the bachelor: meet the parents episode":

* how does matt the bachelor not know lorenzo lamas? don't tell me the snake eater trilogy didn't make it across the pond.
* shayne bought her leppard-skin mom a a leppard-skinned house, yet no mere home can contain the bosoms of this woman.
* wait. shayne used to be a brunette? a brunette who did backandsprings?

* i'm as surprised as you are that chelsea's family lives in house and not in the upstairs of a pizza hut.
* i decided i've mistaken her shyness and youth for trashiness.

* noelle is adorable. i think he sent her home because he can safely assume she won't go all sniper on him after the jilting. the other women? hard to say.

* risky play amanda, with the fake parents ploy. but oh my god. best bachelor moment ever. i knew i liked that girl.

* chelsea looks like a pretty severe russian gymnast during the rose ceremony.

"battlestar galactica: the episode where everyone is bleeding from the mouth": this week's 'not a cylon' award goes to baltar's harem. i'm pretty sure that most of them are not cylons. everyone else is fair game. including callie -- who as much as i want her to be gone for good -- maybe be rehatching in a goo bath as we speak.

* in trying to figure out what adama is reading to laura roslin -- perhaps an earth-bound publication? -- i found a small cult of people who consider these two the meg ryan and billy crystal of deep space.

other tv thoughts: um. that's stephen from laguna beach on one tree hill. i get confused when my reality tv steps into my very obvious and blatant fiction. then on gossip girl someone mentioned brody jenner's name. this is creeping me out.

* also, i didn't understand two jokes on last week's episode of "two and a half men." couldn't even visualize what sort of deviant act they were referencing. possible my prudey metamorphesis has cranked up a notch?

ART PROJECT

with another friend who has moved, i made a super inaccurate chart indicating the states my friends have moved to in the past eight years. i'm sure i forgot someone. i'm also sure that i cannot point to florida and tell you where miami or tampa are. bear with my approximations.

dragon force has left the building ...

2008-04-27T15:33:00.003-05:00

the thing with guitar hero is that it worms its way into your head until you can't listen to "talk dirty to me" without toggling away at the air. "when you were young" is on my running mix, which means i am tapping away in beginner mode on the treadie imagining lines of red, green and yellow streaming toward me.

we went to a going away party for my friend fng last night at o'gilby's. at 2 a.m., we went to his yet not-packed apartment and he unloaded almost an entire case of leinies on us. we walked home. by the time i woke today at 3 p.m., fng had apparently packed, uploaded more than a dozen photos -- including some from an afterbar -- and moved himself 2 hours south, according to his facebook status.

youth. you can't beat it.

anyway, here fng goes apeshit on a pool stick to "dragon force" from the guitar hero III soundtrack.

'stof from christa pista on Vimeo.

he's a cowboy ...

2008-04-26T02:58:00.000-05:00

he's a cowboy ... from christa pista on Vimeo.

synthetic plastics ...

2008-04-25T01:50:00.007-05:00

i stepped outside for my early-morning weather update yesterday and it was hot on the deck. like oppressive hot. i climbed back into bed at 12:30 p.m. "ugh..." i said. "its pretty hot."

sun shinging through tin foil covered windows. and chuck has to cram nice weather into an hour and a half -- he had to work. he damn-near put his foot on my throat until i promised i'd at least read the new yorker on the deck.

but i had tivo shows to watch. things to read. nice days suck. there is so much expectation. here we are in duluth, where we could have 14 nice days between now and halloween. but all i want to do is sit inside. i want options.

this is why i hate nice days.

rainy days are like kids in basic math. when they succeed, it is a great thing that no one expected. ice cream sundaes. people celebrate, throw a parade. when they fail ... well, hell, you expected them to fail. sunny days are like AP english. they have to write great essays and screw the captain of the debate team. sunny days are terrible.

but then i went for a run and almost got mauled by three deer and was giggling and cooing on london road. and then i realized deer are like duluth's version of cockraoches, so i should stop being so thrilled at this display of nature.

***

so i'm on my way to target and i take the rare glance of my face in the rear view mirror and what i'm seeing is that this thing ... natural sunlight ... is exposing a colony of grey hair in my head. not one quaint old-age post-it note. no. a fucking notebook of grey hair. i'm yanking the fuckers.

ripping that shit out of my head. placing them on my running pants, my car seat, i'm starting to look like i just hugged a super old cat. i'm dialing 411 and trying to get my guy david from shear katz on the line. someone has to fix this. stat. he doesn't have an opening until thursday unless i want to turn around and get there RIGHT NOW! i can't, so i have to live as a senior citizen for another day. fffffuccck.

reason number 48 to hate sunny days: age revealed via hair.

so target was fun. i got a pair of sunglasses and ran into beegee. we talked about the first ammendment and i had one of those weird moments where someone makes it look like having kids isn't awful because these children aren't assholes. weeeee!

***

i went to a large sports store to buy a bike helmet.

me: "do you have adult bike helmets?
worker: "yes, they are right here."
me: "okay, thanks."
worker: "if you need anything, just ask!"
[to another guy who is closer]
me: is this one size fits all?
guy: no.
me: okay. will this fit me?
guy: we used to have different sizes but we don't anymore.
me: okay. do you think this will fit me.
guy: i don't know where the other sizes went.
me: WILL THIS FIT ME!
guy: probably. [wanders away.]

***

in retrospect, i'm not sure we talked about what i wanted with my hair, specifically. although, i'm not sure i cared too much. i know he wanted me to go darker, which is fine. gwen stefani blonde doesn't work for me, we know this. but when i said i wanted red-red, i meant a red found in nature, like close to my natural version, not something found in synthetic plastics.

and i'm not going to lie.
i do not hate this. i look a little punk rock. but with converse shoes and a hoodie ... this will be a great homegrown look for next week.
"did you get permission to do this?" david asked. he means from my boyfriend.
"wha?" i said. really? people do that. i just assume chuck doesn't care what i look like. i'm actually positive he doesn't.

***

then chuck and i made dinner, went to starfire lounge and it was super fun.

in the car on the way home from cub foods ...

2008-04-23T02:01:00.002-05:00

me: this song totally reminds me of roller skating in my basement. i swear that all i did in 1983 is come home from school, attach a pair of tin adjustable roller skates to my tennis shoes, plug in my boom box and skate in circles listening to KROC FM.
chuck: is this phil collins?
me: yes.
chuck: ... or genesis?
me: yes.
chuck: i just remember that tall guy, the one with the beard ...
me: mike?
chuck: from mike and the mechanics?
me: living years.

not with this hangnail ...

2008-04-22T02:36:00.003-05:00

it rained on me. a lot. but look at that fresh air biker girl glow.

i was going to postpone day one of my new life as a 'person who rides her bike everywhere.' it was a little chilly and a lot windy, and there are still all these hills taunting my retired male soccer player thighs. but less than a mile into my short half-assed quasimoto immitation of a run i started wondering why i was wearing a stocking cap. and a few blocks later i hawked a pretty meaty luggie and took off my sweatshirt. and that's when i knew that it wasn't too cold and it wasn't too windy and that these were gateway excuses leading to: yowch, i have cramps and ride my bike? not with this hangnail.

today, bydammit, would be the day i turn into 'a person who rides her bike everywhere.' or else seven weeks would pass, then four months, and all of a sudden i'd instead be 'a person who keeps an unused bike in the back hallway.' and while i seemingly am a person who likes to take paper money and set it free in the wild, i hated thinking i'd pay 175 dollars per perch on that cushioned cattle-skull shaped seat.

so i went out riding.

at my first stop, i spent fifteen minutes trying to understand how to fasten my ride to a new age bike rack. when i last owned a bike, it was still possible to just chain your front wheel to a stump. things are more complicated now. they tell me this technique is basically a 'take one free' sign for anyone with a wrench, 3 spare minutes and an open space in the bed of their pickup truck. but i felt confident and boy scouty in the weave of my lock, and left my bike unintended for a half hour before my psychic tendencies cawed like a smoke detector. i walked outside, and lifted my bike right off the thing i thought i'd attached it to. the lock coiled around the frame like a severed tendon. i'd done nothing more than create the illusion that my bike was locked up.

i ran into the norwegian wonder who asked if i'd gotten a helmet yet. i kicked a rock, stammered and said no. she looked at me like i'd just told her that norway had given itself to sweden as a søttende mai gift. i bet she is a real good mom. then my friend dojo told me about the guy who got 97 stitches in his skull and all the while 'brain bucket, brain bucket, brain bucket' was repeating and rerepeating in my head. i started wishing starbucks sold grande helmets.

and then it started to rain. and rain and rain and rain. and soon i couldn't wait it out any longer. the norwegian wonder offered me a ride home; chuck texted to see if i was stranded. "once you're wet, you're wet," dojo reasoned. i am a blogger, i rationalized, a blogger who sometimes does things just to write about it later. so i did like 'a person who rides her bike everywhere' would do, and i rode a few miles home.

it was pretty nice. refreshing even. i did get wet. i'm sure that if my front tire had flung a puffy earth worm in my face, like i half expected, my career as a 'person who rides her bike everywhere' would have ended with me in a taxi and the shiny blue giant cypress in the bushes.