Arboretum / Japanese Gardens Seattle

Arboretum / Japanese Gardens Seattle, a set on Flickr.

Last Friday I spent a lovely morning walking through the trees and flowers of the Arboretum near my house. I’m a lucky lady to be able to live this close to such a beautiful space.

Here are some photos I took while walking around with my friend Ai. This is the first time I’ve posted photos using Flickr sets through this blog, so I hope it works out.

This week we plan to hit up Kubota gardens….I don’t know how well the weather will cooperate, but I’m really excited.

Radiohead Is A Band I Like

Monday night, Radiohead came to town, and John surprised me by scoring tickets that morning. I’ve seen them twice already, but I don’t think you can see Radiohead too many times. They’re Radiohead.

I don’t typically post about shows I see, because you can’t usually capture decent photos and I don’t like to interrupt my experience too much by trying. That said, this show was a new experience for me. I’ve never been to a stadium-sized concert before. On purpose. I can’t not gush about it.

When the lights fired up and I saw how many people were in this room with me, a little piece of my innards flipped out. It was awe-inspiring. In fact, this collective organism was one of the interesting parts of the show for me. From my vantage point I could see the crowd in its entirety reacting to various stimuli in very interesting, if predictable ways. The concept that “we are all one” was illustrated powerfully by this, and I guess I was pretty fascinated and impressed.

The set was intense – several giant video screens on heavy cables were manipulated about the stage in different arrangements, depending upon the song. They displayed footage from cameras trained on the musicians located around the stage, mixed with other imagery, mostly static and lazery bedazzlements. The cameras themselves were gorgeous artifacts.

Each song brought a new visual theme. My brain could not handle the green themes, so for those I closed my eyes and pretended I was being abducted by aliens. This is not difficult to imagine when you are listening to Radiohead.

I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of the latest Radiohead songs, but they got those out of the way during the main part of the show. Once the encore set began, it was back to my old favorites, many from In Rainbows and some from OK Computer and Hail to the Thief. I hoped most of all that they’d play Paranoid Android, but alas, that did not come to pass. Still, a beautiful and powerful show.

Left, John and I are ready to listen! Right, this guy is doing a crossword puzzle, he is so excited! (Later, he was watching the show through his hands, held up to his eyes like binoculars, looking through little tiny holes to see better in spite of wearing glasses.)

This was the night’s set list. Re-live it by listening to this Spotify playlist I made, if you want.*

Bloom
15 Step*
Airbag
Little by Little
Myxomatosis
The Gloaming
Morning Mr. Magpie
Pyramid Song
The Daily Mail
These Are My Twisted Words*
Nude*
Identikit*
Lotus Flower
There There
Feral
Idioteque

Encore 1:
How to Disappear Completely
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi*
You and Whose Army?
Lucky

Encore 2:
Give Up the Ghost
Reckoner*
Everything In Its Right Place

John and I were seated to stage right, a few rows up, so we had a stellar view without being crushed in by the understandably rabid fans on the general admission floor. I didn’t have as much fun sitting down, though; the real joy began when I stood up halfway through. Duh!

I’ve been an enormous Radiohead fan for years, and I’ve watched all the stuff and listened to all the albums a billion times. They’re literally the only band I can listen to over and over and over without ever getting sick of it. I can’t say that for any other band, no matter how much I love the music.

I also adore Thom Yorke’s dance stylings. They are so childlike and true – when you watch him, you know you are looking at something genuine. It’s not self-conscious, it’s just pure inspiration. That’s why it’s so good.

But yes. The show went by much too fast. They played 22 songs but it felt like they only played 5. I could watch them for several days and not be bored. I’m so happy they exist.

*(My playlist doesn’t include tracks from In Rainbows or newest songs, since they aren’t available on Spotify).

Full House is a Lie!

Interesting news to finally report! John and I are moving to . . .

San Francisco

San Francisco!

We’ve been considering making The Move for a while now. We’ve both lived in Seattle for around 12 years now, although I did take some adventure leaves-of-absence out of state a few times. Still, as a grown-up military kid I tend to grow restless living in one place for too long, and regularly crave new geography, culture, and weather. We thought moving – not just to a new house, but to a whole new city – would be an exciting way to shake up our lives. I’m excited that we’re jumping out into the relative unknown together, too. Ok, it’s not THAT unknown, it’s only two states away and we’ve visited plenty of times, but you never know how a place really is until you live there. It will be a huge bonding experience. Neither of us has family in the area – some friends, but mainly, each other. I’m sure I’ll be posting a lot more about all this in posts to come.

Whew. Now it’s time to begin the transition.

In our preliminary house hunt, I’m figuring out that, get this– FULL HOUSE: the house doesn’t really exist!

Like, the Full House you see on the beloved TGIF show from the 90′s? A lie.

A LIE.

Full house house

Here are the ways that this house is impossible:

1) All of the back yards I’ve seen in all of the houses look like a shoebox with (and sometimes without) grass in it. The grass is usually balding. No fluffy, rich pasture like the Tanners enjoyed during their oh-so-family-friendly BBQs.

2) There were a billion bedrooms in Full House. Here’s how full it was: it had to house Danny Tanner in a master bedroom, DJ and Stephanie in one room, Michelle in another room, Uncle Jesse in the basement, Uncle Joey in..the basement too (right? somewhere), and then later Aunt Becky moves in and pops out a couple of twins with Uncle Jesse in the “attic.” Everyone hangs out in this enormous living room, the likes of which I’ve never seen in any house in an urban environment, and there’s like a garage and laundry room and at LEAST three bathrooms. There’s just no way, dudes.

Here are some handy maps to illustrate my point, created by “Alexdarkland” over at “sitcomsonline.com”:

Full house Tanner house 00 Basement bedroom concept

Full house Tanner house 01 living room Kitchen

Full house Tanner house 03 2nd floor concept

Full house Tanner house 04 attic concept

Yes, someone took the time to map out the Full House house. Amazing, right?! The answer is yes.

3) That house is completely unaffordable, even if it did exist.

Now, I suppose that you might, if you really look, be able to find a house in the area that the Full House is supposedly located. It’s called Alamo Square. Hold on, I’ll do a search on Craigslist.

~bleep bloop boop bleep bloop~

Oh yeah, here we go, only $8,500 per MONTH to live in a THREE bedroom.

Screen Shot 2012 03 17 at 6 24 54 PM

That won’t do, though. . .we need at least four bedrooms, an attic apartment, and a gigantic basement, remember. I bet that’d be double the size of this piece of shit. And double the price maybe? Maybe not. Let’s guess around $10K per month for the Full House house. Being generous.

So who’s paying that rent? Let’s say everyone in the Full House has an RIDICULOUSly well-paying job. Danny, a morning TV show host, is pulling in, let’s say, $80K. (I’m not adjusting for inflation because the house rental price isn’t based on inflation numbers either.)

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,

Salaries for news analysts, reporters, and correspondents vary widely. Median annual wages of reporters and correspondents were $34,850 in May 2008. The middle 50 percent earned between $25,760 and $52,160. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $20,180, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $77,480. Median annual wages of reporters and correspondents were $33,430 in newspaper, periodical, book, and directory publishing, and $37,710 in radio and television broadcasting.

So, a third of Danny’s income, if he’s at the tippy-top of his salary bracket, would be around $2000 every month, take home. Your housing expenses shouldn’t exceed a third of your income, so that’s how I get that figure.

I’m guessing that Uncles Joey and Jesse are making less than $80K per year as performers. Just a guess. But let’s say they’re ULTRA SUCCESSFUL performers of their fine (“cut-it-OUT!”/Popeye impersonating) comedy and jingle music. Combined, the three breadwinners of the household are bringing in a mere monthly $6000 to put towards rent. That wouldn’t even cover the cost of this tiny, CRAPPY Craigslist house I just dug up, unless Aunt Becky is pooling in $2000, too. But she doesn’t come in until later, right?!

Maybe Danny simply inherited the house. Maybe he’s the son of a cleaning-and-organizing-business tycoon. I bet that’s what happened. There is no other explanation. And I’m not about to find a reasonably-priced four-bedroom house (with a basement, yard, and attic apartment!) ANYwhere on Craigslist.

F$*%ing Tanners!!!

But I’m sure we’ll find something equally fantastic, for us. And preferably nowhere near The Gibblers.

Today Leroy is 9 years old.

Bleeding Hearts are Punk Rock, Right?

I don’t like it when personal blogs try to get me to do things like donate money or buy stuff, but I make an occasional exception for charity stuff.

I’ve been posting this on Facebook and Twitter, with no takers. If you’d like to donate something to WaterForward with me as your “sponsor,” you can do it here.

More infos:

“There are a billion people in the world living without clean water. Soon, there will be a billion people in the world using social media. What if the billion with clean water could help the billion without?

WaterForward is an online book filled with faces of people helping to end the water crisis. Each slot in the book costs $10, and 100% of the money goes to charity: water – helping build water projects in developing countries.”

I’m “sponsoring” up to five people; I was sponsored by my rad friend Travis and you could be my very own “sponsee.” Then we can all be in this book together, and feel all clean n’ hydratey.

But in a rock n’ roll way. You know. Don’t, like, stop thinking of me as a badass iron-hearted punk just because I want peoples’ babies to drink nice water.

Notebooking

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

This morning I re-read Joan Didion’s essay from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “On Keeping a Notebook.” The first time I read it, long before I was capable of reading anything deeper than grandma’s Reader’s Digest or the back of a Ramen packet, I didn’t get it. That’s the beauty of reading these books on my shelves that have accumulated over the last many years of failed attempts at reading and writing.

The first half of my twenties, spent numbed to all known human environments, were my more adventurous years since I wasn’t yet fully a slave to anxious self doubt or various mortal fears. In those years, and most of the years before them, I kept notebooks of all sizes and shapes, the vast majority of which I kept hidden from others. Most of what I wrote was poetry or fantasy, the only way out of a childhood that I pretended, even to myself, to like.

…the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best.

Mid- to late-twenties, I started to wake up. I fantasized less, wrote less, and did more. I gave up on idealizing other possible lives I could be living after trying on many kinds and understanding that what I was doing was escapism, not me, not brave. I started down that interminable road to identity that I’m still wandering, with white knuckles and varying levels of acceptance depending on the day.

To read Didion’s essay now, with these older (newer?) eyes, is refreshing and validating. I respect her interpretation of “notebooking.” She discusses the way she remembers events in her life as being not completely true, which I do at times too, though I don’t do it on purpose. Why do I remember things incorrectly? I often find myself telling a story to someone, only to have it corrected by another person who was there when the events happened; I have told it wrong. Why? It’s because the way I’m telling it is more interesting and accurate at capturing the feeling and meaning that came from my own experience of the event rather than the boring experience as it may have existed in “reality.”

This phenomenon is much like my tried-and-true ultimate #1 memorization tactic from school: initialing. For an example, take the planets in our solar system. It’s harder to remember “Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto,” than it is to remember “My Very Elegant Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas.” Even better is when you can create an acronym out of the information you need to remember, like “HOMES” representing the five Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. This is essentially what Joan’s and Sherah’s brains (and maybe yours?) do with boring and dry events in life.

I appreciate my brain reorganizing my stories and experiences into feeling-snapshots that help me remember who I am, where I am, and what’s important to me. I hadn’t ever framed it that way…I just thought I was a forgetful, sensationalist schmo sometimes.

Now I plan to run full-force into this and notebook the sh*t out of everything like before I became too self-censoring. Keeping my ears and eyes open, being present and alive, even wider receptive to inspiration and life.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 AM of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

A tip of my hat to you for keeping “On Keeping a Notebook,” old Sherah.

I Chopped My Hair Off

So, today I went from long, long hair to this:

I was somewhat nervous about doing this, but didn’t have second thoughts. I just hopped right into the chair and it was smooth sailing…well, until I became lightheaded and had myself a nice lil panic attack. That one surprised me!

But should it have? I am prone to these kinds of “anxious moments.” In fact, that’s exactly WHY I think I wanted to chop all this stuff off….I got through a good year and a half of some gnarly anxiety, and here I am on the other side of it, triumphant. To reflect my relief and begin a new life of grounded awareness of myself and fortitude in the face of challenge, I axe the mane that was a part of each of those fearful moments of anxious pain. Dramatic? Maybe…but anxiety can be pretty dramatic, whether you want it to be or not! Off with her hair!

I got through the shearing with my awesome new hairdoer. He let me freak out a little, offered me a beer to relax, and generally just made fun of me and kept me happy and calm. Perfect. I hope he’s not scared next time I come in. Haha.

Oh, and I’m sending my ponytail to kids who could use some hair. So. It’s all good!

Cool!