leftovers

In October 2003, my boyfriend and I flew to Iceland. It was something I had been wanting to do since junior high when I first become obsessed with the remote country, most likely due to my fascination with its most famous export at the time, Alt-Rock band The Sugarcubes . Travelling to Iceland had normally seemed prohibitively expensive, but after signing up for Icelandair's e-mail list, I discovered a great package deal for Iceland Airwaves, a huge rock music festival that takes place each year in Reykjavik. Most of my blog readers have had to hear me tell this story over and over again, so I won't proceed any further with details of the trip, other than to say that it was then that I first became aware of Silvia Night. From the cover of the in-flight magazine to huge billboards all over town, Silvia was everywhere, with her red, black and white striped hair, drag-queen makeup and outrageous garb. But what was she? It was hard to determine why she was so famous or what she h...

My band just got back from a whirlwind "tour" which we appropriately enough titled the "Talkin' Shit" tour, to promote our new EP Sidesaddle Sweet Talk . We left Los Angeles right after work on Friday evening, swerving through the canyons that lead from West Hollywood into the San Fernando Valley, then proceeding north over what they call the grapevine (which I have never understood why), and finally rolling into Bakersfield at about a quarter 'til 9pm. I had never actually been to Bakersfield before, but we knew some girls there who have a band called Three Chord Whore and we've played with them in LA a few times. I got along really well with Shantell, the drummer, and each time I've seen her we talk about us going up to see them in Bakersfield . I was hoping to book a show with them up there, but this whole trip was planned very last minute so I wasn't sure it would work out. We arrived at their house still not sure whether or not we would...

Recently, my cousin Amy came to Los Angeles for a wedding, and I got a chance to visit with her quite a bit as she and another friend of hers stayed at my apartment for a couple nights. It was a lot of fun, because I love having family come see me in California, plus I had never gotten much of a chance to get to know my cousin Amy because she was older then me and already had gone off to college when I was a kid. But when I did get to see her at family events such as Thanksgiving at my grandparents house, I always looked up to her and thought that she was really cool. I remember she was always nice to me and my siblings and always treated us like grown ups instead of the little kids we were, which I always appreciated. In visiting with Amy, I found out so much more about my family and our shared grandparents than I had known before, and it was very interesting to me. Talking about my grandparents and their farm, which had belonged in my family for years and still does to this day, brou...

I had a weird dream the other night about the house that my brother and I lived in for our last few years in Kansas. It was at 111 E 4th and is no longer there. It has the distinction of being the only home I've lived in that no longer exists. Odd, isn't it? They tore the house down soon after my brother and I left for Los Angeles, after my parents moved in for a spell during a weird limbo period between selling their own home in Hays and moving east to Kansas City. It wasn't anything spectacular, but it was the first house I ever shopped for and "bought" myself. Actually, my dad bought it, but it was I who came up with the idea and even backed it up with some mathematics. I figured out that it would be way more financially wiser for my parent to purchase a home for Brandon and I to live in during college, rather than us paying rent to someone else, because later my parents could sell the house for more than they paid for it (the housing market in Hays generally a...