leftovers

Wow!!! When formulating this title, so many "v" words came to mind, but I had no idea I'd end up using 6 of them! I should have used 7 since there is a "v" in "seven" but that would just be overdoing it. To break it down, I'll go word-by-word: VALENTINES: I'm a holiday person, what can I say. Whenever a holiday approaches, my mind automatically reverts back to elementary school days, when our teacher would lovingly create some bulleting board featuring cardboard cut-out decorations symbolizing whatever special day was drawing near. Thinking of this makes me feel good, because I know my mom continues to make scholastic bulletin boards to this day. Valentine's Day is usually one of my favorite days, even back when I was single, if only because of the flowers and chocolate. It's a pretty holiday, and has nothing to do with religion, and is meant to celebrate Love - so what's not to like? However, that part about LA Valentine's that...

Let's see, what been going on? Since I last wrote, I've been getting over that horrible cold that I developed while going out every night like a teenager. In the meantime I've been rehearsing for our upcoming battle of the bands show at Girl Bar, recording on our album (more listening really, I haven't recorded anything myself for awhile) and working on the video for "Delay" - I guess I'll say a little about that. We filmed the footage for "Delay" in May of last year in my hometown, Paradise, Kansas. I had been really excited about the video because since I was a kid, I always wanted to film a video there. I used to daydream about being in a band, about a band being in Paradise, about filming a video in Paradise; I squandered many a middle school afternoon by not paying attention in class and instead looking out the window. There is this brown house across the street from the school and I always had this fantasy that The Thompson Twins would move...

Sunday morning came and went and I finally got up a little after noon, feeling a little worse for the weather. It seemed my recklessness had finally got caught up with me and I had acquired something of a cold, with a little bit of a sore throat and a hangover headache to boot. I had some breakfast (Boo Berries Cereal, yum!) and made coffee, then just read and watched Logo's Top 10 funniest videos, which included Electric Six at #10 with "Danger! Danger! High Voltage!" which was fun to see on TV rather than the internet. I think I had seen it on FUSE once before maybe, or MTV2, but it was awhile ago. We had rehearsal at 4pm so I drove Dylan and I out to Silverlake to the studio. Alexa came around 4:30 and we practiced our set for the Battle of the Bands on the 15th. After she left, Brandon and I jammed on some music for some of the new songs we've been recording at Hoagies. Afterwards, I stopped by Tiger's house to help him get his website, www.tigrefino.com, ...

I woke up around 7:30 am on the couch in the living room wondering why I was there. I got up and went into the bedroom, where I crashed on the bed until sometime shortly after noon. I forgot to mention in yesterday's blog, that I actually somehow dragged myself to the gym after work and did yoga. It killed me! I found it much more difficult than usual, which I'm SURE had to do more with the extensive partying I've been doing, but the roller-skating definitely added to the pain. Anyway, Saturday I got up, had breakfast, and decided I needed to go into the office to get some paperwork I needed in order to figure out Dylan and I's personal finances so we could pay rent. Since it was a beautiful day, I invited Dylan to go with me, and we thought we'd walk since my office is only about 2 miles away. First we went to his eye doctor to pick up his new glasses, which are really cute. It ended up being slightly chilly outside so we stopped back by the apartment so I could ge...

The title of this blog is also the headline I used for the various myspace bulletins promoting my bands show this night which took place at The Anarchy Library in Downey where we opened for Gene Loves Jezebal. From wikipedia: "Gene Loves Jezebel is a gothic rock band from the early 1980s founded by twin brothers, Michael and Jay Aston . Michael Aston (vocals) was the poetic, goth -leaning side of the twin brothers while Jay Aston’s distinctive banshee-like, wailing vocals supplied Gene Loves Jezebel with one of their many trademark quirks." Also on the bill was Moscow, an all-girl band that showed influences of goth and new wave bands such as The Cure and Siouxsie & The Banshees. They were good and I enjoyed their show. We were up next and we were lucky to have both of our dancers on stage with us as the crowd was getting bigger in anticipation for GLJ and some of them were being a little rowdy and heckling our Drag Dancer, Dusty Bibles (Dylan's new alias; he ...

Thursday came and I was feeling the physical effects from not only going out three nights in a row already, but also from my night of roller skating, which had manifested in several blisters on my feet and what felt like a sprained left wrist (the aftermath of one of my pratfalls). Work was pretty easy and I had to break the monotony by taking my lunch break at Amoeba records where I picked up a used Deborah Harry CD (the limited edition with a lenticular cover) for $10 and a PAL (UK) VHS copy of the Twin Peaks pilot which set me back one whole dollar. After work I came home and tried to do some chores but only really managed to do one load of laundry, which I later forgot about in the dryer and didn't end up fetching it for over a day. I waited for Dylan to get home from work and he picked me up and we went to Jason and Ishmael's apartment, which is in the same complex as Marc's. We had a little pre-party before heading to FUBAR, which is a block away from my apartment. ...

Rising tired again on Wednesday morning, I nevertheless made it to work determined to continue my week of partying like a teenager. At 11:15am I ventured down to Wilshire Blvd. to the old Bullocks Wilshire Department Store, now home to Southwestern University of Law for the monthly Los Angeles BID Consortium Meeting. It was the second time the Wilshire Center had hosted the meeting there; the last was a couple of years ago. It's a beautiful building, and as I walked up to the entrance I couldn't help but imagine I was a wealthy Angeleno back in the day excitedly going on a shopping spree. The meeting was interesting because Wilshire Center BID made a presentation about their "Cool District" program which will aim to reduce their district's global warming carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2% each year for the next 40 years. I am excited to see if our BID can implement a similar program. After work, I hurried home and got ready to hit the roller rink! My friend Jason had...

Of course I was a little bit hungover and tired when I woke up on Day 2. I had attended a work-related meeting for about 3 hours earlier the previous evening so I had some flexibility with the time I went into work, allowing me to get some much needed sleep. Work was OK and I didn't feel too bad, I mean I've gone out late and went in to work early lots of times before. I had another after-work meeting Tuesday evening which went pretty well. Afterwards, I really wanted to just go home and lay down or something but I thought that going to the gym would give me more energy, and besides I had already put it off the night before. I like to go at least 3 times a week, usually M-W-F. I did end up going to the gym for a little over an hour, went home and ate, and then my friends Ben and Marc came and picked me up to go to MJ's. I think we got there a little after 10pm and there was a small line to get in. It was $7 at the door - perhaps an interesting side study to this expe...

Since having turned 30, I've noticed a disturbing trend. OK, so it didn't necessarily start after I turned 30 and it really doesn't have anything to do with that, but lately I find myself confined to the couch/tv routine by 9pm most every night. I don't think I have to explain why that's troubling to me. So, last week I made a goal: to go out every single night one week, just to prove I could do it. My sister thinks this is a silly goal, and I agree, but it's something I need to do. I started my week of living like I'm still a teenager by going out to Mustache Mondays, a club downtown at Charlie O's that I've been hearing a lot about. I used to have a love affair with Downtown LA and for a time I was trying to start my own crusade to make it the "happening" place. Maybe I wasn't so successful, and after moving to West Hollywood kind of abandoned that idea altogether. However I still love downtown and so I had been wanting to go to this ...

This blog is perhaps a tad late but I wanted to put it up before the end of the month. Here, I look back at the songs that made me happy in 2007. 10. "Slut Buffet (Solar City Slutty Radio Edit)" by Shitting Glitter vs. Solar City - I would be remiss not to include this track on the list because I probably didn't hear any other song more in 2007 than I heard this song, and no song gave me more personal satisfaction or enjoyment. Hearing this song being played at The Abbey, at Chi Chi LaRue's Dirty Deeds, at Blender, or any other bar I heard it in always immediately made me feel a whole lot better than before I was hearing it. More people heard my band because of this song than any other song. Having said that, I am sort of now officially "over it" and that's why it's only #10 on my countdown. After all, it's a remix and it's also a song we recorded several times and has appeared on 4 or 5 different Shitting Glitter projects already, beginnin...

Just a warning: this blog may ramble and contain many asides! My brother has begged the rest of his blogging family members to get on the horse as far as our blogs are concerned and get something written before the holidays! Since this month has already been completely jam-packed and fun filled, it's going to be difficult to sum it all up in an orderly fashion. First, as you all know, I went home for Thanksgiving last month. I got to spend the holiday with most of my family (mom, dad, and Adrienne) as well as my cousin Amy, my aunt Sharon and uncle Tim, my cousin Andrea, her husband Dallas, and their three kids; and my uncle Ronnie and Aunt Lisa, their daughter Caitlyn and her boyfriend Colin. Hopefully I didn't miss anyone there! It was a fantastic day. We drove back to Kansas City that night because my plane was leaving the next day. On the way to the airport, we stopped at a casino called Argosy, where we indulged in an all-you-can-eat brunch buffet - as if we needed more fo...

Today, my sister and I took my mom and dad (even though technically my dad drove, so he took us) to Weston, MO to go shopping and then out to dinner at a restaurant/winery. It was a joint birthday present from my sister and I, since my dad's birthday is this month and my mom's is next month. Weston is about 25 miles north of Kansas City; my parents live in Olathe which is about the same distance (I believe) south of KC. Weston was apparently a place back in the olden days where farmers raised tobacco and people would get off the riverboats and onto a stagecoach to head out west. (I hope I got that bit of history right). Today, Weston is a BEAUTIFUL little town, that looks like something out of a picture book. Let me back up. First, dad drove us through some similar little town called Parkville I think, and I had a weird deja vu moment when I saw this beautiful college campus up on a hill. I told my family I had dreamed this place before, but because I've been saying t...

It's funny how bands can mean everything to you at one point in your life, then slowly fade out of your mind for years. When I was in the 8th grade, The B-52's were like the second coming of Christ, as far as I was concerned. Although completely mistaken into thinking they were a "new" band when I first saw the video for "Channel Z" on MTV during the summer of 1990, I quickly discovered the band's long history and began collecting all their albums. I had the cassingle of "Love Shack" about 2 months before anyone else in my school had even heard of the B's. One of my proudest moments in all of junior high was when I "premiered" the video for Roam at a Christmas Party my parents let me have at our house for the entire 7th and 8th grade classes. Several weeks later, Roam would become inescapable. So, it's probably no surprise that last Friday night when I got to see the B-52's live for the second time in my life at the LA...

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...