home | musings index | feedback | other journals
eya, our resident window expert, replaced the worse of the two windows broken by Matthew Hart during his Kappa Mutha Fucka residency. I helped out a bit. We stacked up tires outside the house to serve as scaffolding. We didn't have a ladder, but it was actually pretty easy anyway. Both Jessika and I are in the market for a job, and to facilitate the process, I drove us both to UVA's department of personnel (we stopped at Gilmer on the way to check our email). The department of personnel is a cold unfriendly place, and the nature of Virginia State applications does nothing to ameliorate this feeling. Jessika reported that she felt like a number not a name. We continued on to City Hall so I could drop off an application for a library job. On the way back to Kappa Mutha Fucka on Cherry Avenue, we simply had to stop at the Salvation Army to buy 8 track tapes for our new stereo. We spent way too long there, as usual, even though their 8 track selection wasn't too hot. We also bought a few vinyl albums because now we can play records. We're hanging out listening to the haul. We just heard a compilation of Carpenter's singles, and now we're listening to 1999 by the artist who was then known as Prince. I kind of like the nostalgia of the Carpenters, even if I'm a little embarrassed to admit this. It's a cold cloudy day, and we're not too inspired. I think Jessika is already hitting her Sambuca, and it's only 5pm. Deya cooked up some polenta, a foodstuff made of maize (corn) that comes in a big sausage-like loaf. Cooked up, it tasted like grit patties, which my Dad used to make.
ost of the evening we sat around talking about things and listening to Jessika's latest favourite 8-track tape, a compilation of 30s big band numbers called Jukebox Saturday Night. She found it today at the the Salvation Army and didn't think she was going to like it. But it's got a Wizard of Oz tune on it and lots of the songs sound like they're being sung by munchkins, so of course she plays it continuously now. We discussed the indelible imprint that music leaves on our childhood. There's something about the memories triggered by a song you heard when you were five that will never have an equal the rest of your life. For Deya and Jessika, that's the music of the early 80s. For a long time I didn't understand this fascination with early-80s music by my friends, but then I realized one day that it's exactly like my fascination with early-to-mid 70s music, extending even to such dustbin-of-history material as the Carpenters.
e watched Southpark, of course, but, unlike the others, I didn't pay attention and I didn't laugh. I really want to like that show, but all it ever does is annoy me. Instead I found myself reading an article in an abnormal psychology book about identical schizophrenic quadruplets, the Genains. |