DEATH SUCKS, LET'S PARTY

Shitty post.

2010-07-24T22:57:00.000-07:00

Hey guys. I wish I was posting under better circumstances, but it can't be helped.

I'm in a serious financial jam at the moment, and I need money by Thursday to publish the next issue of my zine in time to take to Warped Tour, which will undoubtedly be the biggest moment for the zine and my imprint all year. It's the biggest gathering of "our kind" that's going to happen this year, and I'm going to turn up empty-handed if I can't get some $$ in my hands by Thursday, so I can run the new issue of Burn Your Friends to the printer and get it all folded and stapled in time for Friday's debauchery.

And since I don't weigh enough to donate plasma and I don't have a job or any other means that could get me enough money to print up my zine by the end of the week, I've made the decision to put two of my typewriters up for sale. I'll resort to Craigslist on Monday, but I wanted to give them a day out in the typosphere to see if I could get one (or both) to a good home where I know they'll be loved and appreciated, and not made into jewelry.

Edit 7/25, 10:45 PM: somebody has already made a deal with me to buy the Lettera 32, so I'm removing it from the post. If, for some reason, that doesn't go through I'll contact the other people who were interested. Thanks for considering, though. :]

--

First up for your consideration is Jimmy, a beautiful Smith-Corona Classic 12. My great-uncle was the original and only previous owner, and Jimmy was shelved "sometime in the eighties" and didn't resurface till I got him in November. Aside from normal wear on the squidgy pad on the carriage return and normal signs of aging, he's been very lightly used. My dad (a former Olivetti tech) gave him the usual shakedown and cleaning and he works like a dream. His carriage is extra-wide and you can put a normal sheet of paper in sideways and type on it, which is rad. He boasts a pop-up paper support and a "jeweled encasement". He's a delightful shade of institutional gray-green, and I was planning to strip off his body and get him powder coated "Kroil can" orange. He comes with the original manual (a little worse for wear, but hey it's nice to have) and a sticker in the lid of the case touting Smith-Corona's service plan. Sweet, right?

His case is plastic, his body is metal, and the case latches properly and everything.

I'm not putting an asking price, but feel free to make an offer. I can email with better pictures. And if you end up buying him, I'll throw in a pack of vintage typing paper...if somebody else doesn't buy the other one first, and take the typing paper. Oh, and I'll toss in a copy of the zine too

--

So, yeah. Never thought the day would come when I'd be selling off typewriters to finance self-publishing. But if you want to help out a starving artist, please consider giving one of these babies a home. They love you. They want to caress your fingertips and help you make sweet, sweet words happen. Please take them, so I don't have to sell them on Craigslist, because I know there are some really scary keychoppers living in my area and I don't want to go into An Unnamed Antique Shop I Frequent and see either of them made into bracelets. That would break my heart even more than sending them to live with a new mommy or daddy.

If you're interested, email me at psycho(dot)zine(at)yahoo(dot)com and make an offer. I have no clue how much it'll cost to ship either of them, but Jimmy weighs at least five pounds. We can work something out, and I can send better pictures and test pages.

This is really tearing me up, but I'm unemployed and can't afford to put my zine out. But it needs to come out. And in order to do that, I need to have cash in my hand by Thursday. This is honestly my last resort...they're the only valuable things I own.

Thanks for reading this, and wish me luck I guess...

xo
julia

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

2010-06-13T19:11:00.000-07:00

So I really did go MIA on you all for a long while. I'm sorry. Blogger has managed to entice me back with a snazzy new redesigny thingy, and we all know how much I love my HTML.

I don't really know what to say here, other than I've been keeping up with your posts, and it seems like y'all have been slacking nearly as much as I have. I've had to start following snack food blogs to fill the void--seriously.

So right now I'm sitting here eating milk coffee Pocky and my birthday was yesterday and I went on a lovely date with a gothy boy I'm sort of irrational about (sometimes, I love being young. I can be nose over tail for a new guy every few months and it's perfectly normal) but who I'm not officially dating-dating yet, and listening to Saves The Day and wondering how the hell I'm going to maintain my tyepcasty image when all my machines need new ribbons stat and I'm out of a job...again. My mom is still crazy and drunk, I got a new notebook somewhere along the line, I put out my first music zine (which you can buy here) (issue 2 is coming soon) (parentheses), and basically life just continues as normal.

I update Livejournal almost every day with fannish crap and rambling about boys, because I feel like I've kind of set an image for this blog and if I were to come over here and just babble about how difficult it is to be a funny-looking chick with opinions when you want to date I think it would alienate everybody. So I do all my minutae-related creepy life posts over on LJ, under strict friends-lock because I really, really don't want a potential employer linking me to the exploits of my love life and the crazy shit that happens with my friends. Plus, I don't think anybody over here would really be interested in constant flailing spamming about how I hate William Control's new album and want Hawthorne Heights to come back to Michigan, etc etc. So I'm still undecided on where to go with this anymore. I dunno. Nothing cool really happens...my life has just become entrenched in boy-drama of the most fucked-up degree and I work too much. I'm sure once I stop working (June 30) I'll have more time to get in ~crazy adventures~ and stuff.

I dunno, tell me what you guys want to read? I'm out of ideas and feel so uncreative anymore.

xo
julia

Oh dear god, did you think I died?

2010-04-12T22:01:00.000-07:00

Hey y'all. I know it's been a long-ass time. I know I've let you all down terribly and I'm a bad blogger and should be beaten with big sticks. It's after 1 in the morning and I'm watching a TV preacher yammer about the evils of masturbation. I think I've hit a new low, even for me.

I honestly haven't read any google alerts or blogs or anything since mid-February, which is a LONG-ASS TIME for me. I've been super active over on LJ, though, mostly whining about zines and fannish things and what my girl parts are doing at any given moment. But now I've kind of gotten into the swing of things at my job, and the boy ships off to boot camp on the 27th, so I'll have plenty of time to myself for the next six months to write bad fanfiction, zine a lot, and hopefully stay caught up on the goings-on around the 'tubez. You know. Instead of crying myself to sleep every night and gorging on ice cream.

I'll be back later, to update about zines or something. I'm having a conflict in my online presence, as it were, and it's no doubt going to be fascinating. :P

xo
julia

I am Jack's plot spoiler.

2010-02-03T22:07:00.000-08:00

It's one o'clock in the morning. My wisdom teeth are coming in and I'm shaking the bottle of Advil over the kitchen sink, but the pills keep sliding back in due to extraneous foil bits I never bothered to get off of there. Fight Club is on TV and I'm listening to Tyler Durden beat the shit out of the character played by Edward Norton and when I stick my face in cold water I'm thinking about how millions of 'badass' jocks across the country would be offing themselves if they knew that the badass ubertough they so aspire to be is a figment of a gay man's imagination.

The water is icy, practically slush out of the ground and tastes vaguely of lime--the mineral, not the delicious citrus. I drink directly out of the faucet, water-fountain style, till I can taste it in my nostrils and my ears are cold.

Back in the living room, Edward Norton shoots himself in the head and punches a gaping hole in the left side of his face. My whole head feels swollen, I've been giggling all day at nothing because I've been so hyped up on ibuprofen. My pain mirrors the Narrator's. My teeth are coming in on the left side.

I'm sick of seeing the same rebroadcast J.D. Salinger obit everywhere

2010-01-28T13:50:00.000-08:00

J.D. Salinger wrote books like Catcher In The Rye and Nine Stories and was my favorite author when I was in my My Chemical Romance, swoopy hair, woe-is-me depressive phase. Find me one literary-hipster that doesn't have a dogeared copy of Catcher on their bookshelf and I will immediately revoke their fake glasses and ironic moustache.

J.D. Salinger also kicked the bucket this morning at the age of 91. Dude was old. He was also what I would consider marginally crazy; living off in New England somewhere all alone and writing for himself and being an old grouch to everybody. From what his daughter says, he was batshit insane, but that's ok. Dude could write.

I first read Catcher when I was in the eighth grade and I thought it was so subversive. Holden was saying things I wanted to say and--even though everybody else, when we read it in 11th grade, said it was pointless--the book really spoke to me. I think that's more because I like people-driven books, as opposed to plot-driven. I don't need a bunch of shit blowing up everywhere to make a book exciting. I'm content to read about fictional people's emotions, cuz it makes me feel more normal.

I can't say Salinger has been a major influence on my writing or anything, cuz he really hasn't. I think the only thing I've taken from his work is that now I know it's totally ok to ramble at length about things that don't really drive an external plot, because internal action is just as good. And I frequently write entire stories in which nothing happens. Seriously.

So yeah, J.D. Salinger died, this is very sad. He was a cool writer with great emotional depth and the ability to write entire books in which nothing really happens. I'm sick of seeing the same thing over and over about him dying, because it's boring and sucks.

The end.

xo
julia

No hardcore dancing in the zine room: looong post.

2010-01-10T16:24:00.000-08:00

My order from Microcosm got here on Friday (sooooo fast, considering I ordered and paid with a check I had to mail to them, and it was New Years and everything else) and I am tickled about this. Super fast, super easy, they are a bucket of win and kittens.

I'm gonna throw down some quick'n'dirty reviews and stuff here, k.

I got...

Hot Damn and Hell Yeah/The Dirty South Cookbook (two books in one! $5) - Kitschy and wonderful vegan cookbook. Instead of being a typical upside-down-on-one-half flip-zine-style split book, the book just becomes another book halfway through.
I love the design of it--the HD&HY half is Southwestern/Mexican recipes with Old West-themed skeleton illustrations. They're wonderfully detailed and have a strong Día de los Muertos vibe to them. The descriptions below the recipe titles read like the Stranger is speaking them. So do the recipes, but not so much that they're unclear.

...And it includes recipes for things like Chili Gravy, tortillas, black bean salsa, bourbon BBQ sauce, vegan Worcestershire sauce, red beans 'n' rice, breakfast burritos...oh yeah, and pot pie. Be still my heart!

The Dirty South half has cute thick-lined illustrations of kitchen tools and foods and stuff, and the recipes really shine. Ohhhhhhh the recipes. I was going to spend $18.95 on Vegan Soul Kitchen, but this is like all the recipes I'd actually use, if I even found them in there at all. Dirty rice, cornbread, collard greens, Johnny cakes, BBQ tofu, mint julep sorbet, red velvet cake, carrot salad, macaroni casserole, Fake Fried Chicken...sort of like eating at my Mawmaw's, only without all the lard! ;D ~
postcard advertising Nate Powell's stuff. It's cute, it was a freebie. :]
Indestructible (a book! $5) - I got this for the art, and it doesn't disappoint. Cristy's sense of perspective and ability to actually draw people and places in her own style is just...amazing. However, as much as I love the art, I wish there was more of it and less comes-off-as-overly-dramatized-rhetoric, implausible-for-teenagers dialogue in the text. It's like when Jhonen Vasquez started waxing poetic about the futility of meaning and stuff in the Johnny comics. Make with the art and killing, a little less speech bubbles, plz.

The story is a bunch of tales of Cristy's adolescent struggles with her sexuality, feeling outcast, and her strong Cuban upbringing. It was good, but it made me feel like most zines do, that because I don't ride a bike everywhere or listen to Crass, shave my legs, and have never doubted that I'm straight, that I am somehow less-qualified to write a zine. But Cristy carries it off well, and I found myself cheering for her anyway. The subject matter's just not my cup of tea...maybe I'm still too close to my own high school experience, or something.
"Support Green Scare Prisoners" and Microcosm sticker (not pictured is the "a hamburger stops a beating heart" that I later discovered in my couch cushions--all of them were freebies)
19c. (zine! $2) - A zine about a girl who spent a year reading nothing but 19th century literature. Compelling, because it's a whole world I've barely dipped my toes in, and she spent a whole year totally immersed in it. I admire that kind of dedication. The layout's typical of zine layout, it's photocopied a little dark, but it's darling and reads quick.
Brainfag Forever (BFF) (kinda sorta comic anthology! $8) - Not only are Nate Beaty's cityscapes fantastic, so is his lettering. Honestly. I'm in love with his lettering, especially his titles. Oh, yeah, and the book is thick, entertaining, and makes me want to get off my butt and write moar and get a job so I don't end up like him, which is more than any high school guidance counselor's ever been able to motivate me. I think it makes me want to move because I see so much of him in me or vice versa; he's got that frustrated-single-person and constant-identity-crisis thing going on, and it's like reading about me.

Also, his comics about how much living in an electrified greenhouse in Washington State sucks don't necessarily make me NOT want to do this anymore, but definitely take some of the 'ooh! shiny!' romanticism off it. Thank you, Nate Beaty, for making a compelling anthology of what you consider your personal best comics, and for slightly dissuading me out of living in a greenhouse in Washington, among other things. Your drawings are spiffy, too.
I Was A Teenage Mormon (zine! $4) - It's tiny, the text is tiny, and I saved it for last because it was the thing I was most excited about. A pocket-sized 136 pages that promises me to be about the author's experience of being a teenage girl in the Mormon Church. If that sounds boring to you, then go read something else, cuz I'm taking this with me to read in line at the show tomorrow cuz it's tiny and adorable and photocopied well and did I mention text-heavy? Seriously. 136 pages, mostly text, with a nifty glossary of terms in the back. I consider this a win, unless I read it and it turns out to be a pile of failure and stupid, but I doubt it will be.

My total, with shipping (media mail cuz I'm a cheap bitch), was $28.25 and I paid it by check. Microcosm is awesome like that, because you can place an order online, print your order form (I handwrote mine, due to my printer not working), and mail in a check, if you don't like using credit cards on the internet or are a broke student and need to deposit money so your payment doesn't bounce but are impatient and want to get the order rolling anyway.

Every book I ordered is printed flawlessly. The bindings aren't shoddy, the pages are all tight and square and the same size, the covers are beautiful, the paper feels good, the illustrations and text are all crisp. It's not hard to read or anything. I'm not strained to read anything, nothing's too dark or too light, and they look like books you could pick up in the paperback section of any big box bookstore, only without the conscience-sucking guilt that comes along with throwing your money at those kinds of places. Because with these books, it lists who worked on them, it lists how big the printings were, it lists how to get a hold of people. It's not sterilized or bodyguarded by any stretch.

So as you can see, I'm flailing around with glee about Microcosm, the books they make, their fast shipping, their transparency, their free goodies, and their general awesomeness. This is my endorsement of their awesomeness, so order from them, support zine people, and be awesome.

-------------

In personal zine news, I have to write either 5 or 9 more pages and do the cover for Save The Last Laugh, which used to be called Dreamlanders till I got mad at that name and scrapped most everything I'd written for it. I've got a couple short blurbs to write up, plus an essay that needs to get typed or copied down nicely or otherwise formatted, plus a few more ideas floating about that are all essay-length or so. I need to get my paper cutter back from my dad's house though, because once I get all my spreads done, I'm going to have to cut them apart for collating, and I refuse to do that with scissors. It'll end badly.

I'm hoping to have it finished by the end of next week, but my mom's going out of town, I'm starting one or two jobs, and I've got two shows between now and then. Also, my car needs to get aligned, we have a house inspection, and did I mention I have to start working. I don't know what scares me the most out of all of this.

I'm back and forth on the cover concept, and that's bugging me, cuz I wish I could do some kind of superdetailed cityscape, but I just can't draw like that. I kind of suck at drawing, actually, compared to other people, so I don't want to parade my drawing-fail around in the open. I kind of want to do something that looks like an old-school monster comic, but I'm concerned that it might get mistaken for an actual monster comic when I give it to Vault of Midnight (a comic store in the area) to sell. Plus, I can't draw like that. WTF, life.

The cover concept I'm floundering on is a giant typewriter, which appears to have been spattered with blood. But I'm concerned how this will translate to black-and-white, I'm concerned with my ability to draw it, and I'm concerned I might be entirely misleading or putting off potential readers.

Thus far, my features (planned or otherwise) include a couple things about my breakup with Brett, a thing about how I don't feel like a 'real' zinester, a page titled "Morrissey Can Kick Your Band's Ass", this typecast (with spiffy zombie illustration!), a page titled "Dear Ugly Scene Girl", a thing about being a n00b, a thing called "I Believe in Andrew W.K.", a spread of miscellaneous typed bits that I needed to throw somewhere, a bit about feeling distinctly 'Michigan', a report from the scene at the Aiden/Anti-Flag show I'm going to tomorrow, a thing about my bff's surprise pregnancy, and a thing about how awesome it is to interact with people who fail to realize I'm spooky.

I don't want to mislead people or put them off or anything. Ugh. My debut issue, so hard.

I'll shut up now, cuz if you've reached the bottom of this entry, you're a saint.

xo
julia

p.s. I totally welcome choice photos of really old-school typewriters (nothing too postwar) and/or other cover concept ideas, if you've got anything. I just can't see the forest for the trees, anymore.

I swear I'll make a real post again eventually

2010-01-06T14:12:00.000-08:00

Dear Pottery Barn Teen design team and/or prop manager(s):

Please stop arbitrarily sticking typewriters in rooms geared toward 13-18 y.o. girls. These people typically do not own typewriters, especially people whose rooms look the way you've pictured. I'm being harsh, yes, but I don't know many private-school student-council-type 13-18 y.o. girls who have typewriters.

It does not make the supposed inhabitant of the room look more 'continental' or 'cultured' or something. It just makes you look like a dumbass who doesn't realize there are people like me out there who will rage at you over these things.

Furthermore, this piece of failed set dressing has made me not want to spend $149 on a peace sign lamp from you after all.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that even if a fifteen-year-old ~perfect~ girl owned a typewriter, it would be IN THE BLEEPING CASE when not in use instead of sitting out ready to be stepped on by the cat you also put in the room, or have that smoothie you put on the corner of the desk spilled in it.

I mean, honestly.

Kisses,

Julia Eff.

(Hey Brigadiers--who's the youngest person with a typewriter you know? When did you get your first?)

When it's Me vs Stationary Objects, they usually win.

2009-12-28T14:56:00.000-08:00

Yeah, it was sort of like that.

Today my little crapbox car and I picked a fight with a curb and lost. It was a few minutes after noon. I was freshly showered and my hair was done and my makeup looked good and I had the snow scraper in the backseat. With Christmas money in my pocket and visions of a new Hole CD dancing in my head, I hit the blinker and tried to turn onto Lafayette from the service drive or whatever that thing is that runs topside over that one part of Woodward just after 10.

It was snowing. I should have known better, it was snowing. I should have cancelled the whole outing, told my cousin I had to bitch out, and sat at home with a stack of DVDs and a pot of tea all day. Nobody else is buying up the Hole CDs, they'll be there later. I shouldn't have been there in the first place.

So it was truly surreal when I felt my car start to go sideways, with no traction, then sort of rotate...I saw what the day could have been, with fuzzy pajamas and a pot of tea, before my tiny car and I smacked into the curb wheel-first.

It was okay. It was okay. I was okay, the air bags didn't deploy or anything, and once it stopped moving I put the parking brake on and the four-way flashers and scrambled over to that side to check it out. It looked fine.

I'm obviously not the best judge of these things, cuz it's pulling to the left when the steering wheel is straight and my dad came by and crawled under there to tell me I have a bent tie rod. Luckily, it's not going to cost the arm and leg the mechanics I called all quoted me, we can do the work in his driveway, and I'll be roadworthy by the end of the week.

It needed an oil change anyway.

The moral to this story is, of course, that I shouldn't be allowed out when there are floaty white things falling from the sky. I guess I'm one of those insane fuckers I complain about. It must come from living in Michigan.

I went outside today and all I got was this lousy typecast.

2009-12-20T20:16:00.000-08:00

Click through to read it in full size.
Today was actually pretty cool, when you drink enough to forget the battle with the crosswalk-hating hipsters. Except only do the drinking metaphorically, because I don't drink, much to the great despair of everybody except me.

I went to the used bookstore in 'downtown' Ferndale and bought Hip: the History and Dirty Blonde, which is that book of Courtney Love's diaries. Really nice book and I got it for $13 in hardcover instead of the $35 list price. Looks like new. I'm really excited for Christmas now, because I'm going to wrap it up and stick it under the tree for myself and not read it till then.

Then I hustled onward to Royal Oak, where a small girl was so distracted by my funny hair and gaudy hat-brooch combo that she managed to ignore my batty tallness and mistake me for an elf.

Awww, look. We even have the same exasperated 'aren't you a precious little snotwipe, now stop looking at me' smile to use on children in crowded bookstores. The mix-up was totally understandable, guys.

Crazy seems to gravitate to me. Maybe it's the hair.

xo
julia
p.s., as a footnote, I typed this on the still-ugly-as-sin Jimmy, on the envelope my xmas money from my (ex?) stepdad came in. I'm so eco-friendly I can hardly contain myself.

Please stand by

2009-12-19T23:07:00.000-08:00

We will return to your regularly scheduled snark once the
holiday funk leaves us the bloody hell alone. Do not panic.
I have not fallen off the face of the planet, yet. There is no
reason to panic. This is merely a test of the emergency
broadcast system. We will return to your regularly scheduled
snark after a brief word from our sponsor...

When fighting for freedom, never wear new pants: a typecast.

2009-12-07T20:23:00.000-08:00

Click to read it big.
The first snow fell today. It wasn't even real snow, it was the occasional flurry, but everybody went insane anyway. You'd think people that have lived here their whole lives would be able to handle seeing the yearly cold white drifty thingies in the sky, but apparently not.

We eventually got an xmas tree, though. Even if my mom's last-ditch effort didn't work, thus we purchased a pile of crap, and had to take it back to a different store. The second store's paint section didn't look like it had been run over by a truck, but the people were just as fucking nuts, so the experience wasn't much different.

I got the paint though.

xo
julia

Brothers and sisters, I am an atomic bomb: a typecast

2009-12-02T12:42:00.000-08:00

Witty click-it-to-make-it-bigger text goes here
Brought to you this time by the newest addition to the brood, Jimmy. He's a Smith-Corona Classic 12 sent from Washington D.C. by my grampa's brother. I've spent the last two days cleaning the keys and what-have-you, and now he's purdy. His case (body?) leaves a little to be desired; I think he was at one time some shade of blue but has since gone this nasty green color. Which is more than likely the case, because the keys all looked like they'd been dipped in coffee and decades-old rubber cement. My uncle (the original owner) also did things like stick masking tape on the body/case, which over time became ~one~ with the paint and now refuses to let go, no matter what kind of solvent my dad and I threw at it.

So there are no pictures of him yet, because my dad's xmas present to me is going to be to strip off the cases and take them to be powdercoated an irritating orange color, and I don't want to show him off till he's good and purdy. So he's got nasty masking tape residue all over and I'm not going to bother to try to chisel it off, because the powdercoating guys use some kind of highpowered sheep-dip to take off all traces of paint and gunk and everything else, and it's just not worth the effort.

Art's from one of my favorite comics ever, Screamland.

xo
julia

No means no: open letter to Mom.

2009-11-24T20:28:00.000-08:00

Tonight, when my mom came down from her latest tantrum du jour, it was 11:00 PM and my stomach was about to eat itself for the third time over. All I'd eaten today, in the midst of the job hunt and tutoring and crap with Michigan WORKS! again, was a cup of stale tea leftover from last night and some roasted potatoes. By eleven PM I'd been up for more than thirteen hours and my IM buddies were urging me to go get some food before I collapsed onto the keyboard and started twitching.

(No, I haven't noveled, why do you ask? >>)

I went to make soup before I died, rinsed the can out, and went on the porch to put it in recycle. My mom was out there smoking and then grilled me about my eating habits, asked me again for the third time this week if I'm on drugs, and I just shook my head and walked away.

Dear Mom:

I know Most People My Age are twats with about as much moral fiber as a hunk of Jell-O, but I'm not like that. Yes, I go to Big Scary Rock Shows that aren't all that big but they're genuinely scary to you, I go to them quite frequently sometimes (early spring and late fall seem to be when EVERYBODY tours at the same time and so I have to go to a bunch close to each other time-wise cuz otherwise I'll miss these bands till next year). I don't drink there, I don't have sex with people there, I don't try to get in anybody's pants or kiss anybody or do drugs, I mostly just sit around and gossip stupid fanshit with my best friend, talk shit about oh my god those girls whyyyyyy are they HERE oh dear god they were at Attack Attack, why are they heeeeere, mosh, talk to the dudes in the bands, and insult the crappy local acts. I'm not a starfucker, my friends are all transexuals with facial piercings I met on the internet or chicks I was in Girl Scouts with back in grade 4, and on top of that I'm straightedge.

I'm not edge in the obnoxious way, like that kid at the Color of Violence/Fear Before/Baptized In Blood show we drove to Toledo for, who flailed around hardcore dancing and called everybody assholes for drinking in a bar because he's straightedge and he's also in a bar. (And his reason for being edge, when asked to explain, is "BECAUSE I'M FROM D.C. YOU FUCKWIT". So smart, there, dude, thank you for mutilating my system of beliefs.) But I'm edge nonetheless, mom, I'm just quiet about it. Even though clubs don't ID me anymore cuz I look 24 or something, I tell them to mark my hands so everybody knows I can't or won't drink. I don't go to parties. I've never gone to a party in my life. My definition of a party is a football party at My BFF The Girl Scout's house with her family, while we hide out in her room with junk food and talk about how awesome we are. I don't like the feeling my meds give me sometimes, and I'm not going to do that to myself voluntarily.

By wasting money I don't have.

On something my body is going to process out in a few hours anyway.

As if it didn't disagree with my basic fundamental core values on so many levels.

Mom, I'm so edge I'm almost VEGAN. I've never been high or drunk or smoked anything or taken anything funny in my entire life and I intend to keep it that way. When I was fourteen, I read a magazine article about how Davey Havok, this famous rockstar I look up to, who's in a wildly successful little band called AFI, has never smoked or drank in his entire life and he's vegan and that has a name; when all my other friends were getting into drugs and partying and I was sitting at home listening to music still, I finally had something to call it, and that was edge.

You have a much weaker moral compass than mine, though, so I don't really expect you to understand the lifestyle, but at least stop treating me--a slightly nocturnal, proud edge kid who wouldn't dare risk her street cred at this point, if nothing else--like some kind of goddamn junkie because I'm telling you I don't do drugs and won't do drugs but go to get some soup at eleven PM.

Thanks, bitch,

xo
julia

Apply pants directly to forehead

2009-11-23T13:45:00.000-08:00

Dear Michigan WORKS! Program:

When I write on my application that I'm 18 and have only made $140 in the last six months, this is not your cue to call me back to tell me about EXCITING UNPAID INTERNSHIPS!!!1! If I wanted unpaid internships, I would go back to MetroTimes instead of bothering to dick around with all of your paperwork.

Further, I'm 18, I'm not taking classes right now, don't put me in the YOUTH PROGRAM11!!!1! that will find me things like unpaid internships and two-hours-a-week-cleaning-toilets. No. I have one of those lined up right now, I don't need more that'll conflict with the scheduling of my first two-hours-cleaning-toilets job.

I'm 18. I'm not taking classes. I still have bills to pay. I wrote on my application that I'm looking for jobs involving feature writing, illustration, and graphic design. This does not give you the go-ahead to sell me to some struggling hipster magazine as a coffee bitch for no pay and expect me to be happy about it. In fact, I don't want anything to do with the struggling hipster magazine, or being a coffee bitch unless I'm being paid at least $8 an hour to do so.

I've told you this several times. Are you ignoring me, or are you really pants-on-head retarded?

Kisses,
julia

Adventures in 23K-land.

2009-11-22T22:32:00.000-08:00

I'm at that shoot-your-writing-device stage with NaNoWriMo, personally. It's not the month's fault, it's not the one making my brain take a dump. It's not my story's fault, it knows where it's going and what's happening. My grey matter has simply turned to mush. Putting one word in front of the other seems like something I can't cope with. Of course I have plenty of steam to write a post about how I have no steam, but whatever.

It's 1:37 AM and I didn't even do a thousand words today. One of my MCs had a cigarette, the other burned his draft card. That's all that's going on, folks, it's now the third week in February, they're still in Utah, and I'm at 23,665 words for the night.

It's been five days and I've only written 2,000 words. This is getting disconcerting, especially with only a week left in the month.

Tomorrow isn't looking much better, either; I have to finish filling out a job application and drop it off in RO and go to Michigan Works! so I can tell them that I've been looking for months and have filled out approximately one hundred job applications, why haven't I gotten some kind of employment yet. I'm sure I'll forget to do one or both and end up at the coffee shop cruising eBay for typewriters and sulking to myself how I'm never gonna finish this novel.

Today I did pretty much everything but write, including watching a 2-hour episode of Clean House with that chick from Reno 911! as the host...you know, she screams a lot. Then I got on the computer, wrote 140 words, complained to Brett, and he then ran about like a bull in a china shop flogging me to death with a dead fish that he thought was a hammer. And when you have a dead fish that you think is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Even if they're actually hex bolts, and a hammer (especially one that's actually a dead fish) isn't going to do any fucking good. Convoluted metaphor is convoluted. Sorry for all of you trying to follow along at home.

Anyway, the boy-unit was coughing up such pearls of wisdom as:

"Let me cowrite your next novel!" (there's not going to BE a next novel at this rate, and I don't work well in teams even with my braintwins),
"You've written yourself into a corner. You're trapping yourself in with your time period. Put them in an alternate timeline! YOU HAVE BOXED YOURSELF IN, YOU HAVE TO LET GO OF YOUR TIMELINE." (uhh, dear, you can't do that with historical fiction or god will kill a kitten. Besides, this is not the new Star Trek movie, I'm not going to destroy 40 years of IRL canon/history just so you can warp this into a scifi novel. Whose novel is it again? Oh yeah, mine),
"You've Hancock'd yourself, then. You wrote your whole story in half your word count." (uhh, no, I've written maybe 1/16th of my story in half my word count, if you'd been listening you'd know that...don't compare me to Hancock, it makes me feel like shit),
"You have to introduce another character and use their perspective to tell the story. It will help with continuity. OKAY. I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING, I PLAY VIDEO GAMES. YOU HAVE TO. FINE DON'T TAKE MY ADVICE. YOU'RE UNWILLING TO ADAPT." (I'm writing a very Ordinary People-, Catcher In The Rye-esque novel, pitching a NEW character in to TELL THE STORY would--simply put--MAKE ZERO FUCKING SENSE. Tell you what, next time you write 23,000 words of anything? You can tell me how to disrupt my narrative thread, you jackass. Rage rage rage)
and then, my favorite, right before he signed off: "I'm going to go do something fun, maybe you should too."

He just. would not. let up. I was ready to murder him with the fish I was talking about earlier. I was all ready to write earlier, all geared-up and happy that I had time with my novel, but by the time I was done with THAT waste of time (seriously, that took way too much time out of my writing...sigh...) I was just so pissed I couldn't write much more. And it's the wee hours now, I'm IMing my friend that's shipping out in a week, and not much is getting done on the novel front.

Hopefully I'll get enough of a groove going tomorrow to catch up or something. Even getting half of what I'm behind, caught up, would be a miracle. I'm not giving up yet, but my apathy is starting to get the better of me. I just want to sleep till December.

xo
julia

Shanghai'd from the Typewriter Brigade thread

2009-11-21T22:39:00.000-08:00

I was in one of my local vintage stores today, procrastinating, and an Underwood (y'know, from that indecisive period when they said 'made in Italy' and looked for All The World like the Olivetti portables...) set my typewriter radar off. White/cream color, cream-and-maroon case, jammed, bent typebars, absolutely filthy, flat rollers, filthy filthy filthy platen that had been typed on with no paper in, sluggish action, dust lodged firmly in every crevice, had been left out at toddler-level in an open case...asking $40.

I'm sure it wasn't in such sorry shape when they got it in; even years of writing abuse couldn't get it THAT dirty I'm sure. (Unless the previous owner was an absolute moron with no regard for their things, but I highly doubt that was the case...) It made me sad, because it was pretty and I wanted it, but no way was I shelling out $40 for something that I'm only going to have to seriously rehab to make usable. Even if it is in the color I want. Grrrrr....

Also tragic was the Smith-Corona Sterling that they wanted $48 for and was in even sorrier shape than the Underwood. I don't even want to think about it, the poor baby. I wanted to beat the girls at the counter about the head and shoulders with my purse, sobbing and screaming obscenities and bemoaning the fate of these beautiful machines, then run away very fast before they could call the police. While hauling the Underwood off with me and attempting to zip the case at the same time, cooing reassurances to it the whole time. They might not even call the cops, they'd be so perplexed.

So that's my story, I've had too much coffee today and written jack squat, I'm somewhere to the tune of 13K behind, and I'm sitting here procrastinating and sobbing about typewriters.

This place is getting to me. I think I'm getting the Fear.

xo
julia

p.s. I had a serious case of The Fear driving home tonight. From Marysville to Utica on I-94 it was fog so thick it was the movie adaptation of Silent Hill, even with my brights on. No amount of windshield wiping would do. When I pressed the brake, I could see my own red lights because the fog was so bad. Now imagine me driving down the freeway in a fog out of a horror movie (ten foot visibility, tops) in my long coat and earflappy hat with fruit leather hanging out of my mouth, hunched over the steering wheel like a madman. Yeah, the other drivers thought it was funny, too.

Oh no no no no no, NaNoWriMo...

2009-11-18T00:09:00.000-08:00

I drew that.

It's week 3 of NaNoWriMo, for those of you that have no clue why I've been ignoring your phone calls and claiming appendicitis to get out of any other form of conversation, and last night during sprints I hit 20K and then 21K without even noticing. I'm behind in wordcount, but nothing some sprints can't fix. It's also only the very beginning of February in my story, and I have a storyline that ends at the end of December. I wrote 21,000 words about one month in my characters' lives! I don't know whether this is a good thing or if it's going to make me cry great tears of despair. I haven't decided yet. I'll decide later. No decisions till December.

I've been doing sprints to boost my wordcount. The competitive/community aspect of it makes me write more than I would if I were just sitting there by myself, so they're helping make up for the string of days I had where I wrote four hundred words or nothing at all.

Things I'm Worrying About Right Now:

The length. I'm posting it on Livejournal. Will the community shun me because it's too long? Will people not read it? How much can I crop out without affecting the story? How many words is it going to take to finish the story? How am I going to post it without making it seem like it goes on forever?
Typewriters. I'm going to typecast parts of my story, and I don't know if this has ever been done before. Well, I'm sure it has, but not in the crowd I roll with on LJ. They are fickle beasts and my life-force comes in the form of comments. What if I typecast parts of it, AND NOBODY READS IT?! AND I GET NO COMMENTS?! So I'd be working my butt off for a month and get no recognition. I'll either be exalted as a genius for creating an ~immersive story experience~ or everybody will hate me and my story will languish with its usual six comments from my friends that will read whatever I write, even if it's tentacle rape porn with characters that sparkle.
In story-world it's only the first week of February and I'm already at 21,066 words!! I was going to split my story into two parts: the first part would end the week before the Chicago riot in August, and the second part would start mid-riot and go to the end of the year. (I'm writing in 1968. Democratic National Convention, fer the win?) HOW MANY WORDS WILL IT TAKE ME TO GET THERE?! D: I'm worried that if I go any or skip more time I'll lose important things like the dramatic tension in my romantic plot aspect, or something equally brainmeltingly bad. It feels like it's not moving fast enough, but at the same time it feels like I've already gone too fast and left out important bits. And then I'm worried that part 1 is going to be a lottttt longer than part 2, or something. ACK. Oh, December, how I'm going to hate you...rewrites are going to be a motherfucker and a half.
WHAT IF NOBODY READS IT BECAUSE I'M A FREAK OR SOMETHING?! D: And I don't want to ask about the typecasting thing, because if I ask, I'll ruin the surprise, and I'm going to typecast it no matter what, just...why is LJ so retarded, that I even have to doubt the awesomeness of my typecast idea in the first place. Ugh.

So that's what's been going on. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go listen to Andrew W.K. and panic.

xo
julia

A typecast a day keeps the gremlins away...right?

2009-11-03T14:45:00.000-08:00

Santa says click to read it in fullsize or he'll cap you.

I've come to the conclusion that my creative mojo operates on a series of steam engines and magic. The reason I'm having wordcount issues, I figure, is due to a mechanical gremlin. If you're not familiar with gremlins, they are responsible for all things that vex airplanes, and also novelists. I made that last part up. But it's totally true.

Happy noveling, everybody.

xo
julia

I'm Trying Very Hard To Be Here: a typecast

2009-11-02T11:17:00.001-08:00

Click it to read it in not-strain-your-eyes-size.
NaNoWriMo is trying to kick my ass. But I won't let it. I might have to seek out a place so inhospitable I'd never be able to write in, to get the brain-juices working, but it's only 3:00 and I'm not dead.

I typed this on a section of the cover of this week's Metro Times. I am so crafty.

xo
julia

Ok, I Feel Better Now: A typecast to my idiot landlord

2009-10-28T22:23:00.000-07:00

As always, click the picture to read it in fullsize.
Hoooooboy do you wanna read it in fullsize.
That's been my week, and it's not even all on there.

In other news, I went for a job interview today as receptionist/secretary of an industrial cleaning company. I can fix printers and computers and copiers, which made the HR girl more than fifteen shades of happy. Pay's ten bucks an hour (starting!!) and it's a real full-time job with health insurance, holiday pay, upward mobility, and flexible time off. Needless to say, I'm happy about this prospect. Everybody keep your fingers crossed, cuz Jepha's ribbon's on the fritz and I need to get that replaced, and the only way that's happening is if I get some cashflow.

xo
julia

p.s. This typecast is superspecial because I also recorded almost 9 minutes of me typing the middle bit. You can download it and take it with you.
Download link

My Mother, the Hand Grenade: the epic saga continues in typecast

2009-10-16T16:55:00.000-07:00

as per always, click the picture to read it in fullsize.

It has been more than a week since my last post and I am so terribly, horribly sorry. Things have just been crazy. For a while there I was separated from not only my typewriters but also my laptop and I thought I was going to go stir crazy. All I had was a copy of On The Road and some NaNoWriMo character worksheets to amuse myself with. I thought I might die. But now all is good, all my babies have been appropriately returned to me (including Jepha the Underwood who I left at my dad's house when this whole living-not-there thing started), I'm in a coffee/tea shop in Royal Oak to bring you this blog, my bff Hayden is here, we're going to go see the Used tomorrow, and while the internet at my house still isn't working, at least I'm writing something. Even if it is just character worksheets.

I drew this on the back of one of my Very Important Character Worksheets and now I'm kicking myself. I want to tear him off and hang him on my wall, but my worksheet..! And I have no printer, were I to give in and tear him off. Oh, my life. So hard.

If you click this one, you can see the original pic.

So this is what I've been up to. I swear I'll stop being such a flake when this move is over... It's Friday Night Open Mic at Bean and Leaf in downtown Royal Oak, and I am sick of douchebags trying to get me to add them on facebook. That will be all.

xo
julia

This is me in Grade 3, baby: a typecast

2009-10-08T20:13:00.000-07:00

Click the pic to read 'er in fullsize~

Typecast brought to you by the fabulous Zelda, because although I got a new ribbon for Dorothee courtesy of The Best Boyfriend Ever, I have to gouge the spools out to make it fit in the diddly screw-on-hold-the-ribbon-in thingers.

True story, too.

xo
julia

My Mother, the Hand Grenade: a typecast

2009-10-04T11:01:00.000-07:00

(click the pics to read it in fullsize~)

A little about the title: my mom used to listen to Hole a lot when I was growing up; I distinctly remember both Live Through This and Celebrity Skin being played a lot. I don't know if my mom ever had their first album, Pretty on the Inside, or the EPs that went between LTT and CS, but she definitely had those two.

My Body, the Hand Grenade was an album of B-sides and outtakes that Hole released in October 1997. And my mom...truly is a hand grenade. She's completely insane, and not in the fun way sometimes.

It just made sense. So now you know a little bit more about the history of Hole, and my messed-up childhood. Today is such a good day for knowledge, see?

xo
julia

I could exist on caffeinated hot beverages and a thesaurus alone

2009-09-21T13:32:00.000-07:00

Still suffering from a deadly case of writer's block and still too broke for the magic book to remedy it, our HEROINE returns to the LIBRARY. The weather: rain. The CLERK's disposition: cloudy at best, with a 80% chance of thunderstorms and gale force winds.

Disoriented and dragging a dripping umbrella and soaked sweatercoat, our HEROINE stumbles through the door like a spooked giraffe in a drug frenzy, looking around wildly with a manic 'get the fuck out of my way, I need books' fire in her eyes.

The CLERK spots her and she spots back, leering and rattling over to the info desk like a scared kitten.

(Niceties are exchanged.)

Our daring wind-tossed HEROINE pleasantly inquires about signing up for a card and is met with blank stares all around. Her kind is obviously not welcome here.

The CLERK folds her glasses off her pointed grey nose and retreats down some rabbit-hole into the inner gears and crevasses of this institution in search of a manager or perhaps some Xanax to calm the nerve our HEROINE has obviously hit by not having any official, personal mail from the address she's trying to apply with; despite The Great Dripping One's ability to produce up to four utility bills for the residence on command.

Our HEROINE stands there like a loon, shuffling from foot to foot as her sweatercoat drips into her socks in stifling wet acrilyc and she puddles on the floor.

Hook-nose Grey Woman reappears with The World's Most Perfectly Spherical Human Being in tow. His head is a slicked-back bowling ball with morning stubble and chubby cheeks balanced atop a creamy puffball torso wrapped in stretch orange pique with only a polo collar to define any sort of neck. His legs very well may be nonexistent. He is a soft, bulbous, doughy pile of man; eyes sunken deep into his primordial forehead with rolls of fat on his eyelids. Aside from being fat, he is also quite stupid.

This MANAGER explains in harsh, hushed tones that without a piece of proper mail they Can't Do That, as if our HEROINE has been going around just collecting library cards like a vagrant. The CLERK is obviously pleased and they exchange a sick smile of satisfaction at thwarting yet another library-card hopeful. They are the jackal-guardians of the library, getting their rocks off on bashing somebody's quest for knowledge to shreds and dumping it out in the rain to disintegrate like paper mache.

Our HEROINE drips, stewing in rage and her own soaking filth, but smiles nonetheless and thanks them and leaves in a huff, banging the door shut on the way out and getting her sweatercoat caught like a bad Three Stooges skit.

Feeling defeated, our HEROINE heads to the BOOKSTORE and then THE 'BUCKS, still looking all the world like the lovechild of a thirties movie starlet, a supporting cast member from Les Miserables, and a drowned rat. The rest of the ordeal isn't even worth detailing, it's mostly just tragedy involving an all-Beatles soundtrack and a Starbucks full of patrons that are all too fat and drinking a day's worth of calories in one coffee alone as they play The Sims on their laptops and pretend they're actually doing something highly important.

The obvious moral of the story is that rich county libraries are book fascists, who want nothing more than to hoard all the knowledge away from skinny girls with frizzy hair and make them keep coming back just to get their own sick kicks out of repeatedly denying them a library card.

I was denied a library card for the third time today, so I went to the bookstore instead and somehow wound up with a thesaurus I didn't really need but that's far superior to the one I already have, then I went across the parking lot to Starbucks and spent my last pittance on a pumpkin spice latte and wallowed in my misery.

xo
julia

Writer's Block

2009-09-20T15:49:00.000-07:00

As per always, you can click the picture to read it in fullsize and mail me $5 to keep me in typewriter ribbons.

Just...fuckin' writer's block. Fuckin writer's block.

xo
julia

The Final Dog Days of Summer, Maybe: a Typecast.

2009-09-15T09:16:00.000-07:00

Another typecast by the darling Zelda, because Dorothee's ribbon is so hopelessly out. I'm still accepting ribbon/$5-for-a-ribbon donations, because I am shameless. Click the picture to read it in fullsize.

I was driving with my grandparents yesterday, and crisscrossing the outlying areas of Detroit is so surreal because you go from country clubs and nice landscaping and wide lawns with sprinkler systems and four SUVs in the driveway to crumbling liquor stores, abandoned cars, vacant lots, and dead weeds in the blink of an eye. Seeing the traffic change as you drive through fascinates me.

I'm one of the people with all their windows down, blaring janglepop and putting my car in neutral at stoplights and soaking up the community of it all. My grandparents drive around in their expensive minivan, windows up, A/C on, and when I cracked my window to flick out some earwax it was like the whole city was trying to climb in that inch of open space. I imagine their existence is what it must feel like to be in a Ziploc bag in the refrigerator.

xo
julia

"I love how you could just be visiting from the distant future via the Fifties."

2009-09-12T13:25:00.000-07:00

If you click the second picture, it'll take you to a magical land where it's big enough for you to read it...!

I had some time to kill today before I go to my friend's to dye my hair, so I was looking at one of my gramma's books of fifties advertisements. You know, the golden age of ads; back when everybody came out of the womb with a cigarette and a perfect coif, and eating food that was no longer recognizable as its original form was actually trendy. So much has changed since the nineteen-fifties, eh?

So I grabbed a little notepad out of the notepad drawer and started typing away on why I would like to have lived back then, and here it is. I am still scannerless so this is the best I can do. Hope it's readable.

xo
julia

p.s., say hi to Zelda again. I like her margin sets and paper guide and she has a livelier ribbon than Dorothee, so it was her turn today. Somebody send me five bucks so I can get a new ribbon for Dorothee, I miss typing on her. :[

Monda gave me an award, let's party!!

2009-09-11T20:15:00.000-07:00

This is the Honest Scrap award. When you get it, you're supposed to pass it on to seven other people who "write from the heart," but because the blogs I follow are mostly music feeds (somehow, as endearing and adorable as the Used is, I doubt they are in fact writing their own news feed) or about notebooks and typewriters and not an actual personal blog, and the personal bloggers I do follow were already bestowed this award by Monda or are Monda, I think it would be really counterproductive for me to hand it out.
Maybe I'll sit on it for a while till I follow some more people, but as-is I'd feel like a tit giving a write-from-the-heart award to...oh, I dunno, Goths In Hot Weather or the tourblog the singer from Kill Hannah keeps.

So I'm gonna sit on this award, so as to not just turn it into a massive circlejerk of giving Candance and Monda the same award again and again (cuz face it, the ladies of Crazy Texas Mommy and No Telling are pretty much the only personal bloggers I can stand), until I have more blog-friends. Or I'll just give it out over at elljay where I've got people like Hayden and Valerie who are constantly whining about their personal stuff in an absolutely heartfelt manner.

But I'll definitely do the ten-honest-things-about-me part of the meme that comes with it. I have such a soft spot for memes.

Childhood fearz, I haz dem. Oh boy do I haz dem. I still have a lot of them, actually; although I gotta say things like animatronics no longer freak me out, but the noise the ancient Fisher Price toy barn makes when it opens? Sheer terror. My boyfriend can make a noise like this toy vaccuum cleaner I used to have that scared the hell out of me? Scares the hell out of me still. I am also scared of escalators, and have been since my shoelace got caught in one when I was four.
I used to have a toy accordion. It was the greatest toy ever. I wish I had it still.
I harbor such contempt for scene kids, but you probably knew that already. I don't even know why. We were all n00b-ish piles of fail once, my old message board posts are a testament to that, but I can't help but hate the living daylights out of them.
I never use half the notebooks I buy, I just like to touch them. Take them out once in a while and smell them. I can be on my last pennies and if there's a notebook that I fancy? I'll put myself in the poorhouse for it. And then I do most of my actual writing on a keyboard of some kind, because I obviously fail at life.
I wish I blogged more, but sometimes (a lot of the time, lately) I'm just more whiny than pissed and I hate spewing teen angst. Well. Hate knowing I'm spewing teen angst.
I am an internet RPer. I'm not ashamed of it, but it's not something I've admitted up front to anybody since I started playing. And that was loooooong ago.
I'm horribly conflicted about my life's vision. I want to do...everything. Time is not on my side.
I'm still conflicted on believing in fairies or not. A fencesitter of mythology. And I'm eighteen years old. No I am not ashamed of this.
I'm my own worst critic, really. Even if I say I'm pleased with something, I'm not, so.
The Muppets. I love them. The Fraggles, too; so much that I'm currently mostly-homeless and I rescued a Fraggle toy from my gramma's garage sale. No idea where I'm gonna put it. But at least if I end up living on the streets, I will have my Fraggle.

tl;dr version:
I won an award.
Monda is awesome.
I have no blog friends, so I am just hoarding my award.
Ten things about me, as stipulated by said award.
I am obviously six years old.

xo
julia

Just one more about notebooks, ok.

2009-09-07T11:47:00.000-07:00

I have never been a fan of Moleskine notebooks. I own tons and tons of notebooks, but none of them are Moleskines.

Something about the whole Moleskine culture--
...the unwarranted self-importance the brand is built on, a thing that wasn't actually an official brand till 1996 proclaiming that these exact notebooks were used by Hemingway and Picasso and Sartre and fuckin' Van Gogh for chrissakes--
...the hipsters that never leave the house without one so they can look like they're doing something 'meaningful' in Starbucks--
...the washed-up failed dreamlander writers going to sales meetings and driving a Prius to Trader Joe's nowadays that carry one to write "the Great American Novel" in--
...the hundreds of thousands of blog entries on countless sites, entire blogs and websites devoted to finding an identical-to-the-beast replacement so you can have that identical notebook without the brand stigma, just to show how cool and not-pretentious you are--
...anybody in an airport boarding lounge, detailing what they had for lunch into one of those overpriced notebooks so they can preserve this exact moment and blog it later, because we all care so much about the mundane details of the lives of mediocre under-the-radar artists--
...the internet archives of drivel scribbled out in the so-called sacred pages of these pretentious little black books, because if you put it in the same book that Marketing says housed first drafts of Sartre, it's immediately gold--
--just sort of revolts me, more than a little.

I am obsessively anti-Moleskine. I have been since I bought one in the tenth grade, thinking it would make me a magical writer, carried it around for three weeks without writing more than a page in it total, and abandoned it when I saw that every person in the cafe at Barnes & Noble had one. Sheer disgust.

And I was having problems even writing in the thing; the first five minutes out of the cellophane I'd managed to crack the binding and piss off the pocket somehow. So it wouldn't close evenly anymore, which irritated me, and rendered the thing unusable because I can't cope with that shit. If it doesn't feel right, I'm outta there. Plus, with all the marketing built around it touting how this is the be-all end-all of notebooks that you'd only put your greatest thoughts ever in, I felt like whatever I could do wouldn't be good enough for it, and that possibly fire would fall from the sky if I tried writing my crappy fanfiction in there.

So now I'm bitter and jaded like the late-twentysomethings I see at shows who stand around and drink and bitch to each other about how great the scene was back in oh-two and sneer at anybody younger than them, nevermind they're grown people at a show full of sixteen-year-olds. I'm sure they sit around when they get home from their job at Waldenbooks or Payless and bitch to their precious Moleskine about how the world still doesn't understand their latest story (because girl-on-girl tentacle rape is simply an allegory for the war between the Id and the Ego) and that all these kids are ruining the shows they go to, doodle a portrait of their cat, and scan it to one of the art-preservation blogs devoted to these pretentious tits.

I carry notebooks with me at all times and I'm obsessive about them once I get one I like, but I'll never be so achingly self-important as to spend good money on something that's horribly mass-produced while raping us all with their 'exclusivity'. My current notebooks are an Umbrella Academy comp book that cost $6, and the new nice leather red minibook I got at the RenFest.

My previous notebook went everywhere with me till I filled it, and it was one of those "LIL FAT BOOKS!!" from Mead or whatever, gray cover, spiral bound. I think I actually stole it, but it cost less than two dollars if I recall. I could wedge it in any pocket if I tried hard enough. I had that for nearly two years till I'd filled every page with notes to self and lists and pieces of everything I'd written in those two years. I'm not claiming any of them started out very unique or special or anything, but what they turned into, once they were loved and pasted-on with pictures and autographs between the pages, was unique and special. And I filled that cheap unpretentious notebook to the bursting, dropped things (things meaning beverages) on it, set it in water in public bathrooms, stuck stickers on it; conceived multiple zines and characters in it, collected recipes and passed notes in it, did interviews in it; carried it with me to psychiatrists and therapists and regular doctors and the people that fixed my brother's broken arm, multiple air shows, every concert or festival I went to, school, work, my mom's house and vacation. That notebook saw more than most people have.

Because my little gray notebook isn't a Moleskine and therefore doesn't have this real or imagined 'spectacular' history to it, does it make it any less important and precious and interesting? I don't think so, but I'm excluded by default from posting to any of the notebook art preservation blogs because it's not a Moleskine. Therefore, it somehow less special and important to the masses than everybody else's, because it's not the creative standard. Stupid.

I'll stick to my oddball notebooks, thanks, cuz fake leather or oilcloth or whatever that is? Just doesn't sit well with me.

xo
julia

Meet my new notebook.

2009-09-06T10:58:00.000-07:00

Here's my unnamed notebook I got at the Michigan Renaissance Festival for $15 off the nice people at Under The Mango Tree. You can find some of the large notebooks on the internet at thejournalguy.

It's brilliant ruby-red leather, bound together with more leather, with a leather strap to wrap it shut. I picked it up and fell in loooooove.
The notebooks at Under The Mango Tree were actually the cheapest at the Festival; it was a notebook-only store and while most of the leatherworkers had notebooks, they were horribly overpriced IMO. (Sixty bucks for a floppy leather cover filled with a couple small legal pads with the Sam's Club logo still stamped on them? REALLY??) For an additional five dollars the nice girls there would even put a hanging loop and a lanyard on it; real sturdy hardware.

With a pair of antique kids' scissors to show scale. It's a small notebook, but very thick, filled with loads and loads of paper. The paper is what sold me on it.
It's cotton paper, and if it gets wet (as my notebooks tend to do) you can actually just fan it out and put it in the bottom of the refrigerator overnight. It'll suck the moisture out of the pages. The one girl's notebook had gotten wet last weekend at the rain rain rain going on at the fest, but it looked good as new.

Inside the flap. I can see this getting marked up really fast with my ritual abuse. Beautiful, rich, shiny leather outside; creamy off-white inside.

Inside cover, with the gorgeous paper. The signatures are sewn really securely but it still opens nicely to write in.

Paper! You can see the grain in it from where it was pressed on the screen. I love the paper. It's all nice and square and even; some of their other pocket-size models were rough-cut to look more "rustic" or whatever, which I hate. And it's supersoft and thick and takes ink like a champ. I tested all my pens on it, but ballpoint ink and pencil just sort of lay there to get smeared around. Not good not good. So I tried a Micron pen on it (real ink), and that made the world of difference! It just drinks ink, and locks it up in there forever thankyouverymuch. So now I'm investigating real-ink pens so I don't abuse my Micron pens writing in it all the time.

If you take a filled notebook back to them, they'll cut the XXX binding and refill it for about $8. That more than anything justifies this purchase to me. That, and I can just stick it in the fridge when I kill it with whatever unfortunate drink stain befalls it, and it'll be like it never happened.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be going to write in my new notebook now.

xo
julia

Singing the praises of things I should already be hip to!

2009-08-28T14:12:00.000-07:00

OH MY GOD. Why did nobody tell me what a gem the Bic White-Out correction tape rollery...thingy...is?! There's no drying time. Praise the lord!

You'd think I'd be able to figure out these sorts of products on my own, but oh no. I am slow. My gramma had some in the drawer and I grabbed it. And I swear to god I never want to use any other whiting-out product near a zine ever again.

Why am I am not being paid to say this.

xo
julia

I'm still 'shtittalks'.

2009-08-27T19:44:00.000-07:00

anonymous9905408 (10:41:29 PM): I just want to get old together with you

anonymous9905408 (10:41:41 PM): We can yell at kids to get off our lawn

shtittalks (10:42:01 PM): i had a cane today. i was yelling at kids to get off the lawn, shaking the cane at them. it was so awesome.

anonymous9905408 (10:42:07 PM): You can distract them with candy while I heat up pennies in a fry pan and throw them on them from upstairs

shtittalks (10:43:40 PM): THAT IS SO HORRIBLE. OH MY GOD. YOU'RE A SOCIOPATH.

And again, don't try IMing the blue name cuz it's not a real name. I changed it.

and p.s., I love my life.

Scene Bands In One Sentence Or Less:

2009-08-22T11:28:00.000-07:00

I decided to go on Myspace in search of some of the bands I'm not keeping up with, that I always see worn on t-shirts at shows like Warped Tour. Here's the best of the worst, with one or two that are actually worthy of their studio time and record deal.

Brokencyde: Pure sexist, talentless shit.
Millionaires: Reverse feminism!
Breathe Carolina: Pussies!
Attack Attack!: Crabcore isn't a genre, but at least you can punch people to it.
Artist Vs Poet: Swill that makes the 'deep, brooding' type of scene girls cream their panties!
Jeffree Star: Self-centered transvestite weirdtechno that every fashionfag strips to on Stickam.
Every Avenue: What happened when Fall Out Boy stuck their dicks in a blender!
Cobra Starship: Laughable at best, whiny neon vomit at worst!
The Medic Droid: They write songs about myspace, enough said!
I Set My Friends On Fire: Fun songs about killing your girlfriend.
Hollywood Undead: ...wut.
Dot Dot Curve :) : Fake hip-hop that your girlfriend can feel good about and you can find on every scene kid's myspace page.
Fall Out Boy: Sellouts of course, so deny you like them, but you own a copy of From Under the Cork Tree.
The Devil Wears Prada: Needz moar Autotune.
Drop Dead, Gorgeous: When somebody's kicked you in the dick, even a "HXC" backing band can't save you, you still sing like Joan Jett.
Bring Me The Horizon: DOOD TOTALLY HxC SCENE SCREAM AUTOTUNE BREAKDOWN Y0!
Blood On The Dance Floor: Scene fags with 'songs' about themselves that don't rhyme, like a gayer Jeffree Star over higher-pitched techno with lyrics that rival that retarded kid in ACT-prep class.
All Time Low: I have the strangest feeling of deja vu...oh right, they sound like all the other guitar-pop bands on here!
Mayday Parade: Ears everywhere bleed for them.
The Maine: What it would be like if Zac Efron made a band!
Valencia: Sounds like every other band with a 'deep' name, with girlie vocals over guitar-pop!
Cash Cash: Retarded name, even worse Autotune!
Metro Station: Utter failure.

I am not keeping up with the kids.

xo
julia

Not keeping up with the kids.

2009-08-22T00:02:00.000-07:00

There's this article in the November 29 08 issue of Family Circle Magazine about how 7 has become the new 16 for kids. And good god, is it true. There's no other way to put it--Iwas at my mom's when the article came out, and my little sister here is 12 and acts like she's 24. Dresses like it, too. Am I one of the last bygone relics from an age where people act the age they're supposed to, dress by the standards laid out as "age-appropriate" when we were growing up, and fear for the kids under us that aren't doing the same?

There are these little girls that used to follow me home from school some days, they're 7 and 6. Goddamn, they are rude. I know I can be *ahem*--a little less than pleasant--myself, but to see kids talking to "big kids" and each other that way? When I was 6 or 7, I was too terrified of a big kid shunning me or kicking my ass to talk DOWN to them. I knew they were older! And I waited patiently for the day I would grow up like my friend's older sisters and be allowed into the world of boyfriends and fashion and makeup and high-school big-kid gossip, and high-school big-kid activities, and this whole high-school big-kid world I could only spy on through books like The Babysitter's Club. And even THEN my mom considered those too racy, so I was resigned to The Babysitter's Club: Little Sisters!

So I bided my time and enjoyed being a little grimy kid, doing things like riding my bike and playing with my friends and making up things for my dolls to do, that often involved the Quasimodo action figure rescuing Pocahontas from the burning shopping mall, with the Evil Queen from Snow White throwing up her hands in the background and screaming. My cousins and I chased each other with sticks, pretended to be knights and wizards (gender lines be damned), and fell out of tree houses. We ate dirt. And I think we turned out okay.

My cousin Summer and I used to harass my little cousin Lydia for acting how all the girls nowadays act at that age--Summer and I were about 6, and Lyd was 4. She was dainty. She ate her peanut-butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off and her pinkies extended like some sort of little princess. It drove Summer and me nuts! Luckily, we couldn't exactly hit Lydia, otherwise...we'da laid down the smack.

All the time I spent at Auntie Dolores's hanging out--except it wasn't called that! It was called PLAYING!--with Summer and Lydia, there were these lurkers Timmy and Adam. Lyd is my Auntie Dolores (actually, my Great-Aunt)'s daughter Emily's kid, and Timmy and Adam are Dolores's. (Summer's mom, Sally, is also Auntie D's. Confusing, eh?)

Timmy and Adam, Dolores's youngest kids, were teenagers. For the longest time, Timmy had the bedroom kitty-corner from Lydia's upstairs, across from the bathroom. The door was covered in Beavis and Butthead and South Park posters (god, back in the early days--must have been back in the days of Mecha Streisand and Cartman's ass being under alien control--1997, 1998. History) and stuff of Satanic symbols and images. It was Big-Kid Territory. It was a no-go. The door was always shut, and I think in all the years of being over there I only saw the inside of Timmy's room all of...once.

I remember it scared the crap out of me, though. It was dark in there, he must have had sheets tacked over the windows or something, and his bedding was black and red and there were posters and enough mess that you couldn't walk in there. It was such a contrast to Lydia's lilac fairy room, always immaculate by order of Auntie D. It was forbidden. It was a whole new world of stuff we weren't allowed to touch yet. And when Timmy wasn't locked in his room blaring scary music, he was in the computer room off the living room, in the dark, on the brand-new AOL. Or playing on the Super Nintendo or Sega Dreamcast (god, remember that?! Remember that?!) with one of his friends.

The only thing scarier than the forbidden teenage world of Timmy was Adam or Emily. We never saw Emily much (she was addicted to heroin at the time, no joke, and sometimes lived in Auntie D's garage. Sometimes not. I went in there only once when Emily lived there, and it was a snuck visit on a dare with Summer. It oozed "BIG KID. GTFO, N00B." only in less lolspeak. Emily was my first experience with wigs, and dyed hair, and girls not having long hair. It freaked me right the fuck out, and nowadays, Emily is the one person I know I can always talk to at family functions. Yes, the crazy ex-junkie who sings in bands called Phallus Uber Alles and carries some of her dead boyfriend's ashes in her Hello Kitty lunchbox at all times.), and Adam rarely came out.

Adam lived in the basement off the kitchen, and I can only remember any of us going down there once or twice. It was Lydia, though, cuz she lived there and all--and it was only to retrieve some sort of toy he'd taken away from us. Adam was scary. Adam had facial hair and watched fucked-up cartoons and even though we didn't get the gritty details, we could catch the gist. It was Scary shit. He was The Ultimate Big Kid. Timmy would come out and talk to you, or at the very least put your Moffats tape in the VCR (remember that?! Remember that?!), but Adam was tall and silent and had zits and facial hair and always wore hats and black clothes and communicated mostly in a series of grunts or yells. He swore.

Big Shit for such a Little Kid. Especially a short one With Glasses.

And so was the Big-Kid Myth. That when you Got Old Enough--only it wasn't old, because when you're still living in the concept of who's older by half-years, things are measured in when you're Big Enough--you got inducted into this magickal mystickal race of nether-humans that live in their bedrooms and make messes and smoky smells and darkness and get to play on the computer. That, when you Got Big Enough, you got to take precedence and seniority over the Little Kids and can do things like kick them off the computer and get to do all these fabulous things you don't get to as a Little Kid, like stay up late and watch cartoons that your parents turn off the TV when you walk in on them as a Little Kid. Being a Big Kid was such a thing to aspire to, it was the greatest hope and dream of being a Little Kid, knowing that one day you'd get to be one of them.

Nevermind that by the time you got to Big Kid status yourself, the Big Kids of your childhood would be grown up with Babies of their own to raise, but that's a piece of logic you can't wrap your little seven-year-old brain around. You just expect everybody to stay the same age forever, even as you and your same-age cousins get older.

Being a Big Kid was a thing to aspire to, and if I was a writer back then (if I was capable of understanding the serious political and moral systems we were setting up in our logic), it would be something deserving of capital letters. Or at the very least, some sparkly pink font. Preferably Comic Sans MS; a font that's lost all of its appeal now that I have no desire to be "cute" anymore and through years of journalistic study know what the mystickal "Sans MS" in the typeface means.

Everything dulls as you get older. Nothing has quite the same magical property it used to when you were looking at it through the fresh eyes of a Little Kid. ("Every child is an artist. It's a challenge to remain an artist when you grow up," said Pablo Picasso. Speaking on the same sort of thread, I think.)

Nowadays, I harbor a potent combination of rage and sorrow for the way kids grow up. First off, I'm pissed that these little cretin ingrates get to treat us Big Kids the way they do. If I'd talked to my cousins like little kids talk to me, they would've smacked me! And because the Big Kid has been so demystified by shows like Hannah Montana and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, iCarly, Drake and Josh...I don't get to shove little kids around like I'd been essentially promised my entire childhood. Now that I'm here, it's a total letdown. Like...I waited all that time for this?

I came up expecting some sort of special executive privilege or something. Where is it? Fail, Modern America, fail. I want little kids--grade-school little punks--to look at me with that reverential look we all gave the kids bigger than us when we were growing up. I want Privilege, I want Fear By Inferiors, and I want to be Regarded With Wonder By All Smaller Than Me.

But when seven-year-olds are trying to be seventeen without realizing that's even what they're doing, when that's becoming the norm, that's being taken away. There's this fundamental innocence that's being destroyed left and right, with every oversexed doll that gets released and every new automated toy that makes the grown-up yuppie moms go 'aww!', the Just Like The Big Kids types of toys that destroy the very foundation of hope that I built my childhood on. That one day, I would have these privileges when I Got Big Enough.

If you have everything already, what is there to ask for..?

I'm "shtittalks".

2009-08-10T12:47:00.000-07:00

[15:38] shtittalks: i'm trying to go see Kill Hannah on September 29, which may conflict with my COV but i hope not.
[15:39] HaydenFuck: I will pray for you
[15:40] shtittalks: *fingers crossed* although tbh, if it comes down to OHEY KH or OHEY COV TOUR i will go do the cov thing. >>
[15:40] HaydenFuck: yeah tour > one show
[15:41] shtittalks: well like i've tried at kh like...this will be my 4th try? but they'll be around again. and cov like...may implode at any time. >> that is how i'm judging it.
[15:41] shtittalks: that's why i flipped a total shit and went to see mcr twice, cuz i know one of these days gerard's ego will break up the band.
[15:42] HaydenFuck: Hmm
[15:42] HaydenFuck: ...I can actually see that happening
[15:42] shtittalks: ikr?
[15:42] HaydenFuck: I read this thing
[15:42] shtittalks: was it fanfic?
[15:42] HaydenFuck: Where he wants MCR to preform on yo gabba gabba that fucked up nick show
[15:42] HaydenFuck: For his kid
[15:42] shtittalks: ...wut
[15:42] shtittalks: wut
[15:42] shtittalks: wut
[15:42] shtittalks: wut
[15:42] shtittalks: wut
[15:42] HaydenFuck: And he's "going to talk to the guys about it"
[15:42] shtittalks: WUT
[15:42] shtittalks: *brain just sploded*

COV=the Color of Violence
MCR=My Chemical Romance
Yo Gabba Gabba=WTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

(no, hayden's real sn is not HaydenFuck, don't message it.)

Hacking College (Or, On Being Young, Broke, and Uneducated in the 21st Century)

2009-08-10T12:15:00.001-07:00

Hi, I'm average.

I graduated high school with a GPA smack in the middle of the 'average' range. I did well on my ACT and state tests, and like most kids in my grade I didn't take the SAT. Like the other average kids in Michigan that test well, I was promised money my whole school career, money that I could then use to go to college in Michigan after I graduated high school.

They were really animate about this at my school. I come from a backwoods town made mostly of migrant farm workers who stayed, where money's tight for everybody, and as early as the fourth grade we were plugged with the promise of magic money that we'd get if we did well on our MEAP tests. When I started investigating financial aid in my junior year to pay for my big, fancy, new-fangled art school, my guidance counselor told me my best bet was to pick somewhere in Michigan and use my state scholarship money, apply for local grants, and kiss everybody's ass--which, being a lonely art kid in a jock town, I didn't qualify for a lot of the local grants because I wasn't on student government or a varsity sports team or in the marching band or have a 4.0 GPA since conception.

But after visiting a few colleges, I realized the Michigan scholarship money wouldn't be able to help me anyway, because I wasn't in love with any of the schools here. I started seeking federal aid in the form of FAFSA and in-house scholarships at the school I wanted to go to.

Then...a bit of a perfect storm of bad circumstance popped up, and I was in the middle of it.

First things first, I missed the scholarship deadline for my school of choice.

After being assured my grandparents and childless aunt would pick up the cost of the first year at Fancy Out Of State Art School, I was still going to go ahead with applying. I had strong references, but...I also had a practically negative GPA.

Make-up classes (at $125 a pop) fixed that, but by the time I got the GPA I'd missed the application deadline.

Oh, damn.

Being one who grew up with my dad shrieking "adapt, adopt, improvise!!" at me whenever something started to go wrong, I made a slight change of plans. Go to Wayne State, a school I was not really a hundred percent on, for a couple years to start my degree and get all my math and science yuckies out of the way, use my state scholarship money to pay for most of it, then transfer to my school of choice to do the rest of my degree. Totally not a bad plan, and it would keep me local so I could finish my internship here.

It was then, when I realized it'd be a good idea to use the money the state supposedly owed me for doing well on my tests, I heard these rumblings about cutting the scholarships.

This is a harebrained move on the state's part, because it's only a $140 Million program. The state has sunk themselves into a budget defecit, so what do they do? Instead of letting out some of the people that are creating a fiscal black hole in the prisons with things like minor posession charges, or stop ripping up roads and moving them six inches to the left just to have something to do, they're going to cut a program that a hell of a lot of kids depend on. One in four MSU students uses a Promise Scholarship to pay for part of their tuition.

And there's not much any of us can do but lie down and take it.

I was legitimately pissed. I wrote angry letters, I wrote zines, and I'm writing this. How dare they take away something they've promised us! Some people were really depending on that, you know?

So, instead of bawling my eyes out like any other average-but-not-quite-special-enough recent high school graduate with no job and limited fundage would do, I adapted, adopted, improvised.

There's a happy ending to this story after all. Because while I was investigating the cost of tuition at Wayne State, it occurred to me: didn't my Fancy Art School have something on their website about being a Student at Large? Didn't that cute trumpet player Alex talk about Student at Large when I slogged out to visit last summer?

So I did some more checking out, and called my Fancy Art School and talked to an admissions guru, and lo and behold it would actually be cheaper for me to go Student at Large there, just taking the classes I want (and maybe transfer into a degree program later), than it would be to go to Wayne State. Especially if my family's paying for it out of pocket. And because I'm so Attention-Deficit about everything in life, Student at Large is perfect for me. If I get sick of it, I just leave. I don't get nagged by the guilt of dropping out of a degree. I get all the knowledge I want, because that's why I'm going to college. I want to learn--I've never been big on marks and qualifying pieces of paper, so a degree has always mostly seemed pointless to me.

I'm getting a job now, or two if I can swing it, to save up to facilitate a move to the Chicago area when I start at Fancy Art School in time for Spring semester. Which works out perfectly, because my also-quite-average boyfriend will be going out there with the Navy at the same time. (He decided a degree was a waste of time, especially since he'd be paying for it on his own--now he's gonna get the US Government to foot the bill.)

When it's all said and done, it'll be a win-win situation: I get my knowledge, my art school, and none of the crap and expense I don't want.

Like most of the other average kids, it was drilled into me that college was the be-all end-all. You would get out of high school, and you would go to a four year college to get some kind of degree, and you would get scholarships and grants to pay for it. But the times are a'changin. While more and more jobs do pay way better if you have that qualifying piece of paper, if you're fine with just living on what you need (and not trying for all the out-of-your-means shit that sunk us into this mortgage-and-credit meltdown in the first place) you can get away with doing something like Student at Large.

But our economy is crumbling. Who really has $100K a kid to plunk down, especially if you've got three kids to put through college and spent their miniscule college funds trying to save the house you got evicted from?

This is my situation. I am average, I graduated with an average GPA and good test scores out of an average farm town high school. I am young, uneducated, unemployed, broke, and determined. I am comfortable with the term "Hacking College". Because hacking isn't always a bad thing--it's oftentimes just executing a trick to make life easier or more efficient, in the broad definition. I am young, uneducated, and broke, and I had nothing handed to me. I am going to make this work. Total economic meltdown is the mother of invention, after all.

--

wrote it for the College Guide here, let's see what happens with it.

xo
julia

My life is so cool.

2009-08-04T22:31:00.000-07:00

Basically, this is it.

Went to a show with Sarah and Erin today, the details aren't important but the realizations were; Sarah and me, or me anyway, we gotta go do something with our lives. I stuck $46 in the Slurpee cup on top of my dresser, taped the word "YOUTHANIZE" to it, and knocked on wood that between the two of us we'll be able to pull together enough cash to go to see the Color of Violence in September. This is us, being spontaneous. Get as much cash as we can, squeak our way down south to see a screamcore band.

Today somehow jammed a fucking epiphany in my face; I gotta stop trying to pose and I gotta stop trying to be cool and I need to get back to zining because it's something I love and not some fucking obligation. Work has me wearing thin in the writing department; I need to get back to my fucking roots and rediscover why I started down this path in the first place.

I wish America was more conducive to actually following your dreams.

We're starting a zine label. Sarah's gonna write her ass off tomorrow, just pages upon pages of bitching, and I'll help her slam together a layout and 25 copies or so, to dump at Vault Of Midnight in A2 when I drop off Dreamlanders. Her zine is gonna be a one-off called something along the lines of For The Music or Vomit or something. We're gonna work on zining our asses off, no excuses, so we have some shit to drop off before she goes back to school and we go trippin to wherever COV is playing.

I've got $50 to get Dreamlanders and Sarah's wreck off the ground, and get some shit going for our label. I want to discover zines, help the people out, get them distro, run it basically like a record label only for written word. This is my dream in motion. I'm thinking about calling it Fat Lip or something. It'll be a home base for publicity and shit for all of our stuff. I'll keep y'all posted on it.

What the hell, y'all. I am obviously tired here.

A little anecdote:

At Warped Tour I was handing out loads of Note to Self, talking to people and giving them this brain-baby of ours. Even though it was badly photocopied and ugly and sloppy and slapdash and not something either of us are really very proud of aesthetically, people came back to me asking for more. It actually felt good.

This is why I'm in it.

And in closing, hopefully when I get off work tomorrow I can come back here, grab Sarah, and beat ass over to Romeo to see Fear Before at the Static Age and yak more about zines. Go backroading a little maybe if we have the gas. I got half a tank, and the show is supposedly only ten bucks.

I'm more confused and wandering now than ever, but whatever happens, it is going to be the most badass shit ever. I got a good feeling about this.

xo
julia

On being young, broke, and directionless during the Economic Meltdown

2009-07-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Legislators of This Failtastic State We Live In:

Hi, you know me. You sent me a letter when I graduated from high school, right after I turned 18. You want my vote, don't you? Keep yourselves in office that much longer? Is there a limit on how long you people can sit there collecting paychecks and fucking people's higher educations into the ground? I don't know, because I learned that factoid for simply long enough to pass the test back in...tenth grade, I think. Maybe eleventh. It was before the ACT, I'll tell you that much.

Thank you, Members of the Board or however you decide these things, you wily sons of bitches, you. That was really cool of you, how you yanked the rug out from under my feet like that. You see, I was counting on your money--money I've been told about with a sparkly air of promise since I started taking those stupid MEAP tests when I was a wee lil' grade-schooler--to get me through college, or at least started, in our fabulous state of Michigan. Had you not snatched that money from me and everybody else with PROMISE Scholarships and MEAP money and whatever the hell else kind of grants and junk we've been promised since childhood, I would have stayed in Michigan and continued to pollute your economy with my hard-earned cash. I'm young and impressionable and I buy lots and lots of things and go out to eat a lot and support local business, and you could have kept my disposable income--and my dad's disposable income I wrestle away from him, for that matter--pumping through The State Economy in the form of all the books I buy from local bookstores and all the cash I fling at local restaurants and all the sales tax you're getting from all these fabulous purchases.

All you had to do, O Overlords of Student Financial Aid, was not take away my fucking scholarship money because you ran yourselves into a Budget Crisis. That is just not very nice. That money, sirs and madams, was the only thing tethering me and my cash to this state.

My boyfriend, you see, graduated in '06. Not a spectacular student, but he graduated, and college was unaffordable even with whatever grants and crap he could weasel out of you, so he worked a string of dead-end jobs and has been hauling fat old people to their X-Ray appointments at a hospital for quite some time now. He is giving up now, because the old people are wearing on him and he's starting to get horrendous wrist aches from pushing wheelchairs and everything else, and joining the Navy. He is quitting his hospital job and packing up his disposable income and moving it to Illinois.

Which is also where I set my sights on, once you stole my scholarships back like the assweasels you are. Now that I don't have the monetary incentive to keep me in Michigan for college, I am ditching this stupid state and its stupid schools and throwing my personal dollars at Columbia College Chicago. The cost of living in the Chicagoland area is relatively high, so I will be flinging large amounts of disposable income at their State Economy instead. Just because I'm moving to a new area doesn't mean I'm going to stop shopping at independent stores and going to family-owned restaurants in favor of multinational corporate chains. I will be supporting their local business.

So not only will I be dumping large amounts of mine--mine, my parent's and my boyfriend's--cash into the Illinois economy just living out there, I will be spending six-hundred-something dollars a credit hour to go to play Student At Large at the school I actually wanted to go to in the first place. I will be buying my textbooks from Illinois bookstores and getting my school supplies there, too. You have driven not only my purchasing power, but also my higher-education dollars away from your State Economy by taking away my scholarships to save money.

Because you see, had I had the five or six thousand dollars total I was supposed to be getting from you fine people, I would have stayed and willingly paid off the difference between the five-or-six-k and the final cost of tuition and room and board at Wayne State University or some other Michigan college. It's why retailers give out coupons and have buy-one-get-one-half-off sales. They get you into the store and make it look like it's worth your while, and you're so overcome by what a great deal you're getting that you spend more money.

Since you took away the scholarships, I have a perfectly legitimate reason to get out of this crappy state. Eventually I will transfer in to a degree program at Columbia (or maybe not; my editor overlord here at MT never got his degree), and live happily ever after in the Chicagoland area. I've noticed there are less homeless people there, it would be a welcome change. I've also noticed that they actually finish their road work in a timely manner, which is practically an orgasm for the soul, but that's another story entirely.

I don't care what kind of new bill you could possibly pass to try to give me my shit back, because now I am leaving. Because going Student At Large at my dream school is cheaper than going for a degree at a school I didn't really want to go to in the first place.

Au Revior, State Legislature, you will see my name on the cover of TIME someday, with "Ph.D." next to it, and you will lament the amount of money I could have thrust into your dying economy whilst I earned that degree.

But keep up the good work, obviously.

Julia Eff

--

the managing editor here, Brian, asked me to write something about being young and broke and directionless and essentially hacking the college experience. So this is what I did to just put down my points. Expect something more cohesive, less vulgar, and well-developed later.

Who says I can't make things?

2009-07-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

My Hello Kitty wallet is vinyl and poofy and too big to really fit in my pocket conveniently. Next week is Warped Tour, a giant punk rock circus, and I need a pocket wallet and I really don't want to go spending money on one because I am a broke kid and I need that money for Warped Tour, go figure.

So I made a wallet according to the instructions given by this page, except I was not satisfied with the mock-up I'd done of it so I changed it like so:

1) The measurements given are 6.5" long x 5.5" wide and when I cut that and folded it, it was too titchy. Uncomfortably titchy. So I ended up going with a 7.5" long, 6.5" wide paper.

2) I used two papers, carefully cutting the interior one slightly smaller and rubber-cementing them together.

3) Folded the thing up and pressed the creases with the back of a retracto-knife before I even put the tape on.

4) Put one layer of tape on the outside, folded it and pressed the creases, before putting the second layer of tape on in the opposite direction. Folded and creased some more.

5) Put one layer and only one layer of tape on the inside, fold, crease, carefully slit the tape on the inside to help it fold better.

6) Trimmed the edges.

7) Taped the sides together, put money in, and creased everything some more just to be sure.

And voila, wallet. All it cost me was some packing tape and 2 pages of a comic book I pulled out of the 25¢ bin.

xo
julia

"Floating Nudely."

2009-07-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

I've spent all morning reading notebook blogs (because there are other people on the Tubes that are obviously just as nutty about office supplies as I am, only their nuttiness involves quantifiable factors and pretty pictures and what-have-you) and I'm realizing exactly how many notebooks I personally have and exactly how many of them aren't full. Which is all of them. But it gets to a point where I get burnt out on a notebook, like I get burnt out on blogs or elljay layouts or brands of pens, and I need a new one so I go buy a new one, with every intention of finishing the old one.

But I never finish the old one, which is why I'm currently hauling around no less than three notebook-type apparatuses (apparati?) in my purse right now. And there's one coming in the mail from a blog, that I won. And there are three sitting at home that I've never cracked, or, even worse, written about 20 pages in (the notebook in question is a five-subject college rule monster, mind you) and then promptly abandoned.

I don't know why I do this, of course, cuz that'd save me lots of time and money and mommy-guilt of having bought these things and never used them; plus valuable storage space that all of these notebooks take up.

But, like some kind of shape-shifting ninja, every time I feel that I've changed, I feel compelled to start a new notebook. Or I'm forced to start a new notebook prematurely--like what happened to my poor red three-subject fic notebook when its cover fell off on vacation and I haven't been able to find a proper replacement for--and that disrupts a whole way of thinking and I don't want anything to do with the new one, even.

And then sometimes I'll be somewhere and see a notebook I've been coveting, and it's on sale, or a notebook I didn't even know I wanted, like the one I'm using right now, or a new type of pens or whatever and I'll snap this item up on a whim, take it home, put my name all over it--with the best intentions of making this my NEW OFFICIAL THING--then write maybe one awkward page in it and ditch it cuz something just isn't right. I like the idea of it, but then I don't like the thing itself.

I don't know what makes a good notebook for me. I like having lots of pages, so I don't feel like I'm gonna run out, but not too many, cuz then I waste them or never finish it. The paper can't be too bright or it gives me headaches, and the lines can't be wonky, and they have to be the right color. The paper has to feel right. The binding has to be right. The cover should be sturdy, preferably plastic for smaller notebooks, but only cardboard--the good cardboard--for bigger ones.

And I'm sure I could avoid all of this entirely if I'd just use a computer to write like a normal person.

----

Does nobody produce 100% original content anymore? Maybe that's the secret to getting internet asspats, is to take content from other people's blogs and reuse it on yours with a linkback, then everybody dogpiles and pats your ass till it's purple. Maybe this is why my followers are exactly zero. Hi, wide-open internet. Come be my friend.

xo
julia

Interning isn't that exciting.

2009-07-15T10:30:00.000-07:00

(After sorting through loads of wrong numbers and accidental misdials that left me with little old churchladies instead of 'upscale' Italian bistros)

Them: (Restaurant), this is John (Jill/Jack/Joyce/Lyn/Linn/Dayve).
Me: Hi, this is Julia calling from the Metro Times, we're putting together a quick roundup of local places that have outdoor seating and we heard you guys do, so what's your outdoor seating like?

Them: Please hold, you need to talk to my manger.
(holds, often for 10 minutes at a time)
Manager: This is Jim (Dave/Lynda/Marc).
Me: (Julia from the Metro Times, blah blah blah, OUTDOOR SEATING)
Manager: (baffled) We don't have outdoor seating.
Me: Oh, um, well, thanks?

OR

Them: Uhhh...it's tables...with...uh...umbrellas....
Me: Streetside, out back, waterfront, what kind of view?
Them: Uhhhhh...hold on, you need to talk to my manager.
(hold, facedesk, call never transfers, hang up and take them off the list)

ORR

Them: Hold on, you need to talk to the manager.
(call transfer, facedesk, holdddddddding)
Manager: This is Louis (Annie/Jake/fuck my life).
Me: (JULIA METRO TIMES HI THERE OUTDOOR SEATING??!)
Manager: Hold on, I can't hear you.
(facedesk)
Me: Okay. (patient)
Manager: Okay, what? Outdoor seating?
Me: Yes.
Manager: I still can't hear you.

ORRRR

Them: Hold on.
(holds)
SUDDENLY NEW VOICE APPARENTLY THE MANAGER: Jim/Brian/Luanne/Mike.
Me: (Julia from the Metro Times, blah blah blah, DO YOU FUCKING HAVE OUTDOOR SEATING OR WHAT AND WHAT IS IT LIKE?)
Manager: Tables, you know, tables...
Me: How many tables you got?
Manager: Uhhhhhhhhhhhh...
(facedesk, remove from list)
Me: Thank you for your time.

BECAUSE NO MATTER HOW SHITTY OR RIDICULOUS OR STUPID OR NOT-SPEAKING-ENGLISH THESE PEOPLE ARE, I MUST BE FUCKING CHEERFUL.

This is my life. Why, oh why, is this my life.

Typewriters and thrift store finds

2009-07-05T15:53:00.000-07:00

check out the fullsizes on my flickr! :D

I still don't have the Safari I won, because of a Paypal issue with my dad's new card and what-have-you. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully it gets here by the time I get to the post office on Tuesday.

The weather's been sort of horrible lately, but it finally broke and today it was hot and sunny and beautiful and I decided to drag the brood outside for some glamour shots. I'm like the cat lady that calls Sears trying to get a family portrait of her 18 cats. Only I do them myself, and they're infinitely more inventive without venturing into "wannabe art student" territory.

Went to the thrift store today too, and bought a CMI 35 and a Polaroid 900 for 50¢ and $1, respectively. Dunno how well either of them function yet, but I bought a roll of cheap film for the 35mm and sealed the cracks with some tape and tried taking some shots. I'll run the roll out on Tuesday in PoHo with Sarah, turn it in on Wednesday after work at Wal-Mart, buy more crap film, etc. I gotta track down the Polaroid film yet.

Oh, and because it bears mentioning, I took the typewriter photos with my Canon PowerShot SX110 IS, which is pretty and shiny and new and honestly instant, unlike even the Polaroid.

xo
julia

Lolaroid.

2009-07-05T15:20:00.000-07:00

(whilst watching 28 Days Later)

Brett: I'd wreck that shit.
Me: *looks* I'd tap that.
Brett: I'd totally wreck that.
Me: I know you would.
Brett: ...you're no fun.

My relationshipz, lemme show u dem.

Canada, O Canada

2009-07-01T12:10:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, July 1. The Canadians are shooting off fireworks to fuck with us America-folk, because I'm forgetting that approximately half my LJ flist is Canadian, eh? As of 11-something tonight it'll be exactly a month since Brett and I started dating officially, and neither of us are dead and we're actually quite happy. It's an accomplishment in itself.

Started writing a short story for my new zine, tentatively titled Dreamlanders (the zine, not the story, the story's still untitled), about the recent spate of celebrity deaths. Found not one but two leads on typewriter repair shops, same day I found a rather proud keychopper and my grand-editor-overlord-Kim's Smith-Corona with glass keytops and about ninety different shift functions that's packed so full of dust and old oil and horribly out of alignment and will no longer type. The poor baby won't strike the page. God love it.

My other editor overlords have disappeared off into the wilds somewhere, leaving me to my own devices and short fiction and phone calls and a book of T. S. Eliot. Just found out the New York Dolls released a new album (FUCK YEAH!!) and Peelander Z has press coverage outside Punk. I really wish I would have brought Dorothee to work, seeing as how I'm sitting here jiggling my foot cuz I have to piss so bad and still don't know where the bathroom is (grrrrrr...) and my brain is full of words and I can't handwrite fast enough and on-screen composing is just so blase.

The house is fixed, re-sided, it's actually very nice. Of course, when it was 90+ degrees it wasn't, so we couldn't put in our A/C, but now that it is it's back down to 68 and we don't need the air. FML. I'm going to invest in a kiddie pool when it warms back up.

So now I'm listening to Aiden and sitting here trying to behave myself until such a time comes that I can leave or my editors return and give me something to do. Because I'm being a good intern and seeking out my own stories and what-have-you, but now it's just a waiting game. Waiting for phone calls back and replies to newsgroup messages. Newsgroups, I should add, are the weirdest shit ever. I don't understand how people managed on the 'Tubes back before message boards.

oops, brain vomited.

xo
julia

More Green Day, more crying.

2009-06-29T21:19:00.000-07:00

Got off the phone with Brett a little while ago. Basically, I couldn't stop crying because of stupid insecure fears I don't want to go into here. Mostly, I just don't want him to leave. So of course I have to be a stupid foot-in-mouth bitch about it and argue with him about how I think it's totally possible to just take off and run away forever, and how if he really wanted to he could relocate, and how if he leaves so am I. He's telling me I can move in when his lease is up in September, but if he's leaving in the spring then I just can't do it. I'm the one holding me back. I couldn't live in his fucking apartment and expect to have any degree of normalcy with him gone; I'd lay around the house and cry. All the time.

I'm not going to school in the fall. I can't fucking handle it. I don't want to go, I don't see the point in going, it just looks like a giant waste of money, working toward a piece of paper that guarantees me nothing. I've been built up the last four years like Going To College is the be-all end-all END GAME FINAL BOSS. But it's not. There's so much more, I've waited for so long to get out of high school so I could start living and just being tied to another rotting symbol of academia for four more years is fucking ridiculous. I got where I am now, with an internship and everything, not based on my GPA or my journalism classes or my working-in-a-classroom-setting abilities. I got here because of personal drive to fucking write. I got here because I taught myself how to make zines, create content and layouts and illustrations, write, edit, print, everything. I got here on talent alone.

When Brett leaves, I'm leaving. I'll get a job once I get my driver's license in August and don't have to rely on somebody else being in the car with me; I'll work full-time and save up every penny till March and then I'm leaving. Move about the country, couch surfing, and I'll meet him in six months or whatever, wherever he wants. I can't stay in Michigan, I already feel suffocated. If he goes it'll just be unbearable. I'd have to fend on my own if I leave like that, and it would keep me too busy to cry myself dry every day.

I have to keep reminding myself that it's his choice, it's something he put in motion long before we even started talking again, that he didn't do it just to get away from me or something. That I was secondary to this picture and he's not going to change his mind and fuck up his whole life plan just because I came along. But I wish he could just drop with no consequences and it would all be okay, and nobody would feel hurt or anything, but life doesn't work that way. He'd feel like shit and I'd feel even worse and we'd probably break up over it.

I'm just really scared about the whole thing. I don't want to be alone.

I did this.

2009-06-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

Posted today on the Reckless Eyeballing MT blog. Complete with my illustration. :D

The Little Birdie That Could...Did...Sorta...Maybe

2009-06-29T08:42:00.000-07:00

To those not paying attention to world news or politics in the time leading up to the Iranian election, it appeared as if nothing was wrong, especially on the social-networking channels some of us have gotten so codependent upon. Twitter's trending topics were things like Conan and Jimmy Fallon, the iPhone and PETA. We all went to bed, only to wake up the next morning to absolute tweet carnage. Timelines were flooded with things with tags like #IranElection, #Tehran, and #FreeIran, and suddenly the Twitterverse was launched headfirst into a global sociopolitical crisis, whether they liked it or not.

Twitter lets a user send 140-character-or-less messages to a group of friends who also are on Twitter, and receive their friends' updates by "following" them. Musicians, writers, comedians, Oprah, and Ashton Kutcher are on Twitter. Twitter itself was created in 2006 and has since become the third-most-used social networking site, reportedly. The number of active users is mysterious and vague, but it's reportedly at 5 million or so.

The usage data statistics aren't the only murky things coming out of (or not, for that matter) Twitter. When the Iran thing blew up, people tweeted. The government of Iran was running around shutting out foreign journalists and blocking internet access and cell phones, but some people could still access Twitter. And with murky, incomplete, or simply no information coming out of Iran, mainstream news outlets turned to the website for facts.

The problem with that is, Twitter can be accessed by anyone. Anybody can post anything, and if it's sensational enough, a message might get picked up and re-posted hundreds or thousands of times, even if it has no basis in fact or reality or anything else. There's such a potential for misinformation, and if misinformation gets picked up by mainstream news, it becomes reality for everybody from radio newscasters to housewives in Oklahoma that don't know anything of the internet other than what they've heard on Dr. Phil.

Initially the hailstorm of tweets was considered groundbreaking by all parties involved, including meganews congolomerates. The potential for civilian journalism! Telling it like it is! The word from the streets! ...it was all just so good to talk about, Twitter overthrowing a regime! Microblogging to the people! People on Twitter said three million people were protesting in Tehran. They said things like "The losing candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was put under house arrest," and "The president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid on Saturday." It was looking good for the little guy--the people were reporting, and the world was watching.

But as time wore on and real news slowly started to trickle out of the region, things as reported by Twitter started to come under fire. It was looking more like thousands of protestors, not three million. There was no house arrest for Mousavi, he was just being watched. There was no declaration of a bad election. Things are not always as the internet says they are, which is still a hard pill for most of the 25-and-under set to swallow.

The problems with Twitter in relation to Iran are thus: It's unrestricted, it doesn't support Farsi characters, and there's a mob mentality that can push misinformation to the headlines. Anybody can post anything without any consequences, and if it gets picked up and retweeted by hundreds or thousands of people, that misinformation can become as-referenced or more-referenced than what little real reporting is coming out of a hostile region. More is not always better. Fifty million screaming bloggers can all be dead wrong.

Furthermore, the lack of support for Farsi makes it nearly-impossible for people in Iran to post things to be read by people in Iran. If you were to click on the trending topic of #IranElection at the height of the Twittersplosion, you would see that most of the messages were coming from middle-class white kids in the United States, all passing around the same information to their respective circles of friends. All this political organizing that was supposed to be happening using Twitter? It was bust. Most of it was done the old-fashioned way, by word-of-mouth, individual text messages, and Farsi-language web sites. The Twitter buzz was Twitter's target audience, doing what Twitter was designed for. Facts got misconstrued or exaggerated, and amplified by thousands of retweets, then by the bloggers, till finally all of us were standing around waiting for the info-dust to settle before we could tell for real what was going down in Iran.

So the so-called Twitter Revolution of Iran was a bust. It was like an Internet-sized Lite Brite had been tackled by a hyperactive toddler. Thousands of points of color, some of them clustered together, some of them the same, but not enough information to make a real picture. It was the proverbial dust storm, hail storm, fog of information...whatever metaphor you choose, what it adds up to is a lot of confusion, a lot of hype, and a lot of trying to pick up the pieces.

----------

wrote it for the Metro Times, but what they used was far more pared-down.

xo
julia

Going to go listen to Green Day and cry.

2009-06-28T14:30:00.000-07:00

Normally I'm one for words. I've got words for every situation, even the awkward one. But today's just like...no words.

Brett's military thing is ramping up and it's just like OHEY REALITY. Have a slap in the face. Billy Mays died today, along with my hopes and dreams. If Billy can't sell it to me, then I don't fucking need it. The man was a legend.

I'm just wallowing in a pit of my own emo, mourning Billy Mays and trying to forget about the whole fucking my-boyfriend-is-joining-the-Navy thing. Which shouldn't be a big deal. I need to chill the fuck out, really I do, he says he's not going anywhere till March. Really this is no big deal. I can handle this, right?

Except I can't, and I've just been on the edge of tears for the last two and a half hours, and my eyes hurt, and my head hurts, and no amount of happy-RP-squee or anything else is making it better.

I'm going to go listen to Green Day and cry now, because I'm just exacerbating the situation by thinking about it. But you know when I get to "Wake Me Up When September Ends" I will bawl my fucking eyes out, because these are the types of things I do, especially if I have no Billy Mays infomercials to cheer me back up.

I made u a typecast

2009-06-24T10:58:00.001-07:00

...but I eated it.

Or maybe it just exploded in the horrendous heat we're having today. 94 degrees, with 98 percent humidity. I can feel my buttcheeks sticking together already. The ride home is not going to be fun.

And Jackman tried to send me halfway across town to deliver a copy of a restaurant review to said restaurant, but I went D: D: D: D: because seriously WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK. It is hot. It is so hot I can feel my mascara like melting. The block to Greektown for lunch was torture. No way am I walking six blocks each way. Yes, I am a whiner, but seriously. My blood's too thick for Michigan summer. I've never been able to properly cope with myself in this climate.

In more cheerful news, at the vaguest suggestion by Monda the Enabler I'm in the market for a new zine. "In the market" meaning "I have Post-it Notes stuck to my monitor with possible titles on them, whilst I try to figure out a format". I have no clue what it's going to cover or anything. Sometimes I just go for it... I want to see what I can turn out weekly, biweekly, whatever. I'll start on it tomorrow hopefully, or later tonight. I've been wanting to type for a couple days now, I just haven't really had the motivation. And thus is the dilemma of laziness. Having to actually find a spot in my fucking mess of a house to plop down a typewriter is simply too much effort. As is y'know. Opening the google doc and working on the fic I'm writing with Sarah, or cracking the notebook and finishing the map for our RP, or scanning in a typecast or doing anything other than sit in my house and bitch because it's way too hot and we can't put the A/C in yet because we're being re-sided.

Fuck my life, that wasn't more cheerful news at all. Misleading bolding is misleading. Or at least it starting being such when the paragraph turned into a bitch about what a lazy-ass I am.

I've been listening to Aiden and William Control a lot lately. I love the new Aiden album so hard, omg.

...there was originally somewhere I was going with this, but my under-slept brain is so riddled with holes I can't make heads or tails of it. It's simply too hot in my house to sleep. FML. I need a nap.

So yeah. New zine with no format yet. House is being resided. IT IS FUCKING HOT. I am lazy. Don't have to work tomorrow. Wee! This is how I roll.

xo

The Agony of De Feet, and Why Monda is Going to be the Death of Me

2009-06-20T19:33:00.000-07:00

I'm watching the clock wind down on this beauty on eBay. I chased her to $55 or so, before my dad went "alright, I refuse to go above $70 with shipping" and some loser (I'm looking at you, "l***h") skated off with her to the tune of $58. SIGHHHHHHH. I was going to name her Edna, or possibly Clarissa, which I got in a search I conducted recently on *shudder* Sparknotes, looking for stuff about The Libertine. That, and Clarissa Explains It All, which I shouldn't even have to say was the single best live-action show on Nickelodeon back in the day when it was still called that.

Ahh, the nineties. How I miss you.

So I lost that typewriter, or, more accurately, am sitting here watching myself lose it as we speak. It's quite appalling. And as if to add insult to injury, Monda over at Fresh Ribbon just skated back into town with a gorgeous $10 Remington Quiet-Riter and a $2.50 Remington Streamliner, both in that aqua/baby-blue color I apparently have such a girlboner for. Guh.

This makes me immensely jealous, because not only did she pick these up for dirt cheap, she picked them up in person, with the luxury of being able to fiddle with them before purchasing and then peek at them the whole way home while giggling like some sort of schoolgirl loon on crack. Meanwhile, I covet the shit out of typewriters from afar (lacking the magic kinds of junk stores Monda and Every Other Typecaster on the 'Tubes seems to have access to) for a really long time, pay exorbitant amounts of money for them, or end up doing all this coveting and not getting them after all. Damn eBay, damn you to hell. My heart aches at watching the red one go. Seven minutes left on the bid and I'm contemplating waking dad up and offering to pay the difference. Oh, lawdamercy.

Three minutes to go, and it's at $71. No hope for me now. "E***s" has taken the lead. Good, I was starting to really fucking hate "l***h" for no reason there.

2 minutes left on the clock and "l***h" has thrown down $76. Somebody enlighten me as to why this is such a valuable typewriter.

One minute, 24 seconds, "l***h" is now at $86, bringing it to over $100 with shipping.

47 seconds, $92 to "l***h".

23 seconds, $93 to "e***s".

4 seconds, $96 to "l***h".

...Congrats, "l***h", I hate you. Fuck you. I just wanted a red one. To type on. TYPE ON. BECAUSE I LIKE TYPING.

My efforts have now shifted to an Olivetti Valentine, red; a periwinkle-and-gray Royal Futura 800; and a cream Royal Safari. Cheap, but not as cheap as Monda's wonders. DON'T BID ON THEM. I WANT THEM. AT LEAST ONE.

Every time one of the typewriter people in my sphere of influence gets a new machine, I want another one. Because theirs is so pretty and shiny. And mine feel inferior. >.> There you have it folks, I suffer from The Grass Is Always Greener On Somebody Else's Typewriter syndrome. I want a new shiny because all the other kids on the playground have a new shiny too. Even though people I know IRL are starting to scorn me because I've already got three (four if you count the neglected red-headed stepchild of an electric I don't even know the brand of because it's so ugly and useless) typewriters, I can't stop, because they're like crack. I must acquire a new one every few months or I'll go insane.

I figure I'll be the Crazy Typewriter Lady when I'm 30; no kids, no boyfriend, just me and five hundred typewriters in a two-room apartment...you know how this story goes.

In addition to Monda blogging about her new shinies, she is also a massive enabler. She replies to my comments with encouraging shit like how she showed my zine off to everybody with eyeballs and how cool it was and everything, and how I should totally get together a group of alt.spookys and have a write-a-thon or a write-in or whatever I want to call it, and totally make a zine out of it.

She lends credence to these half-assed, otherwise cracktarded ideas, and now I'm sitting here and it's 1:15 in the morning and trying to figure out what my next regular zine should be and where I'm going to get a bunch of spooky kids with discernable writing talent to lock in a room (where? when? internet, or typewriters and pens only?) to have a "write-in" similar to the Be-Ins and Live-Ins and Yip-Ins of "back in The Day" because dammit Monda you are a humungous enabler, and I cannot cope with this many ideas at once.

I think I need to up my meds a little to shut my brain up.

Stay classy, Tube-dwellers.

xo

Greetings, blogosphere. I've been lazy.

2009-06-19T14:48:00.000-07:00

Normally I'm a proponent of the "If It's Really That Annoying And You Hate It That Much, Blogging About It Will Only Drive More People To Check It Out So You Should Just Secretly Wish It Dies In A Fire And Not Blog About It Till The Threat Of It Is Gone Entirely" system of picking what I write about. But there are certain things that cause me to rage so hard I can't control it and have to blog about it.

My friends, I give you: The Iran Election.

Now, I'm all for human rights and the advocacy of democracy, and when a government is suppressing the crap out of media and interwebz and stuff in an attempt to cover their asses and keep their civilians from protesting, normally I'd be up to my ass in it.

But this is just yet another flavor-of-the-month cause, protest, whatever. Websites have sprung up to change your Twitter icon with a green overlay to "show support". Livejournal is "going green". It's simply a symptom of an internet disease that allows people to do absolutely nothing for real but feel like they're saving the fucking world.

It's not that I'm sick of hearing about the Iran Election Debacle (okay, I am), it's that I'm sick of what a bandwagon it's become. This happens periodically, am I the only one that sees it? A cause gets lit in the blogosphere and then it's just the cool thing to do, support it. If you're not speaking out for it, you gotta be against it! You're bad! Gtfo my page, bitch!

On the contrary. My refusal to support doesn't make me a horrible fucking person. It just shows that I'm seeing through the hype and not leaping at the bandwagon like everybody else.

Does anybody out there, on Twitter or Myspace or LJ or whatever-the-fuck, actually know what's going on? Are any of you over there in the middle of it? It's not that I don't give a shit about the people of Iran, but this is like Darfur™. It's just another trend, all that's happening is you're building a brand out of tragedy. Diet Dr Darfur. Waterboarding, Now With 80% Less Fat! Iran Protest March Combo, Only $3.99 At Taco Bell!

Wear one of those bastardized keffiyehs you got at Hot Topic or Forever 21 or Urban Outfitters and don't realize what that shit stands for, cuz it's The It Thing to do right now. Dye your Twitter icon green, because that's totally gonna fix the problems they're having on the other side of the planet.

This Iran situation is no different than the OMG LYKE MASSIVE OUTCRY!!!1! PETE WENTZ SAID SOMETHNG ABOUT IT U GAIZ!!1! a few years ago with Darfur. It's easy to "support" something on the other side of the world that we have no control over. You don't have to actually do anything. You're not risking your life or money or time, really.

Where were the Twitter icons, trending topics, and Livejournal layouts when our own government was torturing political prisoners at Guantanamo Bay?

Nowhere. Because nobody gave half a fucking shit, because it wasn't trendy to care, and because it was us that was doing it. It's only bad when somebody else is directly responsible, but our own transgressions fall under the Don't Ask Don't Tell school of thought and the world carries on functioning until there's a minor uproar years later when the gory details come out, then it all fades away and drops off the Buzzword of the Day board and everybody's life goes back to normal. We get concerned with the iPhone and the sale at Pottery Barn again and nobody cares about health care or human rights or anything, until there's a nice shiny little widget you can put on your page to show everybody how 'cultured' and 'in the know' and 'subversive' you are.

Fucking fabulous, congratulations, Everybody Else On The Internet! You've reduced another blasphemy of human rights to another viral marketing campaign. So glad you all have the computer skills to jump on the fucking bandwagon. What are you gaining from your "support"? And more importantly, what the fuck good is it doing for them?

It's making me fucking sick to look at.

Maybe all the internet hipsters will listen to Johnny Cash. Because I fucking hate him, but they all seem to beat off mercilessly to his bloated ass.

I'm The Biggest Fan I've Got Right Now,

julia eff

Point of rant long lost. Please send search party.

2009-06-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

A purse is supposed to be a gateway to a woman's soul or something, that's why everybody's so obsessive about theirs...or so I keep telling myself.

I've been in a state of purse-denial--or perhaps pursaphobia, as it were--since the seventh grade or whenever it was all the other girls in my class started hauling their shit around in teacup-sized purses and miniature little fashion backpacks, in some sort of 2003 revival of a trend from 1997. As a little girl, I'd loved the shit out of purses, coveted them, couldn't wait till the day I got one of my own. I had one at my gramma's house, this little red leather deal, and I'd fill it with change and just carry it around and pretend to be big.

But in the seventh grade, the purse thing was A Big Fucking Problem.

I couldn't find the right purse. It's still something that eludes me; everybody else has the coolest shit of all persuasions, and I can never find it for myself. I went through a series of mini-backpacks, trying to follow the trend, but failed miserably cuz my shit was just not as cool as everybody else's. That, and a tiny backpack looks funny on a girl with waist-length hair and a peasant shirt. That, and I sort of really didn't have anything to put in it, so I just stuffed it with a bunch of useless stuff that made me look admittedly retarded.

So I gave up, and when I transitioned into the high school building for eighth grade and all the girls around me started getting purses, big purses to carry all their mysterious shit around in, I didn't. I started my love affair with denim backpacks/messenger bags; eventually settling on a cheap one from Target that I dyed purple then black and painted on and only stopped using when one of the straps fell off. I carried most of my shit around in those, but they stayed in my locker all day. They accumulated crayons and chapsticks and overdue assignments, candy wrappers, pencil shavings, dead batteries...typical Julia detrius. It was nigh impossible to find anything in my backpack sometimes, and it didn't matter cuz I was always leaving my house keys at home anyway.

My giving up on the purses turned into an irrational fear of them. When I bought a Finnish ground-forces gas mask bag at the army surplus store last summer, it was because I'd lusted so hard after a military messenger-style bag since I'd seen Brett wandering around with one my Freshman year. That, and there were all these cool people, at shows and at coffeehouses and what-have-you, with their messenger bags and laptops and chunky glasses, looking all artsy and important and awesome and shit. I wanted in on that, and apparently a bag was going to solve all my problems.

So I bought a bag, to use for what-have-you, and refused to call it a purse because of this pursaphobia of mine. "It's not a purse!" I argued in sixth period Bio, digging around in its deep pockets for my mp3 player, lipstick, and homework simultaneously. "It's not a purse because I'm not the type to own a purse!" as I shoved aside my key ring and twelve tubes of chapstick. "I don't need a purse because I don't have a cell phone. I can carry all my stuff on me, thank you!" I lamented as I dumped out the contents of my gas mask bag on the desk, sending pens and Tampax and sunglasses and People Mover tokens and tins of medication bouncing in every direction.

I didn't want a purse. I was in purse-denial. Hell, I still don't want one. People that carry purses seem to have some sort of bizarre urgency about them, or some inflated sense of self. Their cell phone rings on the Mover and they have to dig around in this giant, faux-psychedelic-print floppy bag with braided leather handles to find it. You can hear their stuff rattling around in there, and you don't know what it is, but they look so damn smug. They have Very Important Things in there, obviously, when it's in all reality probably just their cell phone and their Blueberry and cigarettes and keys and a cosmetics kit.

So today, months after that day at the army-navy store when that messenger bag caught my eye, I looked over at the poor thing barfing its contents onto the mindbogglingly grey Formica of the cubicle I'm sitting in, and realized, my god. It's a purse.

I take it everywhere. It carries all of my necessary shit. It's a catchall. It's a handbag in the old-school sense.

Inventory of Julia's ~~Purse~~ ~~Pocketbook~~ Handbag:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
4 tubes of chapstick
3 notebooks--small legal pad, Lil' Fat Notebook, full-size red monstrosity for fiction
car/house/everything keys
3 copies of Note To Self
sunglasses
Tampax
2 functional pens, 2 dead ones. Guess which ones are which on the first try and win a prize.
mp3 player
2 spare carabiners "just in case" (for keys, notebooks, mp3 player)
2 folding mirrors, one with fold-out hairbrush
eyeliner/eyeshadow
Hello Kitty tin with Advil and meds
out-of-date student ID, health insurance card, Staples copy card (unknown balance), key card for hotel that was stayed at during December '08
2 People Mover tokens
2 ripped-out pages from the legal pad, with articles on them
$1.10 cash
2 copies of intern handbook
eraser, but no pencil
2 used tissues

Now, I don't know what the girls I went to school with carry around in their purses, but it's nowhere near as fascinating as the shit I can produce out of my own beat-ass bag at a moment's notice. It's the world's greatest companion if I get bored, and it saves me from cosmetic and wardrobe disasters all the time. If I run out of things in the bag to play with, I just pull out a pen and draw on the bag itself. No designer bag could say that about itself, nor could any of the knockoffs from Wal-Mart or Forever 21.

The girls I went to school with and the women around me all place such a high value and importance on their purses and the contents of them and it just seems sad to me. They'd never--dear god!--draw on their bags, or defile them in any other way. They hold these things as holy, but fling them into cars and at restaurants like they're trying to take out a linebacker with them.

They can all go suck a cock, for all I care, a bag is a bag and while I do have a deep-seated emotional attachment to mine, I realize that it's only a bag and its contents are trivial at best. It's not some holy institution to never be fucked with.

...but I'm not gonna exactly let a dude go through mine anytime soon.

xo
julia

Knife in the back, thanks for the memories

2009-06-03T16:28:00.000-07:00

I've been promising myself I'd sit down and blog the living shit out of the last week or so, but I have just lacked the time and motivation to do it. Now, stuck at my dad's office due to some horrible cosmic turn of events, I figure it's as good a time as any to write about it.

I graduated high school on Sunday. My mom came up from Cincinnati, my grandparents came in from Clarkston, and I got a car. It's fucking amazing. I can't even drive yet, but I got a car. I also got a camera and a new mp3 player and infinite amounts of jewelry from my aunt; but the point is I got a car. It lifted such a ton of worries off my shoulders because now I can get around. Relying on my dad for all my transportation is what was keeping me tied to home, and with home being as chaotic as it is...I just feel like I can breathe now. I can go visit Brett, so he doesn't have to slog out here all the time.

Actually graduating was a rather uneventful thing. My shoes were uncomfortable, yet I got a standing ovation when I went past the teachers on the walk to the gym. Our "chosen guest speaker" (I didn't vote for him. Did anybody?) Mr Huss rambled about Vietnam and both Brett and I had the same unmistakable urge to stand up and yell "What was all that shit about Nam?! Not everything's about Nam, man!" when it was over, because seriously. It was like Walter Sobchak at Donny's funeral going on about Hill 364.

In other Lebowski-themed news, my birthday party was Saturday at the lazer tag place in Utica and it was a barrel of lulz. My hair and my belt both glowed under blacklight, about half the people I invited turned up, and all was good. It's Lebowski-themed because of course I had to make a Lebowski cake, and while bowling paraphernalia or even an Uzi in a paper bag or a Folgers can or Larry's Homework could be misinterpreted for something else or (gasp!) as being from a different movie, a severed toe with green nail polish is unmistakably Lebowski. There is no confusing it for anything else. And for the five or six people in attendance that have actually seen the film, the cake was a pit of lulz. When I'm not at my dad's office and have access to my camera I'll post pictures of it.

I'm hoping to attend Lebowskifest in Louisville in July, or barring that, then the one in Chicago or NYC or Philly in September. Brett too is an Achiever, so I could probably even get him to go with me. :D and if I went to the Philly one I could kick it with some RP peeps, and if I went to the NYC one I could kick it with some RP peeps. Either way, peeps will be kicked, there will be much abiding and achieving and marmots.

The new mp3 player is nuts. It's probably the most technologically advanced thing I've ever owned and I'm still getting used to the thing. I only have a little music on the thing because all my music is locked on my other hard drive and my dad still hasn't gotten the cables to transfer my drive. Because he's a lazy asshole.

The new mp3 player, among other things, came with a CD of software. And holy shit, software. It tried to install about ten programs on my computer to run one dinky little device. I deleted most of them, because I really just wanted to get to the manual (which nobody includes on paper anymore! It's just this little twelve-language 'Getting Started Guide' that demands you install all their software) and the media converter. I had heard bad things about it not being able to do lossless-*.wma files, but all my music is WMA Lossless and it's all on there no problemo. Listening to Color of Violence on it right now, in fact, and it's beautiful. Once I got the shittarded graphic equalizer to make things sound normal, all my music is crystal-clear and shiny like listening to it in a nice large empty room.

I downloaded this freeware called mp3tag, which was recommended by everybody I've run across, to tag the album art to the music. This player has such a nice screen it's a crime not to have the album art on it.

Well, I'll tell you what. Mp3tag is probably the single most fucking confusing, horrible, crashing piece of shit software I have ever used. As soon as I get my shit all transferred, I'm going to get it the fuck off my computer, because it sucks that hard. It looks like an explorer window when it's running, only shittier. It's counterintuitive. It unselects things. You select something and then your hard drive kicks on and it deselects and selects the whole root directory instead. FUCK THAT. Where's the fucking manual, this thing is a piece of shit, but it makes such pretty things.

I started my internship at Metro Times today. I got there two minutes early, after a hellacious People Mover experience and construction workers heckling me, then reception stuck me in what I'm supposing is their equivalent of a conference room. Nice open space with windows on both walls, huge table. Reception said I was apparently running ahead of Jackman, the editor I'm supposed to report to, so just hang for a while. Jerry-the-hipster-who-says-'word'-too-much introduced himself. I started writing an article that's been bouncing in my head all morning.

It felt like it'd been an awfully long time so I looked at my mp3 player for the time and fuck, it was 11:20-something. I was there at 10:28. What the shit?! And then here comes this guy with three inches of dirty-grey roots under his dyed black...sticky-uppy...aging-rocker...dyed black hair and an open shirt and hipster knockoff Dogeared jewelry, and he introduces himself as Brian, the managing editor. Hi Brian The Managing Editor, nice roots, I'm Julia The Intern, where the fuck is Jackman The Copy Editor? He doesn't know, let's go ask Kim The Head Dude. Kim says Jackman isn't in today because he's burned out. LOLWUT. But...he has a new intern starting today... Well, there's nothing we can do about that, do you know how to work a copy machine?

So I got to make copies. They didn't have anything else for me to do, because Jackman's the one running the dog-and-pony-show of the interns, so I just came back to dad's office and waited for hours while the movie crew outside anticlimactically blew up a car. It wasn't very exciting, for the amount of gasoline they dumped on it. I expected an explosion at least three times that size.

Then I took a nap in an office chair and fucked up my ribs doing it. The end.

Carrie is a mere footnote in this story. Because on Sunday night her 31-year-old boyfriend dumped her for being batshit insane, and she was being batshit when I was hanging out with the dude on Monday. I told her she was being batshit, she screamed at me, hung up, called back, screamed some more, repeat. Haven't talked to her since and I couldn't care less. She keeps texting about how she'll still be there for me blah blah blah, whatever, play the fucking martyr a little more why don't you.

I wouldn't even be upset about her batshit-ass behavior in this situation had she not called Brett on Sunday and tried to weasel a ride out of him. Then she was pissed because he was with me and wasn't going to change his plans just to drag her screwy ass home. We were hanging out on Friday and she was fighting with the ex, I guess, and came over to my house all in tears and got defensive when I asked about it. We were on our way out to Lions Park anyway, so we invited her along, and she said she couldn't because hark, the ex might come home and she needs to be there when he does. She's just so emotionally fucking dependent it's disgusting, and whiny and bitchy and needy and clingy and selfish and she flies off the handle and I'm quite sick of her.

Which sounds selfish, but it's all in the name of self-preservation.

In other news, Brett and me are as official as it could get and I'm going to the comic book store tonight. Life is good.

-julia

Note To Self:

2009-05-28T21:38:00.000-07:00

The saga of the zine, in Tweets. It's very easy to Twitter these things, as opposed to blogging them. I'll link to scans when I have it up, so the world can see what a beatdown we truly gave the typewriters today. Dorothee and Jepha were at the top of their game, and Jeph was even a little less cranky than usual. Maybe it's the humidity.

http://twitter.com/julia_eff/status/1947668971
http://twitter.com/julia_eff/status/1948615694
http://twitter.com/julia_eff/status/1949397129
http://twitter.com/julia_eff/status/1951393829
http://twitter.com/julia_eff/status/1954126207
http://twitter.com/julia_eff/status/1954444367
http://twitter.com/julia_eff/status/1955537846
http://twitter.com/julia_eff/status/1955774045
http://twitter.com/julia_eff/status/1956147977
http://twitter.com/julia_eff/status/1956289964
http://twitter.com/julia_eff/status/1956300509

I get to sleep now. Juicy details coming soon. Also possibly with typewriter porn.

I wanna celebrate, I wanna sell you hate, today's the day you're gonna fucking die

2009-05-24T10:30:00.000-07:00

Features I Wish Myspace Had But Does Not: When you look at your expanded friends page, you can see whether you requested them or they requested you and when. It would be cool to track your social interactions that way. Like, you friended a guy you met at a show cuz you thought he was hot, talked to him for weeks, then he got a girlfriend and now you don't speak. Or, your ex-bff friended you but then stopped talking to you altogether. So you could compare the then vs. now on all your internet--and possibly real-life--friendships.

I posted Wilford Brimley two nights ago when Brett was over and we were Youtubing various Liberty Medical commercial remixes. He's essentially a basement-dwelling /b/ tard, in a better body that also includes 90 more I.Q. points.

Also two days ago, when I was walking to the gas station with Carrie and Brett, Kait drove down the alley with her new boyfriend. She gave me the dirtiest fucking look, because I was with her two least-favorite people in the world. She hasn't snarked at me via myspace or snarked at Sarah about me yet or anything, but she doesn't exactly speak to either of us anymore. We'll see how things turn out.

Sarah won't even speak to me if Brett's over, which sucks, because he's hardly left the past couple days. I was on the phone with her when he came over yesterday and she just stopped fucking talking. Long pause.

"Is that who I think it is?"

"Um...who do you think it is?"

"Whatever. Not talking to you now. Bye."

With friends like these, who needs enemies.

I like people whose arms make me feel safe. This is a class that includes a certain individual who's been hanging around a lot lately, but I'm not going to point that out. He kissed me before he left last night, out by the car. It was small and adorable and I was essentially stunned. Don't know where this puts us. But it's okay, I can handle this. I've got it. I swear I'll stop talking about him so much, too.

Listened to the new Manson album via myspace yesterday, and I'm relistening as I type this out. It's not so full of suck as I expected, but it's no Antichrist Superstar. It's less horrible than Eat Me, Drink Me, but the lyrics seem juvenile at times and forced-shocking, like MSI. "Look! I said a bad word! Abortions! Suicide! Satan! Satan! Look at me!! I'm so edgy~!! Censor me!"

Yes, Marilyn, you said a bad word. You're honestly not shocking us anymore. Reminds me of this article, which is an absolute pit of lulz, especially the part about Twiggy. But then again, I'm a flailing stupid fangirl for all things Twiggy Ramirez. Marilyn Manson has turned into the kid at school who screams "I HAVE GONORRHEA!!" in the lunchroom, who happens to be Carrie at our school, and Carrie doesn't shock me anymore.

The album has the sensibility of Mechanical Animals, but less bombast and balls-out and dramatic. Somebody's castrated Manson and needs to shave his eyebrows back off, stick that fucking contact lens back in his eye, take away his lipstick and hand him M.W. Gacy and demand they play nice now and write some songs that aren't bellybutton-gazing introspectives about...I don't even fucking know, that's how bad this is, content-wise. I can't find a thread, I can't figure out what any of the songs are about when he's just flinging spit and rape in our faces and expecting us to be shocked.

And I'm probably the most rabid Manson cheerleader of them all. He's alienating his audience.

Downloaded the new Green Day album, from two different links on StrikeGently, but when I unzipped the files it got to track six and went "UNEXPECTED FILE END" so I clicked 'go' again. It unzipped the rest, then went "UNEXPECTED FILE END!!" and we continued in this vicious cycle for five or more minutes before I opened the unzipped folder to see what I had. I have tracks one through six, and eleven through whatever, but no middle bits. The middle bits tend to be my favorite, so I scrapped the file in disgust.

The only song I bothered playing off it was "Horseshoes and Handgrenades" simply because liked the title, and I don't regret it or want to un-hear it. I enjoyed it. It's more poppy than American Idiot was, but that's what we all said about that too so we'll see how this turns out with repeat listening.

The Yahoo! weather says it's raining right now. It's sunny and beautiful, and not a cloud in the sky. Fail.

Wilford Brimley

2009-05-22T19:43:00.000-07:00

You can never have enough diabeetus.

This is beside the point.

2009-05-21T23:12:00.000-07:00

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Rise
To: @julia_eff™
Date: May 22, 2009 1:05 AM
Subject: RE:

Yeah you'd need a carrier that uses sim cards to use any of my old phones. The sidekick is cool, but it's on T-mobile so it sort of loses points with me because of that. Virgin Mobile isn't bad though. It's what my first phone was, and I'd still have it if my friend hadn't microwaved it (don't ask). It was this indestructible Nokia brick phone that had snake on it. Damn I miss snake...
Like I said though phones are over-rated, no matter what you get. Even the iPhone which is supposedly the top of the line phone to have is fairly fragile, and a total rip off when it comes to what you get VS what you pay. Something that baffles me too is now it supports Skype, which lets you make calls via Wi-Fi. But you need a contract to even turn the thing on, and said contract is a "full plan" which includes unlimited everything for $99 a month. SO, why fuck with Skype when you can just call someone? It's beyond me... But people are slaves to their Apple products. It's sad really.

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: @julia_eff™
To: Rise
Date: May 22, 2009 1:10 AM
Subject: RE:

I refuse to own an Apple product. I was offered a Macbook and an iPod for graduation, and I turned both down because I can't buy into that corporate culture. Everybody is a slave to their iWhatever, they need to get a fucking iBrain.
One of my friends got a first-gen iPhone and failed to get a case for it, figuring he'd wait till the next paycheck. Dropped it the next day in the parking lot, the screen shattered, and the retailer announced his warranty void because he dropped it. Mmm, beuraucracy.

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Rise
To: @julia_eff™
Date: May 22, 2009 1:51 AM
Subject: RE:

Thank god you don't like Apple bullshit. I never know how people are going to react when I talk about it so I try to play it cool, but I fucking hate Apple. Their products are nothing more than elitist fashion statements wielded by people too incompetent to run any computer that doesn't have proverbial training wheels on it.
And yeah, you can't insure an iPhone either so if you drop it like your friend you have to shell out $600 for the basic model. However, if I crush my Samsung under my boot in front of a sales rep in the AT&T store, while making obscene gestures and insulting his mother, I can still get a new one for $50 because I pay $5 a month to insure it for just such an occasion.

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: @julia_eff™
To: Rise
Date: May 22, 2009 2:03 AM
Subject: RE:

Apple is shiny. The people like shiny. Personally, I find their programming to be fucking stupid, their menus on everything to be arranged in a completely nonsensical manner, and thier products sub-par at best. I can't make an iPod change songs to save my life. I'd bust the fucking light-up girly shit on a MacBook in about 2.4 seconds. The back of the iPod scratches so easy, it looks like a cat slept on it. And oh yeah, you can't replace/maintain any of it yourself, can't replace your iPod's battery yourself, can't service anything. And when it burns up, you just throw it away! Awesome! We can ship it to China and let orphans work for pennies a day wallowing in our toxic waste-metals to "dispose" it, which really means "melt it into the pellets they use to make vending-machine jewelry". I have nothing but bad things to say to Apple.
I would quite honestly love to see you trash a phone like that in front of the store guy. Lucky. I don't think Virgin offers a deal like that, otherwise I'd have a new phone by now and my piece-of-shit cheaply-made easy-to-break assphone would be a 50-cent vending-machine charm bracelet at the grocery store already.

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Rise
To: @julia_eff™
Date: May 22, 2009 2:14 AM
Subject: Re: RE:

Wow. I wish there were more people like you around :)

------
This is why I like this guy so much. We can bitch for hours.

-julia

idk how to feel on this one.

2009-05-21T22:46:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to Eminem and Blink-182 lately. Old Green Day. Brett's coming over tomorrow to hang out, and I swear I'll write a proper update when life stops being so...ugh.

The thing with Brett is, I've known him since the 9th grade. He's twenty, he was a senior when I was a freshman, and he drew on my math homework. I've had this awkward lil half-crush on him pretty much since I met him, because he's basically an asshole for the good of society. He's a fucking genius, too, and an amazing artist.

When I was a Freshie, he dated Kait, Nancy, and Carrie. My best friend, the girl that's essentially my older sister, and the girl that pulled me through mental crisis after mental crisis. He just got back together with Kait for about a month or whatever here, and about a month ago they broke up again. Well, she dumped him, because she's a tremendous whore, but she's always been that way.

Because he was dating all these people I'm very close to, I've never really been allowed to have an opinion on him. But we've been talking on myspace more lately, and Carrie told me a couple days ago that he called her up, tipsy, gushing about liking me. Either Carrie's yanking my crank and we'll have a good laugh on this later, or dude actually likes me and I can be ecstatic now. Well, reservedly ecstatic anyway; because everyime I go all flail in one of these situations it backfires.

We had plans to all get together--Carrie, Rob, Danny, Brett, and I--on Memorial Day in Port Huron and cook out and shit. But then Brett didn't know if he could make it or not, and he was all interested in hanging out with me anyway, so he gave me his number and we're gonna get together tomorrow--me and him--to play video games and just hang out. I'll see if I can scam some fucking Taco Hell out of him, that would be awesome. We'll see how things shake out. I'm not flailing. Yet.

Somewhere, there's a Universal Truth in this story, but I can't find it right now.

Gonna go listen to "Stan" and maybe sleep. I have to be at school at seven tomorrow, and finish an assload of homework.

Bunch of fuckin' amateurs.

2009-05-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

I just returned from an altogether-way-too-long trip to Subway for a deelicious sandwich.

Why does it take three workers 25 minutes to make me a sandwich? Really. Okay, there were two people in line before me. Why does it take three workers 25 minutes to serve three customers? It takes talent to suck this hard.

First they were out of every kind of bread besides Cheddar and Herb. It's supposed to be Herb & Cheese, but they fucked up and left off the cheese. So cheddar bread, or herb bread, or wait an hour till the other bread comes out of the oven. Right.

Then they systematically ran out of every ingredient on the sandwich-line, having to leave for these grand expeditions to the back, only to return five minutes later clutching a thing of pickles or lettuce or cheese. This is pure dedication, you see, to delay my food this much. It's a fucking artform, and it played out like a dumb blonde/Pollock/Mexican/Negro/Italian/Redneck/whatever joke. I am astonished.

Then they took my five-thirty and gave me a dirty look on the way out the door.

Great customer service.

Open letter to my landlord.

2009-05-20T06:10:00.000-07:00

Dear Landlord:

I realize that there is an epic hole in our house. I realize that, as landlord, it's your duty to fix the epic hole in our house.

But why must you do it at 8:00 AM on the first day of Senior freedom?

Honestly. You're up there ripping boards off the roof and it feels like the house is actually shaking apart. It's 8:00 AM. I am still asleep. Or I was, anyway, till it sounded like a herd of elephants racing around the upstairs bedroom.

For future reference, please refrain from making any massive home repairs, completely unnanounced, at ungodly hours I do not ever wish to see again. Or I'll cut off your dick and feed it to a squirrel.

Sincerely,

Julia Eff

Inaugural post, with a side of bitching!

2009-05-11T03:41:00.000-07:00

So it's really shitty to start a new blog this way, but does anybody have all the Wednesday 13/Frankenstein Drag Queens stuff prior to Skeletons, Shallow Believer, and the Retard-O-Bot demos?

My iPod, which isn't an iPod, it's a stupid fucking piece of shit Sansa I want to fucking replace because I lard-assed it and it fucking cracked the fucking screen like some sort of cocksucker, wiped fucking everything. So bye-bye, all of my videos (that was srsly like ten hours of uploading time, u gaiz. srsly. i mean srs bzns.) and all my digital-only music, which includes pretty much my entire Marilyn Manson collection, the Retard-O-Bot demos, 95% of my Wednesday 13, and tracks like "Choke Me" separated from their parent track for extra convenience and rockage. Furthermore, Covetous Creature, Sexless Demons and Scars, and Human Teenage Mediocrity all are gone too.

I'm not an idiot downloading things directly to an mp3 device, but all those tracks are stored on my other laptop, which is currently about as functional as a 15-lb Compaq doorstop. Wahh wah wah, my life, so hard. I'm going to go starve myself because my iPod crashed and I hate my life.

So I'm trying to rip my physical discs to the computer and it's making such a noise I think it could explode, which is freaking me out because goddammit I have a Kill Hannah CD in there!

Shit, that's what else I lost, all the early KH demos and EPs going all the way back to Beauty In Sinking Ships. So if by some grace of god or something to do with Satan, Mat or one of the KH dudes, you're reading this? Send me all of it. Took me two years to download it and now I fucking lost it?! This is daft!

Bitch bitch bitch moan moan moan, write about something interesting...

People keep asking me why I want or need typewriters, why I'm embracing that kind of nostalgia and low-tech over computers. I'm not embracing it over computers, as anybody that has any experience with me would know, it's just that typewriters don't have calamities like broken charge pins that render your data all useless, locked inside it with no way to get it out; typewriters don't crash and take fucking everything with them; typewriters can always be tangibly fixed because they can't catch viruses that delete fucking everything or hijack all their settings and sell them to a botnet network. Everything is hard copy.

Now, all the downloading evangelicals are going to tell me that, since my iPod isn't actually an iPod, unless I bought the tracks from Amazon or similar then I shouldn't have a bunch of digital-only media that I lost. Sorry, you caught me. You caught the tater. I download things illegally. Believe me, if KH were to suddenly repress all of their early CDs (and sign a couple more Welcome to Chicago DVDs, hint hint) I would be the lunatic ordering all of them in one fell blow. Same goes for the Retard-O-Bot demos, which were probably the most-listened-to things in my entire music collection. But dowloading things illegally is so easy, and the quality is good enough that hey, you can't beat it for free.

Then you lock your digital-only media in a device that's supposed to keep it safe forevers and evers, only to have it fucking go batshit and crash and take everything with it. And you figure, 'hey, I can just reupload it if it crashes!' but then what if you can't access your original files to begin with because those are locked in some mammoth hunk of plastic and metal that won't even start? Then you feel pretty stupid, right? Or you just die because you can't fathom something like that actually happening.

See, if all of this were on vinyl? Sure, I wouldn't be able to download it illegally, but I sure as hell wouldn't lose it all if say, it got damp or couldn't charge. Record players don't throw technological hissy fits. They can only be destroyed by sitting on them or fire or water or acts of god or dust or a sneeze. And if your record player dies, it doesn't take all of your LPs with it.

Call me Luddite if you want, but I'd much rather have a hard copy of something I've worked my ass off for--an article or what-have-you--that can only be destroyed by shredding or burning or similar, instead of being just fucking erased at the machine's whim or rendered useless by the machine's decision to never be started again.

So that's why I embrace typewriters, they give me the hard copy, and I'm not going to lose that hard copy by my own stupidity because of how long it took to type up. Now everybody stop fucking pestering me on my decision to own typewriters before I beat you with one. And trust me, unlike some flimsy little Macbook Air or something? You could seriously kill a person with one of these...they weigh at least twenty pounds.

You call it 'old fashioned,' I call it 'technological genius,'

-julia