Friends

I have no idea what you're talking about, but happy birthday.

Not much to say lately, but thought I'd pass on a snippet of someone else's voice. My friend Libby is an awesome writer. Check out this excerpt:

My life is absolutely totally great. I love working in the sex industry. I’m sexy and young and well-edjumicated and full of bubbling energy. And my car is bitchin’.

My life is an x-rated soap opera written by alcoholic spinsters with too much time on their shaky, ring-less hands. The sex industry makes its money off of mixed signals- porn starlet as sexually empowered woman on screen, exploited and humiliated smut slave on set- which is complex and bewildering for a female nymphomaniac who tends to warp her career into her identity.

In two months I will be 30, a deadline that has been shaking my psyche since I turned 26. My sexy clothes don’t fit anymore, and I feel like a polish sausage when I wear garter belts and high heels. I spend most of my time alone, exhausted from doing nothing.

And my car is an ashtray on wheels.

I hear ya, girl.

I know I'm kind of late to this party, but what the heck:

1. Every time I see a bottle of calamine lotion, the song "Poison Ivy" gets stuck in my mind.
2. Every time I fly, during takeoff the song "Keep Their Heads Ringin'" gets stuck in my mind. (In the video, they steal a plane.)
3. I love the show Everybody Loves Raymond.
4. I am the biggest misocapnist you know. I guarantee it.
5. Sometimes, when my feet feel really good and I feel good all over (my feet have to feel good in order for this to happen), I think that if other people could experience how good it feels to be me, they'd never want to be themselves again.
6. I drive a 1998 Honda Civic with the following stickers: Keep Abortion Legal, a Lucinda Williams World Without Tears sticker, and a Kasey Chambers The Captain sticker.
7. I lived with my parents until I was 24 years old.
8. The biggest regret of my life is caving in to family pressure and going to college in my hometown rather than going away.

I didn't do one thing on my itinerary except present my paper, but I still had a great time. I met Liz, Alex, Andrew, Tracy, and Jeremy, and I also met Jason and Jason, which was lots of fun. I spent a little too much money at LUSH, but hey, when do I ever have the opportunity to go to a LUSH store?!

Anyway, now for the linking roundup:

Tracy blogs about a panel she and I both attended (and Tracy was one of the presenters by proxy): "Online/Offline Intersections." Tracy also writes about our panel in that same post and has more notes here. On Sunday, I attended a roundtable on qualitative internet research which was excellent. I took three pages of paper notes and will blog those as soon as I get a chance.

I'm going to follow in the footsteps of Liz and Alex by posting my tentative AoIR itinerary. I won't get to the conference until Friday night, so my Saturday schedule is as follows:

8:30: "Pornography and Ideology"

10:00: "Identity: linking identity, community, and belonging"

11:30: Keynote

2:00: I might need this time to meditate before my presentation, but if I go to a session, it will most likely be "Expanding the Boundaries: Methodological Issues in Doing Internet Research."

4:00 I'm presenting--in the "Blogging: authors and consequences II" session.

Sunday:

8:30: "Digital Divide: haves and have-nots?"

10:00: "e-Democracy: localism"

Hey, Anne and Andrew, what are your schedules like? Are we going to have a bloggers' night out? (Ugh, that sounds nerdy.)

Update: Looks like Anne's going elsewhere.

I just found this reading diary entry written by my friend Darren on In the Time of the Butterflies by Alvarez. It had the same shattering effect on me too. If you haven't read it, read it now, and while you're at it, read her other books, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Yo!, and In the Name of Salomé. Alvarez is one of the few fiction authors I try to keep up with; when she comes out with a new novel, I buy the hardcover and read it immediately.

Recently, I Googled a friend of mine from undergrad and found her blog. I emailed her, we briefed each other on the past 7-8 years, and I told her I had some photos of a band she was in a long time ago called The Chicklettes, and that if she wanted them, I'd send them to her. I had meant to send them to her for years now, but never had her mailing address. She was delighted, and said that the other members of the band would be thrilled to see them too, that they're 30-year-old wives, architects, etc. now. They've never seen these pictures. So today I very excitedly rummaged through my archives, found them, and they are now en route to North Carolina. The whole thing makes me feel really happy; these women are going to see heretofore lost photos from their rock'n'roll grrrrrrrl days. I'm having this warm fuzzy Amélie kind of day as a result of having sent this stuff--I hope it gets there soon!

Thanks a lot, Scott! Scott has just invited me to Friendster, the latest web community "six degrees of separation" craze. I've known about it for some time but have tried to resist it. Oh well, so much for that.