decompression

i am sitting here at muddy's coffeeshop in the 816 attempting to get some work done, being blown away by whatever public radio dj is doing her thing right now. without warning, in the middle of an already pleasant string of songs on which i am/hipsters are currently doting, emerged the familiar, nostalgia-inducing chords of "skull." sebadoh bakesale 4-eva!! still love it, proto-emo self-loathing and all.

it's been cozy, carnivorous times here in kc after 12 hours of travel hell on wednesday. i am only mentioning this to say: FUCK UNITED. i realize there was a snowstorm in denver, and i realize that denver is one of their hubs, and i realize that they and all major airlines are bankrupt and understaffed, etc. etc. etc. but even after accounting for these factors, i was subjected to some of the worst customer service i have ever endured for anything, ever. endless hours of breathtaking ineptitude, rudeness, and abandonment punctuated by fragmented, unreliable announcements. the management must really be doing a spectacularly bad job over there. i finally ended up bailing, leaving o'hare all together and taking the last southwest flight out of midway. in summation: FUCK UNITED. now it's all about going running and being slayed by the northeastern kansan hills, assisting my father with last-last-minute holiday shopping (mercifully keeping my lunch in my stomach when a weatherbeaten, beaded-sweater-wearing blonde relentlessly hit on him at 'shop beautiful'), watching the british version of 'what not to wear' with my mom, and reading my book about the kinks. oh, and eating lots and lots of meat.

LOFT PARTY TONIGHT BITCHEZ!!!

something to consider

this would be really, really, really sad even if it wasn't happening to one of my favorite musicians since forever.

housekeeping

catching up on some of the recurring themes around here:

1. my inability to cook: on saturday, a new low. i fucked up a bowl of quick oats. OATMEAL. i estimated the water incorrectly and it overboiled and i had to use a strainer. i thought i was ready to graduate from the individual kiddie packets but apparently NOT.

2. the everyday unintentional awesomeness of my friends:

a. so, the other day i filled out one of those ridiculous surveys that an acquaintance had posted on myspace. because i'm secretly 12 years old, and it's finals, and at that particular moment i could deal with "pepsi or crack cocaine?" much more than "describe the scope of the 'intangible rights doctrine' as it relates to the federal mail fraud statute." call it a new low of a different sort. out of the 4 friends that slummed along with me, 3 answered a question relating to the music of jack johnson with "i don't know who that is."

b. the same day, an email from jessica: "is it wrong to think mr. spitzer is sexy?"

all i want for christmas

well, god bless big brother and guerilla marketing and all of it, because it appears that some wily entrepreneurs have devised the MOST EXACTLY PERFECT gifts for yours truly:

exhibit a: earring of the month club

exhibit b: joan didion non-fiction collection

feel free to take this post literally.

marsha!

"Dear Claire,

I really like the photo of you and Rob and the kids...(that I took) Yes,
I'd say those two crazy blondes look like Mother and Daughter!! Love,
Mom....thanks for the phone call....Darn it, I missed Boston Legal last
night also. I heard Candice got kidnapped the other night...I'm getting
hooked. I recently saw James Spader on Conan...and He said he liked
dressing up a girl in one episode because the clothes are so much more
comfortable. His favorite things now are good food and drink...and he
admits to gaining girth. That show went from a year like being The
Practice to being very camp.
I can see how you enjoy it. Love, Mom.....ps. stay warm"

thanks, brain

for choosing today, a few days before finals, to obsess over why i: don't challenge myself/don't have a better job/sell myself short/settle for less than i'm capable of. while we're at it, why don't we go over global warming, the meaning of life, and why no one will ever love me? oh, and that chicken-and-egg thing. i've got NOTHING but time.

oh my goodness!

thanks for the shout-out, mac mccaughan!

also: there are lots of new photos on my flickr page, because apparently i care about that more than graduating from law school.

hot dresses and sweet jams.

it was such a long week but by friday i'd forgotten about it. bought a hot dress because my next paycheck is going to be at least twice the usual (although, who am i kidding? i would have bought it anyway). saturday went to erica's birthday party, which was a lot of fun, but cut out early to go see portastatic with kastrup. i had the plans before i knew about her party (and, um, it was portastatic), but i think it all worked out for the best. i just don't think i could have dealt with another night in a generic lakeview/old town bar or club. i love my friends, but my already-limited tolerance for that sort of scene has been worn pretty thin lately. like, threadbare. plus i really needed to laugh a lot, and with kastrup, that's a given. it's too bad i sort of took that for granted for a while.

the show was awesome. apparently so awesome that somebody fainted, although i don't remember it. (and not because i was the faintee. for once.) you know how i feel, or maybe you read hopper in the reader (although i like her blog post better). rocking and heartfelt and true. and just when i thought the show had reached its incendiary end, they played "BABY," gal costa/os mutantes tropicalia touchstone reconfigured as americana rave-up. dude sang the english AND the portuguese. randomly met jim wilbur and the talented violin player while waiting at the bar. totes good people. this means that i have now for-serious talked to 3/4 of superchunk. funny how these things work out.

tomorrow is going to be so crazy, but as long as the blue line is halfway functional, it should be ok.

thanksgiving is going to be awesome this year. i am so stoked and grateful. i hope the same is true for you.

more happy photos.

another little cousin. sadie grey murphy was born yesterday. one day old, and she looks way wiser than i'll ever be.



given her parents, we know she is already hipper.

half full.

spent all of yesterday in a legal research k-hole, but things are looking up. to complement my optimism, here is a photo of my young cousins mia and ted:


also, although the underlying events are obviously nothing to laugh at, this is the funniest thing i have read in a little while.

sick.

i am sick of ricola drops. i am sick of tea. i am sick of my job and almost all of the people there. i am sick of people generally, with about 5 or 6 exceptions.

that last one was particularly exacerbated this morning. as i walked to the bus stop, i saw people ahead of me walking around something. that something turned out to be a homeless guy laying in the middle of the sidewalk. now, i'm as jaded as the next girl; if dude was merely laying in an alley, i would have kept on walking, told myself that he was just sleeping (one off), and convinced myself that there was nothing much i could do anyway. but this guy was in the middle of the sidewalk, and he was kind of twitching. i asked him if he needed to go to the doctor, and he didn't appear to hear me at all. so i called 911, and stayed until the firetruck arrived. the cops and firemen managed to sort of rouse the guy, but it took some doing, and he didn't look well. and when i got on the bus, i could still see a medic trying to communicate with him, and not getting very far. said cops and firemen were obviously annoyed that they were called out to deal with the situation, and they equally obviously thought i was some kind of bleeding heart naif for calling them. (i recognize the redundancy in that sentence, but bear with me; i'm too busy trying not to cough up a lung to worry about syntax.) totally fucking rude macho bullshit. but i'm not mad at them; they still did their job. i am extremely disappointed with all of the people before i got there who didn't do anything. yeah, maybe he was drunk. but who the fuck knows? he could have had a concussion, or a seizure, or worse. and ok, even if they didn't care, even if they could not give a shit about some smelly black homeless guy, they also completely don't care about the many young children who live in the neighborhood.

i am merely extremely fucking frustrated with school.

capsules.

1. this tells you all you need to know about yesterday:

"cko444: today is so fucked. i'm trying to write a memo on stuff i've never seen before, bill is rageful, angel is gone, jen is wearing ugly boots, and the brownies taste weird."

2. this sums up current events better than i ever could.

3. talented friends:

ad astra per apsera got another pitchfork review and it's not completely gay! and s & t's entity shallowboi got a a glowing writeup in the Ptolemaic Terrascope, which is like the psych-rock bible.

man, i'm glad i'm frittering around on the internet this morning, because it enabled me to see that my conflicts teacher cancelled AGAIN. this makes seriously 6 or 7 times now, excluding holidays! i want a refund.

second wind.

you know how sometimes you just have the best girl talk, or just plain talk, with a friend, and it makes you feel infinitely better and hopeful about your disfunctional little self? that's the kind of experience i ended up having tonight with loren, at the bar, and in the car. after we drank pbr from giant chalices, or "schooners," as the bartender was intent on describing them. south bend rundown to follow, early-morning-standardized-testing-experience-in-the-southside rundown to follow that, i'm sure.

yin/yang

man, today has not been that great. not enough sleep, not enough coffee, too much sugar in the coffee i finally got, etc., ad infinitum. i guess nothing affirmatively bad has happened, but i just feel out of rhythm with respect to everything today. characterized by a strong sense that i missed or forgot something obvious with respect to everything i did at work and volunteering. yet ironically, inexplicablly, i seem to know what the fuck is going on in federal crim law right now. oh wait, just kidding, he just started talking about TICKLE ME ELMO. . . . i CANNOT wait to kick it with the o'connors in south bend tomorrow.

if she says we partied, then i'm pretty sure we partied.

wow! fun times last week. as i told nick parish, i realized once again that from next june until, um, FOREVER, it will be all work all the time, so i am embracing the relative flexibility of my current schedule. in other words: carpe diem, bitches.

weds. was the guest bartending event for the LRAP, at a random bar in the south loop that i found that does that sort of thing. it ended up being really fun, although actually bartending was one of the most stressful tasks i have undertaken in a long time. mercifully, i was only only on call for an hour, at which point i got to drink for free and eat TATER TOTS. lots of folks showed up, including john hiltz, pretty much the only person i truly liked from law review, and the roommate. then went out and met my best homegirl erica, who was in town for work, at some other random bar in that grey area between the west loop and ukie village. i got really real and danced a lot with her 21-year-old-friend (male readers, you missed out) and sang a pretenders song.

thursday i got moderately real and rocked out and saw the hold steady with parish. so much fun, he is truly one of the good guys. catfish haven brought it as well. and the return of sean na na fed my conviviality, although i preferred their/his stage banter to the songs. except for "princess and the pony", which i might have been the only one in the audience to recognize/care about, out of sheer nostalgia, until he dedicated it "to 1999" at which point, the nostalgia evaporated and i just felt old.

on both thursday and friday, the universe truly dealt me get out of jail free cards, because i was not just not hungover, but, irrationally exuberant, so to speak. maybe there were three cards, because i later found out that our occasionally cool, violently passive-aggressive, turbo-bitch of a litigation secretary, was at the show (and got to PARTY WITH THE BANDS) but i had no idea at the time.

friday was bananas. spent at work. one of those days where either everyone was crazy and i was sane, or vice versa, 50/50 odds. just plain weird. started the day with no work, ended the day with too much work, in the process repeatedly laughed harder than i ever have in my adult life as the eccentricities of all my coworkers were somehow amplified a thousandfold and i hit late-day frustration at the absurdity of the particular task i had been given. i swear, it was like, "can you pull a couple recent first district cases on the meaning of life? thanks." so i was a little fried. seriously, if 200 laughs equal 10 minutes of rowing, then i have a six-pack now. ask schad.

finally slept for something like 10 hours on friday night in anticipation of our halloween party the next day. which was really, really fun. lots of people ended up stopping by, many in costume (parish made a particularly ghoulish appearance as HIMSELF.) quote of the evening occurred early on, when this girl, who works in pediatric psych research, explained that she had "taken a year off to work with recreational drugs." as in conducted studies on same...but HA. i defy any of my many brilliant science-oriented friends to drop THAT line in a job interview. one of our neighbors even made it, who is a physicist. like all my neighbors, i barely know him, but potential conversational awkwardness was avoided as van dyke, ever the dark horse, displayed a heretofore unknown avocation for physics. yay for party mingling synergy. best costume would be a tie between this kid in what looked to be a legitmate nasa jumpsuit and caitlin's friend molly, who went as tippi hedren from "the birds." no, seriously. she sported retro attire and wore one of those novelty headbands with little birds suspended over it, but also liberally applied the fake blood. honorable mention goes to caitlin's boyfriend taylor for going as walker, texas ranger (see photo). you can't fuck with chuck norris.

now am rededicating myself to running and studying until this week gets even crazier. on wednesday the entire o'connor clan is going to south bend to see my uncle coach his college basketball team at a tournament at notre dame, where my other uncle teaches. the parents are picking me up at work, and i am truly excited. even my cousin who is a 1L is going. at the other end of the spectrum, saturday morning, i take the "multistate professional responsibility exam." for unknown reasons, parish and schad and i all got stuck with the testing location of kennedy king college, which is roughly located at 68th and bumfuck. and i just found out that i have to go take--and pay for--a passport photo for my exam ticket. whatthefuckever. that should be a fun morning. thankfully, due to loren's reliable contribution of a wine cube and parish's donation of the leftover abita from the hurricane student network benefit, caitlin and i have enough leftover alcohol to survive an apocalypse.

that is all!

great minds thinking alike.

wow wow wow wow, freaky. i was on the bus today, and i was thinking about how i wanted to reiterate my love for the last few couple, post-fatherhood, portastatic albums. most anyone who knows me and who at all likes the music i like knows that i have been long been down with the superchunk, and correspondingly, portastatic. but neither were bands i would say that i loved for their lyrics; although sometimes very clever and always very earnest, they also came off abstruse and random and either overthought or sort of tossed off. you know, indie rock. (partial exception to “foolish,” which will probably always be one of my top 10 albums of all time.) but something began to change with “the summer of the shark”, which communicated post-9/11 loss and confusion and emotional drift in the most honest way i’ve yet heard, sleater-kinney included. (this guy agrees, much more eloquently.)

and then with “bright ideas” (my number 1 with a bullet last year, i still listen to some portion of it every day), and now “be still please”, mac macaughan entered this completely new terrain. i know that “post-fatherhood” connotes fuzzy sweaters and boring-ass folk songs, but here, construed in its truest sense, it’s really apt. on these albums, open-hearted affection and wonder and humility (“song for a clock”, “i wanna know girls”) is irresolvably juxtaposed with wariness and anger (“bright ideas,” “you blanks”), which is how i’m sure i would feel if i were trying to raise a kidlet in america 2006. it’s kind of how i feel already. and the songs are as good or better than before, too. the new one is a little harder to get into than bright ideas, less immediate, more self-consciously “pretty” (specifically the one inexplicable clarinet (?) solo at the beginning of “you blanks,” otherwise one of my favorite songs on the album), but still solid and becoming more rewarding on each listen.

anyway, i was thinking about it, then i got home and discovered that none other than ms. JESSICA HOPPER beat me to it. le whoa.

i joined the club.

yesterday i played hooky. capital-h-o-o-k-y-period. but whatever. i give to oxfam on the regular, i've probably paid to see your band play, i'm kind to animals and sometimes children, i can take a day off, right?

two things precipitated the laziness. one, my volunteer site totally flaked on me. two, the previous night saw an incident with my laptop, in which keyboard started fritzing on me. this was kind of the last straw. i was going to try and hold off until next semester, but it was time to embrace the inevitable and buy A Mac. so help me, if the JMLS fucks up my loan in any way, i will unleash a rageful hate unlike anything anybody ever thought me capable of.

but anyway. oh, this machine is beautiful. beautiful. although i can't seem to load google talk and i am having issues with my new, mac-compatible quicken software. which sounds like a nerdy thing to complain about, but it's the only thing standing inbetween Claire Living In Her Wicker Park Apartment and Claire Living In A Cardboard Box.

but anyway. beautiful.

truth is funnier than fiction.

HA.

well, fiction is pretty funny too.

this week's hit parade.

8. the old woman i met at the anti-war rally. spookily, she was a fellow traveller from from fairway, kansas, hotbed of radicalism. she lives here now, came in from the south suburbs because she felt so strongly, even though she conceded (rightly) our naivete at being there. (the rally itself kind of sucked but that's another story.) anyway, in contrast to all the tired and shrill slogans that surrounded us, she sported a button that simply read: "peace takes courage." i like that.

7. the new portastatic album, and i haven't even heard it yet. i'm just that stoked. (related: this. and this.)

6. seeing talented kansas buddies ad astra per aspera featured in pitchfork.

5. this video. it's fun to watch, and appears to feature a fair amount of lollapalooza footage.

4. the snow. not freezing rain, but legitimate, beautiful flakes of snow. even though it arrived way too early.

3. my fairly decent performance in the bucktown 5k, which officially solidifies my status as a Wicker Park Yuppie.

2. my upcoming interview with polsinelli, shalton, welte, suelthaus, p.c.

-8000. giving my shitty "closing argument" in a half hour.

1. getting to see swearing at motorists afterward.

shiny objects.

not to get all consumer fetishist on you, but i got the best pair of shoes today.
i just couldn't say no. but i am working an extra day this week and got my drinks paid for on friday (and my chicken the night before...long story) so it evens out, right? right?

please don't answer that honestly.