Sweetney

adorable? yes. but DEADLY.

let the neighborhood beggary commence!

god i hate the evil mimes.

drunk on the power of trick-or-treating.

"i want MORE candy, mommy!"

umm...maybe we shouldn't...

the people who live here are CRAZY.

dude, is that don ho?

links for 2005-10-31

• The 100 greatest horror movie performances
• eBay: DKNY Men's Leather Pants I Unfortunately Own
  distinctly frightening
• Exhumation Celebration
  famous exhumations
• Guide To The Scariest Music You’ll Ever Hear - Stylus Magazine
  for your consideration.
• The Legend of Me.
  They say that when the October moon is full, and the swamps and meadows are covered with an eerie mist, I will put down my beer and go walking through the streets.
• Defend yourself against the coming robot rebellion
  oooh! SCARY!
• emotipumpkin

xine's hat.

better late than never... tis very longshoreman and salty, yes?

greetings on the day of the dead, from the land of the very-nearly-dead.

oh, i've missed you, you interweb you. does that necessarily translate into: i've missed the only semi-confirmed yet mostly vague and insubstantial sense that there are scores of invisible people out there who seem to have some sort of unexplained yet abiding interest in the goings on in my minute life? yes, yes. in any case, ya'll haven't missed much, dearies, what with all the sniffling sneezing coughing aching stuffyhead feverishness going on around these parts. truly, i spent very nearly every waking moment this weekend sprawled before the teevee, sucking down vast quantities of America's Haunted Houses, Haunted Hotels, A Haunting, and similar low-rent basic cable productions involving 3rd-rate reenactments and laughable special effects. i gained nothing from absorbing all those programs, except perhaps a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction, knowing that indeed our home is thankfully free of growling demons and spectral materializations of previous owners and their not-quite-dead-yet hostilities. so, you know, yay us.

we're going trick-or-treating mighty early this evening, since M_ has festered up a loverly ear infection (what is that, the TWELFTH this year?), and seems unable to remain conscious much past 5pm... so expect some photos documenting the grand unveiling of the inexplicable hello kitty witch later on (but really, who needs a comprehensible costume when hello kitty is involved?).

i'm slooooowly climbing back into the blogging saddle here, people.

and yes, i'm wearing the assless chaps.

that's what i get for trying to take a week off.

i should've known my plans would be foiled.... by The Pestilence. M_'s been plague-ridden since wednesday, and despite a valiant internal battle that included attempts at jedi mind tricking myself into wellness, i too succumbed. the past two days have been a blur of crumpled tissues, mucus and vast, fuming vats of vicks vaporub. all productivity has ground to a gear-shredding halt, and i've been reduced to a blanket-swaddled lump protruding from the cushions in our couch.

i've been 100% offline for around 48 hrs -- the first time that's happened in any past -- recent or not-so recent -- that i have mental recall of. i'd planned to put some of my downtime this week toward responding to a sizable backlog of emails, but since that now appears unlikely to happen, let me now broadcast here a general, blanket apology to everyone waiting on any kind of response/correspondence from me: for lo, i am in a pitiable state, and deserving of your kindly pardon. when i am recovered i promise to embark upon a campaign of correspondence that will set everything right and mold me back into a shape that resembles something like a real, interactive human -- one who responds to questions, speaks in turn when spoken to, and is generally not such a tremendous ass with the email and whatnot. sorry, guys.

in the interim, enjoy the following dispatch from our lovely pittsburgh pal kelly, who is joining the ranks of us homeowning-types in less than a week... and is, understandably, a little freaked out about it.

[c]harm city.

this from the brilliant and hilarious angela, who i've pimped mightily round these parts in the past, and will continue to pimp in the future. she's a neighbor, the mother to M_'s bestest pal, R_, and the closest thing i've got to a doppleganger in this city (i'm the evil half, natch).

I have a huge headache this morning and am in less than generous spirits about certain aspects of Baltimore life. I would like to be able, just one Saturday morning, to drive Joel to work and come home without having to stop 897,543,220 times to wait for people to finish up their conversations IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING ROAD. On many, many days -- more days than I will ever admit -- I find this little Mobtown quirk very charming, and it makes me proud to live here. It really does. When I'm not dying to come home and put my aching head on a pillow and stretch out my aching legs (fucking broken elevators), I find it amusing and oddly comforting that I live in a place where people assume that they can just hang out or wander around right in the middle of the street. I mean, in D.C., you would try that once, and your missing limbs would serve as a reminder not to do it the next time you got that crazy idea. Baltimore, for all the violence and murder and stuff, is gentler than D.C. that way. But today my fucking head hurts, and I don't feel warm and fuzzy about how gentle the goddamn city is; I am cursing it for its lack of consideration of my need to get home to my pillows and my computer. (Before you run off and tell everyone what a pampered asshole I am, note that I am noting that me-self.)

Baltimore's so different from D.C. So different. I've always understood that to live in D.C. is to be somewhat disconnected from reality in some way. A lot of the population turns over every four years with the federal government, and that has strongly influenced my sense of community. I have to remind myself all the time that this is not Northern Virginia, and I cannot simply grit my teeth and wait for the people across the street to inevitably move far, far away. In all likelihood, they're not going anywhere, ever, and that means that I'm going to have to adapt and become a person who likes to, or at least CAN, live across the street from loud people with a loud dog and creepy kids. I still think of this as “quirky,” but it probably isn't.

And Baltimore doesn't hide its scars or its dirty laundry. We seem to have a citywide discussion going on pretty much all the time about how fucked up we are. Like my family. We have long discussions about how fucked up our relatives are, and no one really has any hurt feelings about it -- it just *is*. So while Anthony Williams and Vincent Orange will come to community meetings in D.C. and just lie right in people's faces about things everyone KNOWS are fucked up, and the media will serve that bullshit like it's the word of god, it's not uncommon here to hear city officials on TV saying, more or less, “yeah, no shit, the schools are a disaster.” There's no hiding of broken people here, either. It's an interesting place to be depressed. On one hand, you've got plenty of company, and no one's going to any trouble to appear “normal,” so you don't feel like you're particularly or especially fucked up. On the other, it can get just a little... soul-crushing to see all these crushed souls wandering about. In the middle of the street.

At the end of the day, though, if we have to live in a world that crushes people's souls, I'd rather we just put it out there for all to see. You never have any idea what anyone is feeling in D.C. From the looks of things, everyone is feeling rushed. Always. Just rushed. Not happy and rushed, or sad and rushed, just rushed. They're in a hurry, period. That's the official group emotion -- rushed. Here... people don't seem to have any issue with letting you know they're fucking sad because life is kicking their asses. Or that they're pissed -- I hear a lot of shouting here. Or that they're in a fine mood and they're quite happy to see you, hon. It's very real. Here's how we're feeling, and here's what our lives are, and it's okay for you to know about that, because you're just another person like we are, and by the way, how are you doing?

It's like... community... or something else I'm not familiar with.

links for 2005-10-25

• get your war on | page 50

the good feeling.

here's a little something from my best friend christine, who has been an enormous force in my life... she also happens to be one of the smartest, most talented and interesting people you're ever likely to meet, in addition to being wise beyond any measure. we've always lived oddly parallel lives -- encountering similar challenges and frames of mind simultaneously -- though it didn't take me long to figure out that christine was light years ahead of me in all sorts of ways, and i've grown tremendously as a person just by rubbing up against her (if you know what i mean. heh.). so ya'll be nice to xine, or i'll give you a beat-down, basically.

there's this thing i call the good feeling. it's a physical sensation of happiness and satisfaction located in the chest area. i feel it after i've made something really good, and i've become addicted to it.

about three weeks ago, i finished what i thought was the final draft of my novel. i must have carried the good feeling around for at least two weeks (until my husband read the novel and reported that there's still work to be done, but i expect to have the good feeling again when the next draft is finished).

the thing about the good feeling is that it's pretty constant. it's like the opposite of a toothache. in the case of my novel, i certainly didn't think about it all the time, but the good feeling never left me. i'd be driving to work and feeling happy, the good feeling warm in my chest, and i'd have to stop and remember why, which would remind me all over again that i'd “finished” my book. so the good feeling is physical and doesn't just come when i think about it. the good feeling can last for a couple weeks or just a few days, and like any good drug, i find that i seek it out.

i guess i'm lucky. i've been pretty empowered in my creative life. i grew up with an artist mother who demonstrated time and again that if you wanted something, you just made it. it helped that we were poorer than dirt and couldn't afford to go out and buy things; so we made them instead. we made clothes, jewelry, and our walls always had the loveliest paintings on them.

in college, i wanted cool jewelry, but beads were expensive; so i found a little antique store in greenville that sold the strangest things for little money: a tiny tin filled with watch hands, old strings of carnelian beads; my mom would go to estate sales and send me austrian crystal beads and other cool things. i got compliments on my jewelry and started selling them at a local shop called “lizards and mice.” it was the start of the good feeling.

i ended up getting my mfa in poetry--probably due to the good feeling i got every time i finished a poem. but with poetry there was always that endless chasm between poems (even if it only lasted a few hours) when i was afraid i'd never write a good poem again. although i still write, i've found the longer form of the novel more sustaining, and i do a lot of other creative things.

i've tried my hand at painting, making paper, and making things out of clay. every year for christmas, instead of buying gifts for people, i make a whole slew of things. people still have my handmade lavender bookmarks in their books. my parents' cupboards still have cups i've made in them. the ceramic wind chimes were a big hit. the best christmas ever, though, was the slipper christmas. i'd taken a class to make felted clog slippers and managed to make about fourteen pair before the usually dreaded day (working retail, i've come to dread christmas). but that very special christmas found me in a room where everyone was wearing my slippers. that good feeling lasted for weeks, and occasionally it still hits me even though that was about three years ago.

as humans, i believe we're born with a few things hard-wired into our system: the need for love/sex, the drive to believe in a higher power (one we may intellectually thwart, but the base is still there, i think), and the need to create. I read a study once in college that said the main difference between creative and non-creative people is that creative people think they're creative and non-creative people think they aren't.

and so this is my platform: make stuff. everyone should. even “home making” has the word “making” in it for a reason. i watch tracey making her blog, her wonderful mix cds, her efforts with rock n romp and even the occasional glimmer of poetry she still writes. it's a compulsion. it's necessary. we'd all be happier if we could find what we can make, and then let that thing work inside us. it's important to recognize the good feeling, give ourselves a pat on the back for it. i wish the creative drive were more recognized as a basic need for human happiness. i don't think it's just me.

most recently, i've gotten the good feeling from my knitting. a few days ago, i knitted a simple little hat for my husband to keep his head warm. he wore it to work, and a co-worker at this design firm sent me an email with the subject heading simply reading: “hat.” the email said, and i quote, “I saw the hat you made scott and I think it's probably one of the coolest things I've seen. I appreciate a good stocking cap. Are you taking orders, cause I could really use a red or kelly green one.”

i had the good feeling after my husband liked the hat, but it doubled, tripled in size when i got this email. i would have made hats for all the designers for free--just for more of the good feeling--but my smart husband has offered hats in exchange for help putting up gutters on our house.

so it's a win-win, and there's nothing better than that.

i'm sorry i lied to you.

but i HAD to post a link to this, the most bestest article EVAH:

Recently, Time magazine published a list of the 100 best novels. But the praise of professional critics hardly matters to the book-reviewing readers at Amazon.com. ...The following are excerpts from actual one-star Amazon.com reviews of books from Time’s list....

[via joey.]

they work hard, so i don't have to.

to soothe those of you clamoring for content, i've decided to ask a few close friends of sweetney.com to provide guest posts for this week. the first (below) is from my dear friend kelly, aka kdiddy, who recently purchased her first home in mighty pittsburgh, PA.

My grandparents drove past the house yesterday and the seller was there, cleaning and fixing stuff up. My grandmother has bestowed upon our house the rating of “nice.” Which is huge. If you know my grandmother, you know that her approval is the difference between a peaceful life and spending your days fielding phone calls that consist of, “When are you going to do something about that house?” (See also: my mother) Of course, she did tell me last night that she's concerned about the chimneys. “What if they get struck by lightning? And collapse?” This is a very real fear for my grandmother. She is the woman who goes into a panic if someone she knows is staying in a building above the fourth floor because she insists that fire engine ladders only go to the fourth floor. So if you're on the fifth floor and a fire breaks out, you're fucked and then you have to hear my grandmother saying, “I told you!” during your time in eternity.

My grandmother's paranoia is legendary. Years of Irish Catholic guilt, old wives' tales, and gallons of vodkas and grapefruit juice have created the monster. To wit:

As a child, upon entering my grandmother's house, I would be scrutinized for an undershirt and, if wearing a skirt, a slip. Failure to wear these items would ensure my untimely death due to pneumonia.

My father once had the audacity to decorate the front door of our house with a green wreath for Christmas. In my grandmother's dimension, green Christmas wreaths = bad luck. My grandmother called him incessantly until he removed it. When I decorated the windows of my dollhouse with green ceramic wreaths, my grandmother feared for the bad luck that would be sure to visit my dollhouse.

My grandmother has participated in every chain letter that she has ever received. Thank dog she doesn't have email or she would never be able to move from the computer.

I have been told on numerous occassions that reading while on the toilet will give me hemorrhoids. So will sitting on cold pavement.

She keeps a Virgin Mary statue in her kitchen window to protect their house from the large trees that surround their house in the event that they are struck by lightning and fall over. Apparently, moving out of the woods has not yet occurred to her.

In high school, I got a stress fracture in my left foot. My grandmother gave my mom a bottle of blessed oil and instructed my mother to rub my foot with it every night. It didn't work.

I was not allowed to have a baby shower prior to the baby's birth since it would be bad luck to do so. Consequently, I never had a baby shower.

On New Year's Eve, the person with the darkest hair (since he came around, this honor has fallen to the boyfriend), has to leave the house at midnight through the back door and enter through the front door with a loaf of bread. Failure to do so will, say it with me now, bring us bad luck.

I can only imagine what kind of bizarre, new home rituals I'm going to be subjected to.

break.

i have so many little projects and things i need to do right now that i think the only way i can get shizzle done and maintain some semblance of sanity is if i take a brief blogging hiatus this week. if i have a change of heart, or miraculously become super productivity lady and accomplish all i need to ahead of schedule, i'll notify the uhh media. otherwise, expect to hear from me again roundabout halloween.

until then, stay classy.

links for 2005-10-20

• e-closure: documenting break ups, anonymously online...
  people's bad spelling and grammar aside, quite interesting.
• So You Want to Be a Poet, I Mean Rock Star, I Mean Poet - New York Times
  interview with David Berman -- of the silver jews and author of the beloved "Actual Air"
• self portrait at 28
  my favorite poem by David Berman
• The Complete List | TIME Magazine - ALL-TIME 100 Novels
  debatable, but i was pleased that The Corrections was included along with more obvious, well-aged choices.

the f word.

that would be forgiveness, peoples. sheesh.

imagine if you will: someone you consider a friend inexplicably and without warning turns on you and hurts you real bad, messes with your mind, attempts to discredit you amongst mutual friends and acquaintances, and generally causes all kinds of unwarranted anxiety and drama with you individually, as well as within a larger circle of friends. you (and the larger circle) cut off all contact with this someone, and they kind of magically disappear, despite living mere blocks from you. then a year goes by, and you run into this person quite by chance, and they (in an unexpectedly noble turn) have the guts to approach you and apologize for the debacle in what seems like a genuine, thoughtful way. what do you do with that?

i guess this boils down to what exactly forgiveness means, and whether it is inherently an external reconciliation between two people or something one internally processes as the forgiver separate from the forgivee (if you will). and to what end? do we forgive to free ourselves from the past? to reconcile and rekindle? to take the high road? to make peace or keep the peace? to make the other person feel better, and thereby ourselves as well?

my nature is such that my immediate inclination -- in an almost knee-jerk sort of way -- is to heap on the forgiveness, piling at the feet of anyone asking for it a mushy tower of exoneration comparable in size and consistency to the mashed potato devil's tower richard dreyfuss built in close enounters (mmm.... forbidden tower). but then i'm famously a sucker -- or, as my mother has chided since grade school, “too trusting” -- and i'm trying really hard to be more considered in situations such as this. plus another tendency of mine is to think things to death, so OF COURSE i have to commence with a philosophical exaM_tion of the conception and execution of forgiveness. god how i suck.

so yeah, that's where i'm at today.

hayride to hell.

a tale of horror and torment told in pictures, after the jump...

gravitas

colbert v. stone phillips on the former's new show.

yeah, i never really liked florida anyway.

umm, guys? not to be a broken record, but we should really be getting on that whole global warming thing, pronto.

when is it going to stop?

from this sunday's NYT magazine: chris ware's comic this week was spectacularly heartbreaking [pdf download].

fucking vegans.

not to make gross generalizations about an entire human population or anything, but WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?

[via the exceptional styro, who i met this past weekend, and she is glorious. it was like spending time with an old friend i hadn't seen in a while.... and she “eats punks like you for breakfast.”]

links for 2005-10-18

• Julien Lions / Portfolio
• onegoodmove: Fox Facts
  bill maher's take on fox's support of all things Bush. funny shit.
• hot wings - the daily show
  in case you missed it, TDS on the 'bird flu'
• Made-up words in The Simpsons
  from wikipedia

oh my god, the talking.

when and how does it stop? and what drugs can i take in the interim to make M_'s incessant, babbling narration of EVERY TRIVIAL NANOSECOND OF EXISTENCE tolerable?

this morning, during an ill-fated trip to target, i reached maximum density and could be overheard muttering among the personal hygiene products: “M_, you need to stop talking or mommy is going to lose it. MOMMY IS GOING TO GO INSANE.” not that it helped or anything.

lord knows i love the girl, but seriously, i feel like my head may explode.

a lot of random, unrelated pix (with cat).

that's one big-ass duck (taken at the yearly duck derby in baltimore, where they race rubber ducks. don't ask.).

mmm...inflatable slide...

random: zelda, the eldest of our three kitties.

since fall has hit i've become increasingly obsessed with our home's interior, all suzy-homemaker stylee. and because i'm always curious about how other people's homes look inside and how other people live (and thus spend hours watching lame interior design and home improvement shows), here's a glimpse inside ours:

entry (with shadowy cat). note exploding pile of M_ toys.

LR (with cat and nasty sun flare).

LR, again with the stupid cat.

DR (with dyson. okay, i'll stop).

kitchen.

lots of white. i'm considering some fall/winter painting.

if you have a blarrgh, i challenge ye to post pix of your dwelling so i might drool over your living space and -- perhaps more importantly -- steal interior design and decorating ideas from you.

links for 2005-10-14

• Jess Hutch Crafts
  knitted robots!!
• Scientific American Mind: The Movie in Your Head
  Is consciousness a seamless experience or a string of fleeting images, like frames of a movie?
• The Cutie Bunch Friendly Pal Pack
  Happy Sunshine Story Time!!
• [adult swim]
  AdultSwim.com is posting full-length streaming episodes starting at 11 PM every Friday

happy birthday, daddy.

this is joel, otherwise known as “daddy” -- both to his actual daughter, R_ (pictured), as well as to my daughter, who calls him this as though it is a nickname rather than a designation of genetic intimacy (M_ calls jamie “papa” and always has, which conveniently eliM_tes any possible confusion).

its funny, but i was going through my pictures trying to find some good joelesque shots to post here, but these were the only two i could find. and i'm genuinely appalled by this because, in all honesty, i see and interact with joel probably more than any other person outside of M_ and jamie. PERIOD. joel is a part of at least half of every week's events every single week of the year, and yet i don't have a decent picture of him.

i take joel for granted a lot. i take joel for granted in the same way that people (see: ME. AGAIN.) take their spouses for granted -- they're just kind of there, being themselves, doing their thing, and its easy to forget how fucking ridiculously lucky we are to have them around. joel is, if i'm completely honest, M_'s co-parent during the daylight hours when jamie is away at work. at least twice a week joel has M_ over to play with R_, and i get a nice couple of hours to myself -- which is, in and of itself, enough to make me feel love for the man, but that's not what's making me have to stop repeatedly as i type this sentence to keep myself from collapsing into weepy-sobbyness. its this: that M_ loves joel. and i mean that like: M_ thinks of joel as a member of our family, sees him as, indeed, “daddy”-like, and is utterly and unreservedly at ease with him -- to a degree that replicates our life at home. when M_ sees joel under any circumstances she immediately screams his name excitedly, runs at him, and quite often unhesitatingly latches onto a leg in huggy-greeting fashion. beyond jamie and myself, M_ does not act this way with anyone else. and for M_ to have this relationship with him.... well, at the risk of sounding completely cornball, its a gift. and i need to really try harder to remember that, to honor that.

anyway, joel is legendary for his silence. he does not talk -- much or often (or at all) -- and though our conversations are therefore frequently not vast or luminous, over the past two years i think we've developed a certain kind of easy, familial closeness and shared trust -- i've openly wept before him, which in and of itself speaks volumes for my level of comfort with him (i'm not a public weeper.... or in-front-of-people weeper... or any kind of weeper that involves me not being alone in my house with all the doors and windows closed and locked, my face buried in some sort of absorbent cloth-like item). yet he remains a bit of a stoic mystery despite how much we are a part of each other's lives... and i'm okay with that, figuring that over time he'll unfold without me forcing him open. and besides, i find his silence ennobling in some odd sort of way. living in a culture filled with so much blah blah blah, its kind of refreshing to spend time around someone who doesn't just blab all the time, as though silences were deadly things that must be eradicated. its kind of, well, cool.

so joel, i know its your birthday today, and i also know that you are HATING with blood boiling intensity the fact that i've written this post about you -- being that you're joel and all -- so i'll cut this short (but here's where the weeping begins): thank you for your joelness. thank you for helping me. thank you for being so good to M_, and for taking such good care of her, and for really being a third parent to her. thank you for your gentleness, your centeredness, and your awesome taste in music (heh). thank you for the genes that contributed to making The R_, who M_ could not live without. thanks for all of that, and then some.

happy birthday, dude.

ps: no i won't take this down.

rapido!

1. if i had a band right now, i'd be covering go diego go's song “rescue pack”. dude, the rescue pack song so SLAYS the backpack song (to those of you who don't have children: move along, move along... nothing to see here...).

2. M_ and i both got haircuts this week. despite being a “mommy special” cut under flailing toddler duress, hers is way cuter:

(note: the wind blew her bangs up as i was taking the picture; they're actually straight in real life) my goal is to make her indistinguishable from any member of sleater kinney. i think we're 90% there.

3. caught Rev Run's new show on Mtv last night, Run's House, and it is RIGHTEOUS. sample moment of awesomeness: when Run's youngest son doesn't want to go to bed one night and starts in with the typical little kid whining and pleading, Run calmly (yet commandingly) responds: “man, i don't wanna diss you or anything, but its bedtime.” BOOM! aww right Run!!!

4. current fixations: oh my god, how are we going to afford to heat our house this winter?; the mix (ALMOST done burning, finally); lipton diet lemon iced tea; the sudden influx of my little pony crap into our home (its M_'s new thang); a sudden feeling of claustrophobia at the onset of fall -- leading to a desire to rearrange every item of furniture in our house so as to have MORE SPACE (or at least the illusion of); polar bear night (now read at every naptime and bedtime); catching up on arrested development (how is it that this is on TV? and how is it that i'm just now getting a clue?); big fluffy floppy-eared bunnies hopping through our backyard; sweater weather!

5. ahem, mix?? where my bitches at?

6. i'm gonna meet styro this weekend! she's coming to play at our house! squee!!!

a train wreck.

in three acts.

this is just so appalling and embarrassing, i'm torn between competing feelings of disgust and utter mortification.

can you even believe this is our government?!?

like totally important scientific stuff, dude.

no wonder i'm so smart. [snort]

links for 2005-10-13

• Google.org
  the philanthropic arm of google.
• Muglets.
  send ecards with your own (or someone else's) face, etc.
• Gas and Oil Heating Costs to Soar This Winter
  time for electric space heaters, people.

perhaps i simply need to take up residence inside a large plastic hamster bubble-ball.

in addition to getting all jacked up on some new happy meds last week (effexor, if it matters; i'm playing with the dosage to achieve maximum NOT CRAZY coupled with maximum NOT ZOMBIE at present, but my sense thus far is that it is a boon for both me and my relative stability), since i was having to do the dreaded doctor thing anyway i figured while i was there i might as well re-up on my allergy medication, aka that which enables the survival of the unfittest (me), who would in any other age have perished at the hand of multiple simultaneous sinus and ear infections or something (when i was 18 i went to my first allergist (by hasbro), who -- after several hours of unpleasant sub-dermal injections, blood tests, and other variations on the poking-and-proding theme -- proclaimed me The Most Allergic Person He'd Ever Encountered... an undesirable title right up there with World's Largest Goiter and Most Pock-Marked in the realm of notable xxtreme bodily fuckedness). and since the supposedly 12-hour prescription antihistamine/decongestant i've been taking for the past year has proved ineffective past about, oh, 6 hours, my doctor gave me a supposedly 24-hour version.... which, you guessed it, lasts about 12 hours. bastards.

now admittedly, my allergen sensitivity is guinness world record-level remarkable in its breadth and depth, but COME ON. is our grasp of human physiology really so limited and/or inept that we can't figure out how to time-release this shit properly so i don't have to take five freaking pills a day, every day, for the rest of my itchy and scratchy life? its almost enough to make me lose faith in our medical establishment... oh wait, nevermind, i actually already lost my faith in our medical establishment, back when doctors first started INJECTING BOTULISM DIRECTLY INTO PEOPLE'S FACES so as to achieve that paralytic expressionlessness that's oh-so-hot these days.

bah. stupid modern medicine.

autumn mix.

sounds like some of you have already received it! leave all mix-related thoughts, questions and opinions in the comments here, por favor.

i've been listening to said mix pretty much non-stop since this weekend, so i'll be interested to hear whatchu all make of it.

continue to rock on, fair readers.

rockheals update.

with an all-new hothouse 5 from that other sweetney.

mixy bits.

sooo... i mailed out 25 autumnal cds yesterday, with the remaining 35 or so to go out before the week's end. whoever gets their cd first (see: if you get it today or tomorrow) give me a heads-up via comments or email and i'll post an open thread for mix comments/feedback/banter. woot!

now please get thee to a-viewing the new teen girl squad. thank yous.

love and death: two great tastes that go great together!

balt amour.


[in the voice of cartman:] kick ass!

added to the list of people i'd pay 1K+ to punch in the face.

every single teenager featured on Mtv's My Super Sweet Sixteen.

it would put me in debtor's prison, but i'd go to lock-up happily, knowing i'd really made a significant contribution to society in my lifetime.

define masochistic.

because we just bought her a boombox for her birthday, this evening i actually -- of my own free will, and without any coercion -- downloaded the Lazytown CD for M_ from the itunes music store.

christ do i love that girl.

pictured: the evil masterminds behind what will no doubt be my soundtrack for the next 70 gazillion hours.

goddammit.

do you guys know about this lazytown shit? or am i just living in some alternate, more grotesque and hellish dimension?

question of the night.

if given the opportunity, how much would i be willing to pay in order to PUNCH ANN COULTER IN THE FACE?

at least a thousand bucks, easy.

mix-making factory

musical uplift, people.

alrighty, so the mix is mixed: 23 songs, 1 hour 18 mins 23 seconds, 79.1 MB of LOVE. i expect to send these out in waves of 10-15, with the first batch going out saturday, in the order in which your requests came in. i'm hoping to have them all sent by the end of next week... yet there is still time for you slowpokes to hollar at me for one (email: sweetney AT sweetney.com). be sure to include your mailing address, dorkus.

this is providing a lovely distraction for me this week, what with my facing the yawning neurochemical abyss and all. i've recently come to think of myself as taking on the character of the zoloft blob: sloshing quietly through my sad blob life, intimidated by the sight of other blobs gathered in social groups, sighing forlornly at the sight of little blob puppies (bluppies?) frolicking rolly-pollily in the distant sunlight.... so near, yet so far. sniff.

uhh...what was i saying?

anyway, thanks to ya'll for supporting the fun little project. i hope the end result will provide you each with AT LEAST 78 minutes of enjoyment (give or take a few, depending on how you feel about singing German Modernist Playwrights).

don't worry. its all good. i promise.

476 pounds of evidence that this guy wasn't getting dates.

on the positive side of things, dude must've successfully completed therapy recently or something.

glowy.

for the record: that's a CARVEL ICE CREAM CAKE, PEOPLE. [insert voluminous drool]

blowing out the candles.

no, really, tell me what i need.

while i am staunchly anti-meme for 364 days of the year, this one is damn near poetic:

Google “[your name] needs” and see what comes up.

Tracey needs to grow up and admit the problem isn't Mooney.
Tracey needs to (respectfully) stop being self-righteously wrong, become humble
and do some research.
Tracey needs someone to have her back.
Tracey needs to come up with an interesting costume.
Tracey needs a hot hand to take the zone off.
Tracey needs your Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, Hard-Fi, Maximo Park, Editors
and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah records.
Tracey needs to be on her own.
Tracey needs to know faith and prayer saved that girls life.
Tracey needs 18 N effort at the handle to lift 6 kg.
Tracey needs to be played as more petulant and dissatisfied.

yes. yes, i completely agree.

hi, i'm an idiot.

so umm hey, about that autumnal mix... i stupidly underestimated the interest in my mad mixmaster skillz, mainly because i'm a huge, flaming moron like that. so i just wanted to send out a call for donations to cover even a little of the materials/postage expenses involved; if you signed up for a mix and CAN (this is *in no way required* and not intended to be guilt-producing -- i lerv making mixes and will send you one regardless), feel free to throw a buck in one of my tip jars in the right-hand column. again, this ain't compulsory, but i'd appreciate the help. werd.

also, if you haven't signed up for a mix yet, jump on board by sending me an email at sweetney AT sweetney.com

and now i'm off to target, the land from whence all good things come, to purchase some of their fine mailing materials and ogle their conspicuously well-designed yet inexpensive household items [slobber].

more stuff by other people.

i just started reading hip: the history by john leland, and came across the following paragraph on page 13 of the introduction:

Hip has flourished in periods when it is needed, always corresponding with wrinkles in the economy and technology. These flash points comprise six convergences of hip. Chapters in this book will discuss each in detail, but a quick chronology might be helpful here. The first hip convergence, in the 19th century, produced black and white Americans' first responses to each other and their lives together: the blackface minstrel show, which looked in one direction, and the blues, which looked in the other. During this period Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, in a brief flurry from 1850 to 1855, laid out the formal groundwork for hip. They are hip's O.G.'s, or original gangstas. No skater, raver, indie-rocker, thug, Pabst Blue Ribbon drinker or wi-fi slacker today acts without their permission.

i may weep.

autumnal.

i'm putting together a musical cd mix type dealy in honor of the new season. tunes old and new, a soundtrack for us to share.

if you'd like a copy, send your mailing address to: sweetney AT sweetney.com

links for 2005-10-04

• Beautiful Dorena Download
  nifty. (mac osx beta only)
• ghost town: a photo essay on new orleans.
  stunning. [warning: contains some graphic images]

my kingdom for a soma.

i'm having one of those weeks where despite having just seen the pixies this weekend (who were magnificent and not at all sad; not the Aging Pixies but rather their old selves of the 80s who left me in awe as i drove to high school each morning), and despite just having endured M_'s 3rd birthday (which, incidentally, lasted ONE WHOLE WEEK, because she kept insisting that every day last week was her birthday, and i wasn't going to be the one to contradict her and thereby ignite the whining and shrieking that accompanies any forced adjustment to M_'s reality) and the compulsory party with her fellow toddlers (slightly more fun than a spinal tap), and despite having gone to a bar this weekend where i discovered that -- at least here in baltimore -- spaghetti strap tank tops coupled with large, garish belts just shy of those given to heavyweight champions in terms of size, is now apparently The Fashion (and my deconstruction of that could potentially run to dissertation lengths), and despite similar related and unrelated etcetera, i feel i have nothing to say.

which sort of screams chemical imbalance to me, waiting as i am on a long-needed adjustment to my very special medication, aka that which secures to me a single tenuous thread of sanity. and as much as i hate going to the doctor (and it is an epic hate), i hate feeling like this more, so i'm dragging my ass there tomorrow morning to endure the poking and the prodding and the very same questions i've answered again and again for well over 10 years: family history of depression? CHECK. been depressed long? FOREVER. primary symptoms? CRUSHING DESPAIR AND UNCONTROLLABLE WEEPING. have you taken medication for your depression before? PAXIL, ZOLOFT, WELLBUTRIN, XANAX, LEXAPRO. GOT ANYTHING BETTER? and so forth and so on, until i'm given that magical piece of paper that entitles me to those magical pills that somehow make being alive magically manageable. at least for a while.

so that joke about linking to other people's stuff may become not so jokingish shortly, until i get my feet back under me, or i may tomorrow experience a mood enhancing placebo effect (yay! i love those!) upon ingesting The New Thing, whatever that thing may be. details at 11.

why can't my life be easily reedited and recut like this, dammit?

links for 2005-10-03

• Flickr Toys
• The Sneeze - Steve Don't Eat It!
  silkworm pupas make me pukea.

money talks, but i can't sing and dance and it can't walk.

file under RAD: rick rubin is producing neil diamond's upcoming album.

[from an article in the chi trib:] ...the singer recorded an album with Rubin, who has also previously worked with Slayer, the Beastie Boys and Rage Against the Machine -- none of whom, you can bet, would ever be in regular rotation on Neil Diamond's iPod. The still-untitled collaboration, to be released in November, is built on Diamond's songs, voice and guitar-playing. It was designed by the producer as a throwback to the singer's earliest days as one of the '60s' most distinctive singer-songwriters.

dude, this is probably going to be the first album in 25 years that my dad and i are going to both buy.

get awesome.

hey, you guys think maybe patrick's family would adopt me if i asked nicely (or, uhh, belligerently)? i mean, i already know the secret handshake...

by the way, this entry is part of my newly devised plan to just post links to other people's shit rather than having to actually write anything myself. pretty genius, huh?

my work is done here.

no children.

I hope that our few remaining friends
Give up on trying to save us
I hope we come up with a failsafe plot
To piss off the dumb few that forgave us
I hope the fences we mended
Fall down beneath their own weight
And I hope we hang on past the last exit
I hope it's already too late
And I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here
Someday burns down
And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away
And I never come back to this town
Again in my life
I hope I lie
And tell everyone you were a good wife
And I hope you die
I hope we both die

I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow
I hope it bleeds all day long
Our friends say it's darkest before the sun rises
We're pretty sure they're all wrong
I hope it stays dark forever
I hope the worst isn't over
And I hope you blink before I do
Yeah I hope I never get sober
And I hope when you think of me years down the line
You can't find one good thing to say
And I'd hope that if I found the strength to walk out
You'd stay the hell out of my way
I am drowning
There is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unlovable hand
And I hope you die
I hope we both die

--The Mountain Goats