I can't sleep . . . but the org is back up, however temporarily it might be. it is exciting!

I'm bad at actually, you know, writing in my journal. heh. well, I'm really bored right now so I'm going to, and hopefully it will start a trend, cause I really do want to write in here.

I have a headache.

that was a random interjection, it's not my real post. but I just wanted to mention it becuase I rarely ever get headaches. end interjection.

yesterday I was at my friend's house and we were watching a movie and such. then my mom called and said she was coming to get me RIGHT THEN and I was like "huh?" cause she normally doesn't do that and I was getting a ride home from someone and such. but she's crazy sometimes and it's best not to argue with her. ever. so we leave and in the car she goes into mega-lecture mode where she keeps getting angrier and angrier and repeating herself, augh it's annoying. apparently she randomly went into my room and bathroom and decided they were messy and I had to come home right away to clean them and other people live here too and it makes her sick to live in such a messy house and ehhhhhhhhhhhh on and on and on she went and it's annoying because I say "I'm sorry, I won't do it again, I'll go clean right away" ok so what else am I supposed to say? but she keeps berating me endlessly and it's really no fun. and my room was not that messy. trust me, I'm not going to live in dirt.

and then, when I got back, the phone rings and my mom answers but it's for me so I start talking and it's my friend, I left my mom's digital camera at her house. so we discuss, etc. partway through I hear the other phone hang up. I figured my mom just forgot about hanging it up until then. but anyhow, I figured I wouldn't tell my mom, just because she might get mad about it (a lot of the time she gets mad about random things, as you can see). she never uses it anyway, so I'd just get it back the next time I saw Amy. But this morning, she asked me why Amy called, and I said "just to ask why I had to go home" and my mom was like "I think you're not being truthful, I think she called to say you forgot my camera there." so I asked her "what, did they tell you before you gave the phone to me?" and she said "no, when I hung up the phone I heard her mention it" which is totally a lie because I know that when I heard the hang-up noise it was after we talked about the camera. so basically she listened to our conversation, which pisses me off. then she tried to get me to lie to her, which I shouldn't have done, but why was she doing that? so she could get mad at me? the thing is that I was lucky, she was in a good mood (so much that she was randomly cooking everyone in the family breakfast potatoes, which she NEVER EVER does). so she wasn't that mad. but it's still so weird to me that she's listen to a conversation and try to get me to lie like that. augh she's so crazy and messed up. well, yeah, as you can see I really needed to vent, huh?

I stole this from Monkey . . . thanks Monkey

What was the first album you ever bought? -- either the Evita soundtrack or "A New Flame" by Simply Red. but from when I considered my music-listening era to take place, that would be Tubthumper by Chumbawamba

what is the first album you can remember listening to? -- I remember having these World Music tapes from Putumayo when I was younger, they were the greatest, I still listen to the Contemporary Folk one at times

what was the last album you bought? -- "Pottymouth" by Bratmobile and "From The Desk of Mr. Lady" by Le Tigre, I love them both

what was the last cd you listened to? -- I'm listening to Y Kant Tori Read right now . . . and before that I was listening to "Call The Doctor" by Sleater-Kinney. just a bit of contrast, no?

how many albums do you currently own? -- about 300, I believe.

which one of your albums do you wish you never would have wasted your money on? -- "Fashion Nugget" by Cake and "Fortune Cookies" by Alana Davis are two that come to mind which I have never listened to all the way through and that have been in my cd player probably once each.

what album do you listen to most often? -- I listen to "When The Pawn . . ." by Fiona Apple quite a bit, ummm, "All Hands on the Bad One" by Sleater-Kinney too. I switch my cds all the time, so it's kinda hard to tell.

how many concerts have you been to? -- ummmm . . . hmmmm . . . none, really. not counting ones that I went to as a very young child and ones at the local bookstore. but I'm going to Dar Williams soon! and I would have gone to Bratmobile but I had too much homework.

which of the above, if any, was your favorite? -- Well, I saw SisterMonk Harem, a really local group, at the bookstore and they were really cool and I got the cd.

name a fantastic album someone else introduced you to. -- my friend introduced me to Ani DiFranco, who has basically shaped my entire music collection

name the last album someone else bought for you. -- "Listen Hard" by Melissa Ferrick, because my mom forgot that I charged it to her credit card . . .

name the last album you purchased for someone as a gift. -- I tend not to do that, but I burned a couple Dar Williams cds yesterday for my friend Eva who I've known for ten years who is moving away this month.

name a fantastic album you discovered entirely by accident, on your own. -- hmmmmm, I discovered "Home" by Carrie Akre and "Away" by Nancyt Hess randomly clicking around on Amazon.com

name an album that brings back painful memories of adolescence. -- my Aqua cds. the painful part comes from how I used to listen to them.

name an album that was playing when you underwent a major rite of passage. -- I was listening to a Simply Red b-side ("Ghetto Girl") when I first came out.

name an album you'd play for someone you wanted to seduce. -- a mix tape. I'd include wonderful songs such as "Drive" by Melissa Ferrick.

Date:	2002-05-30 20:42
Subject:	Raaaagh!
Security:	Public
Mood:	annoyed
Music:	Hammerbox (don't know the name of the song)

my mom is being really really annoying. ehhh . . . you see, my personal style is sweatshirt and jeans. every single day. never anything else. but she always tries to get me to wear button up shirts because she thinks it's cool or something. and tomorrow I'm going to a friends birthday party after school and then we're going to the Tattoo Coffeehouse (Tattoo is the school's literary arts magazine) and I'm reading something with my friend Hannah and it'll be lots of fun and it's going to be a long day because I'm going to leave home at 7:30 am and get home at like 10:30 pm and I was saving up my favorite sweatshirt and jeans for today because I'm silly like that and now my mom's trying to get me to wear a button up shirt. see, here's the thing, NO ONE EVER EVER EVER dresses up for coffeehouse. so I'd look like a freak. and my mom is like "you don'[t have to be dressed up you can wear it not tucked in or unbuttoned over a t-shirt" but that's SO not me and just gross and stuff and (no offense to anyone, but at least at my school) the people I HATE who try to be cool dress like that. so that's like one of the worst things she could make me do, it's awful. and she's like "why are you being so stubborn" but I think she's the one being stubborn because it really doesn't have anything to do with her what I wear so why is she insisting? and now she's threatening to go to Coffeehouse if I don't dress how she wants which I REALLY REALLY don't want her to do. so I'm annoyed. the end.

my friend Dustin sent me this review of Sleater-Kinney and he had to type it all up himself and it was really really nice of him and it seemed like a waste if I just read it, you know? so I'll post it here for everybody. it's from quite some time ago, back in the Call The Doctor era . . . I don't really think that Bikini Kill went pop like the guy says, and if he were writing it now he'd probably say S-K went pop too, but oh well, here we go.

oh yeah, it's by Robert Christgau

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

Grrrowing Grrrls: Sleater-Kinney

As a media event, riot grrrl was a classic skyrocket, hooked on a brand name
so catchy it could have sold bikinis to Eskimos. First no one but its tiny
constituency and a very few interested observers knew it existed. Then,
whoosh, there were grrrls everywhere, even to the top TV show in the land.
And now the movement is missing and presumed passé.

To a limited extent, this reflects the reluctance of the trademark
originators to distinguish between righteous rhetoric and righteous music --
to admit how often the useful theory that anyone can make great rock and
roll reduces in practice to automatic hardcore, inept pop, and posturing to
the converted. You'd never have known to read the supportive accounts of
likeable efforts by, to choose (relatively) well-known bands I've put time
into, Slant 6 or Tribe 8 or Team Dresch or Bratmobile or Huggy Bear, how
incomplete their albums were in the end, and when boosterism masquerades as
criticism, outside credibility fades fast. But as with feminism itself, most
of riot grrrl's rapid disregard was a simple function of male chauvinist
piggery, with a dollop of unsisterly factionalism thrown in -- a fear of
antimale confrontation masquerading as the canard that ideology is
incompatible with formal impact or expressive truth. Which is why it's so
encouraging that no fewer than four of the key riot grrrl bands have ignored
their supposed spiritual demise and put out new records this spring -- and
that not one betrays complacency, stasis, or bad nerves. Queercore stalwarts
Tribe 8 and Team Dresch may never deliver musically, but second time out
Lynn Breedlove is aiming her vocals and Donna Dresch's mates are deploying
their guitars like a team. As for Kathleen Hanna's revolutionary cell,
Bikini Kill has followed the trajectory of so much good punk before it and
gone pop, a little.

The holy quest for good punk is finally why any rock and roller should cheer
riot grrrl on. What makes punk so quintessential isn't just its formal
strictures and saturation guitar. By definition, it's a music of becoming --
simple enough to encourage half-formed human beings to create themselves,
accessible enough to allow bystanders to witness the miracle, which has been
a rock and roll thrill since young Elvis P. sang "That's All Right" for his
mama. And no riot grrrl has generated this thrill with anything approaching
the musical instincts or emotional breadth of Corin Tucker. Now
twenty-three, Tucker first surfaced in Heaves to Betsy, a duo with
drummer-bassist Tracy Sawyer that put out the usual singles and compilation
cuts and an enduring Kill Rock Stars album called "Calculated." Her current
and I hope future band is Sleater-Kinney, a trio named for an intersection
near Olympia's Evergreen College, where Tucker graduated with one of those
vague TV-film-media degrees and twenty-one-year-old bandmate Carrie
Brownstein hopes to get her B.A. In sociolinguistics in 1997.

Structurally, Brownstein is an equal partner. Like Tucker, she sings, plays
guitar, and collaborates on the songs; on Chainsaw's ten-song 1995
"Sleater-Kinney," her lyrics are if anything more wrenching than Tucker's.
And without question Sleater-Kinney is the richer band -- on both of their
excellent collections, especially the inexorable catchy new "Call the
Doctor," the second guitar guarantees that there's more going on.
Nevertheless, Sleater-Kinney sounds very much like Heavens to Betsy and not
much like Excuse 17, where Brownstein and Becca Albee started off plashing
in childish Tiger Trap clatter before revving up to a yell on Kill Rock
Stars's 1995 "Such Friends Are Dangerous."

The obvious reason Tucker dominates the band is her voice. Neither riot
grrrl proper nor its Hole/L7 correlative is devoid of commanding singers
(Hanna, for one), but the sensibility doesn't attract belters or thrushes,
and instruments as individual as Tucker's are rare anywhere. Its high,
almost girlish register doesn't diminish its strength, and its slight
natural vibrato deepens the penetration of an attack that's at once
meditative and abandoned -- you can just see Tucker closing her eyes and
throwing back her head as she gets into the lyric, although that's not what
she actually does on stage, where's she's playful and self-possessed.

Since the most insuperable barrier between what we'll call postalternative
and what we'll call the mass audience is said audience's weakness for big
voices and the big emotions they share with poor stunted us, Tucker's
physical gift could constitute a major professional advantage if she chose
to channel it properly. But of course she doesn't. Instead, she limns her
alienation, she complains bitterly about socialization and compromise, she
equates stardom with sexual victimization, she declares herself unmoved or
worse by several penises, she screams, she goes off. Although she's never
stupid she's rarely deep -- in a contrary mood I might nominate
"Calculated"'s "Waitress Hell" as her most incisive moment. But ideas aren't
the point. In a music of becoming, Tucker's albums enact a
coming-of-age-in-progress that's conveyed by the conviction in her singing
rather than the acuteness of an analysis millions of young women have
already stumbled toward. From a parental perspective like mine the effect is
intense, touching, and up. For her fans and peers I bet it feels like life
itself.

Yet when Brownstein -- who makes a virtue of her milder pipes on
relationship songs that close the two Sleater-Kinney CDs vulnerably,
humanly, specifically -- is at the mike, nobody's going to think she's
rejoined Excuse 17, because Sleater-Kinney's music, like Heavens to Betsy's
before it, is also its own. You know how riffs are -- some got 'em, most
don't. Tucker and Brownstein got 'em; like the good rock and rollers they
are, they're in it for the guitars, which take over in virtual
call-and-response with verses and sometimes lines. The aesthetic isn't quite
elegant, but it's close enough -- formally canny, minimalist in its own way,
original without self-indulgence, often fairly fast but never speedy, a
punk-informed variant sure enough of where it's headed that it can take its
time getting there. Once it builds a little live, it surges and calms itself
and surges again, the way sex does sometimes when it's fighting an undertow
of insecurity or fatigue. This is music that waits confidently for you to
come back to it. It's also music with growing room.

As we drove down to Bryn Mawr last Saturday to check out the band before
their first New York appearances, photographer Bob Berg asked casually
whether Sleater-Kinney was a lesbian band, as their publicist had indicated,
and I realized I'd never thought to wonder myself -- not because I'm too
sophisticated to suffer curiosity about women's private affairs, but because
the songs rendered the question irrelevant. Both Tucker and Brownstein sing
songs about bad sex with guys and bad relationships with anyone -- boys,
parents, lovers, friends, many of them apply across the board. There's no
reason in theory why hitting on transvestites or using the wrong bathroom,
to choose two topics from Tribe 8's "Snarkism," might not come to seem as
universal as sniffing glue or taking the bus to the beach once did, but
Tucker especially has the pop gift for generalization -- for lyrics that
bear upon a range of recognizable emotional experiences rather than pinning
one down. When I arrived I discovered that they'd sanely decided to replace
pen-pal-turned-drummer Lori Macfarlane, whose Australian address made
practicing extremely inconvenient. The new member was the decidedly butch
and out powerhouse Toni Gogin, and from the way Tucker held her hand and
blew in her ear I wondered if they were an item. But musically, the question
remained irrelevant.

The Bryn Mawr gig, one of thirty-plus shows on a whirlwind u-drive-it tour,
was free, but it was poorly publicized, attracting fewer than fifty fans --
three quarters female, most not from Bryn Mawr, some still in high school.
The opening act had gotten lost, so when Sleater-Kinney went on as scheduled
at nine-thirty the crowd had been waiting over and hour, and the band was
slightly bummed. Brownstein's cold kept her from yelling the vocal overlays,
which can get pretty loud, and despite her splay-footed young Elvis C.
moves, the stagecraft was more offhand than it had to be. At times during
the nine nevertheless terrific songs -- all they ever do, they're wise
enough to know at their level of competence that even your favorite band can
get boring after forty-five minutes -- their concentration flagged. But at
other times watching these young women ride the surge was enough to make me
shout out loud. The truth is that most people can't make great rock and
roll, or create themselves in public either. But the more people get the
chance to try, the better off we are.

When scorned, you are like a woman on the war path who takes no prisoners! But instead of violence, you vent your anger and hurt through beautifully crypted creativity that will have everybody talking and singing your praises! From your network of friendsand/or hot love affairs, you gain strength and you always come out on top as a more mature person. (oh and you dont mind the odd spank once in awhile either!!!) Which Era of Tori Amos are you?

yay! Boys for Pele is my favorite . . .

Date:	2002-05-27 17:09
Subject:	more stuff
Security:	Public
Mood:	thirsty
Music:	"Wood Floors" by Lisa Germano

here is my second entry, days later I know . . . oh well, I'm going to keep this updated because this is just the sort of thing I need to pour random thoughts into . . . so, since my last entry, my best friend Hannah and I both made Assistant Editor for Tattoo, our schools literary arts magazine, which is really cool, there's one editor and six assistant editors. Hannah's boyfriend/my friend Dustin didn't make it though, we think it's because he's too busy next year, and he probably is, seeing as he's going to be in AP US History, AP English 11, Calculus, and Intensive Physics, as well as being the ASB treasurer. he really didn't seem to mind though, so that's good. one cool thing is that only one other person who's going to be a junior next year made assistant editor, and it's not Hannah, so that means there's only one other person who might apply to be editor-in-chief at the end of next year, and it's not a friend of mine, and he's kinda flaky and I know one of the people who's going to be a senior next year (they decide who gets editor and everything) doesn't like him. so maybe it's too soon to say, but I might get to be editor-in-chief my senior year! That'd be exciting. Saturday and yesterday I was up at my cabin in the San Juans, it's a lot of fun up there, nothing especially exciting except that, since there aren't any police officers on the island, I got to drive all the way to the store on the other side of the island all by myself (I only have my learner's permit) . . . so that was lots of fun and excitement. right this very moment, one of my best friends, Amy, is seeing Star Wars with the guy she has a crush on, it's very exciting and makes me happy. hopefully she'll have a great time . . . I'm going to make her tell me all the details so I can live vicariously through her . . . heh heh heh.

so yeah . . . and oho.net apparently is down, or it was five minutes ago, so I don't know what to do with myself! no, not really, I think I'll manage. and it's probably up now again. so that's all for now. I need to go get a drink of water. the end

Date:	2002-05-22 21:51
Subject:	First Entry
Security:	Public
Mood:	tired
Music:	believe by nancy hess

so here's my first live journal entry! yay! I know, very exciting. I don't really have any content to put here yet, I must admit. But I will start making content-filled entries soon. so yeah.