The Great Escape

As my semester inexorably draws to an end, I can't help but wonder what made Blur's paean to middle-class boredom The Great Escape my go to album. First it was Country House, then It Could be You. Or the other way around, either way they overlapped. Then Yuko and Hiro and He Thought of Cars. And Entertain Me. Then all of them at once. And Mr. Robinson's Quango. I've never liked an album in this way: as though it were a collection of singles, each of which I've liked in a different way, with no real regard for the flow of the record itself. All that, and I've owned and listened to the album, as an album, since the late 1990s.

I could stretch and compare the repetitive banality of my studying to the most skippable track of The Great Escape, Ernold Same*:

Ernold same awoke from the same dream in the same bed at the same time
Looked in the same mirror made the same frown
And felt the same way as he did every day

but what wouldn't make sense. Maybe I'll just think about it after tomorrow, after Friday.


I'm listening to:
motherfuck, have you heard a word I'm saying:
Blur- The Great Escape

*Ernold Same is the annoying novelty track, akin to Parklife on Parklife or Fitter Happier off OK Computer. Eminently skippable.

Sunday

I remember some random shit from my college years. We're in the middle of a Nutrition module in Pathophysiology, which at the start sounded deceptively useful. "I would love to learn how to help my patients lose weight and eat the proper nutrients," I thought, which was just fucking wrong. Turns out Nutrition is just lame, complicated biochemistry pathways with a clever name. Med school 1, Awa 0.

So what I wanted to mention was that my first year of college- that would be Fall 1999 for those keeping track at home- I learned the 20 amino acids in my Biology I class. And I still remember the mneumonic I invented:

non-polar amino acids: VIMPP GlyAlaLeuTrp

polar amino acids: SC ThrAsn SerGln

charged amino acids: (+)AspGlu (-)LysArg H

Maybe some student of General Biology will find my mneumonic helpful. After all, six years later, I still do. In all likelihood, he'll find it dumb, and to him I pre-empt, "Bitch, I'm in medical school. You can eat shit, as I am living your dream."


For a while there, I thought I had a blog stalker, someone who had me rss'd and would read the page obsessively every time I posted. It made me uncomfortable, but I posted more to keep that person entertained. I wondered what kind of job the stalker had to check my website so frequently. Then it turned out that the Sitemeter was routing my home server through some other state, and it was just me obsessively reading my own blog. I felt pretty pathetic.


I'm listening to:
Blur- Live at the Budokan

No joke: Joao Miro's family asked Google to remove their front page tribute to him, the one I found pretty adorable. It's a good thing I waste so much time on the internet, or I never would have learned of it. That's me, wasting time so no one else has to.

In other news, I've decided that after feasting on an empyema, I'd like to devour an empyomoma. While technically a pocket of pus within a leiomyoma, I'd like to envision the empyomyoma served on a bed of red cabbage drizzled with a balsamic reduction.


I'm listening to:
The Islands- Return to the Sea

praise be

This could easily be the best news of the millenium:

The Vatican is studying whether condoms can be condoned to help stem the tide of AIDS

tarnation

I recently (as in, in the last 30 seconds*) participated in a phone-a-friend survey. Eager to impress my friends with my trivial acumen (or acumen in trivia), I quickly turned my brain on. It is my great hope that some day I am singled out by an acquaintance (it would mean that much more if it wasn't just a friend feeling obligated to pick me) to be his lifeline.

They asked: #1 selling album of all time
and I answered, without pausing: Thriller. With a flourish, I added, "Michael Jackson."

Wrong. Dead wrong, I am, according to the top 2 google searches. The number 1 selling album of all time, going multi-platinum (which apparently means selling a million albums) is The Eagles Greatest Hits.

Really?

Seriously?

I'm not disappointed in myself, I'm disappointed in you the American people. We are a society of consumers, Thriller is but a paltry million albums behind, get out there and consume.


I'm listening to:
Serena-Maneesh- s/t

*were not blogger being petulant this evening, the post really would have been up on time. Curses.

degeneration

Eight months after tearing my ACL and MCL, I have intermittent arthritis in my right knee. I haven't yet decided whether my osteoarthritis is in sync with the weather, but that would at least be handy.

I have bunions, bilaterally but worse on my left foot. I can't wear heels for more than an hour or two.

My total cholesterol is around 265.

24 going on 70. Awesome.


I'm listening to:
The Islands- Return to the Sea
I wonder how long until I pejoratively refer to them as young whippersnappers, disturbing my peace with their loud rock and roll music.

best anatomy joke ever

This actually might be my favorite joke period:

Two cadavers are rolling down a hill. Which gets to the bottom faster?

The one with the greater omentum.


I'm actually just posting to avoid responding to a lovey-dovey text message I just recieved with the pithy notice that, in fact, "I just threw up a little in my mouth."



I'm listening to:
Andrew Bird- Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs

happy happy

Happy birthday, Joao Miro. You got a shout on the Google homepage, which is pretty badass. I first saw Miro young, visiting what is nw my favorite museum ever the Fondation Maeght near our house in France.


I'm listening to:
Pretty Girls Make Graves- Elan Vital
but the new Kelly Clarkson is stuck in my head

I knew there was a reason I sat around waiting for the Pulitzer prizes to be announced:

Robin Givhan of The Washington Post has won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism for her fashion coverage

Damn, Gina. While I may think she's out of control, looks like it's working for her.


I'm listening to:
shuffling the 223 Blur songs I have on iTunes

they're asking for it

This may be the silliest New York Times editorial I've read in a long time:

It's hardly a tragedy on a par with what is going on around the world these days, but there was some serious bad news for the silver-spoon and vodka set in last week's announcement by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species: it is indefinitely extending the global suspension on Caspian Sea caviar exports.

Everyone knows that silver spoons oxidize caviar, changing its taste. One should eat caviar with a non-metal spoon. Nice try, paper of record.


I'm listening to:
The Flaming Lips- At War with the Mystics
this album is incredibly inconducive to learning about cervicitis. curses.

best thing I learned this weekend:

Our hands are enantiomers: two structures with identical composition, but exactly opposite. Non-superimposable mirror images, in Chemistry Major speak. When molecules are enantiomeric, they are identified by the way they make polarized light spin, be it right or left. Left or right, or because I'm sure it was all invented by the Germans a few hundered years ago, rectus and sinister. Rectus as in upright, and sinister for left like the devil.

Thalidomide is a mixture of two enantiomers, one drug that relieves pain and another that is teratogenic. And of course the thalidomide that stops long bone growth in babies is the sinister one. Lefties always get the short end of the stick (I should probably take that pun out but it's about the only justification for this post. That this is the best and pretty much only thing I learned this weekend is a clear sign that it's time to buckle back down. *sigh*)


I'm listening to:
DJ Shadow- Endtroducing...

YouTube is totally disappointing me today, failing to find me the video for the brilliant SNL commercial for Bad Idea Jeans (quote to live by: Now that I have kids, I feel a lot better having a gun in the house.) and now Fiona Apple's awesome VMA video (here's the audio). I'm thinking of the Fi clip because David Blaine is up to wonderful new antics, as he prepares to live in an aquarium. I think of him, and I immediately think of Fiona:

And my boyfriend can make you disappear. He can pull something out of your ear and say things like we have not met before have we.

Go with yourself.

Go with yourself.


I'm listening to:
Tapes n Tapes- The Loon

Do yourself a favor, check out the PandaCam immediately. Butterstick has been lounging on his rocks all day soaking up the sun and looking just adorable.


I'm listening to:
PJ Harvey- Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea.

on Hipster Central

So there's this bar in town my drinking buddy and I call Hipster Central. He doesn't have a car, so when he lived a block away it was easy for us to bike the four blocks to get there. Even I couldn't get winded (except one painful night, the first night biking a week after taking my brace off post unhappy triad. And I digress...).

So Hipster Central, there are hipsters that congregate there. Some of them have the Flock of Seagulls haircuts. Those are my favorites. Most are just tattooed and wear tight pants. They have good fries and Stella on tap, so who am I to complain. It's always a good time, except that delightful/painful/embarrassing week wherein I visited Hipster Central 4 nights out of 6. It was the week following a test, that's all I've got.

So the point to this story is as follows: we were sitting on the patio this afternoon, my drinking buddy and me, when a cream-colored minivan rolled into the parking lot blasting the theme to Ghostbusters. Out rolled 4 little hipsters, too young in their hipsterdom to have any interesting tattoos, but clearly devoted enough to have pooled together the funds to purchase a van for the band I'm sure they formed some time in the last 12 months. I guess they're past the phase where everything is indie is regarded as holy; they're in the I'm-not-ashamed-of-anything hipster phase. Rolling around listening to an old tape of a shitty movie theme pretty much exemplifies this. I would have found the moment precious, were it not for the fact that I now have the fucking theme from fucking ghostbusters stuck in my head.


I'm listening to:
Jens Lekman- You're Oh So Quiet Jens.

on my phobia

I'm not much for David Sedaris, actually. I find his fatuous obsession with his adorable boyfriend Hugh and the adorable things they do together as they adorably navigate foreign cities just nauseating. Also, I'm a huge snob and wouldn't deign to enjoy fiction as popular as his (I use a similar snobbism in explaining why I haven't read the Harry Potter books. While I probably would enjoy them, there are so many more important works out there I need to read first that I'll never get to them).

As far as I'm concerned, the only funny bit in Me Talk Pretty One Day is actually something his awesome sister Amy did, getting made up as a battered woman and going to the dry cleaners (and curse the internets for not supplying me with that picture from Paper):

Employee: Oh my dear, what happened to you?
Amy Sedaris: Can you believe it, I finally found somebody who loves me!

Naturally, I usually read his New Yorker articles as soon as I get the magazine and hate on him until I get bored and then move back to the beginning and read straight through. This week (last week, really, since the Sy Hersh article in the issue I have yet to receive is apparently getting a lot of press right now) though, he wrote something I can relate to, in describing the life-altering grossness of scratching his babysitter's back:

My 5th grade teacher was pretty great, notabe especially for the book collection in the back of the room she let me sit inside and read instead of having to go outside and enjoy recess. But, oh, she had this 50 year old smoker's skin, greasy and tight and covered in age spots. And she would have us rub her shoulders during presentations, all the while making not-orgasmic-sounds-but-definitely-moans. I may be misremembering some of the events, but I'm reasonably certain that I would accumulate some of her shiny skin under my fingernails. Here's where I'm all for David Sedaris:

To this day, should any of our boyfriends demand a back-scratch, my sisters and I recoil. "Brush yourself against a brick wall," we say. "Hire a nurse, but don't look at me. I've done my time."

This may be why I'm single.


I'm listening to:
Feist- Live at Park West, thanks to rbally at your left

And now, in chronological order, the songs that I have forced everyone around me to listen to on repeat for a least 3 weeks straight as I worked through my obsessions:

1. Chery Lips (Go Baby Go)- Garbage
fall 2001. having a convertible was nice.

2. Murder on the Dance Floor- Sophie Ellis-Bextor
summer 2002. the theme to a summer of debauchery on the Riviera.

3. Haiducii- Haiducii
summer 2004. after hearing the song on the radio in Milan, I came back to France and got myself the single at the Fnac.

4. Wigwam- Wigwam
spring 2006. thank you myspace

Yes, reader, a new obsession has been born.


I'm listening to:
as if you had to ask
Wigwam- Wigwam

Should I ever resort to petty theivery to reimburse any student loans I may have incurred in the process of obtaining this medical degree, I know how I'll do it*:

Most women hang their handbags on the hooks on public bathroom stalls' doors, hooks that are all of four inches off the top of the doors. Then they pull their pants around their ankles and hover over the seat to pee. Eyes are either on the floor or peering back to make sure the stream is going in the right place. All if would take is a pair of anonymous high heels and I could swoop in and steal anyone's purse. Even if a woman noticed, she'd be hard pressed to run out of the bathroom mid-stream and half-naked.

I think the key to this plot is to get a bathroom with only one occupant (rendering the likely screams futile) and no toilet-seat covers (forcing the hover technique unless the woman wants to waste time [and resources- save the planet, bitches] laying down toilet paper.

I'm just saying.


I'm listening to:
Oh, Inverted World- The Shins

*I am wary of posting this information on the internets. I feel like the scientists that published the anthrax genome, torn between my desires to enrich public knowledge and to entertain the world (myself).

news to me

The only thing that can stop my seething at this news (that could lead to the only possible way my grandfather could win his dollar bet with me that President Bush might be impeached) is a good pop song. Apparently Alex James has done an album with a certain Betty Boo. I'll try and buy it today, but for now the ridiculous WigWam song is available at their myspace page.

Shaking out my wigwam. Aww, damn. (It's probably 'checking out my wigwam, but I'm going for absurd points here, and shaking wins that one hand down)

I'm listening to:
Wigwam- Wigwam

grizzly bear

I spoke to my mom today. Love it:

Me: Next time you see [my step-brohter], tell him he looks just like the lead singer of Grizzly Bear, the hipster band that opened for The Books.
Mom: oh, who are they?
Me: just a lame band that opened for a band I like. They sound sortof like every other hipster band, and also like this group Elbow.
Mom: [(clearly struggling to maintain her credibility with me since the Crystal Method "I'm blue da-bo-dee" incident] The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are getting a lot of good press. They're on time this week.
Me: oh. What makes you think of that?
Mom: you burned me their CD
Me: really? [struggling. I know I enjoyed Fever to Tell, but I know it's not her kind of music. My mom likes bops and repeated choruses- really poppy stuff.]
Mom: Yes
Me: really? [still struggling]
Mom: Yes
Me: Mom, I burned you Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah.
Mom: oh, those aren't the same?
Me: oh, Mom, not at all. Um, I have to go.
Mom: I blew it now. You can get off the phone now that you have something to tell all your friends.
Me: Thanks, Mom. I love you.


I'm listening to:
Tori- To Venus and Back

When it comes to Serie A Italian soccer, I'm a Juventus girl all the way. Chic uniforms AND Zinedine Zidane? OK, so he's gone now, but so is Edgar Davids, the soccer player who inspires so much venom in me that I'll have to save my wrath for another post (more than likely during some prolonged procrastination session in the middle of both the World Cup and my USMLE Boards study time.). Still I silently cheer for the blessed boys of AC Milan every time I watch them. It's not just because they're all so handsome, but because they're just such an all around stellar team from front to back (and my is that Pippo Inzaghi's front one to be marveled at).

The great eyesore on the team has been Gattuso for quite a while, but here's why that doesn't bother me: mine is a world ruled by onomatopoeia. And what do you think the words Hugo Gattuso should look like?

This here is a pretty good estimate, don't you think?

At any rate, I couldn't make myself wrap up my laundry during the last 10 minutes of today's (particularly boring) match between Olympique de Lyon and Milan AC. I just felt like something exciting was going to happen. And sure enough, there comes my boy Inzaghi and the unfortunately named Kaka to pull out the game in the end.
Aww, damn.


I'm listening to:
Blur- Country House

this just in

only the best transcript quote ever:

albendazole is the new mebendazole.

update

The unhappy triad and I went swimming yesterday for the first time. I think I only swam a kilometer, and of that maybe 200 was breast stroke. I'd been pretty worried about the movement, because of all the stress it puts on my healed MCL, not to mention the never-going-to-heal ACL. I have been practicing the movement during my fake-me-out pilates sessions on my bedroom floor, but that doesn't help with the fact that air has a lot less resistance than water. 7 months out, I'll say I can (and hopefully will get off my lazy ass and) swim.


I'm listening to:
Death Cab for a Cutie- Plans
blah blah someday I will be loved blah blah.