I sorta learned to speak by listening to Ani DiFranco; you can hear me hem and haw and um and ahh my way through my sentences complete with lil’ folksinger giggles and breathlessly ended phrases. This isn’t an all-the-time thing, but you can certainly hear the influence whenever i forget who i am and start talking about my music. But, Ani’s not the only person who’s had an unintentional effect on my speech patterns: i pepper my campus tours with twangy southern “y’alls” and attach “ya knows” to the tails of my statements in an unmistakenly Fargo fashion. In the cases of the latter two affectations, i’m not entire sure how i picked them up, but generally anyone i listen to often has an effect on how others hear me – and the surest way to tell is to ask me to talk about music and proffer me a bemused smile as my sarcastically directed patterns take a left-hand turn and suddenly i’m saying “Well, ahh, this song… this song was, um, not the easiest song. Not the easiest song to write… but it wrote itself, i suppose.”
Oh, did i mention i picked up some loopiness from Tori?
Speaking of Ms. DiFranco, she was just on the always-scrumptious KCRW show Morning Becomes Eclectic with her two horn players accompanying her otherwise solo acoustic performance (of the beat-poem “Fuel,” a wholly stunning “Marrow,” and (wow) the funky “Ain’t That the Way,” among other things). Catch the webcast here in streaming real audio!
Songs are continuing to ambush me. Two weeks ago “Necessary Evil” came to me in the guise of a riff consisting of a single half-step and a bluesy first line that i won’t ever do justice. Before that were two other ambushes… “Up & Down” with it’s rough and tumble sexual upfrontness and “This Tiny Trouble” pretending to be a song about vintage sitcoms. Somewhere inbetween exists the still-forming “Destination,” which portrays something near the opposite emotion from REM’s “Stand.” All four for unintended, unexpected, and anything but premeditated.
Tonight the fifth song in this merry ambushing band came to me without a warning… with literally only a few seconds of idle time between the first and final lines (most of which was spent looking for my poetry book). The unusual thing about this one is that i wrote it before… last week it came into my head while crossing the street and i could really hear was the melody and a pattering drum machine. Taken out of context it seemed entirely irrelevent so i filed it away under things to “sing in the shower” by the time i reached 36th street. But, tonight, i wrote two lines neatly clipped from Ani DiFranco americana songs like pictures from a newspaper, and they somehow led straight into that pattering song i found in the middle of the street. It’s not about me or anyone i know, but i can easily see the people inside of it, and it was a lot like “This Tiny Trouble” in that it seemed as though i already knew the ending, i just had to remember it. There is a kiss. There are bodies side by side in the grass. There are shoes wet with morning dew. Though it is still newborn and all-at-once incredibly wrinkly and cute and entirely awkward and unformed, it might even make it onto Dawson’s Creek…
There has been lazy rain dropping through the haze all day and it has left the sky a baby kind of yellow like ruddy cheeks after a long shower. I bought lots of food so that i’m not starving so often, and i washed some dishes. Tiny dents in the giant pile of stuff i’ve been meaning to get done. I finally did away with all of my various nested tables because they were from the ages of antiquity. Matt fits perfectly on the couch from toe to top of touseled hair. He sleeps there often and i can never figure out why … this room is cooler but the couch is too fuzzy for this weather and we can turn the air on in the other room. I’ve decided not understanding a roommate is no reason to hate them. I have fixings for tortellini alfredo that will be yummily cooked as soon as i finish the second half of my dishes. Also, i updated my favourite links with recent reads book of days and halo33, as well as adding liz to the crushed bar.
I have been neglecting linking to Liz for quite some time now and it has only really hurt me because i keep forgetting to read her site; she comes at everything freshly and she makes me feel young and romantic even when i’m not feeling too much like either of those at all. Reading her page actually puts a lazy smile on my face that leaves me glowing & clean afterwards. Just like the rain.
So, i redesigned.
This design is the first one not to use the basic frameset of left-side vs. middle that i’ve been publishing with since day one, and as redesigns go it was quick (less than six hours from starting the logo to publishing). It’s not exactly a visual revolution, but the interior code got totally scrapped and rewritten and a few old mainstays have been given the boot (ie: the rainbow separator bar and the brief date styles). My general dislike of graphics obviously persists, but i still want to add a touch of color here and there so we could be seeing a few more in the future.
Aside from my old sidebar getting entirely too long for my tastes, the old style of the page was beginning to make me feel claustrophobic. The page started out black and green but shortly evolved to a very white look with intricate background patterns, and then to a white on white scheme. I like a mostly white pages and i like tables with outlines, and neither of these facts will be changing anytime soon. However, just the ‘xoxox’ header graphic was too plain an idea to have hung around as long as it did. Behind the scenes i’m sporting increasingly cleaner code that doesn’t quite make it through the W3C validator on technicalities that i’ll clean up tomorrow, as well as a beefed up style sheet that i’m definitely going to hone so that i never have to fuss with font tag again.
I’m not done with this design-shift by a longshot… it’s still slightly too plain (and i have to somehow make the rest of the site continue to work until it gets the matching makeover, and i suspect it doesn’t right now). But, anyhow, here’s the new look that will become the old look once you reload it a couple of hundred times. It’s very… pumpkiny. If it makes your browser cry, or if you have useful suggestions, please feel free to give a holler.