high on a hill was a lonely goatherd

Julie Andrews is on the ellen show right now, and i just started thinking about how much of a super genius she is. i mean...has anybody seen the muppet show that she guest stars on? she sings this song with kermit (i've watched this episode many times) called "When you were a tadpole and I was a fish" that is the most hilarious and amazing thing i've ever seen. my friends and i used to watch it over and over (i own the muppet show on dvd in case you're wondering) because at the end of singing that song she makes the craziest face i've ever seen. its really really funny. but i don't mean to make fun of her because i really do like her a lot.

These are my top ten favorite movie musicals of all time:

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
Little Shop of Horrors
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Funny Face
West Side Story
The Sound of Music
Carousel
Oliver!
South Pacific
Swing Time

awkward moments

well once again, i spent a serious amount of time googling today. funny, there was a time in my life when i couldn't imagine using the word "googling."i must be getting old, as there must be some kids out there who can't remember not using it. maybe i am in denial of almost-turning-30 -anxiety. crap.
anyway in my googling today, i came across another moment worth sharing. this is the best picture i've seen all day. its absurd. its hilarious. its awwwkward....

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/tags/photography

besides that, my big news is that a few colleagues and myself are headed upstate for the weekend to a grassroots arts and film festival turned mtv plug.i would love to invite you all, you, my fiercely loyal fans, but who are we kidding? you're not about to get in a car to drive to rome, ny, this fine labor day weekend! but i promise to return next week and tell you all about it. maybe there will even be pictures to prove it! of course none of me, or i wouldn't be anonymous anymore, would i? how awkward it would be then seeing each other on the train, or in the street. you knowing who i am, me having no idea you know anything about me...
happy labor day folks.

Even though i fight it with all my might, i always tend to be slightly controlled by my inner hypochondriac. this whole summer so far has been punctuated by a series of not even mildly serious but annoying health problems...leading up to the inevitable fate of getting my wisdom teeth removed. Here is a story from yesterday:

I had an oral surgeon appointment at 9 am, which was already difficult because i had seen my friends' band play the night before (www.myspace.com/redsailsband...check them out), and i was hungover enough to have a rough time getting out of bed. So i'm in the office (which is in a hilarious art deco building on 57th and madison, i felt really cool entering, like i was back in time, ignoring the fact that i was only going to the oral surgeon) and this lady's like, "your insurance won't cover this" and i was like "what?" and she was like "its gonna cost you $300 dollars for a consultation" and i was like "oh...great". So i finish filling out all this information and then finally (its now 9:45...cause the insurance problem set me back) the nurse says "Right this way." So i follow her into a teeny tiny consultation room (after an x-ray from a monster sci-fi machine) that has shelves with all these tempting books with titles like "Largely Deformed Tumors of the Face" and "Guide to Impactions" and i'm like, "shit...damn...what am i getting myself into". I sit down on the dentist chair and she leans it back so i'm comfortable and says, "the doctor will be in in a minute". So i just sit and think about how it would feel to wake up from anaesthesia in the middle of getting your wisdom teeth out, and eventually i kind of drift off not noticing that i've kind of curled up in the dentist chair and fallen asleep. At one point i jolt awake because the nurse has come back in but only to retrieve a skull from on top of the bookshelf (with great difficulty because its jaw had come disconnected and was lost somewhere). apparently the doctor wanted to demonstrate to another patient what would happen after too many facial procedures or something. So she leaves and i wait some more and of course fall asleep again until i get jolted awake again by a voice saying "hello!". I look up and there's the doctor who's like, a 6'7" Scandinavian giant, and i really hope he didn't see me sleeping. he's like "okay lets see whats going on here and looks at my teeth and he says "yep! all four need to come out!" He gives me this prepared speech about what the procedure entails of and i just nod my head still half asleep. Then he leaves and i'm like, "that was it?" i look at my watch and its 10:45, which means i was asleep for at least 45 minutes. So i go out to pay for it to this little room with an equally little man who writes me prescriptions for premedication and pain relief and stuff and gives me a twenty minute speil about what i'll feel after the procedure...and a scary scary cost estimate...and there are pictures on the wall of barry manilow and some other hilarious looking people. I finally leave, back through the crazy art deco lobby, and its now almost 11:30, and i feel like i just had some kafka/david lynch mega super surreal weird dream experience. and then i go to the japanese pastry store on 49th just to get some of that out of my head (only i also thought it was all hilarious).

so...basically if this was the consultation i am really really scared for the procedure.

tragedy is everywhere

greece is burning. owen wilson tried to commit suicide. and couples everywhere are buying into the consuming process of living happily ever after, starting with feeding their guests gourmet appetizers at hundreds of dollars per head. im sure among gazillions of other awful things happening in the world. a friend emailed me yesterday and wrote that the amazing thing about having international friends is that in a world full of photographers, inundated with visual stimulation to the point that it all becomes meaningless, we still have our voices. all we can do to change the demise of the world as we know it, is share what is going on in our separate countries, neighborhoods,and lives. we can bring the world together one conversation at a time, whether with words or images.
while all this is going on, i quietly googled for six hours today. i came across a few things that are worth sharing so check it out.greece, blind artists,and a couple of galleries dedicated to emerging artists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/world/europe/27cnd-greece.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

http://www.artingeneral.org/projects/389

http://blindatthemuseum.com/wingwall.html

http://www.artistsai.org/cuchifritos/Exhibits/current.html

http://www.sundaynyc.com/future.html

last day

Today I spent my last day as a zing intern organizing itty bitty plastic letters. I got a real job, so now I have to do that five days a week instead of the internship here. The job is not exciting. It has nothing to do with art, which is awfully disappointing. That's right, I'm using my $40,000 master's degree in arts journalism to be a proofreader for a real estate marketing company. Kill me now. But none of the magazines and galleries I applied to gave me a single response, so at this point I need to take any job that's offered 'cuz I've got bills to pay :(

Well it's been fun. Hopefully I will be able to help out with projects from time to time.

On the plus side, there's a party at the Chelsea Museum tonight. One last time to take advantage of my press pass.

dime bags of helvetica

all the letters came today and the office kind of looks like a drug den in that all the little white letters are in these small clear plastic bags and organized throughout the room. i'm real excited to start making these bulletins. i LOVE organizing things and putting things together in a certain order. i'm kind of ridiculous in that way.

yesterday my friends and i had "superfriends wednesday" again (miraculously a large group of my friends don't have work on wednesdays...including me, so we all get together and go on an adventure). yesterday we got kind of a late start but it was still action packed. i got my ear pierced then we went to Babycakes NYC where we got gluten-free red velvet cupcakes (http://www.babycakesnyc.com/), then we went for a massive walk through the lower east side and chinatown, then went back and walked across the williamsburg bridge and went to the Bedford Cheese Shop (http://www.bedfordcheeseshop.com/) where we sampled a large variety of cheeses including THE BEST CHEESE ON THE PLANET only i'm forgetting what it was called.

so that was superfriends for this week. here is one thing we noticed:

im getting old, but staying lucky

today i woke up in a malaise at yet another strangely cloudy, too cold august day. i had to put a scarf on for crying out loud. yesterday i saw (well, first i heard them) a group of teenage girls in the throws of a hummer-limo ride around nyc. their excitement could not be contained. they yelled and squealed at every person within a 20 mile radius of the over extravagentsicklyhugemonster of a vehicle. today i wondered what happened to that feeling inside me, if it ever existed at all. i must be getting old.
i just saw an article and pictures about some iraq veterans who have been permanently physically disfigured by their experience there. lets all just take a minute, to remember how lucky we are to be living a pretty comfortable life, and that there are people out there who aren't so lucky.when will the madness end? how many people are going to die before the end?
there must be a connection between those girls in the limo and the war but, i wonder if they ever think about life outside the tinted windows?
i may not be riding around in an suv limo, but even on these ugly cloudy days, it could be worse....