Pictures Of My Life, August 16 - August 20 (by Liz)

I'm in Massachusetts and last Thursday I took the bus down to New York City to see lots of people I love, including our friend Laura Fisher, who hosted a gorgeous party on the stoop of her building in Brooklyn. There was pink wine and Twizzlers and so much cheese and I brought chocolate-covered ancho/chipotle tortilla chips I got from Vosges, and we ordered Thai food and drank some beer and decided we're all going to be a sitcom in which most of the dialogue consists of our buddy Katie saying her catch phrase ("Ya get whatcha pay for!") over and over and over again. Here is me and Laura being cute -- look how lustrous her hair is! Look how it catches the light.

In preparation for Laura hangtime I watched some weird interview with Mary Timony from like 1997, which I'll tell you about later, and screencapped the hell out of the video for "Honeycomb." I like this filmstill and totally relate to it:

Due to magical traffic and other terrible things, my trip back to Massachusetts on Friday took about eight hours instead of four hours, and I hadn't slept much and I got motion sickness and generally felt like I was dying. I tried to pacify myself by pretending I was swimming in a freshwater pool and/or eating chicken pho, which was intermittently effective. I also attempted the crossword from the fashion issue of New York, but only got this far:

And then I read the article about Jane Pratt and re-confirmed that my "emotional age" is 25 (i.e., the age at which I moved to Los Angeles) and learned who Cat Marnell is, which set off this whole thing of Cat Marnell popping up everywhere in my life. I've got mixed feelings, but I will say I think it's cool that she's very passionate about the sky being pretty.

On Saturday I went to see Bruce Springsteen! With my whole family. We took a limo and drank pink champagne in the limo. I'd never seen him before and the show was so good and somewhere in the middle he did "Growin' Up" into "LOST IN THE FLOOD" (oh my god, oh my god) into "Because the Night" into "She's The One." I wished for "Jungleland" and he played "Jungeland," and he also played "Spirit In The Night" aka the song of my tattoo. After one of the first few songs he was talking to the crowd and at one point said "Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts!" and that really hit home for me. The last song he played was a cover of "Twist and Shout," and everyone did the twist.

Sunday, I got an iPhone and bought some cute headbands (one of which you can sorta see in the crossword photo above) and watched Anchorman with my brother and then finished watching Heartburn, which I'd started like a month before. I decided I'm going to learn to make a really gorgeous spaghetti carbonara, like Meryl Streep makes for Jack Nicholson the first time they go home together. But I will not make my spaghetti carbonara for Jack Nicholson! Why would anybody ever make anything for Jack Nicholson? What is Jack Nicholson's appeal? He's just soooooo Jack Nicholson-y; all he ever does in any movie is just show up and be Jack Nicholson. I don't know much about acting, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it's done.

And then this morning I got up and went to Dunkin Donuts for a medium french vanilla hot coffee with cream and one sugar and discovered that the Italian bakery I worked at in high school no longer exists, which is sad. Then I drove to one of my old neighborhoods and took a picture of the apartment building my dad lived in when I was little. It's going to be the apartment building where one of the dudes in my book lives (Bobby, the milk-drinker/Oreo-eater of my Storychord story) and it used to be ivy-covered but now it's not. And I think that's a damn shame. The act of removing ivy from a building seems so vulgar and profane to me. I hereby curse all ivy-removers everywhere.