weekend recap

As Sinead O'Connor once yelped, "I will rise, and I will return; the Phoenix from the flame." Spending a week away from blogging (more or less) was certainly recuperative for me, though I was hoping to feel a bit more refreshed, somehow imbued with new and exciting ideas. I am not.

But I do have a number of little anecdotal tales.

I'm getting used to a new commute, one that does not include the unwashed masses of the L train. Now I take the 7 (which appears to be a train whose ridership is solely short foreign bachelors) to the Lexington line. It's very fast, but more crowded. And now, for the first time in years, I am confronted with the whole Unwelcome Frottage problem.

When a train is crowded, you inevitably finds yourself sandwiched unpleasantly amid other passengers. A certain amount of rubbing is to be expected. But occasionally, it falls outside of the realm of ordinary jostling, and it shakes you to your very core--kinda like when Jerry Brown plagiarized Midnight Oil and made you realize, What a tool--because you don't want to seem hysterical, but something inside you screams out "THERE IS A DOCKERS-CLAD PENIS TOUCHING ME. INTENTIONALLY." What to do?

I found myself in this situation just last week. I determined that a)although the train was crowded, it clearly wasn't crowded enough for this man to be pressing up against me and b)no matter how I shifted, he was adjusting his stance so that he could be grinding full-bore up against me. We were passing 28th Street, which meant approximately 3 more minutes of the Unwelcome Frottage. I thought about pitching a fit. But I didn't like the idea of sapping what little early-morning energy I had. So I chose a different tack.

I farted.

Oh, and what a fragrant fart it was. Silent, graveolent, meaty. He backed off right quick.

So, what else? Saturday night I attended the party at Magnetic Field for the stupid horrible Horizontal Action. I don't mean to hate on the scene, but this zine is a piece of shit. It's like the worst of MaximumRocknRoll with a lot of crap porn from the '70s, plus the most unintelligent misogynist commentary I've ever read.* If I had actually paid the $3 cover price for this crap, I might be angrier. But there are so many other, better confluences of punk and porn out there, so I'll just point you to them.

As Reeves, S, and I sat there reading the zine in the bar that night, I scoffed at the cover interview with a band called Dirty Sweets. "You know, that tape-on-the-nipples thing is so old. Wendy O'Williams did it 20 years ago.

S looked up and said, "Ha. Someone probably did it 10 minutes after the invention of tape."

In other news, I'm currently very waterlogged, having consumed several gallons of water this weekend to cure the awful bleeding through my girl-weenis. Yes, a lovely UTI. I've spent the past two days shopping for unsweetened cranberry juice and cruising Usenet for homebrewed remedies. I found myself in groups that referred to AIDS in quotes because it's all a myth perpetuated by the government and the pharmaceutical companies. I also found myself in scary Michigan Womyn's Music Festival-territory contemplating making tea out of uva ursi and yarrowroot and cornsilk. Ultimately, I rallied with the aid of a close friend whose stepfather works in the cranberry bogs and she helpfully delivered a pound of frozen cranberries to my door. Boiling the homebrew yesterday afternoon, I felt fecund and truly in touch with my inner goddess, feelings I managed to quickly banish by cranking Angry Samoans (thanks to a mix CD from N/C, who is so virile I sort of suspect him of giving me the UTI in the first place).

All the cranberry juice in my system helped me finally put up the curtains in my bedroom, much to the dismay of the residents of the southside of 46th Ave.

Now I'm sitting at home while I should be working because there's a guy here working on my plumbing. And no, that isn't a double entendre.

*And you know I don't throw that term around lightly, being somewhat of a misogynist myself. But this wasn't clever Jim Goad misogyny, it was the "Hey, who invited this adenoidal douchebag to the party?" kind.