The 8th Wonder of the World
| April 11, 2012 | Filled under Photo Album |
Last week, for work, I got to take a tour of the sad and dusty Astrodome.
It was my first time, and probably last time, in the building. (I’m a late-blooming Texan.)
In spite of it’s weathered appearance, it was still absolutely beautiful. My resulting slideshow ended up getting quite a bit of traffic thanks to Deadspin. If you’re feeling nostalgia-y, take a tour of the world’s first domed stadium.
On Basketball, Tragedy and How I Became A Writer
| May 17, 2011 | Filled under Video |
In 2008 Oklahoma finally got a professional major league sports team. For years people said OKC could not support such a venture. Boy were they wrong.
I’ve always been a college basketball, never a pro fan, but that’s changing now that the Thunder are in the playoffs, against a Texas team even. Yesterday, on the even of the Western Conference Finals first game, my mom sent me this video.
In Oklahoma, basketball goes hand in hand with tragedy. But something else struck me about the story above.
I was 14 years old when the Murrah Building was bombed. I was in junior high, had not yet taken my first creative writing class, had not yet worked for a newspaper. But I loved to write, and I had been keeping journals every year. Watching the video now reminds me of my desperate need for info after the bombing. How voraciously I consumed every newspaper, magazine, news report and update. It never occurred to me before, but in no small way did the OKC bombing influence my later development into a news junkie and journalist.
R.I.P. Cleopatra
| March 23, 2011 | Filled under Video |
Elizabeth Taylor has died. I loved her in nearly everything she did, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to A Place In The Sun, but the above scene has always been my favorite. The Film That Changed Hollywood, a feature-length documentary on the troubled production of Cleopatra, is an absolute must-see for anyone with an interest in the way cinema works, then and now.
Update: Here’s the obit I wrote for the Houston Press on her best movies.
Finders Keepers
| March 22, 2011 | Filled under Video |
These chicks stole my favorite (thrift store) nightgown.
Yes, I wear a nightgown from the thrift store. Whut.
Compare and Contrast
| January 24, 2011 | Filled under Video |
Jerry Lee Lewis in 1957.
Jerry Lee Lewis on January 21, 2011.
He can still hammer those keys away, even if he was a little slow-moving on stage. I have always, since I was nine years old, wanted to see him play. I remember taking a road trip to Missouri with my grandmother and listening to a JLL greatest hits tape and loving him even back then.
Read my write-up of the show on Rocks Off.
Put your hand inside the puppet head
| January 18, 2011 | Filled under Video |
This week in “I Love My Job,” here is how I spent my morning.
And here is the accompanying story.
In a past life I was an entertainment writer, though covering music has really always been my thang. I went to this as a last-minute assignment. Covering kids’ puppet shows ain’t exactly my idea of a lively beat but it was a super fun laid-back interview and they insisted after the fact that I try my hand at it. My job, it is so hard.
Goofy
| January 14, 2011 | Filled under Blog |
The half-marathon is in two weeks and two days. Tomorrow I am getting up in the morning and will run the entire half-marathon route with my friend Lydia. It’ll be my last long run before the race. Afterwards we’re going to gorge ourselves at The Black Lab, especially taking advantage of their brunch cocktails. It’s a motivation trick we picked up last year. Incidentally, when we pre-ran the route last year it was so cold my sweat was forming frost on my headband/earwarmer thingy, and the wind was blowing at about 20 mph. I kept telling myself, if I can make it through this today, I’ll be able to handle anything come race day.
I originally signed up for the full marathon this year, but in November I started having trouble with me IT band. I’ve only ever had one other running injury, tendinitis in my knees, and I learned enough about training and self-care then to make sure it never came back. I used the same techniques to get over my IT band issues, but I also lost about three weeks worth of training, and since it was getting so close to crunch time I eventually decided to just drop down.
Since the Houston Marathon has switched to the lottery system this year, that decision was a hard one to make. I really want the Houston Marathon to be my first, and there’s no guarantee I’ll get in next year unless I pay to join a running club with reserved spots. But in the long run it’s probably for the better. I’ve only done one half so far, and moving from that straight into a marathon might not have been the best plan. After January 30th I’ll have two half under my belt, and depending how I feel after this one, I’m thinking of running the brand new Galveston Mardi Gras half marathon February 20th. I may be totally burned out, but it’s the first marathon (and half) on Galveston Island since the ’90s and it sounds like a lot of fun. A week after that is the Rodeo Run 10K, the very first race I ever ran and a race I will run every year no matter what else I do. Then in March I’m running the Race Against Violence on Team Walk the Walk for the Houston Area Women’s Shelter. Normally I am a person who runs just for myself, but this will be the first race I’ve ever run for charity and I’ve super excited to do it.
Aaaaaaaanyway. The point of this whole post was to point you to this race report from a guy who ran the Disney Half Marathon last weekend with his mom, a 20-year cancer survivor and a novice runner who just started running in September. If you have ever thought that running 26 miles, or 13 miles, or 6 miles or 3 miles or even one mile was crazy or impossible, I want you to read that story and I DARE YOU not to get a little bit choked up. What’s crazy is that next day the guy went out and ran the Disney full marathon.
Oklahoma Moonshine
| January 11, 2011 | Filled under Shorts |
Drank this beer while we were in Hot Springs, and it was deeeelish. There were not yet microbrewerys when I was living in Oklahoma so I’d never had it before.
The Oklahoma Historical Society has an excellent write-up of so-called Choc beer which has nothing to do with chocolate and does nothing to dispel the stereotype that Native Americans like to hit the sauce.
Why hello there
| January 11, 2011 | Filled under Blog, Photo Album |
Time to say a proper farewell to 2010, a year that kicked my ass, mostly in good ways. I spent a lot of time thinking about it over New Years. Christopher and I went to Hot Springs, Ark., a place I’ve wanted to visit since I was a teenager, and exactly the kind of slow and quiet town that makes introspection easy.
Hot Springs is beautiful and we spent a lot of time sleeping in, staying up late, and walking all over town. Bathhouse Row is pretty damn amazing, but there are other awesome middle-America aspects to the town that I’ll talk about in a future post. We were so lazy we didn’t even go hiking, and going to some pace outdoorsy was one of the main goals. Oh well. Just gives me something to do next time, and believe me, in fell enough in love with the town that there will be a next time.
The whole time we were there I kept thinking about where I was and what I was doing the year before. We have to travel so much to see family during the holidays (this year it was Oklahoma for Thanksgiving and Florida for Christmas) that New Year’s is usually our own holiday together. After all the stress and buildup of the previous months we usually like to get away to some place secluded. In 2008 it was Robber’s Cave, Oklahoma. Last year it was a week through west Texas, culminating with a camping trip in Big Bend.
2009 had been a pretty shit year for me. I won’t go into details but I will say that two major events sent me spiraling into a well of hate and depression. I’m not really much of a metaphysical person, but on New Year’s Eve, just outside of Big Bend, I decided to do something I’d never done before: I wrote down all my heartbreaks and regrets on a piece of paper, and I threw it into the fire at La Kiva in Terlingua.
It didn’t matter if it worked or not. It made me feel better. Then I got waaaay too drunk on champagne and puked in the National Park the next day.*
What’s crazy is, it seems like it *did* work. 2010 was one of my most amazing years in memory. I started it off by running my first half-marathon. In March I went to SXSW for the first time. In May I found out my portfolio was accepted into the creative writing program at UH. In June CLH and I went to Sweden for a month, spending July 4th weekend in Stockholm.
Just before our trip to Sweden, I’d been asked to fill in for my music editor at work. I was flattered by the responsibility. On my last day, I found out about a job opening there. Not just any job opening… and opening for my dream job. But, it had been years since I’d worked full time, and I agonized and agonized over applying. After applying, I agonized over whether I’d take the job if offered. Then I agonized over not hearing anything about it for the month I was in Sweden. I actually did my job interview from the kitchen of our apartment via Skype, miles and hours away from my interviewee. And then, a few days after we got back to the US, I was offered the job.
Life since then has been hectic and happy. Believe me when I say I am literally working at my dream job, the kind of place I wanted to work at when I decided to study journalism. But it is a 24-hour position and has left little room in my life for other pursuits, like all my crafting projects, blogging and the thing I miss most from my former life — travel. But I am working to balance things out and hat is one of the goals for 2011.
But the awesome year didn’t stop there. Probably the most amazing thing I did this year was jump out of a plane. In November a large group from my running club got together to do the scariest thing I can possibly imagine doing. I hate heights, I hate the feeling of not having something underneath me (like when you’re standing on a ledge) and I hate airplanes. But skydiving is probably the most amazing and formative experience I’ve ever had in my life. There is no way to describe the freedom you feel, freedom of movement and freedom from fear, as you are falling 120 mph toward earth. It was so peaceful. I can’t wait to do it again.
Just look at the grins on our faces there. That is life well-lived. I also kind of feel like I’ve done the scariest thing I can possibly imagine, and it was awesome, so what do I ever have to be afraid of again?
So what will 2011 hold for me? In three weeks I’m running my second half-marathon and I may run a third at the end of February. Other than that, I have really no idea. I have a lot of goals for work, for my personal life and for my creative endeavors, but if this year is half as challenging and rewarding as the last one was, I’ll be happy. Bring it on, Elevensies.
* Didn’t think about it until now, but might this have been some kind of purging of negative energy? God, listen to me.
