Auf wiedersehen
I had an awesome weekend at the museum. Really awesome. I got paid to attend a party, got to drink a glass of wine and flirt on the job, met dozens of fascinating people and was invited to three (three!) after parties.
So I am really sad that tomorrow is going to be my last day. I gave notice two weeks ago because C comes home Wednesday and I want to be able to spend as much time with him as possible. The whole purpose of this living apart experiment is that we could spend every day together on the months that he is home but with me working that has just not been possible. We are now halfway through his assignment and we are determined to make the second half better than the first half. We are determined to do it right.
I will not be bored when he is gone! I will hang out at the museum and write all day! I will take the dog to the dog park and read a book a week again and finish the baby blanket I’ve been knitting since December.
Twenty eight
11:03 am | Blog | Below The 38th Parallel, Girly | 0
My house is empty. The dog is with doggie friends, husband is millions of miles away. It’s hard sometimes to sleep when it’s like this, even harder when I am excited about something.
I will be spending my birthday tonight on the banks of the Guadalupe River, figuring out how to attach my digi-cam to the handlebars of my scooter so I can capture the Texas Hill Country scenery as it passes by during tomorrow’s ride.
Yesterday during a bizarre spring-y rainstorm I looked at the umbrella I bought in Seoul, the one that reminds me of a Magritte painting, and had a very strange feeling.
I looked at this umbrella in my hand, and for a split second I felt a fondness and nostalgia for the monsoon season in Korea, for waking up in the mornings and watching the fog rise over the bay and walking everywhere with a umbrella in my hand, the smell of humidity in the air before the stifling heat of summer.
It’s the first time I’ve felt any kind of longing for Korea since we got home. And as soon as I realized what it was, it was gone.
Shakin’ that stick and drivin’ me crazy
9:53 pm | Blog | El Perro, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? | 3
For those of you who know me and have already heard this rant, yes, I am still seething about this, and no, I will not get over it. For those of you who haven’t, the story that follows is pretty gross, both in terms of bodily functions and general human behavior. There is a picture at the end. Read on if you have the fortitude. (more…)
Art Car sadness
12:14 am | Blog, Photo Album | Houston | 0
Tom Jones, curator at the Houston Art Car Museum, was killed early this morning, just a few hours after the annual Art Car Parade wrapped, after he was hit by a speeding car while sitting on the curb outside the museum.
So sad. The parade is one of the things I love best about Houston. I spent all afternoon taking pictures and had an excellent time, as usual, and part of that is due to the hard work Jones lovingly put into the museum and the parade over the years. Truly a devastating loss for the Houston art community.
Above is Jones riding yesterday in a car called Swamp Mutha. Click the image for more pictures of the parade. To quote Jones: “Keep America’s roads weird — build an Art Car!”
The devil’s darning needles
11:02 pm | Blog | Watching, Writing | 0
The worst thing about working in the museum is that, when I’m not at work, the last place I want to hang out is the museum. As a result, I have not yet seen the two biggest exhibits.
When Nan Goldin was there I did manage to eat lightening-fast lunches nearly every day so that I could spend my remaining 45 minutes sitting in the velvet-dark, cold gallery, watching her disturbing slide-shows. I first heard of Goldin when she was referenced in a passing comment on MetaFilter, and since then I’ve been borderline obsessed with her work. There doesn’t seem to be anything special about it, and that might be the draw. Each photo alone is a glimpse into her strange and sad life, but look at them as a whole and you get a very vivid and complete picture of who the woman is, who her friends are and what her life has been like. After sitting through one of her slide-shows I leave convinced that I know this person, that we are friends. I get this feeling from other creators too, people who seem to have selflessly invited us into their lives, no matter how superficially, and who address us with the kind of familiarity with which one would address a sibling.
It might not surprise you to learn that two of these people are bloggers. It’s the nature of the medium.
Art and music and movies seem to have synchronistically melded into my life lately. There is a scene in CQ (which we just watched again) where Paul is talking with his French girlfriend about the film he’s trying to make. Frustrated with his own pretenses, he tells her he just wants to make something that is real and honest. Marlene turns right around and says to him, “But what if it’s boring?” Could there be a greater comment on our self-obsessed narcissistic blog-addicted generation?
Later in the movie Paul meets his father at the airport. Dad tells Paul that his grandmother used to believe dragonflies would come in the night and stitch up one’s mouth if one told lies. Dad finishes by saying “Maybe you can use it somehow. You never know when some little overheard story or image can find a place in your work.”
When my Inprint instructor Randi found out that Christopher and I met through some scootering buddies she was fascinated by the story. She said to me, you don’t think there’s anything special about that because it’s your everyday normal life, but to me that sounds like a great beginning for a story.
Which leads me to Barton Fink, another movie we just re-watched. Throughout the movie Barton is surrounded by inspiration and muses and he remains willfully ignorant of them. Thus the beginning of his self-imposed writer’s block.
Not sure where I’m going here, just a few things I’ve been thinking about lately.
Two-lane blacktop
1:07 am | Blog, Photo Album | Two Wheels | 4
Things look different on two wheels then they do from inside a car.
In Galveston, I could smell the jasmine blooming every time I drove past the state campground, and could feel the sea spray on my face as we cruised along the beach. I have been to Galveston dozens of times but rest assured I have never, ever driven my car on the seawall. Not the street named Seawall. The actual wall.
Sandblast was great fun. The weather was nice (though a little cloudy) and the rally games were some of the funniest and most entertainingly suicidal I have ever seen. The only bummer was Friday night, when my moto jacket was stolen off the front rack of my bike while it was parked with 20 other scooters in front of the fittingly-named Poop Deck. My scooter keys were in the pocket. Nothing else was stolen, but it wouldn’t be a scooter rally without something going wrong for Brittanie.
The newly revived Texas United River Rally is the weekend of my birthday. Be there or be square.
Christopher and I have been on an extended vacation this month home. Camping, scooting every day, epic purchases and even more epic schemes. I might have to quit my job in order to accomplish all the living we have planned this summer. He’s leaving again Sunday, and knowing we’ll have to spend the next month apart makes the adventures of tomorrow, today, right now, feel extra-super urgent. You want proof? Us deciding at the spur of the moment this past weekend to drive the BMW to Dallas and back in a 24-hour period. Five hundred miles, round trip.
I have gone the distance between Dallas and Houston many times on my drives to and from Oklahoma, but I have never seen dogs fighting on the highway service road, or a raptor actually catching it’s prey, and while I usually just whiz by the forest this time I was able to look around, look closely, without a layer of glass between me and the world, without a radio humming in my ears and a windshield blocking the slight dip in the air temperature as one drives through the natural shade.
It’s kind of silly the fraternity you are automatically inducted into when you buy a motorcycle and take it on the highway. Every passing cyclist gives you a nod or a wave. You are a rebel, a shunner of comfort, a vagabond. It’s absurd but I would be lying if I said I didn’t get a kick out of it.
On the way home, at a tree-covered rest stop just north of Huntsville, we met another cyclist named James, a Brit who is riding the perimeter states of the USA for charity. He is keeping a blog, which you should read.
We were only in Dallas long enough to have dinner and drinks at the recently unsealed tomb of Trader Vics. I didn’t take many pictures of the drive, because with the wind whipping you at 80+ MPH it’s not very easy to hold a camera steadily. I did take pictures of the restaurant though.
Towards the end of our ride Sunday, 30 minutes outside Dallas, the sun was setting on us. C looked down at the pavement to his right, and then patted me on the thigh so he could point to our shadow, two bodies on a motorcycle, my arms wrapped around him.
Really? Really!?
Ugh. Currently editing two-year-old blog posts that make me sound like a vapid, attention-hungry idiot.
But don’t worry, I’m not deleting any of them.
Yet.
Dilemma
5:17 pm | Blog | Listening | 0
For a month I have been anxiously awaiting the March 29 performance of Asian-beat psych-pop band Dengue Fever.
Yesterday I found out that The Fleshtones are playing the same night, along with friends of my friend Miss Formika. If I could be in two places at once, I would, but as of now it looks like I might be forced to choose.
To make matters worse, I have developed bruises on the tops of my feet from dancing/being danced on during Tuesday night’s show.
Upon my velocipede
When we first moved back to Houston I bought a new bicycle. It was a difficult decision to trade my old beach cruiser in since we’d had some good times together. And some bad. I still have scars on my ankles from trying to ride that thing on the Memorial Park bike trail so treacherous it’s nickname is the Ho Chi Min. But the new bike is better in dozens of ways. The tires have grip. It has shocks! And more than 20 speeds and front and rear breaks.
Three years ago I rode my Schwinn beach cruiser — the bike with no gears and with nothing but coaster breaks — in the first annual Tour de Houston. Twenty miles isn’t that far on a bike, and that was my plan. Ride 20 miles and see how I feel. The long ride was 40 miles, but the route circled through Houston’s six wards and passed close by my house several times along the way, so I figured I could skip out and ride home at any time. When I felt pretty good at the end of 20 miles I decided to just keep going. At 30 miles I didn’t feel so positive. Towards the end of the ride I was getting to the relief stations so late they were already out of snacks and water. But still I soldiered on, me on my beach cruiser, and I finished the race so emotionally and physically drained I actually cried with relief.
Much has changed since then. I weigh about 30 pounds less and I’m in much better shape in terms of muscle mass and cardio endurance. And I have a better bike. So tomorrow I’m going to ride the Tour de Houston again, and this time I’m aiming for a distance they didn’t have the first year, 70 miles.
Seventy miles on a bicycle. We’re actually going to be riding on the highway. We’re riding to the suburbs of Houston and back. Seventy miles is like riding your bike from Oklahoma City to Stillwater.
I’m not sure if I can actually do it, but I am so excited about giving it a try that I can’t even sleep, and I have to be up at 5 a.m. tomorrow.
Springtime down in the ‘Trose
10:35 pm | Blog | Houston, Listening | 3
A while ago someone asked me where I lived. Not the actual address — she already knew that — but the name of my neighborhood. “What do you call that? Midtown? Or Montrose?”
I wanted to be offended but after giving it some thought I understood her confusion. For the record, I refer to my neighborhood as The Montrose. Sometimes other people call it The Mantrose. Or the Gayborhood. I live off lower Westheimer, behind Numbers. The eastern border of one of Houston’s most eclectic neighborhoods. But I can see where the lines might be blurry, where the borders begin to meld.
Ten years ago, before I even considered moving to this city, before I even knew Houston had a gay district, people were decrying the gentrification of my neighborhood. I first noticed it while on a visit here after moving to Korea. Someone had painted over the deliciously salacious mural at Mary’s.
(Here is a side story about Mary’s that is altogether unrelated but too good not to share: My old friend John grew up as a punk rock/surfer kid in Houston in the 1980s. At the heyday of Judas Priest’s career, long before Rob Halford came out, back when it was still completely fashionably acceptable and rock-n-roll for a seemingly-straight man to wear ass-less leather chaps, John went to see the band play somewhere in town. Being the star-struck teenager he was, he and some friends decided to follow the Priests’ tour bus back to their hotel after the show. But the bus didn’t go to a hotel. Instead, it promptly delivered Halford to Mary’s, Houston’s most notorious gay bar.)
Since moving back I’ve noticed other changes too. Dozens of new built-in-a-week townhomes, including a trio around the corner from us selling for half a million dollars. That’s half a million dollars for a home with two out of four shared walls and no front or back yard. (Also, have you seen the monstrocity being built between the Height’s Target and I-10? The thing is so big it looks like it could house half of Houston alone. And there is another one going up next to our closest dog park which will effectively block out the little sunlight the park gets in the first place. And this is not a phenomenon isolated to The Montrose.
The transvestite hookers on our corner have been replaced by Mystic-tanned sports car drivers looking for fresh meat at LaStrada and even my old favorite haunts are now plagued by Juicy-clad chicas and young urban professionals who can only manage to button the bottom half of their shirts. There are no less than 10 new wine bars in my hood, meanwhile, it’s impossible to find a St. Arnold’s within walking distance.
Granted, I live in one of those townhomes, but it was built in 1993! And for the most part it’s structurally sound! And my husband may also be a young urban professional, but we have a leg up on the typical Midtown resident and that advantage is this: we are not annoying. Still, even as I type this, techno music is blaring from Numbers on a Monday night, plans have been finalized for the Westheimer Block Party, and the collar-popping jerks of the world have yet to overrun my other favorite sleazy bar, Lola’s. My faith in my ‘hood was reignited on Election Night when I communed with my neighbors — people who actually live in this neighborhood, not just spend their money here — and no one even threw a hissy fit about the hours they spent in line.
And weirdo folk-rock musicians are still writing wonderful little odes to my neighborhood which has had most of the Houston music bloggers linking with glee this week.