mmm...

making a raspberry tart for an intimate dinner party. yummm. it is bubbling up slightly unfortunately in the pan, and might not look as perfect as the America's Test Kitchen Picture when finished (what does, though, really? damn food photographers) but is sure to taste delicious.

i love summer. i don't want to do homework ever again.

another night

My mom says that my cat and I are the same creature when she sees me staring up at the tassle from the found photo album hanging slightly over the shelf in the living room, clearly perturbed. I don't doubt it - except, I hope, for her senility at the rather impressive cat age of 14. Did you know that cats could have dementia?

I wish that my house were air-conditioned only when I am overcome with the desire to drink tea but it is far too hot and sticky, which is actually quite often. The rest of the time, the purring 80's steel fan with the head that twists to cool the whole room is quite fine.

summer day

So, I think I may qualify as a Yeasayer groupie...seeing as I have now seen them twice in the past week.
(Loves)I don't even really blame them for the fact that today's show at the XPN festival was a little less life-altering than last week at Pitchfork, when they literally controlled the weather...the crowd was a little different, by which I mean far, far older and tanner. Their biggest fan today (besides me, the freaking stalker) was perhaps the short, leathery woman in the front row who was wearing a neon pink bikini top and white terrycloth hot pants with a pack of cigarettes stuck in the pockets and a cow-print cowboy hat and playing her miniature maracas on the steel banister. Who can blame them, really, if they ended the show rather non-momentously for this crowd of middle-aged hippies barely swaying along to their music? Although, I continuously promise myself, even though it doesn't matter because it will never happen, that if I ever became a famous or well-regarded musician, I wouldn't become too good for anything. Because it sucks when you see a show where the band's not giving it everything that's in them.

And anyway, hippies included, today was a wonderful, relaxing day spent with wonderful, relaxed people on blankets in a blazing hot field in Camden, drinking mint tea and feeling dirt stick to my grainy, sweaty skin. And there is nothing like getting home after a night of no sleep, after driving home half awake and half-believing you might have seen a lamb on the side of the road as you passed by on the trip back, and changing into a 1996 Celine Dion concert t-shirt and getting into your bed, which feels softer and more comfortable than ever, and sleeping into the meat of the day with the fan whirring in the background of your bizarre dreams.

PITCHFORK: 3 DAYS.

so hype.
must see list:
- Yo La Tengo
- The National
- Beirut
- Matt & Kim
- Wavves
- Yeasayer
- Bowerbirds
- The Pains of Being Pure At Heart
- The Flaming Lips
- Grizzly Bear
- Vivian Girls
- M83
- Women
- Blitzen Trapper

Woo woo woo. Only problem is that half of these bands play at the same time as each other. Music festivals are so hard!
Preparing myself for the epic beer stench/12 hour days of music watching/paying billions of dollars and waiting in line forever for food/majesty of it all.

sore throats and hangovers

so its been awhile...
so i'm now half confined to bed due to an epic sore throat...probably karma/god's payback for the 5 hours combined sleep I got over friday and saturday nights. my house has been restored to a relative state of normalcy - i.e. no longer has the stench of a watermelon filled with vodka and dumped on the floor - but still has cute little pieces of memorabilia, such as the whiteboard calendar in my kitchen, to which events such as "penis day" and "leave for mexicoooo" have been added.
now, the house is quiet (except for my throat screaming mean things at me until I attempt to soothe it with some sugar free ice pops that look like they must be made of 100% chemicals, due to their rave-worthy neon colors), which is a notably weird thing. And I'm making tea and have been lounging all day, wrapped in blankets and surrounded by sickbed items (cough drops, throat spray, aspirin) and missing all those wonderful people who filled up the place so well.

this is what calm feels like

Drinking green ginger tea in a beautiful indian mug and listening to the newest sigur ros album while my mother sleeps curled up on the sofa to one side of me and my cat snores in her little cat bed on the other. someone was setting off fireworks far away, and listening to their little pops and imagining them was probably more fun that seeing them would have been.

For possibly the first time in my life, I did something patriotic! Or semi-patriotic, or at least typically American. my mother and I somehow got kickass tickets to the phillies game and (of all people) we ended up sitting seven rows behind home plate. Like so close I had to get worried about getting hit with foul balls (which I always worry about at baseball games, as a general rule, due to my complete and utter unathleticism, which, as if it had to be proven again, was in fact proven again in a particularly unsuccessful game of badmitton last night, but which this time seemed like a legitimate concern), so close we could judge from looking at the player's faces if they were attractive or not. It was wonderful. And sunny and beautiful. And I ate a delicious pulled pork sandwich and pretended like I knew what all of the many acronyms and statistics on the scoreboard meant, just for today.

Liking it here and missing what is not here, all at the same time.

Victoria Legrand is possibly my new hero.