laptop purchase imminent

As I prepare to embark down the Information Highway with my own little cruiser, I just thought I'd write a little about my thoughts.

I am preparing to buy a refurbished Apple I-book with a 12 inch screen and a year warranty (sold by Apple). This will be my first time using a macintosh system in about five years, maybe a little less.

This is significant because I used to be a Mac girl. I always used Macintosh and I almost always enjoyed it. I still have the insides of my favorite computer that I named Luke (to which I would encourage with those treasured geek words). There is no real reason why I gave up on the mac, other than it appeared that the pc industry was doing its best to stamp the mac out of extinction for good. Well, thanks to the ipod and the large pool of artistically inclined working force that uses macs to create beautiful things, Apple is experiencing a come-back. And I'm getting back on board.

So I found out in my computer class last week that the reason I'm a Mac girl and everyone else who's younger than me isn't is simple. The Mac came out in 1984, when I was seven. I grew up in the era of and under the rule of Macintosh. I remember using Windows and DOS prompts, but mostly, in school, we used Macs. I'm a Mac girl because I'm old and nostalgic.

cheers.

Four things I love (by category)

Four jobs you've had in your life:
1. babysitter/nanny
2. coffee slinger
3. office assistant (for at home workers)
4. dog walker

Four movies you could watch over and over:
1. Mullholland Drive
2. Hudsucker Proxy
3. 12 Monkeys
4. Clueless

Four places you've lived:
1. Lincoln Ave.
2. Bosworth St.
3. Southport Ave.
4. Henderson St.

Four TV shows you love to watch:
1. South Park
2. Family Guy/American Dad
3. Medium (egads, that's embarassing)
4. Any show on TLC, especially design or organizing related

Four places you've been on vacation:
1. Europe [twice] (Paris, France; Rome, Florence, Italy; Vienna, Austria; Amsterdam; Madrid, Spain; sigh)
2. Florida (Tampa with Laura, Orlando/Disney World with Gina and Family)
3. Cape Cod [!]
4. Colorado

Four websites you visit daily:
1. hotmail.com
2. myspace.com
3. dictionary.com
4. epicurious.com [maybe not so daily]

Four of your favorite foods:
1. avocado tacos
2. dark chocolate
3. mini muffins
4. pineapple

Four places you'd rather be:
1. where I can see the stars
2. where there's no Bush
3. where evironmental sustainability is a practice
4. where everybody knows my name

Four albums you can't live without:
1. Lifted, Bright Eyes
2. Tragic Kingdom, No Doubt
3. When The Pawn...Fiona Apple
4. Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Stereolab

Four books you loved:
1. Go Down Moses, William Faulkner
2. Youth in Revolt, C.D. Payne
3. Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
4. Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

Okay, and now: four to tag: I call upon
1. daddy
2. Natalia
3. Marilyn
4. Drew

forgive my absence

You'd think since I had five weeks off I'd be a blogging fool, but mostly I've been a working fool.

My friend Marilyn's apartment is under attack by remodling plans and I've been on hand to do anything that needs to be done and keep her from going insane. There is so much to do that I could literally spend a year here with her trying to get all these things in order.

School starts on the 23rd. I'll be attempting another five classes and possibly two or three extra hours of tutoring (free and credit fulfilling) to reach 120 credits so that I can graduate in May and not have to take courses over the summer.

I have never been this close to such an accomplishment and the strange thing is, I know all it took was my dunking my head in the water and just doing the work.

There are plans afoot to travel in the spring for our birthdays (Eric will be 30, I'll be 29) and I'd also like to buy myself an macintosh labtop with my student loan money.

I've had a touch of the flu the last few days, which is keeping me subdued but not down.

cheers.

When galleries attack

Just a report on an exciting new facet to the world of stine.

I have a friend that I met at Starbucks who is doing a comprehensive review (in blog format) of art in Chicago. She's tapped me on the shoulder for writing for the art blog. She is a sculptor and enjoys touring galleries and seeing what other artists are doing. I like hanging out with her because she's a totally great person and we've gone to First Fridays at the Musuem of Contemporary Art as well as the Fall Gallery Tour Walk in River North.

Last night, with writerly intentions in mind, Eric joined my friend and I for the Winter Gallery Tour, again in River North. It's fun to go on these tours because everyone's a little relaxed, there's usually small glasses of wine and maybe some food and people get to see great art without feeling sneered at by pretentious gallery staff (what I feel like when I've gone to galleries during normal hours).

So it was a lot of fun and I am looking forward to writing up a review/synopsis for the site. chicagoarts.blogspot.com is the name, by the by. I think it's an amazing idea and I'm glad my friend has asked me to participate. My user name is going to be native chicagoan. I'll let you know when my first post goes up.

cheers.

organizing in the new year

No one's home, so instead of showering and getting ready for my day, I am sitting in bed trying to write and listening to my favorite Bright Eyes record, the especially breathy and tortured Fevers and Mirrors.

Yesterday we cleaned out the basement and I found all this stuff I'd been looking for and sure I'd thrown away or stored at my mom's. We had to make room for the tenant in the basement so I couldn't just move it around, I had to take it upstairs and do something with it. There are certain projects I've stored down there, knowing that when I have extra time, I'll probably fill it with something else.

One thing I did that was kind of fun and full of reminiscing was sorting through my school notebooks from when I moved in with Eric. It was really fun to find old history test scores (I progressively got better, from B's to A+'s), astronomy notes and even a couple notebooks from my writing classes.

Will I ever need this stuff again? Probably not, so I just took out things I found interesting in my writing notes. I'd totally forgotten that I'd wanted to write a story about how my mom and dad worked with a traveling roadshow carnival around the city of Chicago. And all the ideas I'd had for my travel writing. And all the ideas I'd had about things that happened to me when I was a kid.

I didn't find a lot of actual writing, because that's all in folders in my room already, but the funniest was this review I had to write for my potential memior. It was so great. I was such a smart-ass.

"Her cynicism and angst feel like dirt under relatively well kept fingernails, a tone that forces one to question whether her life is worth whining about."

I'm really looking forward to my last semester at Columbia. I'm going to have my last Fiction writing class and I can't wait to see what is evoked there. All the things I've wanted to write are still with me, waiting for the day when I sit down and write them.

Some of you might be familar with my liquor store story, which I did about forty pages of, but there was still only one customer the main character waited on so far. I based a lot of that work on stories my brother told me from his time working at a liquor store. Imagine my surprise when he told me his girlfriend of late wrote up some of the stories for a writing class she was taking. I wanted to go and strangle her and tell her those were my stories to tell. After that moment of irrationality, I then realized they were my brother's stories to tell, but it was all about who was going to commit them to paper first. Now I realize that this girl is not going to publish her homework for a writing class, but maybe she could.

I think I'm finally starting to feel some urgency about my work. I know that the ideas I have are palatable. For instance, recently a friend of mine went to see the roller derby girls. She thought it would be a great thing for me to write about and even brought me the program, full of pictures of the girls with hysterical captions, like Miss Knocksalot will take out your teeth if you're not careful. So I agree this is great material, take the program, put it in my room and go off to school and work. Yesterday I see a commercial for a new reality television series all about the lives of roller derby girls.

I have got to get my shit together when it comes to my writing and do it as much as possible, despite having all these other obligations I have.

happy new year.