home for the weekend

My sister Sarah works at a gift shop at art museum in our hometown. The other day she was at work, standing behind the register, looking down at something on the counter when she felt a pair of eyes on her. She looked up to find a woman staring at her intently with a puzzled expression on her face.

"Can I help you with something?" Sarah asked the woman.

The woman didn't reply at first, just squinted some more and then said slowly, as if she was bequeathing a great revelation upon Sarah, "Ohhh... Lindsay Lohan!"

"What?" Sarah replied.

"Lindsay Lohan," the woman said again. "I've been standing here trying to figure out who it is that you look like, and it's Lindsay Lohan!"

When Sarah told me this story last night, I said I remembered someone else saying the same thing about her once. She said it was our grandmother, who when Sarah was 12 or so said she looked like the girl in the Parent Trap remake. I said I guessed that was it, though I was sure someone had said the same thing more recently.

I made her tell the story to Joe when he came over later, and as soon as she was done he exclaimed, "I've always said you looked like Lindsay Lohan!"

"Oh, that was you!" I said. "See, I knew someone else had said that!"

Then Joe said, "No, I was just kidding. I don't think you look like her at all." He paused. "But there is one scene in Spiderman 2 where Tobey Maguire looks just like you."

this is my last attempt to begin all entry titles with "this"

I love Hellsongs!

I also love our interns, one of whom just sent out an email about Frisbee Friday that began "hey whoadies." (No one knows what a "whoadie" is.)

I also also love Fridays!

this is a true story

Didya hear the one about girl who was allergic to soy and went to a vegantarian BBQ with the Polyphonic Spree and could only eat the corn, tater salad, and whitebread?

Then she got thirteen of them to sign a poster for her office, and meanwhile tried to make conversation with such brilliant lines as "So, you're like the only blonde girl in the whole band?" and "I don't know if you guys had anything to do with it, but this lemonade is AMAZING."

Then she got her brain blown to bits by awesomeness.

She now officially loves this band.

not that you ever did, but...

If you ever wondered why I love the internet, it's because of things like this, which I definitely could have done without ever experiencing, but oh my shit, "boat people"? Is this straight out of Palindomes or what? (From here, via here.)

this was bound to happen eventually

Hey look! It's Conor, aka "that Weasley looking guy," aka my little sister's boyfriend. You can take a gander at all the other folks who consider themselves "look alikes" right here, but I guarantee you won't find a better fakeRon.

No, really-- you won't. Because at least as of right now, the only other alleged Ron "look alike" is this really frightened (frightening?) male model type dude who just happens to have red hair. And looks like he's about to kill someone with his eyes and/or his impressive jawline.

I'm not that in to Harry Potter, but even I know that one of the main facets of Ron Weasley's personality is that he is not threatening, not in any way. Much like Conor, who in fact seems to have mastered Ron Weasley's "OMG WTF GONNA PEE MAH PANTS" Look Of Terror™, as displayed with such finesse the photo above. See? Best fakeRon ever.

this might be proof that I should whine on the internet more often

Joe got into town mid-afternoon on Friday, stopped by and got my spare key from me at work, then went to my apartment to read Breakfast of Champions until I got home that evening. He also, quite inexplicably, washed half of my dishes for me. Please refer to my previous post in order to fully comprehend how mind-boggling this is.

He said he could only do half because he ran out of space on the counter to set them out to dry. Valid point, boyfriend.

Needless to say, when we were at Kroger later that night and I saw him staring at the tiny keg/huge can of Heineken they had in the beer cooler with that "OMG SO CUTE" glimmer in his eye, it was the least I could do to bestow upon him as a token of my vast, incalculable appreciation.


I now believe that ALL ALCOHOL should come in OVERSIZED CONTAINERS just because the feeling of being a tiny child again while drinking beer is a feeling that more people should experience more often. Too bad only Heineken seems to come this way, as it's definitely not my favorite beer ever. But oh well. Got half my dishes done so I guess I shouldn't be asking for too much more-- except for, perhaps, the motivation to finish up the rest by myself, before I wake up one morning fully ensconced in crusty bowls and very, very happy cockroaches.

this should probably embarass me more than it does

This is a small pictorial slice of the absolute wasteland that is my kitchen sink at the current moment. I have not done dishes in over a week. I have not done dishes in over a week because I have not felt like it and there is no one around to make me feel bad about it.

Much in the same way that this was looking mighty nice to me a few weeks ago (before I finally broke down and hauled my month's worth of dirty clothes to the laundry room in the apartment across the street, emboldened by motherly ridicule and this article), these guys are looking pretty sweet right now, at least from my perch over here on Lazyass Street, right outside of Denialville.

But really, how great is this? For somewhere between $160 (for the regular countertop-sitting, sink-nozzle hookup kind) and $1900 (for the deluxe sunk-in-the-sink kind), I'd never have to do my own dishes again! Instead, I could spend my time working a third or fourth job just to pay off the debt incurred from hyper-correcting my slovenliness with cheesy gadgetry.

this is, like, sooo meta

I picked a real name for this blog and made it a real banner. I feel very middle school, suddenly, tending to a little patch of the internet like this. The banner involves a bird, and even though I hear birds are sooo out I genuinely like it, so the world will just have to deal with my egregious passé-ness until I change my mind.

The world will also have to deal with this completely unnecessary screencap. It's for posterity..?

this is getting framed ASAP

Conor, Feist, Sarah!



Last night = Awesomeness

this is an ideal friday at work

Kira (beer, not my dear dear friend from college) from Corner Pub, Ladder Golf in the courtyard; back in the office, the interns play a trivia game for a spare Feist ticket; the answer is "Reykjavík."

Sarah and Conor are in town somewhere and we're seeing Feist tonight, too-- hopefully the Vortex (sweet potato fries!) will be involved sometime between then and now.

Wordsmiths is opening this weekend, so if you're in Decatur, please stop by! It's going to be so fun. Among all the many other incredible things about them, they're letting me fulfill my longtime dream of working in a bookstore (as well as my more recent dream of using the word "moonlighting" to describe a way way part time second job).

I need AA batteries, and once they are procured, this weekend can officially begin TO ROCK.

this is less about music and more about venues and sweet potato fries

Tuesday night I saw Eleni Mandell and Great Lake Swimmers at The Earl, where-- travesty alert!-- I had never, ever been before*.

Pretty much everything about the evening was great: Linda (who has no blog, so you get no link) came with me and we ate burgers before the show, because for those of you who do not know, The Earl is HALF MUSIC VENUE and HALF BURGER JOINT. It's also a burger joint that happens to have sweet potato fries on the menu, which is even more incredible. If given a choice, I will almost always pick sweet potato fries over regular fries. I recommend them with mustard. The Earl's were kind of overdone but still delicious.

Walking into the (tiny!) back room at the Earl was like entering into one of the many strange dreams I have had in my life wherein I am seeing one of my favorite bands in what ends up being a very very tiny room, which honestly I used to believe could only happen in my dreams. Chalk it up to my first two major concert experiences taking place in 1) what used to be known as Starwood Ampitheatre and 2) the former home of an NBA team. Add that to all the Riverbend and Nightfall concert series of my youth, and you've got a Rachael who is largely convinced that live show are, simply and eternally, events of great excitement but also vast and impersonal scale.

I know better now, of course, but I still feel really lucky when I go to one of these not-so-gigantoid venues, even if it's to see a band that I've never listened to and an artist that I've heard in passing but never really clicked with, both of which I wound up enjoying quite thoroughly-- as was the case Tuesday night.

So thank you, The Earl, for continuing to remind me that real life is not limited by the vast parameters of my adolescent musical experiences. Also thank you for having big Gatorade coolers full of water PLUS an endless supply of plastic Solo cups sitting out on the bar, presumably for people like me suffering from weird allergy-related spontaneous coughing fits that inevitably crop up during awkward times such as quiet moments during sensitive songs-- and weddings, but that's another story entirely...





Oh yeah, then there was a moose with human ears. And a Linda.

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* Except for the time Katie H. and I went to poster for Rock & Reel back in my intern days (um, last fall). That same day, just down the street actually, we got heckled by these random old guys sitting out in busted up lawn chairs in an empty lot next to a gas station where we were taping up our posters under a few rows of Toni Braxton album ads. They yelled at us that we ain't got what Toni gots, she been doin' it for twenty years and she still look good, and we were like, Oh really? Shit, why did no one tell us before? Literally, up until that moment I'd been going about my daily geeky whitegirl business thinking that I had gots the exact quality and quantity of what Toni Braxton gots-- if not more! So thank you, random dudes in sketchy East Atlanta empty lot, for setting me straight.

this is what my oglethorpe education prepared me for

Death of Socrates
Originally uploaded by brocksides

By far my favorite spin-off of the LOLcats phenomenon is the PhiLOLsophers Flickr pool. The image above and also this one made me LOL the most, although it was more of a very internal, cerebral LOL type thing.

Thank God for Core, or most of these wouldn't be half as funny.

this is a blog rec & a deep dark confession

Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands is a blog that I used to have listed in my links section (over to the right) that for some reason I took down a while ago. I don't remember why but this post reminded me that I really need to add it back (so I just did).

Chad, who runs the blog, is starting a series of posts that I'm really looking forward to: YouTube videos of people playing some of his favorite songs, the first of which includes six videos of people playing "First Day Of My Life" by Bright Eyes. I really like the idea and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest, as it's something that seems really interesting but isn't something I think I would have ever really thought of collecting myself.

Hopefully it will turn out that Chad and I love the same songs, but if not, I might have to take on my own personal mission of doing the same with my own favorites. At any rate, I definitely love "First Day Of My Life," but-- well, slit my wrists and call me emo!-- I have to literally fight off the urge to cry every time I hear it. This is actually true for several Bright Eyes songs. Let's not dwell on this fact. Maybe I'll watch all the videos all the way through sometime later when I'm not at work and can blubber away all by myself, sick sad walking musicfan cliche that I am.

I could definitely get through this one, so I'm sharing it with you (the rest can be found here). Autoharps just lack the emotional punch of the acoustic guitar, I guess, and then she flubs it around the 2 minute mark, but it's still pretty neat. Or at least just extremely endearing.

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If you can handle another gooey slice of blog-based awesome, you can listen to "Boy With A Coin," the first single from Iron & Wine's upcoming (July 10) album, over at My Old Kentucky Blog. It has handclaps. HANDCLAPS! And it does not make me cry.

this is in lieu of something more embarassingly giddy and rambling

The Avett Brothers are the best thing to happen to Riverbend since chicken-on-a-stick.

[Please imagine the here placement of a photo I so desperately wish I'd taken Friday night, of a very old lady wearing huge old lady glasses, reclining in a fold-out Coleman chair, holding a freshly delivered chicken-on-a-stick out like some kind of dainty, oversize, deliciously fried, biscuit-topped parasol.]

The festival is kind of perennially lame, but exceptions this exceptional are so exciting. There's something definitely cool (in this really eerily nostalgic/meta way) of watching one of your recent favorite bands perform on a stage set up in the middle of the road, with your childhood dentist's office building sitting to your left and a early 20th century mansion-turned-art museum looming up on the hill to your right.

If you don't know the Avett Brothers, you should. You can listen to them right here, and you should see them live if you can. Hell, if they came to Chattanooga, they'll probably be in your town (wherever you may live) sometime soon.

louie is watching you, phillip wellman

My hometown's Bellsouth Park AT&T Field hasn't seen this much action since... um, well, ever:

That would be the manager of the Mississippi Braves (the Atlanta Braves' AA team, incidentally) freaking out (not sure why) and (eventually) getting tossed out of the game (though, don't he seem happy 'bout it?). I first read about it this morning while reading some Cable & Tweed posts missed over the weekend, though I didn't realize it happened during a Lookouts game until I called home tonight and my dad mentioned seeing it on ABC's evening news.

To the 397,772 folks who have viewed it on YouTube as of this posting: if you're wondering, yes, the mascot is a big pair of cartoon eyes .Named after a very beautiful and prominent local mountain, yes, but still a big pair of cartoon eyes. Named Louie.

this kind of post makes me feel like a creepy brat (bratty creep?)

Once upon a time I wrote the intro to Paste's list of "Rock's Greatest Screams" (in the June issue, out now, with Parker Posey on the cover!) and then Music Editor Jason and I got to do a scream-off for the podcast.

It was then that we discovered that when you scream for no real reason other than just to scream, your body kind of freaks out and starts acting like you have some actual reason to scream, i.e. your arms and legs get all wobbly and you feel like something terribly frightening just happened to you when really all you did was holler til there was no air left in your lungs. I don't know if this is due to some weird cognitive process where acting like something terrible is happening cues your body to physically react like something terrible is happening, or if it was just wooziness from very rapid oxygen depletion.

Regardless, it was very strange and I probably would have never realized it otherwise because, honestly, how often do I have the chance to scream at the top of my lungs for as long and loud as I can without running the risk of someone nearby thinking I'm dead and/or dying? The answer is: not often. Although, uh, apparently our officemates thought that an intern had been crushed by a toppled-over shelf in the CD library when we started shrieking. Man, I love my job.

The podcast episode is up for download here (and you can even subscribe [via iTunes or otherwise] by going here)! The scream-off is at 18:54. This is my Official Podcast Debut, though I interviewed Amanda Kapousouz of/aka Tin Cup Prophette a few months ago for an episode that hasn't aired yet.

And heck, while I'm on this icky streak of self-promotion, a few weeks ago I got to speak (briefly) with Bob Odenkirk for a piece on the website, which you can read right here.

this is a true story