i look like...

I was at a liquor store, a while ago, with a friend buying... alcohol ... and the woman behind the counter gave me what I think she thought was a compliment. She stared at me for a while before she gave me my total and then, while pointing at me, said I looked like a mix between Sigourney Weaver and Sally Field. She quickly added "the younger version" when she saw my smile falter, but it was too late. The damage was done.



These women are movie stars, I should be happy, right? Except that both of these women are my mom's age. And my mom was old when she had me. And what random women, huh? "You look like two older movie stars who were more active in the 70s and 80s than the 90s or today." Should I say thank you? Or should I slap this woman with the very credit card I'm using to pay for my alcohol?

Also, not all thoughts like this should be shared. Unless you're telling me I look like Hotty Current McHollywood, maybe you better keep that to yourself. My friend knows a guy who she thinks looks exactly like Lionheart from the Carebears because of his face and big flowing mane of red hair. Would she ever tell this guy? No. I've seen guys that look like Steve Zahn. Would I go out of my way to tell them that mildly offensive fact? No.

So here's to keeping some things to ourselves.

too god damn clever

Life lesson learned: Don't give your number to people you don't want to hear from just to be nice. I made this mistake in DC the other night after some heavy drinking and dancing. I gave my number to some guy before I left with my friends and this is the text I get the next day:

Text 1:
"So I'm (one of) the fairly inebriated guys with whom you spoke with last night.. You were staring in the film, 'The Red Hat Drops' as I recall.."

Text 2:
"I wanted to commend you on your acting chops. My name's John btw."


Alright,
#1 - I didn't talk to that many drunk guys so much as swat them away by speaking at them and then leaving their line of vision.
#2 - It's starring not staring.
#3 - This is fucking dripping with the cleverness I'm getting really tired of hearing. I mean, I guess he should get an A for effort and creativity, I suppose, but what about a "hey, we met last night, how's it going?" I don't need a re-enactment via text of what you think happened when we met.

I'd rather you cut the bullshit:
"I'm a guy you talked to last night and I was drunk and you probably were, too.. You muttered some shit about how you dropped your red hat..."
"and then you picked up your red hat like a normal person in a bar because all the world's not a stage. My name's John btw."


Even though I'd rather walk over hot coals then see this fucker again, I still had to text him back with something because I don't like to be ignored when I put myself out there:

"Hi, thanks, john! To be honest, i'm going back to north carolina tomorrow, i don't live around here, it was nice to meet you, though."

To which he replied: "word"

As if it wasn't obvious in the first texts he sent me, just so you know, this guy was white and had no business saying "word."

john cougar mellencamp

I can always count on Cougar Mellencamp to make me feel patriotic as FUCK.

This song makes me want to nod my head at a stranger/fellow American I meet in a gas station somewhere in the south or midwest who coincidentally is also buying a bag of doritos, pork rinds and an Arizona iced tea.

This song makes me want to slap my son's back in a playful way if I were a man and his baseball coach and we had just lost the tournament game, but hey, life ain't so bad, little guy. **American flag flies in the background** Now let's go to Dairy Queen!

This song makes me want to shake my head in slow motion while laughing and giving the thumbs up at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert to a silly, middle-aged passerby dressed in hot pants that say "Free Bird" on the butt.

This song makes me want to chase a bison on a horse just because.

This song makes me want to crack open a Budweiser and then drink it.

This song makes me want to marry my high school sweetheart and reminisce with him years later about how he used to be a great quarterback but now that he lost his job at the plant, I want to throw it up in his face that he's 40 pounds overweight and hasn't touched a football in 10 years.

totally looks like

1 step closer to being a baldwin, i wasn't even trying, this happened organically ...

vanilla

Since my mind is still mostly in Argentina, here is a little snippet about a guy I met there several months ago...


This was the time I chose plain vanilla. Canadian. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Here I was in the land of exotic limited-time, special edition flavors like delicious caramel and toffee. I chose vanilla. (Honestly the caramel probably would've given me gas anyway) It started off great right off the bat as I walked into a conversation he was having with my friend Jenny about how much he hated the U.S...

Sidebar: People from other countries LOVE to talk shit about the U.S. to U.S. citizens. It's like the U.S. is the star quarterback from that famous football team that is currently winning in the playoffs.

"You heard about that quarterback that slept with all those sexy women and has all that money and is handsome? Well, I heard he steals money from other quarterbacks and he has a big hairy mole on his back that he never shows anyone and also he has a misshapen anus"

And in response you feel, first, uncomfortable, how did they know that? And then, angry, because that quarterback happens to be your dad. Misshapen anus and all, he's still your blood.

Other than the red white & blue bashing he seemed pretty soft spoken and quiet, (read: uninteresting and/or uninterested, more on this later). He had on a Black Keys shirt which I thought was a plus at the time. We went on a few dates, one in which he refused to sit in a restaurant where there was karaoke, apparently his only achilles heel. I learned he worked for Haliburton (hisssssss), had lived in Indonesia for a while and traveled all over the world, even built a motorbike to travel from the U.S. to Mexico.

What did he have to say about these amazingly interesting things? Mostly nothing. He talked about them as matter-of-factly as I talk about having to buy face wash at CVS or that I found a tiny pile of cat puke on the corner of my bed comforter, (even then I probably sounded more animated than him). I have such a knack for finding guys who are void of emotion, feeling and excitement, I'm starting to think I emit an odor that only they can smell. I am the chum and these indifferent mother fuckers are the hammerheads that circle me. Am I a character in an Ayn Rand book?

He eventually went to work in Patagonia for a while which was probably just okay to him. "These glaciers are kind of nice," he probably said, to nobody. Aufedersein, safe, sad, aryan prince.

my cd collection

I've been back from Buenos Aires for almost a month now. Instead of addressing that, I'd rather talk about something much funnier, my cd collection.

My best friends were nice enough to store my mondo-booklet of cds at their place and I got it back a week ago and have rediscovered the joys of cds in my car. This big booklet of worthless cds that skip on every song may have almost convinced me that I should have children one day. This legacy must be passed down. The Ford family has its automobiles, the Kennedy family has its sex scandals & strange deaths, the Hall family has ridiculous tastes in music and cds that never play successfully all the way through.

This is how my interaction would go, (in 10-20 years when I decide to have kids, and then add another 10 to that so that the kid has reached the appropriate age in which they realize how silly his/her parent is):


Child: The Matrix soundtrack, mom? Why would you have THIS?
Me: Honey, you'd never understand how cool I was roaring down route 50 at 65 miles an hour in my 2004 Chevy Cavalier with the amenities of a radio flyer red wagon listening to Marilyn Manson, The Prodigy and Rob Zombie.
Child: What's a Chevy Cavalier?

Child: Mom, why do you have all these "mixed cds" that are labeled so lazily? This one just says "Cutting Edge, Oak Ridge Boys, Etc." This one says "Stir the pot." This one says "Pop" with either a bubble or a poorly drawn olive on it. What does that even mean?
Me: We will never know, those cds stopped playing at least 15 years ago.

Child: Who is "Super Troopers"?
Me: Woops, that's actually a DVD, let me get that out of there.

Child: Natalie Merchant, Weezer, The Verve Pipe, The Black Crowes, Green Day, geez, mom, there sure are a lot of 90s in here.
Me: (still defensive over my 90s music soft spot after all these years) Oh yeah? YOU are a lot of 90s in here.

i'm back

It feels like just yesterday I was sitting in my mom's guest bedroom in North Carolina with my skinny little cats getting ready to say goodbye to leave for several months. But it wasn't yesterday, it was almost a year ago. Now I'm back, sitting in that same bedroom with my now plump cats and thinking "what a fucking year." It has been a hell of a year. I don't think it's totally hit me yet, but it's coming.

For now I'm still happy as a clam despite the unplanned/unknown/slightly terrifying future that I haven't come up with yet for 2012.

So, in honor of my scrambled mind, here are a series of videos I recorded in Argentina that I haven't uploaded here thus far. In the meantime I'll try to process the past year and get back to you...

My best friends in BA, making fun of an infomercial from the 80s for erection pills that was dubbed in Spanish:



An awesome display I saw at Tecnópolis, a technological fair in Buenos Aires. Turn your computer down before you watch it though, because it starts off at a seizure-inducing noise level: