Archive for August 2004

Oh god, I used to use this shit in the 70s. And remember Short ‘n Sassy, Dorothy Hammill’s shampoo? That too.

MetaFilter: Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific

Yesterday I worked on music for like six hours continuously.  I know… isn’t that supposed to be my job and stuff?  haha.  Well, lazy Edith isn’t accustomed to working that hard, okay?  What I did was, I took my digital recorder and, since it was completely full, dumped a bunch of songs off it and onto Castlewood Orb disks.  Which took awhile… damn, I really need a standalone CD burner with optical-in!!  But I don’t have one, so this must suffice.  I do have a USB dongle for the Castlewood so if I need to get at those tracks from my computer, I totally can.  Well… I haven’t tried it but I’m pretty sure in theory it could be done, heheh.  So yes, I made lots of room on the recorder and that was very nice indeed.

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My downstairs neighbor (the guy I saw nekkid) is outside again talking on his cellphone.  He’s obviously not scared of me yelling at him!  ha ha.  What an asshole.

Just spent an hour blabbing on the phone myself, with Marc Lipscher, the (upright) bassist in the old rockabilly band I sang for in NYC ten years ago.  What a great guy, it was so cool hearing his voice again and catching up on stuff.  He just started doing yoga last week just like me!  He’s taking a class and recommends I do the same.  I’m probably not holding my ass high enough when I do that downward facing dog; the teacher will come around and pull it up for me, right?  heheh.

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So today I had my weekly appraisal-of-progress with Rian.  And… it didn’t go that well.  They can’t all go well but I just hate it when that happens.  It wasn’t bad in some ways but in lots of other ways it was really really bad.  Mainly I just hadn’t practiced my songs enough.  Oh, I’d been playing every day but working on other things, i.e. learning a Boswells Sisters song that I’d become obsessed with, and running through some old rockabilly tunes, and working on a new song of my own.  I hadn’t run through the songs I was supposed to though.  Oh well.

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Matthew taught me a really fun game you can play anywhere, anytime.  It goes like this, for example: Who would you rather — Abe Vigoda or Jerry Stiller?  And if the person says Abe Vigoda then you take Jerry Stiller and combine it with someone even more objectionable, and so on until you find out that person’s most horrible sexual nightmare.  It’s a lot funnier than it sounds, and it just gets even more funny the longer you play.  Gender is irrelevant.  And the one rule is that you can’t use names of people who are present; that would be wrong.  Anyway I kept getting him good with awesome combos like… "Manson or Gacy?" and he would GROAN and I would say GOTCHA!! and he’d be forced to make this terrible choice.  I can’t wait to bust this out on my bandmates.  Or even if I never play it again, at the very least I can use it as an excellent weapon against Matthew if he gets outta line — "remember that time you said you’d do it with that girl from the Windowlicker video with the pigtails and the teeth?" HA HA HA.  I love shenanigans like this.  Just hope he won’t get mad at me for giving away his very best game… :-o

I put myself on a diet, I started this morning.  It’s going to be along the lines of a carnivore-centric Atkins-style diet, but in reality I’m not gonna be that hardcore about it, because I love my veggies too much. I’m just eliminating or severely cutting down on most of the bad-guys they talk about — completely cutting out bread, pasta and potatoes for awhile and, most importantly, ALL forms of sugar.  I’m gonna try this for a few weeks at least, or longer if I can keep it up and still feel healthy.  I want to cut down on caffeine a lot too so I won’t be craving the sugar quite as much.  I’m hoping this will stop me from being such a chemical-bag of emotions all the time, and will stop me from gaining weight now that I quit smoking.  So, we’ll see how this goes… one day at a time, one vice at a time right?

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I have six more Gmail invites, who wants ‘em?  You don’t need to be a member, you can be a total stranger, I don’t care.  I’m not being facetious today, I’m not a very good comedian so I’m just going to play everything very straight and not talk about personal stuff at all.  But I think it’s safe to say I have six Gmail invites, and the next six people who want them can certainly have ‘em.

3M Corporation (makers of Post-It Notes) is building the World’s Largest Pink Ribbon in Times Square for breast cancer awareness month in October. For every person who clicks on this link and signs up, Post-It will donate $1 to breast cancer research and place a Post-It in their name on the billboard. All you need to give them is your name and city, so please sign up and pass this message along!

(thanks Susan…)

So yeah, as you can see by the "future entries" above, I have a couple of Chicago shows lined up in the next few months.  How do I explain this?  Well, I got a wild hair up my ass last night.  After the rehearsal I did with Ryan yesterday, I was feeling the sudden urge to play a show RIGHT THIS MINUTE!!!  It just popped into my head as something I really wanted to do — a sort of a secret show where I could bust out my new songs and try them out on a few people.  I haven’t played in over a year and I’m pretty nervous but getting more confident every day so I really wanted to set something like this up.  So I got ahold of Derek, the booking agent I’m working with for the tour in December with Manishevitz.  He suggested that opening slot at the Hideout, playing first on a bill with Dr. Sax, which is a subset of a band called Judah Johnson that I saw last month and really dug a lot.  So yeah, that sounded perfect and of course I said YES YES YES.  :-)

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This is my rig.  And uhh… that’s my futon.  :-)

So I met up with my bassist Ryan Hembrey at the Hideout this afternoon for our first "rehearsal", which was really more just so I could give him a CD and learn ‘im the new songs we’ll be using on the me & Manishevitz tour in December.  All that BULLSHIT Rian Murphy’s been puttin’ me through (ha ha) finally paid off: I got through every damn song with hardly a mistake at all.  Got to show off my new(-ish) guitar too, what an improvement in sound!!  And I got to sing through the PA finally, oh what a relief that was.  So everything was really a lot tighter on my end than it normally would be after such a long hiatus. It was all super easy for Ryan of course; he’s such a quick study and he’s very good at watching my hands and/or playing things by ear (even though he’s secretly deaf). 

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For the past few days I’ve been doing little 20-minute yoga workouts in the morning, using DVD-Rs that I taped off the Wisdom Channel last year.  The show is called Yoga Zone… kinda hilarious that I spent all that time taping and editing the shows to get them onto DVD-Rs, but never actually did the workouts until now!  Whatever, better late than never.  I’m doing this as a supplement to the daily walking I started awhile back; I felt like I was concentrating too much on pounding the pavement, and not enough on stretching and general muscle-building.  So it feels good to do this, and it’s such a short and easy workout that I’ll probably continue every day.  I hope.  :-)

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A little birdie has told me that the guy I like to talk to at Different Strummer — the one I thought was so cute all this time — well, he’s a drummer, not a strummer. And I’m sorry, but that changes everything!!  Drummers are all well and good, they are hilarious and great to talk to alright, but they are NOT all that cute or crushworthy in my opinion, as a general rule of thumb.  I really go more for the strummers — and sometimes I can worship a good keyboardist from afar, but the ones I really drool over are mostly all guitarists or bassists.  Sorry drummers.  Can we still be friends?

Dammit, this is the 2nd time I’ve woken up in less than 4 hours.  I know I can’t expect to "recover" from quitting EVERY fucking thing so quickly but uggghh, I thought I was getting better with the sleeping at least!  I was in kind of a foul and frustrated mood again this afternoon (=yesterday)… I keep thinking maybe I’d be better off if I started smoking pot again at least. It seems like the one thing that I quit more for money reasons than anything else (’cuz it’s not rotting my teeth like the diet sodas, and it’s not addictive like fucking nicotine).  I want to save money but I also want to sleep.  And which would I rather be — Edith with a little extra money or Edith the looney-ass insomniac moodswingin’ snarlybitch?  Bleh.

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Have I mentioned I’ve been SLEEPING again?  I only woke up twice last night, this is amazing!!  I’ve never been one to get a full night’s sleep in one shot anyway, but this is a hell of a lot better than it was… and if I lay down to take a nap, I know I will take a nap instead of hopping up 5 minutes later all crazy-eyed and foamin’ at the mouth.  This must surely have been the very worst bout with insomnia I’ve ever gone through, it felt like it was lasting forever though in reality it was only a few weeks.  But I will never again underestimate the damage that ongoing sleep problems can have on my mind, ‘cuz I feel like such a new woman here, the difference is amazing.  I feel calm and virtually sane again (ha ha!) — I still have all that energy I had from quitting the smokey-treats, but the feeling of near-psychosis is gone now; my brain isn’t misfiring the way it has been for the past few weeks.  Aaaaaahhh.  Sleep, y’all.  Do it!!  It’s awesome.