i'm a restless soul

and easily swayed.

moving to wordpress. its all shiny and junk.

http://autumnrouse.wordpress.com/

so...

only you understand me explodingdog

i swear. i love explodingdog.com the artwork is fun and interesting and i am routinely amused by it. my wallpaper is almost always some piece or other. it's good stuff.

but lately, it's been more than that. the work is always accompanied by quirky titles that sometimes have nothing to do with the imagery, but have an eerie way of echoing what's going on in my life. especially lately.

a few examples follow...

it is enough to know you are out there

i'm afraid i will lose my faith

i will follow you into the dark

i am going to miss you

i hope you miss me too

sleeping to dream about you

i dont think you meant to do that

everything i touch turns to stone

love songs make me cry

i just cant stop

you have learned nothing












i regret everything

my life in cartoons....

Blatantly stolen from Lyza...

is the following idea.

my personal life is a mess. and rather than a) complain about it relentlessly to the chagin of all OR b) go through a period of blog-io silence, i'm going to post about what i've been doing: reading relentlessly.

i sleep with the light on so that when i wake up any of the 4-9 times per night all i have to do is lift the book back up to my eyeline and start reading again. this prevents pesky nighttime thoughts from occurring for longer than it takes for my sleepy eyes to focus on the page. has lead to some weird dreams, but is overall a generally successful strategy for coping at the moment.

as a result, i have run through quite a few books recently, and have enjoyed putting in my 2 cents about what it is i think of said books. sadly, there haven't been many winners lately,(one always runs this risk when we play the sale table lottery) but i'm thinking my luck is about to change. AND i'm getting a library card so as not to bankrupt myself at Powells.

at any rate, i'm going to post a few of the book reviews i'v written as the fruits of my last few days of labor. enjoy!

I know they’re wrong; wait and see

Current mood: amused

yes, it’s that time again folks; talent show time.

last year hodie had a clear notion of her aim. puff baby. puff.

so, we puffed. it went fine. it’s not my favorite song. i was kinda tired of it by the end of our run.

this year she was at a loss. she didn’t really have a notion of what she wanted to do, except, well, obviously, sing.

so i suggested the best song in all the land. and she agreed. so i get to be kermit. if i knew how to play the banjo, it’d be even better, but as it stands, she’s lucky i can play at all.

oh and also, i am not allowed to sing along. ha.

Ahh stardom

Ahh Stardom
Current mood: satisfied

oh, it went so well.

i liked the venue, cozy but with a reasonably good room sound. lots of spectators. very polite crowd. including many of my besties. could not make the AV equipment work, so there's no record of the event. but on a scale, i'd give the experience a 9. and that was with the voice being a bit unreliable.

and in my general spirit of self-indulgence as form of congratulation i went and treated myself to all sorts of goodness yesterday. new tattoo; turned out AMAZING and really gave the spine totem a sense of cohesion it had lacked previously.

lunch with les @ clay's. mmmm pork loin. little bit of sitting in the sunshine watching hodie ride her skateboard of doom. head shrinking and then thai food with excellent company. all told, an grand day indeed.

fuck fuck fuck fuck

and also fuck.

i suppose it's fairly plain to anyone that knows me at all that i am a terrible brat. i like to get my way, i'm insufferably vain, and i complain vociferously if all does not go according to plan.

so i shall commence here by pointing out that contracting the clinging cold from the depths of the 9th circle of hell a week and a half before my show was most certainly not according to any plan of mine.

so, fuck.

i figured that a week and a half should be plenty of time to recover. and i suppose, i must admit, things are better than they were. thursday before last i could only croak. now i'm back at about 80%. but i simply must point out... that sucks.

i mean, i'm hardly a virtuoso on the guitar. passing fair is generous. what i have, what i am is a voice. it's the best thing about me and it's being unreliable at the worst possible time. which makes me want to cry and break things. instead i'm going to take a break and fold some laundry.

The Return of the Internets

when certain things go missing from your life, you realize their true place in your heart.

it's been like six fucking months since i had an internet connection at my house. praise be to jebus that has finally been rectified.

i shudder to think how much internet porn i have missed out on!

that's all behind me now. back to compulsive messaging, rambling blogs at strange hours, management of internet stalkers, and scouring the missed connections to see if i've made an impression on some random stranger who might offer me some validation! it's a wonder i survived.

finalized set list for show next week. voice is slowly returning. excitement growing. audience expanding. hoot.

It's BLOG it's BLOG!

it's better than bad, it's good!


this has been a weird month. on the whole, i'd have to call it for the team of good rather than the team of evil, seeing that a few SUPERAMAZING things have happened, but since there are like 3 days of it left i am withholding judgment. the balance could tilt. you never know.

i'm quivering in anticipation i tell ya.

and i'm sick. which sucks ass. and i would be happy to be finished with aaaaaaanytime now. it's going to be pretty fucking anticlimactic if i work myself up into this frenzy over my very first show (fuckall, i'm getting a TATTOO to commemorate the experience) only to have it suck various kinds of ass because this cold has turned my voice into a frog's wet dream.

but apparently i still sound good on the internets! one of the superamazing things that happened was that one of my very favorite musical-hero-local-diva-glorious-songstress types responded to my friend request by complimenting my voice. this, equals happiness.

other things have equaled happiness too, but i am far too discreet to talk about them here to you people.

except for the ongoing progress i've made cleaning my house. its so cool to be able to see the floor. and not come close to breaking my ankle every time i take a trip into the kitchen. sometimes it is those simple pleasures...

Beggars still turn out choosy, in my case...

spent some time in the studio on saturday. went ok. of course, once we'd finished and i got home and listened to the cd we made, i wanted to cringe over and over and over and over.

sigh.

this is why albums dont get made in a day.

then i fell asleep on the couch cause i felt all oogy. woke up to Austin City Limits: James Blunt. the whole "you're beautiful" thing notwithstanding i REALLY REALLY REALLY like him. a lot. so i went out and bought both of his cd's yesterday. and got yelled at (justifyably) by my co-worker this morning for listening to the most tear-jerking song on the album about 17,267 times in a row.

also of note: aria believes that the natural enemy of the pirate is the ninja.

and i know at least 20 people who would go see THAT movie.


plus. i know what i'm getting for my next tattoo. so i can save the owl for later and bigger places on my totem pole.

Oh. My. God.

Was offered a show. Booked it. Very, very excited. Almost beside myself.

March 5th 8pm @ The Chaos Cafe & Parlour.



http://www.myspace.com/chaoscafe

If you're interested....

I feeeeeeeeeeel you, Joanna

Sweeney Todd. Loved it.

Wasn't exactly what I expected, but still quite good. It was songier than I thought it would be. I suppose its genesis as an opera should have clued me in that there wouldn't be much dialogue. The vocals were all much better than I anticipated. And in typical Burton style, the darkness didn't preclude a grim humor of which I am singly fond.

So, though I would not recommend it unstintingly as I have some other films recently, I do think its worthwhile.

The Songs in Sleep

So, occasionally I will have this weird, but basically cool thing happen: I will fall asleep, sometimes dream, though not always, and wake up with a song-fully formed-written in my head. I have learned to keep paper and writing utensils handy so as to make record of these sleep-songs, because if I just go back to sleep thinking I'll remember them in the morning, I wont.

These songs are always at least as good as what I can write when I am fully awake and engaged in the songwriting process in earnest. Sometimes better. It happened to me all the time when I was a child, but I didn't have the presence of mind or musical language to translate these songs into anything permanent. Sometimes I would wake up crying at how lovely and necessarily transitory they were. Now I have the means to capture them and I'm struck by something else: they're always happy, too.

Anyone who's listened to my body of work knows that this is, in itself, unusual. My frame of mind, intellectual and emotional propensities, and singing voice all lend themselves more naturally to down-tempo minor key songs about... well... that one guy. Even Aria pointed this out to me the other day as I was writing a song. Her grandmother asked what it was about and Aria said
"Probably the same thing ALL her songs are about." to which I replied,
"Oh, yeah? What are all my songs about?" she rolled her eyes
"_____"
Oh. Right. Him. Although, as it turned out, I managed to make that one about a flood instead. Uplifting stuff!!

But last night, in the cradle of slumber, after having some WHACKED OUT dreams, I woke up with the first verse of a song, sweet and cheerful, twirling in my head. So I wrote it down. And I like it already. It makes me happy to sing it. So, I guess I do care if I sleep. There is some good it can do. And I have the Red Paper Flowers to prove it....