the littlest meap

I support your art but that does not mean that I must support your revolution.

Life in the Underground Economy September 2, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — meaplet @ 6:31 pm
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I’m back from Mendocino County after a weekend visit to my hometown. As tends to happen with every visit to the Emerald Triangle these days, I’ve got marijuana on the brain. Figuratively, not literally— my of youth spent desperately plotting to get away from there means that I’m one of the few people my age I know who has never once smoked pot. But marijuana’s influence on everything about my hometown stands out and lingers on the brain even after I’ve left.

I guess Mendo has been a center of US marijuana production for at least as long as I’ve been alive, but it didn’t really stand out to me until I went to college, and the impact seems to have increased every time I go home. To be fair, it wasn’t until I moved away that I realized how very unusual some of the basic features of my childhood were. “Trespassers will be shot” signs that meant just that and more. Relatives and family friends who count their income not in paychecks but in crops.

The hardest thing about going home is seeing the ways that there are increasing signs of income (nice homes, new businesses that don’t require profits, teenagers with fancy cellphones and ipods) while the town as a whole stays so poor. If there is one single reason that I think marijuana should become legal, it’s so that all the growers in town would have to pay taxes and we’d be able to afford the improvements that our schools, our hospital, our streets desperately need. As growers get richer and richer, they keep sending their kids to the same underfunded public schools where they get a crapshoot of an education (sorry mom) and know that they have two options for success in life: move out or start growing.

Last week my dad sent me an online survey from the County, which is collecting feedback on where we’re going to go with the relative legality of marijuana, and as I answered question after question I realized just how contradictory my opinions on the subject are.

I hate marijuana and judge marijuana smokers… but in the same way that I hate tobacco and judge tobacco smokers. I think it’s riddiculous that such a relatively harmless drug is illegal, but I’m sceptical of “medical marijuana” in California and the even laxer laws in Mendocino County in terms of how they stack up against National law. How can a substance be both legal and illegal?

My opinons get even more complex when my hometown comes into it. Undoubtedly the economy has improved, but at what cost? And since social services and education haven’t come with the improvements, while a complete dependence on an illegal substance and the resulting addiction among a large part of the populace has, what good is it?

I know growers well, I know dealers well. I know a boy who is funding his college education at an elite university by selling pot, and I applaud him for that. I’ve also noticed the high percentage of news about my high school graduating class that involves incarceration, arrest, or drug-related injury (not to mention the drug-related relationships and unplanned pregnancies).

I get angry when I see druggie San Francisco hippies arguing for the legalization of Marijuana, not thinking about how their high is impacting my community. But would legalizing marijuana make these problems worse? Or would they relieve them by evening them out with the rest of the state and the country? I just don’t know.

ETA: A trailer for this movie was featured content on the Apple start page over the weekend. Interesting coincidence.

 

Music recommendations August 24, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — meaplet @ 9:28 am
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I am well-known for my tendency to listen to some… unusual music. This isn’t the “I have lots of indie cred” sort of listening to music other people haven’t heard of*; it’s the “what in hell IS this, Molly?” sort of listening to music other people haven’t heard of. But some of the stuff I listen to is really good, and you should be listening to it too. To that end, a post of music that I like, that I think you would like too.

Max Vernon: He was popular on the internet quite recently for his jazzy cover of “I Kissed a Girl,” and the rest of his stuff is even better. He’s a great pianist, and a swank singer, and his lyrics are awesome. Check out The Hypochondriac Blues . Several songs are available for download on Max Vernon’s myspace page.

Bonfire Madigan Shive: Ever since seeing her as a bass-cello-playing angel in the heavens above ACT’s production of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore I’ve wanted to hear more of her music. (Listen to her play Lady Saves a Dragon From the Evil Prince, which she composed for ‘Tis Pity and you will want to too.) I am waiting for her retrospective I Bleed to arrive in the mail, and I am desperately hoping that she will release a ‘Tis Pity soundtrack. No downloads, but you can listen to more of her stuff, at Madigan’s myspace page.

Hey Young Believer: I have become one of their groupies in recent months. I’m especially fond of some of their earlier stuff when they were still The Landing and writing sad girl piano music, but their new happier songs about death are pretty cool, too. They’re a little bit more traditionally pop-y than the other stuff recommended in this post, but they’re very musically solid (Lilly and Alex both have music degrees from Stanford), fun to listen to, and they put on a great show. Downloads on MySpace and HeyYoungBeliever dot com .

There now, aren’t you totally convinced I listen to music other than Broadway? Haven’t I totally made up for the fact that instead of going to Outside Lands like all the cool people, I’m going to see Sing-Along Little Mermaid tonight?

* Except that I’ve totally fallen in love with Sigur Ros over the last couple of weeks. But if I’m more than five years late to the party, it doesn’t really count.

 

Didn’t we talk about this, Randall? August 21, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — meaplet @ 9:35 pm
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Turns out Randall Monroe is stalking me again, she posts via the neighbor’s unsecured Linksys.

She moved into her apartment last weekend, the AT&T folks say she will have her own internet next Monday at the earliest, and that depends on the thing that looks almost like a phone jack actually being a phone jack. Otherwise she is screwed and will spend the next year bumming off the neighbors’ wireless and never doing work at home.

(That last bit might not be so bad.)

On the bright side, though, the perilous internet situation is really the only negative about the new apartment, with the possible exception of the angry funeral home parking lot bouncer outside. The apartment is spacious, pretty, centrally located in the Mission, and ::her very own::, if not yet unpacked. It’s inexpensive enough that it’s not embarrassing to tell her monthly rent to other people who live in San Francisco, even if folks who don’t live in that august city would blanch at the price and tell her she is insane. And it’s rent-controlled.

Even the building full of skinny uniform hipsters and the anti-Google graffiti at the shuttle stop are just hilarious features of the apartment, about which her current amusing stories are soon to become repetitive. Fortunately they’ll keep being around and causing more wacky adventures in the near future.

Hopefully there will be fewer awkward hanging out with the building manager in his apartment moments than there were last weekend–he is a hugger, and she is not really, at least with people she doesn’t know very well.

 

Keeping up with the dela Cruz August 20, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — meaplet @ 12:23 pm

I am mostly trying to avoid meme-type things on this blog, since I generally find them pretty irritating. But I am taking this opportunity to introduce you to my wee avatar.

Mostly I find it kind of hilarious that is what is essentially yet another doll/avatar making site, just like we’ve had around since 1995 or earlier, is getting so much attention and hip internet cred. Yes it’s fancy and made with flash, and yes, it’s got higher quality images, but exactly how else is Face Your Manga any different from, say, this? Different enough to have Valleywag reporting on it?

Anyway, here I am, being a wee internet sheep now that’s it’s ok for people over 13 to use this sort of thing.

PS Erica it cracks me up that with the exception of the grin yours looks exactly like this picture.

 

I hope this spam is helpful?? August 18, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — meaplet @ 9:38 am
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I got this email today. I enjoy how very unsure of himself the spammer is. Has he started questioning the value of his work?

Dear Sir/Lady:

Sorry to disturb you. We are a wholesale company in China. We mainly
sell electronic products, such as digital cameras, cellphones, LCD
TV, xbox, Laptops, DV, Mp3&Media Players, GPS, and so on.

All items are in brand new box with original accessories, packaging,
manuals, registration card, serial number etc. If you need anything,
please visit our website: [url]

Thank you for you attention??

Best wishes!

 

Night neighbors and contingency plans August 15, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — meaplet @ 11:53 am
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After a lot of searching and two weeks of homelessness aka couch surfing, I am going to be signing a lease for a new apartment tonight. The new apartment is small, cute, and ::mine alone::. It is excellent for escaping from in case of fire, but it’s a terrible location for barricading oneself in to escape a zombie horde.

I’m particularly cognizant of this fact because of my coworker Andrew, one of whose conversational habits is to turn discussions of common objects into discussions of using those objects to fend off zombie attack. Thanks to him, I will now feel particularly safe from zombies in gyms, where you can set up a wall of treadmills to fend off the slowly-moving undead.

Zombies are a fascinating earbug–after a couple of mentions of zombies from Andrew over the last week, they suddenly seem to be everywhere. Wednesday’s lunchtime conversation with Brian, today’s A Softer World, even personal ads on the internet–all of them seem to be filled with the idea that we need to be prepared for the undead to rise up and shamble towards us, possibly more than we need to be prepared for fire and earthquakes.

What is this? Does everyone really think about zombies all the time? Is it the Frequency Illusion having its way with me? Are zombies the mental equivalent of glitter, impossible to remove once you’ve been doused with them? Or is the world telling me that the zombie apocalypse is nigh?

[Game: first person to identify the two references in the post title gets gold star stickers.]

 

Absurdism at the Olympics August 12, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — meaplet @ 8:46 pm
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Scene: Jen’s living room. Jen, Molly, and Wojtek are watching the Olympics.

Announcer: This must be a little bit like waiting for Godot for them.

J, M, and W look at each other and question whether the announcer knows what he’s talking about.

Molly: “Let’s go.” “We can’t.” “Why not?” “We’re waiting for our event to start.” “Oh.”

 

The problem with moving July 27, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — meaplet @ 7:36 pm
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The problem with moving is that every time I do it, there are more things to pack than the time before. I cry foul.

(To be fair, my mother claims that I don’t actually need to have every bank statement, starting in high school, neatly filed. I like having it. Possessions I can take or leave; data is forever.)

Anyway, I am going to pack the whole stack of books that has eaten my bed, and then I am going to go to sleep. So there.

I feel obliged to mention, however, that today in my bookshelf, I found a Directory of MHC Student Organizations, 2003-2004. I will never know why (a) this was actually shelved on its own, separate from my student government stuff and (b) I didn’t notice this on my last move.

—

Readers, I apologize for the unexciting entry. I have while procrastinating from packing been reading a lot of arguments about racism and antisemitism on the internet; after some fascinating yet frustrating debates about homosexuality on a couple of listserves I hold near and dear, I have an extended post (or series of posts) about rhetoric in internet arguments in progress. Trust me, it will be worth it.

 

It is the post I will be writing, all my life July 21, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — meaplet @ 8:08 pm
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I got back yesterday from 10 days in Miami, FL, at the GALA (Gay and Lesbian Association of) Choruses Festival 2008. GALA involved eight days of, well, choral music. And gay people. And fun.

The title of this post is based on “It is the Song,” a piece commissioned for the Festival Mixed Chorus, of which my own chorus, the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco, was a part. In the interests of this NOT being the post I will be writing all my life (which, unlike the song I have been singing all my life, is NOT a metaphor for being a homosexual), the rest of the post will be divided into short and useful sessions. If you wish for a day-by-day breakdown of witty one-liners, please see the Twitter updates on the side of this page.

Lessons learned

  1. Bear soup is not somewhere you want to be. Fortunately, the bears will be too busy paying attention to each other to notice you, especially if you hang out in the deep end.
  2. I have a massive intellectual crush on Eric Lane Barnes. I purchased two CDs of Captain Smartypants music because of this. It was the right decision, even if neither of them includes “Battle of the Gay and Straight Composers.”
  3. I will buy things if they come with free kisses from gay Irish blokes? Whatever, dude, it was a totally awesome tee-shirt, I would have bought it even without the free kiss.
  4. Certain composers of music about new stupid boyfriends and santa’s cocaine are unable to tell short brown-haired women apart from each other. This composer I will not name, because I hang out with him periodically and he still can’t tell me apart from other women (or remember my name ever, which I’ve known for a while). At the whole situation I snort.
  5. Despite the seeming unlikelihood of a deaf person choosing to spend a week of their life at a choral festival, every group must have a sign interpreter. This is, apparently, because one of the founding goals of the Women’s Music Movement was to reach out to all women, everywhere, with their strummy music and expressive sign language. The latter part I learned when a Cris Williamson sing-along turned into a Cris Williamson sign-interpretalong.
  6. Gay mens’ choruses and women’s choruses (almost never called lesbian choruses, but many of them restricted only to bio-women who only date bio-women) are ::completely:: different animals. So different, in fact, that it seemed slightly discordant having them at the same music festival. Gay mens’ choruses, are, for the large part, pretty campy. Lots of show tunes, impressive classical music, and humor. Women’s choruses, however, are for the most part a part of the Women’s Music Tradition, and are basically a choral version of Cris Williamson or Holly Near or Ani Difranco. They are there to be serious and change the world, and you better know it. Or they will kick your ass. Or sing “The Great Peace March” again.
  7. I am, weirdly, totally fine with the racial stereotypes played with in an elaborate routine that shows the Lone Ranger and Tonto falling in love, but very uncomfortable with white gay people appropriating black freedom songs for their own movement. I thought a lot about this–does it mean that I’m more ok with being racist against Native Americans than against black people? Ultimately, I decided that it meant that I’m totally cool with taking racist tropes and turning them on their head and mocking them, but not ok with blind copy-and-paste appropriation of another group’s struggle and art. That and trying to squeeze “homophobia” into a verse of “Turn Me ‘Round” just sounds dumb.
  8. Florida: hot in the summer.
  9. Free public transportation: awesome, but also a hangout for homeless people.
  10. Cuban food: nothing resembling vegetarian.
  11. Holly Near: actually a celebrity. (I am always skeptical when people tell me that people from Mendocino County are celebrities–for example, have any of you ever heard of Spencer Brewer? But in the case of Holly Near and Seabiscuit, it turns out to be true.

Highlights of “things Molly scribbled in her 200-page program”

  • “Boys like me like boys like me.” - a line from Eric Lane Barnes’s “The Theme From Pants” (performed by Captain Smartypants)
  • “Gender and sexual identity/ is a very personal thing you see/ so the rules aren’t what they seem to be” - from David Maddux’s “The Gender Polka” (performed by CHARIS - the St. Louis Women’s Chourus)
  • Amazing Grace to the tune of The Water is Wide? Good. Huh. (”Grace”, arranged by Mark Hayes, sung by Illuminati, from Columbus, OH)
  • Why do cellphones always ring in quite a capella moments, and not loud ones? (During perfomance of New Jersey Gay Men’s Chorus)
  • I call bullshit on this sign interpreter. (Scribbled down during Seattle Men’s Chorus performance of “Every Sperm is Sacred”)
  • Slash fan fiction and pulp novel conventions: discuss. (During Seattle Women’s Chorus’s performance of a show they recently did about the works of Anne Bannon. Much of which was written by ye olde E.L.B.)
  • ! (This by the listing for the Turtle Creek Chorale’s a capella rendition of the William Tell Overture) (During which time the chorus had an elaborate set of signs like those used in football stadiums, with which they had created highly-detailed Lone Ranger/Tonto fan art. I kid you not.)

New games we should play
(In the style of the and the Peter O’Toole game (People You Thought Were Dead Until They Turned out to be Still Alive) Fay Wray game (People You Thought Had Been Dead Until You Read Their Obituary and Found Out Were Alive All This Time))

The George Michael Game (People you thought were already out until they had big media comings out) and The Seabiscuit Game (People your hometown claims are celebrities, who actually turn out to be celebrities).

What about your own perfomance, Molly?
How about we don’t talk about that? The monitor, which would have allowed us to hear ourselves on the stage with lousy acoustics, was down. I could really only hear me, the piano, and maybe one or two people near me. Apparently other people in LGCSF couldn’t even hear the piano.

I reiterate, let’s not talk about that.

 

God knows the temperature’s hot enough to hatch a stone July 4, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — meaplet @ 11:28 pm
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I spent the summer I was 17 in central Massachusetts, just outside Worcester. I’d taken US history the previous year, and had gotten to the state level with my History Day project on Hamilton and Jefferson. So to say I was a little bit fixated with the Founding Fathers would be… a bit of an understatement. And here I was, on the side of the country where it ALL HAPPENED, and I was thrilled. I’d grown up spending the Fourth attending the Frontier Days parade in Willits and associating the holiday with rodeo. That year, though, I spent the fourth of July watching fireworks over the harbor in Bar Harbor, ME. The history I’d loved and the location I was in were united, for the first time ever, and I was radiant with the idea of this country that I lived in.

Flash forward to the summer I was 24 (which is to say, today). It was my third summer back in California after going to college in Massachusetts. And, just like every summer since the one when I was 17, the history was gone again. I tried and failed to rent 1776, so instead I stood out barbecuing tofu kebabs in the Mission and listening to hipsters accuse each other of being anti-American(1). And then I watched Zoolander.

In short, I had a day off of work, and a really fun night with my friend Jen. But it was a great day celebrating the Grill Things In the Summer While Fireworks Boom holiday, and not the Hey Remember When Jefferson Was Self-Aggrandizing in the 1890s and Convinced Everyone To Celebrate His Achievement On the Fourth of July and Not Any Of the Other Big Dates In the War holiday, which is kind of sad (2).

But something kind of hilarious did happen when I was leaving Jen’s:
Bizarre European: Is it okay if I urinate on somebody’s home?
Me: Whatever, dude. ::walks bike to corner::
European: ::follows:: No, really, I’m not going to get arrested or anything?
Me: ::Looks at him blankly::
European: You aren’t an undercover cop, are you? You aren’t blending in like a local with your bicycle and the thing in your hand [a bike helmet] waiting for me to pee, and then you’ll arrest me?
Me: You’ve caught me. I’m an undercover cop.
European: ::starts explaining why he wasn’t able to pee in a bar::
Traffic light: ::turns green::
Me: ::bikes away, relieved::

(1) Note to self: When you see a t-shirt with the text “Die hipster scum” for sale, and you think to yourself, “I should get that. It would be ironic and hilarious” then you have already lost.
(2) I kind of broke up with Jefferson in college. I sort of refer to him in the style of a bitter ex these days.