Dear Diary: Wherein my past comes back to haunt a smidge

1. Last night I missed Conan: both the Hold Steady and Patton Oswalt were on. It was like NBC was saying: HEY! Governess! We've put together a delightful little show just for you, and you should watch!

Instead, I spent the evening drankin' some beers, lassinin' some music, having very weird dreams, and coming up with several genius ideas involving candy cigarettes.

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2. Okay, I'm a moron. You know how I've been like some sort of swoony pimp for this Jessica Hopper thing for a month or so? (Thursday, Infoshop, 9th St)And I'm all excited about it?

So, I have a friend in town tomorrow night.* For one night only! Headlining at a Holiday Inn near Dulles! He brings along with him his soon-to-be-wife-then-ex-wife, because he's a notorious slug of a man, and a new stepson. (?) Like, I HAVE to go to dinner with them, right? I NEVER see him, he lives in CA and is officially bankrupt, and I am officially lazy, so we don't travel from coast-to-coast very often. And, most of his insane stories (J-U-S-T-I-N-A-N-A-S!) are best if told mano e mano instead of via misspelled text messages and emails and late night phone calls.

Man, I'm kind of bummed. No, not kind of, RILLY. Really bummed.

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3. via ILB and TMFTML: read carefully. Pulp? Four Tet? Black is white, up is down? Holy footnotes, Batman.

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4. I had a 17-page term paper on why the world should fear John Roberts, and then I decided this was no place for POLITICS! Or Toyotas! And then I got excited because I remembered I brought Gatorade to work today, so that kind of ended (in a fiery wreck) the John Roberts train of thought.

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5. *Speaking of old friends:

still in brazil.
IN two weeks, you get to see me.
reserve august 14th.
its my drunk uncles birthday.
at my parents house.

I have double-bold-starred-underlined-asterisked the holy hell out of the above email message, because this means something awesome this way comes the second week in August: SEWA is back home in NoVa.


There's a time and a place for a large head-bow and an XXXXL man's hawaiian print lounging-pajama set; and the time is now, my friends. I'm assuming someone had just swiped her crack, and she's gunnin up the stairs for it.

Sewa (sidenote: The "Sewa" moniker, a nickname standing the test of time, goes something like this: a coworker once threw a flaming book of matches at her head and yelled "SHUT YER SEWERHOLE OF A MOUTH!," and it stuck like KFC to Kirstie Alley's thighs, ba dum dum. I am already cracking up just thinking about that, the details i am not providing you, dear readers, are excellent. You just have to trust me) is one of my old homie-homie's from long ago and far away. She and I have known each other in some form since kindergarten nose-pickin' days. We didn't actually become friends until one summer when I was 17 and she was 16 and we ended up lifeguarding at a public pool - a place full of inner-city camp kids brought out to "experience nature", forty year old men who couldn't swim, and teenagers who snuck in because their coked-up girlfriends worked as desk attendants. Basically, the most radiculous place ever for a teenager to waste away hot summer days for $$$. Most swampy afternoons were spent being incredibly sexy and not knowing it, praying for rain, playing spades, conning pies from the dumb phone workers at Papa John's, and duct-taping the newest staff members to the hot dog cart & pushing it down the handicapped ramp into the pool; our nights drinking wine cooler-n-Beast Lite cocktails and getting our ears pierced for the 6th time at Claires or the Piercing Hut. Pagoda. Whatever.

Sewa has been living in NYC in recent years, earning various Women's Studies degrees, hanging with Amy Sedaris and a roving posse of flamboyantly gay NYU theatre majors/club kids, and waiting tables at Greek dirty spoons. In between all that Big Appleness, she travels the world to teach English to adults in (thus far): Prague, Mexico, Brazil, Barcelona, and I think, for a brief week or two, Cyprus.

Basically, the lass is hard to track down, and the last time she came home for a celebration of Christ's birth, we found ourselves drinking cheap beers in a strip mall Chili's somewhere in Vienna, acting vaguely raucous and scaring the bartenders and suburban kids in trucker hats. Usually, it's only over the holidays when she returns - her parents throw the most bizarro Christmas eve party known to man. Her mom, who looks like Bette Midler, usually hits someone and leads everyone in Beatles singalongs, also in attendance most years is her little brother's punk band, all dirty and hungry and angry. (I mean, he's just a baby!!!! At some point, I may or may not have changed his diapers- now he's on "perm vacation, dude" in Redondo Beach, earning money screaming about Satan and capitalism and giving his 16 year old groupies mohawks in the back of his van, or a life something like that.)

I can't wait to see her, and them.

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6. The Nabob's most recent post had me in gales of laughter this morning. A giggle tornado! A guffaw hurricane!