given the occasion, i fall in line.

top 10 noises of 2006:

10. junior boys - "teach me how to fight"
this was my jam in 2k6. most memorably, i listened to it while walking uphill cobblestones streets alone in edinburgh, and also when i bike-crashed into a dog and broke my face open.

9. the polyphonic version of the pixies' "here comes yr man"
my cell phone ring. being the socially maladjusted person i am, every time i hear this song i get nervous about who's on the other end of the flip-open tiny talkbox. but i've grown so used to the call-response reaction that i recently got a new phone that can play real music tones and i think maybe also turn water into wine, and the first thing i did was download some midi pixies.

8. the almost inaudible clunk of a pint glass of stella hitting the bar
all of my tip money helps keep j. brian's alive.

7. "pretty good"
remains the catchphrase of my life, when delivered by one or all of my favorites with the perfect kind of intonation that always suggests hanging out pretty good. if that doesn't make sense, it's okay.

6. joanna newsom - ys
consult the blog a few entries back, or pull cap'n guthrie's string and listen to him attribute brilliance and miracles to newsom. this album didn't settle into my life really until november, which is why it's not higher up, but it's too fucking great to not be a top 10 noise.

5. economy-sized car engines
this year i reluctantly relinquished posession of my '94 saturn to my brother and inherited a brand new 2007 toyota yaris. my saturn boxed in all my adolescent frustration in highschool, all my secret cigarettes, all the times i had to cry and didn't want anyone to know, all the outloud monologues delivered to someone i could never find the right words to say to in real life. my yaris (beatrice is her name) is poised to take over the title of "most emotionally precious inatimate object in sarah's world." i've already cried on the shiny new dash and taken her for long long drives to nowhere at 3 in the morning.

4. the lack of ambulance sirens coming for me
2006 was the year of only one(!) ER visit. no dislocated shoulders for me!

3. mogwai - "friend of the night" & "2 rights make 1 wrong"
these rank high for a couple of reasons: they're the highest played songs on my itunes, i discovered them years too late because i was being a closed-minded dump for no reason and i feel like i need to redeem myself somehow, and having heard these songs this year i've concluded that they may be the only songs in existence that rival explosions in the sky's "yr hand in mine" as being the most heart-meltingly amazing song i've ever heard.

2. thump thump thump whirrrrrr clank twist click beepbeepbeep shhhhhhhh clink... &c.
this is what my life sounds like. these are the noises of my livelihood being a barista at hyperion espresso, and my job, whatever i might think about it, has been one of the most important things i've had this past year.

1. hearing my name read off a card on may 13
i graduated college. i'm still terrified. it was a lot bigger of a deal that i want to admit.

christmastime

over the past 48 hours, i've consumed approximately 10 cups of coffee, a litre of baileys (in various cups of the coffee), a bottle of wine, and more food than i've had in fucking forever. i've also seen a christmas story at least 5 times through and watched maybe 8 hours of law & order: criminal intent. there was also a low moment around 2am last night when, glassy-eyed and fucked, i stumbled upon a local cable access channel playing a film loop of a roaring fireplace, which maybe i watched for more than 5 minutes in an involuntary hypnosis.

i got some delightful christmas gifts which continues to prove that technology is smarter than i am (motorola razr: 1, sarah: 0) and gave myself the gift of doing absolutely nothing today. there's a deep impression of my body that runs the length of my parents' couch, and i feel pretty good about it. i'm not looking forward to going back to work tomorrow. i'd love to sit around more coffee shops with more ridiculous dudes, or on a big comfy sofa watching vincent d'onofrio solving every mystery ever because he's fucking brilliant. but i guess i'll be back tomorrow, making fredericksburg its coffee and puttering with some new toys.

merry christmas, y'all. hope it was good for everyone.

haywire

i have this feeling, and i only half attribute it to the shot of tequila and 2 pints of stella i hastily chugged to beat the 2 am cutoff. it's a good feeling, which is strange because it's been so long since i've had a good feeling that i'm surprised i remember what it's like. it's a feeling like, "okay, today, i'm starting my slow process of learning how to grab life by the balls." it's a feeling of latent selfishness, which makes me really excited. selfishness isn't always a negative thing; when it's self-motivation or self-preservation, it's downright commendable.

this isn't to say that i've figured anything out yet, but i can feel it squirming around inside my loopy head trying to congeal into an actual thought. as someone who's dealt with depression for years and motherfucking too many years, i know that eventually one reaches a breaking point where you just can't continue being sad. it's physically impossible to bleed and cry any more without dying. that's when you know that something big has to change. i'm right at that cusp. it's weird to not be able to put this into more understandable words. it's just, you know, a feeling. it also might be alcohol. i haven't decided yet, as i'm not completely sober on this end of correspondance.

also, all of a sudden i miss everyone, explosions in the sky's newest bit of brilliance, is just fucking incredible. it seems to pick up right where the earth... left off, which is fine by me. this band seems to be the soundtrack to personal revelation, and the thing to which i say, "if you died, you couldn't listen to this any more." and that keeps me breathing sometimes.

also, i have this crush on this guy. it's been a while since i've had an actual crush. i've had irresponsible emotional attachments, awkward interactions, and disasterous bouts versus insecurities, but no harmless infatuation just for the sake of it. there's something really exciting about having a crush, especially one that yr pretty sure will never come to any sort of fruition. it's pleasant to imagine, and it's also pleasant to feel those stupid stomach-butterflies when i make him smile. it's regular shit like that that reminds me that i'm not a total trainwreck of a human being.

my insides are warm and busy. totally fucking haywire.

pretty new internet box

i'm writing this from my sleek new black macbook, which is just gorgeous but a little weird because i haven't really gotten used to the new keyboard and the mac-type-no-right-clicky thing. the ol' gateway laptop broke yesterday and is now giving me alarming error messages and flashing DOS prompts instead of blogs and porn and more internets. being impulsive and a little stupid, i decided i couldn't modify my hi-tech typetype lifestyle for more than 12 hours so i ran to the nearest apple computer store and bought this thing i've been thinking about for a while. i'm happy as a web-clam, but here's the problem; i may have lost everything on the ex-'puter. i actually don't care about a lot of it; in fact, there's a lot of shit that is probably better off being involuntarily deleted. however, i sure would like to keep the roughly 7 fucking days worth of music i had on there, not to mention my entire creative writing portfolio that's been more or less in development since i was 19, and also not to mention all 3 of my zines. god dammit. i don't have a whole lot of hope for recovering things from the old machine on account of it was making grinding sounds when i tried to turn it on today. grinding. yeah. the opposite of good computer sounds. but we'll see.

here, you (3?) readers, is where i need yr help. my itunes is empty, and needs yr generosity-juice to fill 'er up. if you find yrself bored over the holidays, maybe throw some of yr favorite albums on an mp3 cd and send them my way. if you need an address, i'd be happy to disclose the house to which you can mail such a delightful xmas gift. or whatever. i just need music. and if you can pull my portfolio out of the ether, i'll take that too.

also, i'm going to try and be better about updating this thing. i think i need to be writing more. look for progress updates on shotgunwedding #4, which i'm planning to start puttering at circa christmastime.

impulse, revised.

if you were fortunate enough to catch this blog over the last 6 hours, you have my blessing to laugh in my face the next time you see me. some people shouldn't use cell phones when drunk; i shouldn't blog.

fuck the pain away, part 2

i should know better than to devise pre-emptive blog posts, because if i wait longer than 15 minutes to muse on a topic then i will certainly lose interest. the other day in the car, i imagined up a pretty good dissertation re: joanna newsom and why me and her should move to narnia and get down with mr. tumnus for life. it made me happier than most things do these days. then i got bored and days passed and i burned my hands off at work and i can't get the musicbloggery to come out of my charred fingers any more. basically, the gist is that her new album, ys (italics for album titles, anyone? quotation marks? damned if i know. someone get out yr mla stylebook and help a dump), moves me in a way i haven't been moved since explosion in the sky's the earth is not a cold dead place. if you know me, i guess you might know that that's kind of a big aural deal. if you don't know me (or don't care about how i get down to post-rock), i mean, the best way to explain my love for the earth...is that the album is 3 years old and i still get shivers when i listen to it. every time. which is often. also, i silently wept when i saw them live, and i sure as fuck am not the silently weeping type.

so yeah, joanna newsom, pretty much every bit as good as cap'n guthrie might lead you to believe. so i'll let my review stand at "fucking great" and let the cap'n hammer the point into the ground.

and then there was the thing about peaches. i saw her live nearly 2 weeks ago now, mostly on a total whim, and i got so pumped about being a girl that i wanted to write the most pro-vag piece i could muster. then, same deal, days passed, and then unfortunately i got kicked in the guts by the monthly cycle. now my ovaries hurt and being a girl sucks. so much for that. but for a time there, i really wanted to believe that i could make men do whatever i wanted. there was absolutely no existing evidence for that, and quite a bit to the contrary, but dammit i felt like i could. thanks for that, peaches.

so now i'm off to the nyc to hang out with some people (guthrie, gorgeous, and papa parcell) that i'm half convinced now exist only inside computers. 00101011, dudes.