It’s been a long time I know, and I will endeavour to change this.  But first and for now, in case you haven’t yet, you MUST, you simply must head on over to the bottom of this post, click on it, and prepare for  Lady Gaga’s latest video.  I am sure that if you’ve been to a bar/club/party/high school over the last month this is old news to you, but news reaches us old farts slowly.*

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched a video and  been engaged by the visuals. I don’t watch many videos because, well, being an old fart, I was alive when MTV was born and spent my teens watching videos, all of them, from the ridiculous (Taylor Dane writing – and I loved her!) to the sublime (Peter Gabriel Bocaccio inspired Sledgehammer, the classic Thriller) and everything in between (and anything Madonna was in). I used to watch MTV while ironing.  Now I don’t even know where MTV is on my TV.Come to think, where IS my TV? And MTV does not have a feed on hulu.com, so I am 100% out of the video loop.

But this one, this Lady Gaga Bad Romance video, has exploded – and it’s on every website and blog I visit.  I am vaguely embarrassed for being a very late comer to the trend. But then again, I am not 23.

The video is an product placement exercise of such glorious proportions you can’t hold it against the Lady, who does this sort of thing all the time anyway.  I don’t mind at all, since she is all about the Fame, even as she subverts and questions all our assumptions about what fame in this post-Michael Jackson/Madonna/John&Kate apocalypse  is based on. Academics aside, it’s the aesthetics that hooked me.  The strange pods and creatures that climb out of them in the “Bath Haus of Gaga” (she does love her gays), the amazing golden netting on her nails and her signature great Dane, the impossible fashion, some of the moves that are straight out of a Michael Jackson video, the gold chin strap on the hunky model, and finally, finally, the fire breathing bra and the incinerated body of her bad romance. Je veux ton amour and je veux ta revanche she sings en français.  Tous ce que tu veux ma petite, just keep this up and I may find my way back to MTV.

On the off chance you are even less hip than I, enjoy. And don’t covet those shoes, vertebrae or her sheer chutzpah too much. Just enjoy.

*I found out about this video from Nancy Rommelmann’s blog.  If you don’t know her blog but care about journalism, good writing, Oregon, politics, excellent coffee and now Lady Gaga, head on over there.

while this title might seem like an apt reference to my serious lack of posting lately, it is in fact the affliction that has befallen me for the last week.  i am croaking along by now, well enough to make myself understood by my 80 students, but not well enough not to pay the price afterwards (hot tea and silence de rigueur).

i lost my voice upon landing in brussels last week.  i flew out there for a week over spring break.  planet’s sister has been taken ill with the same disease that killed planet (planet = nickname of best friend who died of breast cancer 2 years ago).  i wanted to be with her for so many reasons, but many times it felt like we were both visiting a very cruel ghost.  the ghost of her sister’s -my friend’s – killer, the ghost of her struggle, the ghost of her boredom (chemo is sooooooo boring), the ghost of her. and then sometimes the ghost was gone, and we used the strange parenthesis offered by her illness to go to the movies at 11 am, eat way more than we should and make all sorts of inappropriate gallows jokes.

the last time i lost my voice was at planet’s funeral. it started going during the funeral, when i couldn’t stop crying, sobbing all the way into the car that drove me back to planet’s empty home, empty of her and full of mourners who would all get very drunk that day, the day during which i lost my voice.

i lost a lot more than my voice that day, and it better not mean anything that i lost my voice this time. this better just be a freaky coincidence or some psychosomatic response. it just better not.

i woke up to what sounded like gun shots

then i ran down to the street to make sure i had hung the parkng permit on my car

yesterday i gave a homeless man $20 – he wore braces on his teenth – he was obvioulsy newly homeless. and it was raining.

HRH had a tumor biposied – still waiting for results

i am having lunch and dinner with friends, and both dates will require approx 1 hour of driving to and from

my friend A is turning 40 tomorrow

50% of my students failed the midterm

True Blood still isn’t out on DVD

hard to focus on one cogent paragraph when all this is floating around my brain at 9 am. i blame the gunshot wake-up.  although i suspect the sound came from the construction site 2 blocks away, and had nothing to do with guns…

Facebook is the new meme producer.  I was tagged with this “25 random things about me” task, which my friend C more accurately described as “25 things that are not random but are about me” (she inspired today’s title, she is way good at those things).

In order to shake things up a bit and not let the dearth in posting run completely dry here at galainoregon, I reproduce my list for your enjoyment.  For the American grammaticists among you, I was taught English by the English, and consequently spell that past tense of irregular verbs such as LEARN with a T.  You say learnED. I say learnT. Let’s call the whole thing off.

1. I like making lists, but not necessarily this kind.
2. I met the man of my life at the Newark airport luggage carousel.
3. I vacillate between wanting to change the world and wanting to change my world.
4. I have never learnt how to play chess.
5. I like True Blood on HBO.  I really like it.
6. I wonder what Graham Greene would have written about our current world.
7. Pinot over merlot, sour over sweet, dark over milk, but tea AND coffee, no compromises.
8. I’d rather wear sneakers.
9. Sundays are for the NYT x-word puzzle.
10. My mom and I once dreamed of owning a bookstore together.
11. My grandmother was a great gardener and I am sorry I did not inherit that trait from her.
12. My dad speaks 6 languages, and I did inherit that trait from him.
13. I miss my best friend.
14. I care about manners and grammar (perhaps more than I should).
15. I learnt to swim in Rio.
16. I learnt to drive in Brussels.
17. I like royalty cookie tins, miniature Atomiums, polka dots and stripes, and skulls (but not real ones).
18. I would like to spend one year in Sweden, and then another year in Japan.
19. My desk is always quite messy.
20. I am still deliberating over an iTouch vs a new iPod. Help!
21. I am wedded and committed to my Blackberry.
22. For an historian I have a pretty bad memory.
23. I read maps quite well, but give very bad directions (confuse Left and Right).
24. I just finished writing a book.
25. I love skype, facebook, email and anything else that makes distances smaller.

The world is in chaos, thousands in Gaza are living in the ruins of their bombed homes, 62 thousand trillion people will lose their jobs this year and what am I blogging about?

My washing machine.

And a cleaner for the drug cartels in Sinaloa, Mexico admitted to disposing of 300 bodies in acid, the State of California still doesn’t have a budget and can’t afford tax refunds, and what am I mad about today?

The ugly windows that are being installed in my living room at this moment. At the rate they’re going, the job will be finished by approx 10 pm.

New (ugly) windows installed by slow workmen in my living room versus no windows not installed in any room of bombed out and no longer existent home.

Someone needs a reality check.

I left Oregon, land of vast expanses, clean air and wonderful boyfriend for Los Angeles, city of crammed apartments, definitely not clean air, and occasional visits to and from the boyfriend.  I also left an LG washer dryer set that noone, and I mean noone, should be without.  I imagine other brands are just as good, but it must be front loading, high efficiency, quiet and capable of cleaning a silk blouse and drying cotton sheets without destroying either.

For the first 4 months of my California return, I shlepped 17 pounds of dirty laundry to my nearest fluff ‘n fold. As long as I could not fit a stackable unit in our rather small one-BR, their machines washed my undies. This is not how I prefer it to be.

Now LG has come to my rescue again : a beautiful, compact, washer/dryer combination, it is 24 inches wide, and I can wash large towels and not so tiny undies. And then, when they are clean, that same machines dries it all!  It’s like a domestic plug and play machine – hooked up to the water faucets, plugged into the power outlet and voila! I have been washing clothes (and drying them ) all week-end. And to finish off this inauguration (a new President, a new washing machine!), I ironed in front of the TV hoping for a True Blood rerun on HBO. I did not get the rerun, but I have a lot of clean and ironed clothes.

And now you know of my predilection for ironing and vampire stories. I am laid bare (albeit in clean clothes).

ps: as if I could top this home appliance bonanza, the most lovely PB was in town this week-end and bought a coffee maker. I can’t handle the mess of the French press anymore (with my apologies to the purists), and if I can figure out how to program the new machine, I’ll have freshly brewed coffee before I even wake up.

sorry readers, i’ve been away. not away as in not home, just away, as in not writing.  teaching, publishing, stuff – it gets in the way.

the vignette has also become this week’s racist experience,  mentionable largely on the heels of proposition 8 and all the hullaballoo, not to mention traffic, it has caused in LA.  and so, the event:

this week, on a morning stroll with the princess, a middle-aged gay gentleman from my block rushes over to me hurriedly, asking if i have seen a tabby cat.  “tommy” has gone missing.  i enquire as to this cat’s habits, and apparently tommy is an outdoor cat, one who never misses a meal however.   my neighbor is concerned bc tommy is not coming when called.  i suggest he might have taken a new girlfriend and will show up when the honeymoon is over.

my neighbor winces and visible frowns at the possibility: nonono tommy is not like that (i wonder, like “that” as in “tommy’s not into girlfriends? honeymoons? what??)

and he continues -  “but i am worried.  i don’t trust this neighborhood anymore.  so many chinamen.  i worry they might be eating him.”

[ jaw drops]

[pick jaw off the side walk]

[proceed with walk, walking away from racist neighbor]

and this concludes this week’s vignette. that is all.

Mañana we are flying to Mexico! We are going to the heart of the Aztec empire, where we will climb pyramids that predate the warriors of the highlands, and visit an enormous cathedral built to impress them into catechism.

I am also looking forward to the beers, the tacos, the friends, my parents, and sharing all that with the PB and his little Americans.

Adiós, hasta pronto, and to the Americans among you, happy Thanksgiving!

it means i get to read nancy rommelman’s musings about life, thoughts that feel so close to exactly what i am thinking and feeling right now

http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/228770/36101754

it means i get to share meals without eating them, and compare recipes without cooking, and inspire myself from the imaginary smells of pots in other people’s kitchens

http://desertcandy.blogspot.com/2008/10/squid-ink-fettuccine-with-salmon.html

and

http://orangette.blogspot.com/2008/06/49-degrees.html

and rejoice when these same known-only-through-their-blogs cooks share their engagement news

http://www.thewednesdaychef.com/the_wednesday_chef/2008/09/dsfs-sdf-sdf.html

or when dooce tells the world in her way that she is pregant again

http://dooce.com/2008/11/19/internet-im-craving-doritos, and then see that more than 3000 people have commented.  3000!!!!
thanks you internets (and all the other blogs about serious, fun, political and edible stuff i read that i can’t tag today).

and thank you nancy, i don’t know you, but i feel like i should. that was a great post – and i forgive you for the serious cravings i have now for anything from the momofuku empire-of-best-foods-ever.

It is a bit very lame to commit now to participate in NaPoBlo, and lamer even to commit to next year’s NaPoBlo, but if anyone is still reading now, and is around next year, you will see me copying the fabulous Belgianwaffle’s idea: over the course of 30 days I will retell, explore and try to remember every place I have ever lived.  Maybe by then I’ll be back in the one place where I’d like to stay.

In the meantime, and just to tempt you back eventually, below a few emblematic pictures of the places we’ll visit:

rio de janeiro

merida, yucatan

kinda self-explanatory.

and last but not least

BRUSSELS!