~ September 22, 2003 - 12:19 a.m. ~
Everything is New
Everything is new.I got off my mundane music pity train the other day, and sucked it up and went to the Virgin Megastore to cash in on the three most relevant musical recommendations I've been getting. I picked out CDs by Johnny Cash (his last, pout), the Pogues (their live album "Streams of Whiskey"), and, of course with Ivy's blessing, Rancid's "Out come the Wolves." Actually, I was already a Johnny Cash fan, but as a result of my stubborn refusal to listen to anything new, I hadn't heard anything of his that post-dates 1970 or so. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised by the new goodness (as MTV so tactically told me I would).
Rancid. Wow. Actually, there were a few songs on the CD that I already recognized, so I guess all those years of half-listening to the Buzz in my car in high school paid off or something. "Oylmpia W.A." and "Ruby Soho" are now really stuck in my head, and I am kind of bewildered as to why I "took" to the band so quickly, as though they were a band I had listened to before a long time ago, and I'm just picking them up again. It's odd, but that might actually be the case. I listened to a lot of friends' music in high school without knowing what I was hearing, and Rancid might very well be one of those bands.
Incidentally, if you know or suspect that you might have played Rancid for/at me in high school, please step forward and sign my friggin' guestbook, because this is plaguing me. I really want to know where I've heard them before . . .
The Pogues were like a sweet little flashback all my days holed up in a corner with Tim at O'Shea's in Florida. I'm not as totally into them yet, but that's likely because I've been tuned into Rancid.
Anyway, today we latently celebrated New York's Irish Appreciation Day by going to Molly's Pub (for the first time) for Full Irish Breakfasts. Two plates of eggs, Irish bacon, sausage, black and white puddings, potatoes and beans later (and one plate of French toast in pAndi's case), we waddled out the door.
I spent the rest of the day reorganizing our BRAND NEW KITCHEN!!!
OK, things aren't totally new, but well, you see we had a little . . . accident last week. I burned dinner. A lot. Like, so much that it caused a nasty grease fire, which engulfed the oven and charred the back wall of the kitchen. The damage was largely superficial, thank god, although my virgin lungs are permanently scarred from smoke inhalation probably. But the walls were all ugly and black, and scrub as we might, we couldn't fix it. So we were forced to do what we've been saying we want to do for over a year now: we painted the kitchen.
In this white-walled apartment, the kitchen now glows this completely beautiful lurid orange. It makes the flame on the burner of the stove look really, really blue now. It makes the tile and the cabinets look really, really white. It's amazing. Vaguely retina-searing, but amazing. Of course, the controlled explosion of color really made us (mostly me) realize that we need to do more. Like paint the rest of the apartment. Tim needs to be convinced that it won't be a painful and straining experience, but I'm sure I could convince him. Especially if I let him pick the color. Tim might complain that he's been too formally trained as an artist to have a favorite color, but he still gets all passionate in paint stores.
