A Reprise

... as "country" and have no old-fashioned mannerisms or accent. With my co-workers I feel as out of place as if I am from a different country, and my silence and discomfort, I think, speaks more for my differences than anything. This is a disease not many ought to catch. Now that I am here, I know I can't be content without seeing my beloved Rasputina et al. every few months, without the Indian food I have come to crave, and my choice of coffee houses and libraries every day, but I will never really be happy here. Sometimes I hate the city, but let me specify: Dallas. New Orleans is still Mecca, and Houston is somehow like New Orleans to me, but Dallas is a cold-hearted, titanium-covered city. One apparently antiquated quality of mine is to be considerate to others. I am practically indecent and impolite compared to my predecessors. I naively compare this city to NYC for its rudeness, though I am sure I could never survive there for one day. Why, with all of this, I am ...

Many of Rasputina's songs consist of "This was a girl who lived long ago in [somewhere in America]." Inevitably, I want to go to those places, and find that girl. I feel like it's a common realm of imagination I share with her. She would understand how I see Blanche in the swamp, or Margaret in the pines. Anyway, I wanted to go to Chicago and St. Louis to find Rusty the Skatemaker. I did. On her new album Perplexions she has a girl (with a jet-pack) exploring the North Pole. I want to find her, too. It doesn't exceed my passion to find Saline the Salt Lake Queen in the Great Salt Lake. That is my favorite story of hers. She surely must have seen the painting "The Magic Circle" by Waterhouse when she wrote it. What I love about Melora Creager is that she is a singer of America. Her songs capture the very best of America and remind me of the things I love about it, when it is very hard to remember. She is also a singer about women's experiences, but ...

"Clipped" was on my mind the other night. It was not a song I had noticed before. From Rasputina's Cabin Fever album.

I am trying to work on some Ecto formatting problems, hoping to make my blog more readable. An offline blog editor is an absolute essential for me. Since acquiring a Mac, I have not found anything satisfactory. I have switched to HTML Editor Mode, hoping the editor will not put "br" tags between my paragraphs and double-space them anymore. It is possible to remove these in my in-browser Blogger interface, but I might as well be saving my entries to a text file and copy-pasting when online if this is the case, rendering this not-free software useless. The Mac switch has been a tricky adjustment for me. I have always used Windows-based computers and am used to a great deal more control over my files than I now have. I first encountered the "Apple" culture on my iPhone which was basically the only option available to me when my last Treo died, and Palm was no longer a part of my plan. I loved the fast browsing and brilliant visuals. My Treo looked like an 8-bit game ...

This is an image of Melora Creager, lead of Rasputina. Rasputina concert.

June 20, Rasputina, again. Was I unhappy a minute ago? I can't remember.

1. Finish editing my footage from River Legacy; try it with Windows Movie Maker; add narration and a sound clip, probably "Sister Sleep" by Rasputina. I started it during lunch and had fun. It looks good but I may go re-shoot with the camcorder. I was just doing it incidentally to see how it would work. It was a really windy day, and that looked great. 2. Make a stylesheet for my Multiply site. That site is the awesomest best-kept secret out there. I don't bother using my web space because this is so much better. But it is very ugly, and I'm going to have to use my own design. 3. I need to start my spring planting! I've got to get some seeds when I next go to Wal-Mart.