hi!

forgot what i was going to say.


[there's been some potential cross-posting going on - if you're interested i hope you checked out my south by southwest posts on mincetapes. they're about life as well as music, if not quite as much. at least there are some nice pictures to look at (more coming soon hopefully), and a story about getting giddy over a girl (have i ever devoted a paragraph to describing somebody's physical appearance before?) i just went back and finished this post about the walton house party; that might have been confusing before because it somehow got published while still in draft form. this past week, most notably, has been a veritable deluge of new music, mostly of the indie stripe...but i think i'll write about that on mincetapes as is appropriate, and maybe about the holdsteady olde club show there as well.]

the party was good. [my party, this weekend.] maybe twenty, twenty-five people came. many of them from out-of-town. nobody that hadn't said they were going to (except for the +1s and +2s, who make it interesting.) i spent the morning distractedly picking stuff up around my room, then suddenly dashing off to RTM to buy vegies vegies vegies (as the O.K. Lee receipts have it) and invite kate and katie, and then asia supermarket for many interesting things, and then palm tree and then palm tree again when i realized i'd gotten the wrong amount of chocolate. and then i made five-spice chocolate cake (flourless) and coconut milk ginger ice cream (vegan! basically that recipe but w/o the lime and half + half) and spring rolls and various dipping sauces.

didn't even start cooking until 4:00. hannah and tyler had arrived by the end of it and helped with the sauces and made lemonade, and i spent the first hour of the party assembling spring rolls. meanwhile matthew, who had seemingly spent the entire day vacuuming the apartment, inside and out, showed up at about 8:00 with a sixpack and a bag of ingredients to make asparagus goat-cheese cilantro quesadillas. i feel like i played host a reasonable amount of the time, which is to say i definitely got to enjoy the party but i didn't really talk to anybody for very long. there was a fun spontaneous djing session towards the end (headphone-free, track-selection by conversational suggestion) that was headed towards low-key dancing until tara started gettin' critical. oh bundle.

ben was our intrepid houseguest, and sunday morning we made a lovely large breakfast (eggs and toast, yogurt and fruit salad) with ray charles and ry cooder. i walked him to the bus, and spent most of the rest of the day continuing to walk in the sunshine.

i sat in the green outside christ church looking across the cobblestones. the 1907 ice cream season is open at franklin fountain! - has been for three weeks apparently - so i got a phosphate (no parisian flips this year, or "you may fire when ready" - i got the jamestown julep, which is very not sweet - also not as tasty as the stein of julep raffa made me on friday, though less debilitating) watched the black lips flop around and play demented ?psych-garagey-rock upstairs at a.k.a., which was very amusing. they seem much younger than they perhaps are (they seem young anyway.) then i met dave jonas and jb and we ate at pico de gallo. that place kind of drives me crazy - it has the most confusing menu ever (which they seem to keep printing on bigger and bigger paper without changing the bizarro text), and the food is almost always disappointing, and yet we keep going there because it's cheapish and convenient and it's the only place we can think of in that area. i want to swear off going there (which i sort of had), but it probably wont work.

anyway the reason we were there was to proceed to a reading at the gershman Y starring rebecca. unfortunately i had a really hard time staying awake, and we left after the first act. sorry, the play was pretty bad (not rebecca's fault.)

well, things are good. i didn't have any bringdown after this party, which is refreshing and atypical. maybe it's because the planning was quite uninvolved and last-minute. it's also very nice to have a clean(er) apartment. will try to keep it this way for as long as it lasts. i'm going to need a new roommate in two months - though i might have already found one (at the party.)

i'll probably stay in philly for the summer, at least - because of inertia, but also, i have to say, the prospect of physically moving is not so appealing. but i'm keeping myself open to going somewhere else, whenever the opportunity arises. no, i'll take a more active approach than that. i'd like to think more deliberately about what's keeping me here in philly - not too much: mostly just the fact that i know and like it here. not too many friends left besides rebecca and tara. (angela, author of her own disaster, is being a mystery.) waiting and see.

in the meantime: dc, seattle, nyc, upstate, california maybe (june?), bachelor event somewhere. maine in august maybe. or hokkaido. glad the sun's out in philly (tomorrow and yesterday, less so today.)

i know you've got a thing for ordinary guys
but i've heard your records and they sound a lot like mine
so you be my marrianne and i'll be your yoko
and let's bury the hatchet like the beatles,
the beatles and the stones

Labels: hosting, links to recipes, low, moving, no bringdown, party, phosphates, spring cleaning, spring rolls, springtime, xposting