Entries from March 2004 ↓

She talks to him on the pay phone Monday through Friday from 7:15 until 7:45 when the first bell rings. It is the only pay phone in that entire building. She gets a ride with her cousin in the mornings, who likes to arrive at school very early. She doesn’t care, getting there early is way better than the bus.

When she first gets to school the place is virtually empty. The school secretary is already on the telephone, making copies and gossiping with the senior girls with the big hair. It only costs 50 cents to talk to him on the pay phone for half an hour. She thinks that is very cheap and totally worth it.

By 7:40 though, the place is really humming with swells of people. People in groups. She tells him she should really go, she likes to get a soda before homeroom, but he’s always pushing her to stay on the telephone just a little bit longer. He works at the hardware store on Front Street. He’s 19, and there is this baby that he says isn’t his. She absolutely believes him because he she also believes he is brilliant. He knows about things and gladly tells them to her. They talk on the phone about how maybe I see blue when you see purple, and you see purple when I see blue, and we just call them the same thing. She assures her mother when she asks that they are only sort-of friends.

She calls him every, single morning. Some mornings someone will already be on the phone. It makes her nervous; it makes her stomach hurt. She drinks soda to calm her when she gets anxiety in her belly. Sometimes someone will be on the pay phone already and not get off of it. Not the whole morning, even though she paces furiously and bites her nails to pulpy stumps, and goes so far as to ask if he’ll be much longer. Sorry, he says, he’s talking to his girlfriend.

After a while she grows tired of the worry. She is barely a teenager and already she wears a crease between her brow from a constant, burdensome scowl. She is starting to eat and sleep less due to all the nervousness.

She is starting to dread her morning phone call to him. Soon enough he begins questioning her affection for him. She wonders why she does this. Subjects herself to the stares. The blatant whispering in her direction. All the rumors about the freshman girl and her love affair with a pay phone.

She waits until the day one of the blondest, most popular senior girls approaches her, one late morning when the building was filled with people. To a crowd of onlookers that popular girl asks her for a moment of her time. She gently places the receiver on her shoulder, never asking him to hold.

“We have to know. Who do you call every morning?,” the blonde girl purrs.

“My boyfriend, he’s older, you might not know him,” she replies timidly.

“I know everyone,” she shoots back, and soon enough she’s told them she talks to on the pay phone every morning.

The group explodes with laughter. She hears a confused voice shouting hellos into the telephone. She can hear him trying to find her amidst the onslaught of laughter.

“The one with the baby?,” the blonde girl yells finally, still laughing.

She hears one more muffled hello and slams the earpiece onto the base. She’ll never going to hear his voice again without a chorus of laughter accompanying it.

She’s thinking about walking to school starting tomorrow. Maybe reading in the library before homeroom.

The other morning at work me and three other waitresses sat at the bar drinking coffee and waiting for the first of the guests to arrive for the day. E. mentioned that she wasn’t wearing matching socks. She pulled up her slacks to reveal two different white cuffed socks.

At just about the same time, the other two girls lifted the hems of their pants and said, “Me, too.” L. was wearing one gray athletic sock beside a simliar white sock. K. won by revelaing a thin, printed dress sock paired with a white, thick slouch sock. I’m seriously not sure how she could handle the one-thin, one-thick sock thing, but I’ll bet it involved oversleeping due to the previous evening’s wine consumption.

Earlier that morning I’d fretted while rummaging through my sock drawer. I’d finally found a matching pair, although it made me about three minutes late. There was a hole in the heel and they were too small.

My name is Brittney, and I have music defecit disorder. I know this about myself, but I refuse to see a problem with it. Others, however, most certainly do. So, I thought I should take some time to address it.

For starters, I have a very tumultuous relationship with music. Sometime there can be music blaring and I never once hear a note or a single word. Sometimes there can be music on and people singing it, but I’m so in some zone that I don’t even know it exists. Conversly, there are times (which are a] when I am reading b] when I am writing) that I really can’t stand to hear music. Can’t do it. Sometimes I’ll be all, “I’m going to listen to some tunes and look about the interweb.” Then about 15 minutes into surfing I find something lengthy or weighty that I want to read and must shut the music off. When it stops I am often heard to sigh in relief. Sometimes music makes me really crazy and anxious and it has to go, right then. There were times when I lived alone in the studio apartment that I would go–literally–weeks or months without listening to a CD. I would spend days in that room in total silence. Occasionally I would shuffle the 200 or so mp3’s I have on my hard drive. But I rarely listen to whole albums.

I have a hard time naming ten bands that I absolutely love. Isn’t that weird? I’ve always had just an artist or two or four that move me and make me soar in the way that music is apt to do. But for me it is very seldom that I am blown away by something I hear. In high school it was Tori. In college it was Bjork. I own very few CDs and listen to even fewer. I’ve just never been that into listening to music.

I once thought it was because I couldn’t afford it. I wasn’t about to pay $17 for a CD. That will turn out to be GARBAGE. But then I got a CD burner. I just knew that I would be downloading and burning new and interesting, hard-to-find music. But nope. I flip the radio dial every morning on my way to work.

It’s because I have internet finger. I can’t keep it still. If I put a CD in I will impulsively punch it to the next song, or constantly change the volume or put in on shuffle. Most times I prefer scanning the FM radio while in the car, even if everything I hear is crap.

Which, it isn’t. Granted, 90% of shit on the radio is really shitty. I’m talking horrid. But what haters of the radio are missing out on is the huge laughter potential that comes with listening to radio. Forget those fucker DJs. I hate those assholes. I’m talking about the songs themselves. You haven’t heard funny until you’ve heard Jessica Simpson try to rhyme in her newest single. Or heard R. Kelly croon about “taking his key and sticking it in the ignition.” You can’t get that shit anywhere else. And the funniest genre of music on the radio right now is mainstream hip-hop. Which is HUGE in the South. Those songs are pure idiocy. I swear to God, almost every modern hip-hop song I here on the radio talks about nothing but women and how best to demean them. “Bend over, lemme see it.” “Hold her still, I’m gonna milk the cow.” “Can I play with your pantyline?” It’s so gross. It makes me so fucking sad. If only because it is so prevelant.

But! Hip-hop is the music on the radio that has the most interesting and innovative sounds. A lot of those Grab Your Ankles songs have some of the most infectious beats. I’ve wholely given up on new rock on the radio, and most of the straight pop is diarrhea, too. Justin Timberlake is good when he isn’t hooking up with that Nelly ass. And that new Britney Spears single was alright until I heard it four thousand fucking times.

Which is why I mostly listen to NPR. Which brings me back to my music defecit disorder. I just don’t feel the need to have it. And I don’t feel like I’m missing out. Which is why it surprises me when people just can’t get over the fact that I don’t love music, and crave it in the way that a lot of the rest of you freaks do. I just don’t. I guess it was how I was raised. My parents didn’t listen to much music. Ever. The only music I associate strongly with my childhood is cartoon themes and Chipmunk records and a bit of country. My dad used to sing me this Tom T. Hall song called “I Love” (”little baby ducks…”), which he bought me the CD for last year. But other than that no music to speak of growing up. In fact, I remember thumbing through old records in the basement, wondering what they might sound like. I remember names like Fleetwood Mac. Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall.” Some record that had a doll propped up in front of a headstone, which always creeped me the fuck out. But I don’t remember hearing any of it.

And so in my adulthood music is sort of secondary to me as far as passions go. I tend to appreciate songs that make your heart break, things with danceable beats, or music that is melodic. I shy away from music that is atonal or abrasive or cold. I like very little punk. I love electropop.

I imagine people think I’m really missing out. Perhaps I am. Because if someone asked me what CD I’d want to take with me to a deserted island, I might ask them if I could bring something else all together.

Which makes me a soulless freakshow, I know.

My stupid email server is down. Again.

If you’ve emailed me in the past 3 or so days, and don’t mind doing so, please re-send those emails to this address: inthemeantime@hotmail.com

I promise I’m getting to posting the winners of the Recommend a Site, Win a Mix CD contest. It’s just that I’m spending so much time at the sites that were proffered up that it is taking me a while. I have no idea how I will narrow it down to just five.

Good work, people.

1. That if you somehow trained a monkey to live in your stereo to turn the volume up when it gets too low and turn the volume down when it gets too high, and you named that monkey Compressor, it would act much like a music compressor. (The VCB is very wise.)

2. That 100% Whole Wheat Chex and an apple and Highlander Grog coffee are not a good way to start the day. When you are a waitress.

3. There are going to be even more things plugged into this room since the VCB bought a new (well, used) G4 today. With ProTools all up on it. So he can go nuts and mix his ass off. (Yay you, sweetie.)

4. That people are nice. I mean, I tend to forget it when I get depressed. Which I recently have been. I get really detached and don’t return phone calls or emails. I feel like I can’t trust others. Then people go and do things so beyond kind that it sort of turns all that other shit right around. Some people really rule.

5. That I got a sort of promotion. I get to work the night shifts now at work. Which involve high-dollar wines and $20 pan-seared Lake Victoria perch over shiitake risotto. It means a nice, long 6-hour shift instead of a quick fit of tables from 11-1. It means I might can get back on my feet financially after a really muddy last couple of months.

6. Stay off eBay. One doesn’t need two new red Twin Peaks t-shirts in one week. No matter how cheap.

7. Evanescence’s songwriter quit. I don’t know, I overheard it from these two weird industry guys and they seemed pleased that the songwriter for Evanescence was no longer writing for the band.

8. That Six from “Blossom” is back. I’ve seen her in sexy pictures on the interweb. And she has a big butt.

9. That I seriously need to workout in overtime, oh my God, Spring is like already here. I look at my summer clothes and wince.

10. There is a new planet. Now kids are going to have to buy ten of those styrofoam balls when making thier models.

(Inspired by steeltoe, whom I thank most kindly.)

Electrical devices the VCB and I have currently plugged into two (2) outlets in our room:

ethernet hub
his cell phone charger
stereo
his monitor
his computer
his desk lamp
closet lamp
television
DVD player (which is duct taped to the top of the TV)
computer speakers (which were also duct taped to the sides of the TV until they fell off, and now the TV has funny, floppy duct tape ears)
floor lamp
sexy, mood-inducing Christmas lights
space heater
my monitor
my computer
my speakers
my scanner
my printer
my cell phone charger
my desk lamp
“back massager”
fan
my camera’s battery charger
heating pad
bedside lamp
alarm clock
iron
unicorn sconce

Let me tell you about this one time at an Outback Christmas party. The Christmas party that happened about three days before I quit.

My first year working at Outback, when I was a wee 20 years old, the Christmas party was this extravagent dress-up affair. It was held at the Vanderbilt Stadium Club and there was free liquor and beer until it ran out. Everyone got fancy cocktail dresses and smoked and drank and ate and danced and were generally extraordinarily shitfaced. Real fun.

Fast forward to six, long years later, to a party in a single room, crammed with about 100 people. At a local bar. The All-American Sports Bar. Drinks were $5 each and built for you by a seriously pissed off bartender. Who was plainly an idiot. This chick was selling drinks hand over fist to a room full of SERVERS AND BARTENDERS and was being a first class cunt rag. Servers also know full well how not to tip.

Anyway, my manager gave out raffle tickets to employees who brought in Toys for Tots donations. The more toys you brought the more tickets you accumulated. Six big winners were selected after DVDs and ghetto blasters were given away to the people who brought in the most toys in efforts to score mad goods. (It worked.) The big-ass grand prize, for which six lucky people would compete, was hyped by my manager as the most awesome, mindblowing prize one could ever receive. I actually got a little excited when my name was called. I waited in a huddle with the other lucky winners, $5 vodka gimlet in my hand, when he led us all to another room. After a brief countdown he opened the doors and the lucky winners began running in and screaming. I was sort of last in line and not so much screaming.

Once inside, I saw that there was cash. Not much left of it, mind you, but a couple of fives and twenty or so one dollar bills littered the pool table and the chairs and the floor. I scooped up a few bills while holding firmly onto my drink. I got $4 or so when I looked up to see my manager laughing and jumping up and down. For him, this was what Chirstmas parties were all about. Watching his employees crawl on the ground shrieking and groping wildly for a few measley bucks.

I went back to my chair feeling ashamed. What had just happened? Had my manager really just broken down $100 into small bills and strewn them about for his $2.13/hr. underlings to snatch maniacally? My $4 grand prize was certainly appreciated–hell that is 4/5ths of a cocktail–but the way in which I had to acquire it suprised and embarrassed me.

My manager could not stop bragging in the following days about how much fun the grand prize game was. He’d loved it. He couldn’t wait to do it bigger and better next year. Luckily, I didn’t stick around to see if maybe I could scrounge around on my hands and knees for $5 next Christmas.

There are times when I’ve written nothing substantial in weeks. There are times my only word hurling happens between the college-ruled lines of a $.70 notebook. It’s times like last night when I go to visit a friend to find him typing away manically at an 11 or 12 page story that I wholely notice that I’ve been writing next to nothing. There are times I wonder if I only consider myself a writer because I can’t think of anything else. Certainly isn’t because it’s easy.

These are those times.

The VCB and I took a little journey on Sunday. We took a 4-hour tour and the camera along. To learn more click below.