Everyone awoke a little gloomy. It was our last day, and check-out time was only four hours away. Logan in-particular was not okay with this and sought out the front desk to plea our case. The result was a new check-out time of four o’clock, at no additional charge.

I’m not sure what Logan had to do to get this sweet deal; knowing her, they were probably just charmed, but that makes for a boring blog, so let’s pretend she seduced the owner’s wife, or at the very least threatened them with rad karate moves.


With only half a day left, the majority agreed that the best thing to do was give me a haircut.

Uh, wha...? Really? It’s that bad?

What I saw as my sexy, shaggy mop – so hip and suave was, unbeknownst to me, something akin to Eric Stoltz’ hot look in the movie “Mask”. Apparently I had been unwittingly turning Greek adventurers into stone with my mere hairdo. Who knew?


Carrie was adamant. She was going to cut my hair. My boyfriend immediately switched to publicist mode, yelling demands and controlling events from his chaise lounge. “Short!” he kept shouting, “Short… short!”




My own opinions were merely tolerated as flights of fancy. I had been reduced to a pre-Suffragette woman with hopes of one day earning a living for herself, winning the right to vote, or at the very least, opening her own door without being seen as a dangerous lesbian.

Okay.

I’m looking around my room for gems of pop culture (or, as is more often in my case, unpopular culture) that I can gab about.

A good starting point is whatever’s playing on my iPod. Right now, that’s “La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ”, a piece by the composer, Olivier Messiaen.

(*Chuckle*)

Um… That’s Olivier Messiaen.

Hee! You did it again! The way you’re pronouncing it in your brain is – you must forgive me – hilarious. It’s that cluster-f**k of vowels at the end.

Now, before you get all huffy and pronounce a few crueler things in your brain at me, you should know that I too once pronounced Olivier Messiaen the same way you… titter!… you just did.

But now I know better, and I’m going to pass this knowledge on to you. For free!

The first name is easy. It’s the Freedom version… I mean, the French version, of the name Oliver. Oh-LIVE-ee-ay. Like that one actor who won a lot of awards and inspired everyone with his performances and drank to numb the pain of his crushing depression and repressed homosexual desires.

No, silly – not Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise doesn’t inspire anyone. Pay attention!


The surname is the challenge, and requires making a couple sounds that don’t appear in the English language. I’ll break it down, syllable by syllable:

Messiaen: Mee-seh-YA-choo.

I know, I know. It doesn’t look like it’s pronounced that way, but it is French after all. We’re talking about a people who can’t be bothered to pronounce half their words most of the time.

I am not alone.

I wrote the above sentence then leaned to my right, peering into what once was my kitchen and is now something resembling Dresden after the bombing.

And so it goes.

How this guy has managed to cram a huge ladder into a kitchen so small I barely have room for the second Pop Tart included in the packet, is proof that he is no amateur. (This is what I tell myself, hoping for the best.)

Sonically, I am hidden deep inside my iPod, which just made a seamless transition from Marvin Gaye & Diana Ross’ duet album (titled, mysteriously enough, “Diana & Marvin”) to that inescapable Amy Winehouse record. Every once in a while, on average twice a decade, I find myself enjoying the same album as the rest of the country. Such is the case with “Back to Black”. It makes for boring copy though; I mean, do we really need to hear anymore talk about it?

The answer is “no”, and thankfully there’s a workman in my kitchen providing us with stories.

Last week, amidst my well-documented Vicodin haze (I’m feeling much better these days, thank you), I walked home from Amoeba, as I always do (unless Patti Smith is performing), for lunch.

Whereas normally I am greeted by the meows of my “cat”* I instead walked into a scene from “Brazil”.


Ruling out the possibility of a suicide bomber (I realize they go through a lot of training, but I live on the fourth floor of my building) I found, amongst the sea of bric-a-brac, cleaning supplies and dishware - normally so organized in my kitchen - a lone man doing to my sink and walls what I imagine Jeffery Dahmer would do to a dinner guest.

And I’ll say this about myself: I really am polite. Even when faced with an un-announced stranger tearing my home apart, I start with a simple hand-wave and “Hi,” – waiting for the appropriate social cues from the other person to indicate we can proceed to a conversation. Perhaps about the weather, last night’s game, or maybe why he’s mistaken my kitchen for a newly discovered Egyptian tomb.