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lazy update means taking stuff I wrote for an email pasting it with little or no editing. I gave up on having a separate section for emails. it wasn't stylistically working very well. that's what happens when you have a grand project with no vision. some updates maybe I'll be an Americorps volunteer at the Texas Alliance for Human Needs and move to Austin and teach classes in Spanish about financial responsibility. This goes well with my secret plan to run for Texas state senator in like 10 tens years and do bilingual education stuff in TX. I'm trying to think of ways to make myself a part of education in Texas without doing something crazy like being a teacher. we'll see about that. otherwise here's an email i sent this morning (edited of course)

its great to hear from you. no worries. weddings are just big parties full of slightly toasty relatives and friends anyway. tell me some neat stuff about yr life? what the hell ya been up to? what uni are you studying at? what do you study? I'm all finished with school for a little while. maybe I'll go back in a few years. where do you work? I work for a university doing odd jobs of sorts. its a living. my partner and I just bought a house (we moved in this week!) so we're in the throes of homeownership and all the late nights of spackle and caulk that involves. at least we're not paying any attention to the pamphlet on lead based paint our realtor gave us....scrape...scrape. our house is super old by American standards, built in 1925, Arts and Crafts bungalow, which means it totally rocks! so that's the single most exciting part of my existence. I can't believe I'm 23 and I own a house! only in America where there is so much room and capital that any kid with a debit card can buy a house.

today is a sacred American holiday, Memorial day, which means no work and lots of barbeque. yummy. I'm making ensalada russa and my internationally famous tofu satay. Memorial day marks the beginning of summer and the barbeque season. we just got our first grill, we use it all the time. who needs a stove when you can cook outside! I always get Memorial Day mixed up with the holiday at the end of summer, Labour Day, which is somehow a holiday for working people. whatever that means. at the university I went to in Chicago there was a big public statue that looked like some kind of metal wiggle worm but on labour day the shadow it cast was in the shape of a hammer and sickle. as the day approached you could see it take shape and then morph away after it passed. it was cool. it was also cool because it was in front of the International Policy Building. Chicago was also the start of the Manhattan Project which made the first atomic explosion. They built the Uni a football field just so they could bury the labs underneath. secret. then after the project finished they tore down the stadium and Chicago has not had a football team ever since. That's my University of Chicago trivia. like you needed to know.

our little family has advanced to the modern age buy buying a DVD player. we held out for a long, long time, fearing it would go the way of the Laserdisc and also to avoid being caught in that curios fetishization of technology that so many ppl are caught in. But then the first season of the simpsons came out on DVD. and the simpsons is the single best program to grace the vacuum tube, so we bought it. we didn't have a player so we just looked at the box. then some one felt sorry for us and bought us player. but I digress. now we have this mail thing were movies just come in the mail from a list we make online and its very very nice. we've been all these must see movies from the early 90's like Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon. (both these movies are about Vietnam which is the point of my story) But something I've noticed in the movies set in the late 60's and 70's....America was so crazy in the 60's. some people are like...ooh hippies, the 60's were cool....that is so not true. evidently if you made the CIA mad, they shot you, if you used mob connections and then failed to oust Castro they shot you...if you said anything bad about the war they ruined yr life, until at some point everything collapsed and the powers that be couldn't contain the oh so erupting social change, then there was riots. but they did make killer Planet of the Apes movies (I recommend number 4, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes which is loosely based on the L.A. Watts Riots). every movie about the 60's I see makes me real happy to have skipped over that whole turbulent time. it seems like it was like normal to just assassinate everybody. that's not normal. but there was cool 60's rock from latin america namely mexico, brazil and el salvador. not to mention awesome afro-caribe stuff from the haiti. so that was a good thing. sure people were disaparados, but they sure rocked out.

next friday we close on our house! here is a new section that's being built on. i'm not sure where i'm going to go with it though...we went on a parasol buying spree and picked up wood/water..promise ring, [is just me or am i sensing some will johnson influence? they did do a single together?? sounds great to me, a real maturing, very nice completion] sad sappy sucker...modest mouse [kinda messy, which was expected], and a cd i had been meaning to buy ever since a day trip to mobile, al with my friend neal...ten rapid...mogwai.

so i'm sending out one of those scary emails were i tell people i know that this page exists. there are always a million errors, silly mistakes and sometimes offensive things up in these pages, so sorries in advance. its never really very personal though.. a bit of an update....after seeing a talk at halcyon books we bought a few more cds namely, two Sea and Cake, Saturnine, this old GBV single, and simon joyner. we also saw two zine kids read/give talks and hung out with them. amber does my evil twin sister and Abram does Gynomite (fearless feminist porn). they stayed with our friend and we spend the evening playing "I Never". it made me start thinking about subculture and how it involves people and myself. so maybe there'll be some stuff on that here in the near future. i'm thinking about getting rid of the music section. its kind of funny because in previous incarnations of this page, the bits on music were very in-depth and difficult to maintain. and the personal section was a mere blurb about me being a kid and Texas A&M. now the music section has collapsed a lot into a list of bands rather than discussions of anyone or other thing. i was thinking about dropping the bands all together and instead introducing some discussions on consolidation of ownership in the radio industry. that takes time, perhaps the next update. i must say though, that halcyon books is the scariest place for me in nashville.

For this update I've decided to add a new section that has some neato emails i've sent/received. i think this will be an easy way to express current and relevant ideas without spending a lot of extra time beating out text for the site. so check here . I'm also adding some new pictures and changing the photo presentation to make it easier on dial up modems. ( now that i'm back to having one.) Otherwise, lee has bought us a house. Its a very nice Arts and Crafts Bungalow from around 1925. Its in good shape, and located in snuggly East Nashville. a bit of a drive to Vanderbilt but well worth it. we finally have room for visitors and maybe even a roommate. we'll be doing a bit of traveling over the summer lee to Italy me to Vermont. but we'll be home plenty of time to enjoy our new house and launch ourselves head first into the perils of homeowning.

books: right now i'm reading Baltasar and Blimunda. This is the third Jose Saramago book i've read this year. I really enjoyed Blindness, thought All the Names was ok, and i hope this one is better. I was also on a big Gabriel Garcia Marquez kick at the beginning of this year reading Love in the Time of Cholera and of course 100 years of solitude. I'm looking for more 18th and 19th century historical fiction by 20th century Latin American and Iberian authors if any one has recommendations.

music: i was surprised by the Superchunk album Here's to Shutting Up. Its very good. Late Century Dream is quite an instant classic along with Florida's on Fire. As well a single for that album including a song Length of Las Ramblas was also very impressive. We also bought from Merge Eban and Charley a soundtrack by Stephin Merrit and Clambake vol. 1 in a series of superchunk's live in-store recordings. Of course there's a lot more to life than Superchunk. Moby has a new album may 18. i recommend Spun.com for excellent used cd selection. i got Milo Goes to College (don't ask its a high school thing) for $5. pretty good deal. as always if yr looking for mp3s check out Bearshare and get busy.

can you see how terribly long it has been since an update. somehow i don't mind since no one ever looks at this darn site anyway. so maybe its just for me and the occasionally wanderer. hey you wanderer, be sure to sign my slambook or guest book so that I know someone is out there. ok? so our first year in Nashville is coming up fast. soon we'll be able to move out of our miserable apt. and maybe? buy a house. hardwood floors! we've been buying a lot of furniture lately...check out some pics. its all mod/mid century stuff. I kind of like it though I never would have imagined myself as the owner of a kidney shaped table. we also bought a rug on ebay that is very cool. soon it will come in the mail and we will be so hip, we might explode.

now that we have a digital camera, there might be more updates. pictures really make a difference don't they? so, the update.... I quit that Amsouth job after about five minutes, worked downtown for a while and now to transcription for Vandy. Lee's really trying to get me motivated to apply to grad school, but I'm lagging behind. I know that going to school means leaving him behind (at least geographically) and that makes me sad. but its true, i've been checking out history programs and thinking about how to get a third recommendation. otherwise, I'm still searching for meaningful work. i've been doing a lot mp3 stuff recently on Gnuetella, using Bearshare. Now that we have fasty pasty cable modem i've been educating myself on disco and new wave. "Don't stop till you get enough." Lee dyed his hair blonde. sexxy! we got a new cat over the summer, pollock, he's so cute! but very stinky. he is named after Frederic Pollock, a guy who thought that history had missed its Marxist moment (i.e. revolution didn't make anything better) and that why the nazi's took control. He was German. Adorno takes his idea of missed moment and uses it in Negative Dialectics talking about the missed moment in philosophy (i.e. Hegel) and the end of the old way of the dialectic. so we named our cat after him. lee's in school, he schools around while I transcribe. maybe we'll go to Italy this summer.

Today was good day for our little home. Lee has an interview tomorrow at Borders books, the only of 15 or so bookstores and restaurants he put applications in at. I got a call today and the second interview I thought went so badly, turned out ok because I accepted a position at AMSouth bank as a drive through teller. It might not be meaningful work but since neither of us has had a job in two months it will really help on the long road of getting out of debt. Lee starts school in about a month, about the same time i graduate with my coveted Master's of Social Science degree.

We've been in Nashville since June, hanging around the house, playing SimCity3000 and meeting people in the philosophy department. Getting a job was a lot harder than it seemed and with $1000/mo in rent to pay, holding out for that coffee getting label job wasn't realistic. I'm still applying to places and perhaps something will come up.

Times are changing; from reorganizing our closets, to investing in spices lee and i are in a process of updating our belongings to a more "grownup" version. perhaps it is because we are moving to start a new life in a faraway land, or because our miserable cramped hyde park existence is finally getting the best of our psyches, but we are shedding our old habits as fast and thickly as our cats, Watson and Crick leave mats of their winter coat around the studio. But it true we are moving, as soon as we can form the city, from Chicago and from Hyde Park. A few weeks ago i was sorely complaining about how i hated the city and couldn't wait to leave. My cries are replaced now by two things, one to be excited about leaving and moving somewhere new, affordable, and temperate (well temperate for Southern grrl like me). Also looking for a job, in an interesting field. I'm definitely thinking about music marketing, product development, or even just coffee getting at a Nashville label. I've been reading non-stop about the Nashville scene and music industry stuff. It's all pretty intimidating and it has taken me a while to realize that first job is going to be pretty far away from my education. Not very interesting for most but for those who have spent countless hours and energies preparing (in the mind and the c.v.) for academia, the thought of seeking unexploited markets to sell pop music and products to is a little strange. (i thought i was on team with the good guys, the human rights advocates, the gender warriors, not the, well you know....business sector). After i get a job i plan on burying myself in good works like mentoring a child or volunteering at a woman's shelter, and i want to learn french and german, and buy some stuff from IKEA like those new ice trays that are shaped like X's and O's, then i'll hold garden parties in my backyard (!) serving mint juleps and tomato sandwiches with a new set of napkins. See, i'm just every day kid.

books: Right now i'm reading a book by Daniel James called Dona Maria's Story about Peronista politics and memory in Argentina. I went to a used booksale and found three books that had an interesting similarity. A book form the 70's call the "Screwing of the American Man" and form the 90's Generation Ecch as far as conservative/liberal they couldn't be further apart, but they shared this interesting distrust/reliance on mass media. like mass media can save as well as destroy an assumption shared (by the author) construction of "american(male)ness." So interesting. The third was about the 80's and was by Hunter S. Thompson but i did feeling like going that low, even for social science so i didn't buy it. I excited about reading the infamous "Closing of the American Mind" to look for similar tropes about media. Of course this all connects to my nearly completed MA thesis on Theodore Adorno and Popular Music. but enough about nerdy stuff.

music: lee and are packing away all of our cds and putting them in pro-sleeves and into little boxes from target. it all started when we visited our friend ryan over spring break (toxinlab...soon to be playing in Canada!) since he's a DJ and has a lot of cool stuff, he has all his music in this nifty dj case. we liked the idea (jewel cases be gone!) but wanted to be less practical so we've divided them up by genre (lee's music, bands Stephanie liked in High School) and artist (GBV, Superchunk, Magnetic Fields, REM). merge has rereleased old stuff form their matador past so i'm planning on picking up those early portistatic singles. yeah! will oldham is playing under a funny name at the double door this month. jets to brazil are playing their own name.

I've decided to send the url for this page to the folks i go to school with. of course it's not a big deal but thinking about it and looking at this stuff i realized that all this writing was mostly for people i hadn't seen in a long time. I usualy think of it as replacing those mass emails that people get, where friends update their lives. Those emails are great, but they are kind of impersonal. If you are going to be impersonal about letting people know what's up, i'd rather go all the way and post it to a site. That is one reason and the other is to this day, and now its been a few years, i still compulsively check thedakotasmith once a week or so. If you have a page you like me to post or compulsively check email it over and i'll see what i can do. I really like dakota's page because it has a web cam and you can see him typing sometimes. Now this is the guy i went to sr. prom with and haven't seen in person since 1997 so the thought of watching him type does in fact instill a technological awe in me. Lee and i are thinking of getting voice recognition software for our 'puter and when we do.. woowee! Thanks to Ana, for the idea. We did a couple hours of research and decided on just the software for now so that i chit chat to the computer while i write papers drinking bloody marys in my bed. machines...

A girl in Prague tells me that I never update my page. I'm not bragging that I know a girl in Prague but someone I know has gotten so far out of Texas as to be worth mentioning. She hopes to get a job working as an English teacher in Spain. If you can help send me press and I'll pass it along. I am looking for a job in Nashville or Memphis or Boston. I would like to be gainfully employed next year, but I know me and my liberal arts degree and now MA doesn't exactly smooth the way. I'm hoping to break it big into the Nashville recording industry as an intern.

Music: I quite like Pedro the Lion. I finally bought the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series yesterday after many years of owning on a tape some one made me. Lee and I went to see the Promise Ring and Centro*matic last weekend. The show was amazing, as both those bands always are. It was very nice to see a texas band playing far from home and we wished them luck as they continued to tour.

I've lived in Chicago for about six months now, and it is in fact as cold as I thought it would be. There were some scary days right around Christmas when it snowed several feet in a night and thought I might not make it through. Fresh snow is eerily silent and with the world covered in it walking around felt like the beginning of a bad horror film where the unsuspecting coed is heading towards a dinner party and gets snatched by Humanoids From the Deep. Well, I was mugged, but not when it was snowing. At breakfast this morning my world traveling friend from Cambridge assured me that people get mugged everywhere and I do not argue with that but I will attest that in the four years I lived at Texas A&M Univ. the thought of some one mugging me never crossed my mind, now getting run over by a drunken frat boy in a Dodge Ram.... that's all part of the package, but not mugged. So I tell my British buddy that I am tired of living in the city and i would like to move back to the suburbs. Its not that Chicago isn't nice, it seems to have a lot to over but under two conditions, that you have money and that you not live on the South Side. Lee and i had a wonderful weekend out last week, we went up North to a Suburb that sounds like a Texas town, Schaumburg. We went to IKEA and a movie chain Mexican food. I miss the suburbs and convenience and not having to spend a fortune on everything. The city is much harsher, people are all trying to survive, get by, get ahead. I remember days of bored waiting in high school, nothing but time and plenty of money for cds and little pockets fulls of expresso beans and hazelnut latte. It was easy to get a hold of things. Now we have to make a special trip to buy cat food. I'm not ready to pay three times as much in the city for something i use so much of. I got a Target card. It makes me feel grown up.

Books: Reading In the Fascist Bathroom by Greil Marcus. Sucks. In an Antique Land by Amitav Gosh was good.

School: I am in graduate school and a lot of people from my undergraduate and other previous lives ask me what it is like. Now, granted i'm not really in graduate school or at least that is the University of Chicago treats its Master's students. Graduate school is school of course, there are classes and papers, no tests as far as i can tell. There is more discussion and your professor cares about you less. Office hours are actually 15 min long instead of a pretense of organization. Your teacher has often written books you read for other classes. every one has stories about famous academics. Everyone already has an opinion about everything. For me, coming from a "lesser" institution and another discipline a lot of ideas are new to me and it's weird learning about this from very biased sources. I guess maybe it is like that everywhere. I can't imagine how it couldn't but i never notice before. I've been thinking a lot about graduate school and why i'm not doing very well here. It's not like i'm doing badly but certainly not flourishing. That's a strange thing for anyone, to get up to a place you are so excited about and realize the resources you expected the roads you were planning to take just aren't there.

I'm ready to start traveling again. Well i'm ready after i pay off this saddle of a loan i took to come here. My biggest fear is that i have just spent $20,000 on yet another piece of paper with my name on it and i still wont be able to use it or find a job. Right now i'm thinking about getting a teaching certificate and teaching secondary school in Nashville. I didn't need MA to do that you know. much less an expensive one from the University of Chicago. I'd really like to do publishing or Music rep stuff. Copywriting, that would be ok. I really want to get out though. I have EU citizenship and i'd like to use it before i lose it. I thought about just moving like my friend who is now in Prague, can you tell I've been thinking about this and her, man i wish i had the guts, but money's always there, begging the question.

Lee interviewed for a job that could have taken us to Amsterdam. We talk about lee getting his MA and me paying off my loans and taking off for things abroad. Perhaps we can spend a summer there studying some language or other. I'd like to learn German. A lot of the books i look for in the library are in German and i feel silly because i can't read them. Not very many books on punk and youth culture are written in Spanish, which is sad. I'd like to study Catalan youth culture, especially music. A little language and culture study. Vanderbilt as an Iberian studies program that looks good. I also really want to go to Costa Rica. Just get on a plane and go.

Friends: Some really good stuff has been going on as well. I have a wonderful friend in a girl from Bristol, she's a doll. I hope i get to visit her next year while she's in law school. lee and i are doing well. We have happy times in our tiny apt. When get out of Hyde Park its always a lot of fun. When the weather warms up we'll have plenty to do in Chicago. The cats are fat and sleepy and so you know things are going ok. I should have pictures of them up on the web page soon. As well as some new photos of us. I dyed my hair with a "trendy" blonde streak and i quite like it. Its grown out a lot especially form this summer, so i'm entering the "people with long hair" mix. We live in a studio with two cats and boyfriend and things are tight. We have a lot of couches but no chairs. I really want to have people over for a party but i stop myself, where will they sit? my bed? It's not that way. You know what's different about grad school? every time you go to a party or to a friends for dinner you have to bring something to drink, a bottle of wine, a six pack of (good) beer. When people come over to your house they do the same. I gather up Sam Adams in my fridge (a cool 1960's model Frigidaire that's only four feet tall).

I'm me and I go to the Univ. of Chicago as a graduate student in an interdisciplinary master's program in the social science. I graduated from Texas A&M Univ. in August 2000 with a Bachelor's in English. There I studied linguistics, classics and literature. I'm not thrilled with the education I received there, lets face it, A&M is a conservative, Texas school renowned for it's science and engineering programs. However I had some wonderful and influential professors, (Dr. Bucholtz, Dr. Eide, Dr. Brooks, Dr. Rosner, Dept. of English) and some great times. I was in a few student organizations, KANM student radio and Sigma Tau Delta. I worked for the South Central Modern Language Association and attended a their 55th annual conference in Memphis, TN. I did editorial work including publishing and copy editing as well as hung around the office a lot.

When I get to Chicago in two weeks, I'm not sure what I'm going to be like. what will I be doing. How will a ex-indierock Texas girl adapt to a city, to the cold?

Music: I work at a radio station KANM in college station. I like it all right. I'm officially the Programming Director but I also review music and book shows. I like to help out bands (support your scene and all that) So if you want to play in College Station (I don't know why anyone would) email me. As far as the music I like, its always changing, just like me! I'll make you a mix tape if you ask real nice. I love sharing music with others because it is very like sharing a physical part of yourself.

Books: I read a lot yes and think about the things I read. I don't talk much about books because I have an inherent fear of being pretentious. My favorite authors are John Kennedy Toole, William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. My favorite poets are Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost and Emily Dickenson. Otherwise I try to read and absorb everything with an open mind. Book are an important part of life because they allow you to both live vicariously through the characters and to peek into the thoughts of another person. These things are rare in real life and commonplace in books. The hardest thing about books is getting back into the habit of reading them. I tried at the beginning of the summer and I read three new books but then I got all distracted by the steady pace of life and never read another. Right now I'm picking up, and putting down, White Noise.

Friends: They hold you together when you fall apart. They are the tie that binds the soul to reality. We glean closeness and superficial kind of necessity from our friends. They are gifts to be exchanged every single one. I had a bunch of friends once in a delicately created social network, but it got all messed up slowly over about a year. Now if I had any friends they would complain about how I spend too much time with my boyfriend. Yesterday, it had been a month since I had seen any of my "friends". My roommates however are all out of town and still count. Those are the nice ones. Shout outs to jenny, whose been my friend for ever and I love her greatly, and lisa who i spent the weekend with back in C-town.

School: I'm a Senior at Texas A&M Univ.-College Station. I'm an English major and that means i'm planning on going to graduate school. so if you are from Berkeley, Northwestern, Duke, Simmons, Columbia or UNC-Chapel Hill, I'd love to hear what you think about those places. I'm afraid to leave Texas though i haven't been here all that long. My parents are from Pass Christian, MS. I feel like I'm a close connection to the South. I've never really been north and it doesn't bother me much. When i get my Ph.D. i'd like to teach Southern Literature at the Univ. of Georgia-Athens, but that's a long ways away. OR I want to be an insane cultural studies professor picking apart our ridiculous society. Right now my focus is on youth subculture, esp. punk/hardcore and zines. I've been working on a project, check it out