Lonely in Pittsburgh

I'm a Pittsburgh Lifer. Big proponent of the city, an advocate for the Northside. I consider myself a goodwill ambassador to the out of towners. For years I've been touring people around the city, showing them favorite spots and introducing them to colorful Pittsburgh characters. I also tend to sell the area to prospective homeowners, enumerating the pros and cons of being a city dweller. For me the pros have always outweighed the cons, but recently there's just been something missing. Or someone. It is not often I meet someone I would consider spending every single day with. A few weeks ago, I met that person. In from England for a few months, he came to Banjo Club at the Elks with a friend of mine. Of course, in typical Miss Allegheny fashion, I toured him and his friend through the Northside with the able assistance of my best friend, extolling the virtues of Randyland and Troy Hill cemeteries. We spent nearly every day together after that. For some strange reason, Pittsburgh was more beautiful than ever on those days. Suddenly the skyline was more enchanting, the smell of bus exhaust intoxicating and even the homeless men on the park benches and toothless women on the buses seemed to have a special glow. For two weeks this city was the best place on earth. Unfortunately reality gave me a swift kick in the ass. He had to return to England and I had to stay here. True to form I surprised my guy with a private DUKW boat ride. But I didn't give Pittsburgh a hard sell, didn't really give him much of a tour. We just sat together and smiled. I couldn't bring myself to tell him all the great things about Pittsburgh because I knew he couldn't stay. And when he did leave the following day, Pittsburgh suddenly seemed a much darker, lonelier place. A friend recently told me Pittsburgh had been named the loneliest city. I don't know if it's true (I haven't found any information suggesting it), but it feels true. Which is why I am going to England next month. OH SNAP.

Mustache (mug) Rides, Five Cents

Mustaches. They are enchanting things. A well groomed mustache is not only pleasing to the eye, it sends a message. It says hey, I can grow hair on my upper lip and posses the fortitude and commitment necessary to maintain and display it for the world to see. I've been a huge fan of the mustache for many years now. I'm devoted to handlebars and have a certain fondness for Dali.

My affinity extends to the venerable mustache organizations like The Handlebar Club - raising the (handle)bar since 1947 - and the Svenska Mustaschklubben in Malmo. Through their information I have learned about the wonderful world of mustache accessories such as mustache snoods, curlers, wax and cups.

The mustache cup was invented in 1830 by Harvey Adams, a genius in his own right. The cup features a mustache guard, a ledge, shielding the delicate and pampered mustache from liquid. Genius! Ingenious! Since that time the mustache cup has had many incarnations, the latest being a modern mug. We had little need for the carefully crafted and elaborately decorated cups of old, but the mug is perfect for the gentleman on the go. I recently purchased one at the East Ohio St. Goodwill, and knew exactly who needed it.

I am, by nature, a giving person, and so I presented the mug to a neighbor named Colin. I can almost always find him at Buena Vista Coffee in the War Streets. He was delighted to recieve the mug, and I was happy to give it to him...but I was a bit saddened. I will never need a mustache mug, snood, curler or wax, because I will never have a mustache. It is perhaps the great tragedy of my life.

I said goodbye to the mug and drank my own coffee from a plain old cup, sitting outside the cafe and enjoying the weather. I have no mustache. I never will. But I have a great coffeeshop withing walking distance, strange and lovely neighbors, and a Goodwill that never fails to surprise me. For these things I am grateful.

Declaration.

It's time I finally came out with it and told you all the truth. I am in love. Yes, I am deeply, passionately, undeniably in love. The affair of a lifetime, the stuff films and books are made of. Naturally I want nothing more than to share this love, to shout it from the rooftops - I am in love with Pittsburgh!

We've been together for some time now, Pittsburgh and I. I'm not saying it has been easy - it hasn't. Oh, we've had rough patches like everyone else. At times I didn't think we would pull through, but here we are. Because every time things get stale or monotonous, something wonderful happens and I fall in love all over again.

And so, in celebration of my love for the beautiful city of champions, I will plaster these messages all over the internets in the hope that somewhere out there someone is reading them and loving Pittsburgh as much as I do.

Internet vs Real Life.

Hey internets! I know you don't read me or anything but I thought I would let you know I'm still alive. I kinda validate my life though technology anymore.

This is mostly because of FACEBOOK. Facebook drives me to distraction simply by being distracting. I can spend hours per day glued to the screen, incredibly focused on ongoing wall conversations and Poking wars. Actually, that's not true - I detest poking wars. The quickest way to spark my true temper is by engaging me in a facebook poking war. Really, any kind of poking war. I think there are probably three kinds. Two of them have to happen in real life.

As I increasingly communicate via facebook I realize I must supplement that with other forms of contact. Maybe calling or *gasp* actually seeing people in person. Oh my god, how will I have the time to see people face to face? I'm too busy commenting on their status!

In other news, Pittsburgh has been pretty quiet since June, although last night Vice President Joe Biden was in town for some fundraiser. Honestly, I didn't even notice till this morning.

So WHY was June so fantastic in the Burgh? WELL, the Three Rivers Arts Fest was in full swing at and around the recently re-opened Point State Park (which doesn't look so damn different considering it took, umm, THREE FUCKING YEARS to fix it!) to the delight of Art & Fried Food lovers the city over. I had a corndog. Me loves corndogs. But I digress.

June also marked Pittsburgh's annual Pride Parade and Pride in the Streets party/concert. It was unquestionably the best Pittsburgh Pride to date, with tony winner Jennifer Holliday as the concert headliner and the fabulous God-Dess and She. I love Pride. It's wild and fearless and fun - it's just the warmest feeling the LGBT community can have. This might be because of all the spandex-clad thighs generating friction, but there is love and acceptance in the air as well. And can we talk about Liberty Avenue in all of its homosexual glory - that is the longest single stretch of gay bars in the 'burgh with five, count 'em, five bars in two blocks, and serves as gay pride headquarters each year. Some FAAABULOUS pictures of the evening's festivities...

And before I sign off, a little musical recommendation: Action Camp. They're a local act and I saw them a few weeks ago at Gooskis and was totally enchanted. Check 'em out.

Thoughts I Think

I have been a bad blogger. An absent, neglectful, BAD blogger. Sigh. I had such high hopes for this blog - I'd write faithfully, I'd learn to be entertaining and charming while telling a story, I'd use the word shan't early and often. So what happened? Well my friends, life happened. That's right. I was attacked by a merciless and demanding life. It compelled me to go to work and meet people and even leave the state, and worst of all, to become bored with my own thoughts. The sad part is is that I allowed it! Hell, I full on OWNED it. But lately I have found myself far less boring and I am ready to recommit to this whole interwebz communication tool. I will stand (at least annually) on my cyber soapbox and boldly declare my thoughts to the world!!!

THOUGHT NUMBER ONE:

Fudge is DELICIOUS. Yeah, I'll say it. Because I am willing to go there. I don't care what you say about me. Bitches ain't shit.

THOUGHT NUMBER TWO:

If I could have any 5 people, living or dead, on my side in a bar fight they would be the following: Bea Arthur, George Peppard, Gregory Peck ("Don't make me hit you with my ring hand!"), Janet Reno and John E. Lane Jr. My pack and I would kick some ass. I mean, look at the logistics here: George Peppard ALONE, George Peppard of the motherloving A TEAM for christsakes, could lay down some serious pain. And the ladies in the line up? Myself, Bea Arthur and RENOSMASH could take down, I'm estimating, a group of seventeen to thirty three angry leather-clad bikers and still find time to go shopping for shoulder pads.

After our epic battles the six of us, Peckers, Zbornak, John, Renosmash, Col. Hannibal and I, would go down to Dee's for celebratory drinks, all of us laughing together making people wonder how they could ever belong to such a group. I'd take out my Luckies to share with Peckers while Peppard chucks me on the shoulder to congratulate me on my slick fight moves during the last fight. Turn, big smile and wink to the camera and FREEZEFRAME, roll credits.

God, that's awesome.

THOUGHT NUMBER THREE:

I should blog regularly. I wonder if I can blog from work? Hm...

FUDGE.

Lavender Blue Days and Library Books

I love books. My uncle has the biggest personal library I have ever seen, and he helps me add to my own burgeoning collection now and then. We went book shopping at the Caliban outlet (up a few storefronts on Craig from the real Caliban) and when I left I had three bags full. Later that day I showed a friend what I had purchased and I suddenly realized with horror mounting, as I pulled each book out, I have a problem. Those books painted a vivid and disturbing picture of the person who picked them and took them all home. What was in there? Well...

1. Women Who Kill by Ann Jones
2. The Journals of Sylvia Plath (got home and discovered I already had a copy)

3. An Outline of Abnormal Psychology (published in 1921)

4. Cranial Surgery (published 1926)
5. The Metamorphosis - Kafka

6. A Children's Garden of Verses by Stevenson

Among others. Oy.

The cranial surgery one is pretty funny, just because of how little they really knew at the time. I watch enough Discover Health Channel to notice the advances we've made.

But I'm happiest about getting the Robert Louis Stevenson book. I picked it up because I thought the illustrations were pretty and it was old, and the uncle was paying. When I brought it home it stayed in the kitchen for a few days. After about three days my mom came to me and asked me where that book came from? Was it mine? Did it come in the mail? It turns out she had a copy just like that one when she was a kid. Her sister has it now and I think she has missed it because she's been carrying it around ever since.

I can understand that. My own favorite childhood book had eluded me for years till we found each other again. As a child, my mother would take me to the local library. The library was a beautiful building that looked like a castle from the outside and had trees and pigeons and friendly hobos all around it. I felt it was a magic place. During one trip to the library I saw a small old book, and on the spine it had very colorful handwritten letters: BEYOND THE PAW PAW TREES BY PALMER BROWN. I picked it up and after glancing at the cover I knew I had to check it out. I was probably 7 then and I fell in love with that book.

The story was perfect - a little girl whos father is gone - he makes his living chasing rainbows - takes a trip to see her aunt, who lives on a mirage. She leaves on a day when the sky happens to be lavender blue. This is no coincidence; special things always happen on lavender blue days. She brings her cat, meets a fat lady on a train, and gets a camel, a parrot, and some weird little pink fuzzy animal called a toby on the way. Oh, and she finds her dad, too. They find the rainbow and the gold at the end. It's adorable. The illustrations are ornate and whimsical. There's nothing about that book I do not love. I would estimate that I checked that book out at least 20 times in between the ages of 7 and 10. When I was 11, tragedy struck. They had taken it out of circulation.

For years I tried to track it down. Ebay, Amazon, book sales, antique stores. A couple of times I did see it, but it was a cruel joke. Today that book is worth around $250.00, which I certainly could not afford. I just couldn't forget about that book! I could not let it go, because I loved it so intensely. The books I read when I was a kid have influenced me immensely, and that includes Beyond the Paw Paw Trees...and Medea.

Anyway, cut to me at 19, waiting for my friend at a coffee shop. It's a lovely spring day and I sat outside smoking and drinking my coffee. All of the sudden I look up and notice - the sky is lavender blue. It is a lavender blue day! That reminded me of the book, so when my friend showed up I told her about it. She smiled after I finished and told me to stay there, she'd be back in a minute. About five minutes later she came back and put something on the table in front of me. My book! It was a copy of Beyond the Paw Paw Trees: The Story of Anna Lavinia. I could have cried. She'd purchased it at a library sale the day before at the paltry sum of fifty cents.

Not only was is the book, oh no - it was the book. It was the very same copy I read as a kid, stamped with the library branch name and all the markings. So it found its way back to me eventually, on a beautiful lavender blue day.

First Flux!

Ooo, my very first real blog! It feels like I took the training wheels off now that I've left LJ behind and I'm riding on my own, all the way to Blogspotville. Very exciting!

But where to start? Where to begin? I must set my standards high for my first post! Eh, realistically I know I'll write about anything that pops into my head and then fail to spell check before posting this. So what? That's me...uncensored and grammatically incorrect. Well, I do my best to spell things right. I know I have some grammatical shortcomings, like:

1. My overzealous use of my friend the comma.

2. Is it Blank Person and I or Blank Person and Me?

3. Do I care?

4. I often forget about semicolons. Instead of using them when appropriate I leave them lonely and untouched on my keyboard. I should give my semicolon more love. And not just to make winky faces like this - ;)

Wink!

So I, like many others, have my issues with using the English language, its devices and constructions. Oh, but I am a pretty damn near decent little speller. I find I am very analytical about sounds - the sounds of words, more specifically. I have always paid more attention than necessary to how a word feels in my mouth. Is it a crisp word? Soggy? (Yes, there are soggy words and they gross me out) What is my soft palate doing? What's my tongue doing? Ooo, I like that - keep doing that. Good job, mouth.

I'm putting my oral awareness (shut up, don't make fun) to good use each Friday, auditing a dialects class with one of my favorite professors, Sheila. Sheila is one of the kindest people I know, a great teacher and a damn funny person...oh, and lucky me, she's my advisor. In my college career I have taken a total of five classes with Sheila which she advised me to take. I maintain that she either really likes me or does not wish me on the rest of the world. WINK semicolon! ;) Today we worked on French. When it's done correctly that is a HOT dialect in which to speak. Again, my analytical and IPA skills served me well in quickly gaining a basic grasp of the sounds. Ah, but there is so much more to learn about it! I want to learn it all. All of the possible things I can learn about dialects and more specifically, all the ways to impart this knowledge to students. That's a big part of why I am taking this class; I'd love to get my masters in speech pedagogy some day and teach. I'm a lucky girl because Sheila is the perfect person to observe in this capacity. She's smart, witty, quick to adapt and explains things in a variety of ways so that all of her students find something that resonates for them. That woman rocks and I'm so glad I have the opportunity to continue learning from her.

So I was thinking, what can I throw in here to liven things up a bit? One answer came to mind: trivia. More specifically, catholic trivia. While I am not at ALL a religious person, I was raised Catholic and have a surprising knowledge of silly little Catholic things. So without further ado, a (hopefully) weekly feature on my blog...dum da da da!!!!

CATHOLIC CORNER!!!

(Woot!)


My favorite patron saint, Saint Dymphna, is the patron saint of the mentally ill, epileptics, runaways and happy families. Her feast day is May 15th, but I'm sure you all knew that. I mean, they put out the decorations so early now...

Dymphna was from Ireland and I think her dad tried to sleep with her or something equally weird - I'm a little fuzzy on the details. Anyway, she ran away to Belgium where she lived in a church until her crazed father tracked her down and decapitated her. Sad face.

There's no history to back this up, and she is practically identical to another saint, St. Dahmat.

Oh, and she was a princess. Pretty pretty princess D, your dad wanted to get naughty, you said no-no and went to chocolate-town. (That means Belgium) Oh well, you lost your head in the end.

Hm. That sounded like something Anne Brannen might say. She's another professor I admire, and someday I shall share some of her wisdom. But I don't want to overdo this thang on the first day.

So from me to anyone, and definitely to Saint Dymphna, enjoy the day and take a minute to feel some words when you talk!


Over and out.





Moist. Moist is a soggy word. Yuck.