1.17.03 – household religions

the little brick house on martha street has become our own, now. after 4 days of cleaning came a week of unpacking, which required lots more consultation and discussion than it does when moving into one’s own house: can the spoons go in this drawer? can we hang this poster here? moving in together lets you to learn things about someone that just aren’t important in a relationship without cohabitation: do you need desk space? do you do the dishes while you’re cooking or after? is an unmade bed an offence to the eye? can the cat walk on the dinner table?

we went thrift store shopping for furniture; thanks to the religious charities that run most thrift stores, we now have a catholic couch, a christian end table and a mormon entertainment center. if boise had a better representation of eastern religions we might be able to get a buddhist coffee table, perhaps a muslim coat rack, and the living room could be a regular salon. perhaps the hari kirshna temple down the street will have a yard sale and then we could really let the furniture duke it out over religion. andy and i are both recovering catholics who lack the energy to fight over god; we just try to be gentle, with each other and with the world around us, and go from there.

last year’s new years resolution was to stop using beauty products that are tested on animals; this year i’m trying to eat only cage-free poultry and fish. i just finished fast food nation; luckily i don’t eat beef anyway, but after reading that i’d never be able to look at a hamburger the same again. with our evenings free (still unemployed until monday), we’ve been cooking up a vegetarian storm in the new kitchen. still trying to find a way to make tofu palatable, but i’m not entirely optimistic.

1.16.03 – ring of power

i knew something was fishy about that man….

1.15.03 – overheard

just write something

i haven’t been silent for lack of things to say, just so much uncertainty and change that it’s hard to force a coherent thought. tonight i headed for the flying M, armed with a notebook and pen, thinking that perhaps the narrow lines and the inviting, pale green paper (spiral bound, cardboard cover) would seduce a complete thought out of me. it seems that no one in boise has anything to do on a wednesday night in january except hang out at the flying M in noisy, gossipy groups. things like, “and then i woke up naked” and “i’d put ice in my nipples, wouldn’t you?” kept drifting over from the next table, and it was impossible to ignore the fact that i, with my cup of peppermint tea and solo notebook, writing about employment insecurities, was boring. i moved to a table in the corner, but the girl next to me was busy listing all the ways in which she was psychic: “and sometimes, i’ll say a word, and my dad will be like, hey, i was just thinking about that word too! and it won’t be, like, a normal word, it’ll be a really weird word.”

phrases that led search engines to slithy tove this week include:

fear of dentist cartoon

married lady to cheet with (sic)

parties and sushi and women

tod’s oxford shoes

raspberries & worst movie

rabbits having sex coffee mug

plus the usual references to a certain adult film star whose last name is the same as this blog’s. stop looking here, you dirty old men!

1.14.03 – the beautiful people

1: frolicking amongst the cactopuses

please visit. i nearly lost it trying to make the nested tables behave, plus i’m kinda pleased with a couple of the photos. it helps when one has friends who are capable of being beautiful even when they’re hung over.

1.12.03 – at the employment agency

typing speed: 70 wpm. whomp whomp. the rest of the experience was demoralizing and i’m just not prepared to talk about it yet.

the photos from new years are coming, and in the meantime, i put up the promised picture of paul’s bathroom library.

1.6.03 – Boise, ID (to stay, for a while at least)

three days of down-and-dirty cleaning, scrubbing, paint scraping, painting, papering, sweeping, mopping, hammering, puttying, plastering and dusting later, plus two trips each to home depot, bed bath and beyond, and shopko, the house is ready for us to move into. we’re renting this place, but it sort of feels like trial home ownership – the dishwasher leaks, the washing machine shorts out its circuit, the last tenants didn’t even think about cleaning out the fridge, let alone scrubbing dirt off the window sills, and the bathroom was too hideous for words until we started ripping stuff down with a hammer. next week (or month)’s task is the backyard, but first there must be furniture, curtains, boxes unpacked, find the damn shower curtain so we can stop taking baths, and then i have to find a job, since it seems that the Boise Weekly wasn’t as amused with Princess Jennifer (dec 30) as i was. tonight i’m playing survivor with my closet; this takes some time, as deciding which clothes get voted off the island pretty much necessitates a fashion show. my parents stop by my room and wonder why i’m wearing red nylon surfer shorts, a purple lace bra, and a scarf.

1.1.03 – Tucson, AZ

it was sometime after the sun set today that we’d all made it back from phoenix and managed to bath and dress for the day that had, er, nearly passed us by. the drive was rough; peyton nearly missed her plane and joe had to yak into a bag of chex mix. dinner at a generic all-things-asian restaurant was subdued, and since then we’ve been laying around the living room dj-ing for one another. paul has just begun making gin and tonics, however, so we might perk up after all.

this is the new year’s of the over-educated and under-employed: slumber-partying at paul’s tonight we have two harvard grads, five stanford grads, plus a few graduate degrees, and at the moment only one of us is employed. that’s right: seven grads, one million dollars of education, and only one job. we do play a mean game of scrabble, tho. they should put us in those prospective student catalogues. here’s what life after a liberal arts degree really looks like, kids.

the living room looks like a youth hostel, with backpacks and sleeping bags and skateboards scattered around the room, a fake log crackling in the fire place, and Willy the cat jumping about from lap to lap. paul sorts his books thus: fiction and reference go in the bookcases in the bedroom, non-fiction goes in the bookcases in the living room, and the bookcase in the bathroom has reading one might enjoy while using the facilities. selections include:

zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

the hitch-hiker’s guide to the galaxy

study guide for the GRE lit. exam

civilization and its discontents

the gashlycrumb tines

acu-yoga

the phobias and anxiety workbook

the saga of erik the viking

the art of t.s. eliot

the cat who could read backwards

the indespensible calvin and hobbes.

something for everyone. there’s even a desk lamp, for good reading light. i will photograph this bathroom later.

1.1.03 – Phoenix, AZ

guest blogger, mr. paul:

It has been a Very Car Christmas, or perhaps a Very Car Kwanzaa – I’m not sure exactly what holiday is being spanned here. At any rate, we spent two hours on the I-10 driving up to Senor Steve Marlowe’s house west of Phoenix, which for most of our guests was a reverse playback of the last two hours of their drive to Tucson from L.A. We are myself and Princess Jennifer and Lauren and Julia and Stewart and Joe and Jake, and Peyton. We left the cat at home.

Marlowe is an enabler and has been mixing everyone Tom Collinses (Colinsii?) and so things have degenerated as you wuold expect. I wore a tiara for some time and then lost it. Steve is blending something and making an ungodly noise doing it. The local development rent-a-cops (or possibly real cops, as some attest–Julia’s got a picture) showed up and asked us to stop playing the Hives and Björk and A-Ha so loud, which is probably for the best, since I was burning far too many calories jumping around the room in the shiny shirt that used to belong to Lauren and trying to sing melodies that are just way above my range, no matter what the extent of my inebriation.

I am pleased that worlds have collided in a satisfactory way—my friends from Iowa and Stanford (and the web) have all melded into a sort of mélange cake that is, as Peyton says, “totally tasty.” Lauren and Stewart took a few hits for the team and are now unconscious. Stewart emptied his alimentary canal into the toilet and then took a photo of it with his digital camera. He’s a good man. Perhaps we can link to the photo at some point.

Julia just took a photo of me posting this entry. Perhaps we can link to that as well.

This is all getting a little confusing a cinema verité, especially since there are now two people with cameras taking pictures of me at the computer. Perhaps we should move elsewhere now. Outside the sky is sparkly (we found Saturn in the sky, happily squatting in the western part of Taurus) but it is also damned cold, and I think my sleepnig bag is still out in the car.

12.30.02 – job hunting

December 30, 2002 Boise Weekly ATTN: “Search for the Perfect Receptionist” 109 S. 4th St. Boise, ID 83702 Dear Boise Weekly,

Once upon a time there was a young princess named Jennifer (hereafter referred to as “our princess”). Long long ago, when our princess was a wee high school senior, she interned with the Boise Weekly for a semester. Although her American Government teacher believed that she was prowling the legislature looking for breaking news, she really spent most of her time hanging around the BW office helping out with the top10 music lists and developing a taste for journalism. After high school, our princess went on to Stanford University, where, during a brief stint as a computer science major, she increased her typing speed to 70 WPM and became familiar with both PC and Mac platforms as well as a wide variety of word processing, spreadsheet and database software. Upon graduating, our princess went to work for a dot.com during the tech boom in Silicon Valley. The money was good, but our princess just wasn’t happy. Why not? She discovered that she preferred working with non-profit organizations over money-grubbing Big Business-types. Her search for co-workers who loved their jobs, not their paychecks, led her to the American Conservatory Theatre, where she became the assistant to the Producing Director. This job helped her refine her skills as a receptionist: doing battle over the phone with difficult agents, sorting mail, running interference for her boss when he didn’t want to take a call, and filing headshots until her eyes bled. For the past few years, our princess has worked as a stage manager in a variety of theatrical contexts, from outdoor festivals to touring educational companies. This has made her adaptable, responsible, and cool under pressure. She’s a meticulous record-keeper and is comfortable managing multiple projects at a time. She responded to the needs of her cast and crew, while remaining unruffled in the presence of the most difficult personalities and challenging situations. A perfect receptionist, of course has a British accent. Although our princess in is a native Boisean, she spent a year perfecting her faux British accent in the pubs of Oxford. Additional travel abroad in Europe and Asia made her self-reliant, resourceful, and good at sleeping in train stations. Today our princess has just returned to Boise after traveling the eastern United States with an educational theatre company. She’s thrilled to be back in Boise, and, a devoted reader of the Boise Weekly, was thrilled to discover that BW was looking for her: the perfect receptionist. The End. The moral of this story is that our princess would be the perfect receptionist for the Boise Weekly: she’s smart, computer literate, loves working with people, and can fake a British accent over the phone. Sincerely, JCG

12.29.02 – Boise, ID

apartment shopping with A this week. the most beautiful apartment in the world is going to slip through my fingers later this afternoon, and i’m beside myself with grief. our choices are:

3 bedroom house

university neighborhood

frumpy brick exterior

$500/mo, utilities inc.

2 bedroom apartment

north end (hip, liberal neighborhood)

victorian attic apartment

$650/mo + electric heat

the house is cheap, and it is the fiscally responsible thing to do, plus A really really wants the house. i want the apartment so bad i can taste it – upstairs in a victorian house, sloping ceilings, white-washed walls, little nooks and shelves molded into the plaster walls, black-and-white checked tile floor in the bathroom and in the sunny yellow kitchen. equidistance between the co-op (wonderful hippy natural foods grocery store), and the ymca (happy family-style gym where i work out), in the hippest, liberal-est neighborhood in the city – shady, elm-tree lined streets in the summers, a 45 minute drive to the ski hill in the winters. the house has a dishwasher and a fireplace, hardwood floors and a garage, but that doesn’t change the fact that it feels like a beige living box with a new coat of paint. i love rooms with character, with life, with history.

i will give up the apartment, but i’m not ashamed to shed tears over the loss of a place in which i have already mentally lived, loved, laughed, thrown dinner parties and watched the seasons change in the trees outside the bedroom window. i will do all of these things in the house, and i will get over the apartment once we move in and start picking thru yard sales for furniture, ripping out the ugly fixtures in the bathrooms, and begin the process of living in the house. when i saw it, it was full of someone else’s stuff; it didn’t look like a clean slate where i could imagine our life together there.

my older brother can live for months in a new apartment amid half-unpacked boxes, with framed pictures leaning against the walls and clothes still in the suitcases. i’ve seen him do this in nearly every apartment he’s moved to. i guess housing simply isn’t as important to some people as it is me. maybe it’s some sort of flip side of the wanderlust that keeps me moving; when i come home, i want to have a home to come into, that’s cozy and welcoming comfortably cluttered. i want lighting that’s gentle and flattering, soft furniture, high ceilings and deep colors. i resist the apartment-complex style beige-living-box most of all; i seek out the funky, oddly shaped apartments with narrow hallways, uneven floors and doors that lead nowhere. i am most comfortable in a house that feels as if it has been lived in for many years, by many people. it’s a space that has absorbed a sense of purpose, the walls have drunk up laughter and tears and the need for shelter and protection.