Power Love

Your definitive resource. That's all, just your definitive resource.

30 November 2006

I AM READING
Tuesday, December 5, The Stained Glass, Evanston. With the 2nd Story storytellers, so it'll be good stories all around. And wine. Hey--the more you drink, the better I write.
I'm reading my I-lied-to-a-priest story and though this is the second time reading it in front of an audience, it may be the last because who knows when the hand of God will rip through the heavens and toss my butt down to Hell? Huh? Seriously, who does know? I'd like to plan around it.
DETAILS:
The Stained Glass
1735 Benson Avenue
Evanston, IL 60201
7pm
Tuesday, Dec. 5








Team Power Love needs a blogging break. In the meantime, check out those crazies over at Lost Blueprint. They always have something to say.


29 November 2006

Another overheard conversation, one paragraph from an alumni newsletter surreptitiously spied upon while alumni newsletter reader read valiantly and passionately, and the reason behind the fall of Western civilization.

One-half of a cell phone convo: "Are these antibiotics supposed to make me see bugs?"

Excerpt from alumni newsletter: "Rachel Siegel writes, 'Things with me are great! I moved to Baltimore with my husband Sam Rosenstein in June 2005. Sam started his residency in opthamology. I got a job with the Jewish Foundation fundraising. I'm really enjoying the job and the weather in Baltimore sure beats those Cleveland winters!'"

Are we getting dumberer?

28 November 2006

I would be cooler if . . .
I didn't break out like a teenager; or, if breaking out like a teenager was considered, by indie rockers and arty geniuses and fashionistas, as the path to enlightenment.

I would be cooler if . . .
I wasn't wearing tube socks; or, if the tube socks I was wearing had stripes at the top--no!--Life Saver-colored stripes--no!--Life Saver stripes all the way down the sock and if the socks had toes.

I would be cooler if . . .
I wasn't wearing the exact same jacket as the girl sitting next to me on the el, which should come as no surprise since the jacket is from The Gap, the great American factory of formulaic fashion, and that's what I get for thinking that pulling a jacket off the sale rack, the jacket that was buried between a faux fur-collared blouse and a sleek black turtleneck, and hurriedly paying for it would ease the fact that really, deep down inside, I just want to be like everyone else; or, if I poured paint on my Gap jacket in the middle of the Loop while singing a song from "Mary Poppins" (probably "Spoon Full of Sugar"), and declared this society patriarchal and oppressive, then ripped up package after package of nude-toned nylons and declared myself a performance artist.

I would be cooler if . . .
I could figure out how to surreptitiously pick my nose in public; or, if nose picking was an Olympic sport so that whenever I did it, I could glare at people who clucked derisively at me and say, "I am training!"

I would be cooler if . . .
I could get my shit together; or, if everyone else would admit that they can't get their shit together, either.

27 November 2006

Speaking of tattoos, this one is my favorite:


26 November 2006

So it took me quite a while to charge the battery in my camera, not because it takes a long time
to charge the battery in my camera, but because I kept forgetting about it. After coming out of my food coma this weekend, I promptly charged it only to find these pictures taken by someone, not me:




It's almost as if Someone Photographer said, "Hey! I'm auditioning people for my new movie, 'Wine Drinkers Happy with Their Dental Work' wherein a roving band of artistic genuises talk only in three syllable words while taking public transportation to and from arty events in and around Chicago while discussing the political ramifications of wearing plaid with stripes." And of course, who wouldn't want to audtion for that?

25 November 2006

It's 60 degrees outside. Why are you sitting there reading the internets?

24 November 2006

WELCOME TO LIST WEEK AT POWER LOVE!

Today's List: Overheard Conversations

This guy on the el, yelling into his phone, his voice is getting progressively loud, and he's getting progressively angry, goes, "I'm going to go get my own body bag and make my life simpler!" And I wonder to myself, "Is 'simpler' a word?" and I'm kinda pissed I don't have a dictionary with me so I can check that.

These teenagers, or maybe 20-agers, or whatever age it is when humans gather in huge groups and all talk at once and use the word "like" more than any other word and yell really loud as though a conversation is supposed to be broadcast like a tornado warning, end up talking about a party and one of them goes, "A four-pack of Seagram's! And we can smoke!" and the rest of them go, "Like, cool!"

Two women at the coffeehouse talking about a mutual friend who's just signed up at e-Harmony and the friend spent TWO HOURS filling out her profile and though the friend is not willing to relocate, she is willing to date guys from other cities and they wonder, "How will that work? What if some guy wants her to move?" "I know," says the other woman, "and after all that talk she gave us about how we should stay in Chicago because it's so cheap to live here." "Sheesh," says the first woman.

23 November 2006

WELCOME TO LIST WEEK AT POWER LOVE!

Today's List: Alternate Uses for Turkey

1. Use the slices as a frisbee.
2. Make card houses with slices of it, though it's turkey, so make turkey houses with it.
3. Use the whole turkey as a dance partner.
4. Stick your head in the turkey and voila! A hat. Or a hiding place, depending on who your spending your Thanksgiving with.

22 November 2006

WELCOME TO LIST WEEK AT POWER LOVE!

Today's List: Stupid Commercials on Daytime TV

1. Got an illness? There's a pill for that.
2. Feeling sleepless, depressed, or tingly in the legs? There's a pill for that.
3. Whatever car you're driving, it's ugly. You need a new one. It should be red.
4. Your skin is horrid. You should pay $39.99 a month for a skin treatment system. Jessica Simpson will like you if you do.
5. You're fat. There's a pill for that.
6. You're gonna be a big, fat loser tomorrow at work if you don't watch the prime time line-up on NBC tonight.

21 November 2006

WELCOME TO LIST WEEK AT POWER LOVE!

Today's List: Good Beers

1. Spotted Cow from New Glarus, WI, though maybe it's not actually brewed in New Glarus, WI, but it's sold there, in mugs with spotted cows on them, which obviously makes the taste of the beer far superior to what it would be if it was served in some boring regular old beer mug.
2. That stuff from Texas with the name that sounds very German--sprecher bracht, or maybe spreecher brach, possibly something with "brach" in the name, like the candy, which would make its Texas origins suspicious since Brach candies are Chicago-y, as we all know--this beer is not distributed in Illinois, but it is distributed in Wisconsin because 1) Wisconsinites seem to have cornered the market when it comes to beer and 2) beer tastes better in Wisconsin. Also, I downed half of a six-pack of this very same beer at Megan's and Christopher's one night and I can say, indeed, what very good beer!
3. Delirium because it has pink elephants on the bottle and on the glass it should be served in and if you are not drinking beer out of a glass with pink elephants on it, then what exactly are you doing with your life?
5. Corona with a lime. I know, it's the Budweiser of Mexico. But it's also sitting around the grill in summer waiting for the burgers to cook and listening to easy good rock on the radio and talking with really good friends and loving life and also, they have that cool commercial where they make the boat appear as though it's in the bottle and that's a cool optical illusion, not to mention it takes place on a beach and in the middle to end of November in Chicago, the beach is as much of a mirage as a boat in a bottle.

20 November 2006

WELCOME TO LIST WEEK AT POWER LOVE!

Today's List: The Problems with Getting Dressed in the Dark

1. Mismatched socks
2. Bruises on your shins from knocking into the dresser not once, but twice
3. The illusion that it is still night so why are you getting up and getting dressed when you should be going to bed or at least laying in bed, or maybe lying in bed
4. Mistakenly wearing yesterday's clothes
5. Not realizing you are wearing yesterday's clothes until you get under the white hot flourescent lights at work and see yesterday's coffee stain right in the middle of yesterday's white shirt
6. The smell of yesterday's clothes

19 November 2006

From the cool friends with cool tattoos file:



I present Eduardo.

Cool.

18 November 2006

Ode to Summer

Oh, summer, oh how I miss you.

Fall makes me blue.

I miss racing and leggy pros and hot days,

Riding my bike and sunburns and the month of May.

17 November 2006

WELCOME TO HOW-TO WEEK AT POWER LOVE!

Today's How-To: How to be Confusing

Are they saying that the chips in this container weigh one ton? Or, are they saying that if you eat the chips in this container, you will be able to lift one ton? If the latter, what if you only eat half the container? Are you then only able to lift one-half ton? Or, is it a ton a chip? If I eat fifty chips can I lift fifty tons? Fifty tons of what?




Really, this is a bag for a wet umbrella. It really isn't a wet bag. Why would someone want a wet bag? Why would someone want a wet bag with a picture of an umbrella on it? I mean, unless it goes with your shoes that are matched perfectly with your outfit. If that is the case, then by all means, wear the wet bag.

16 November 2006

WELCOME TO HOW-TO WEEK AT POWER LOVE!

Today's How-To: How to piss off your entire 80-person office in one fell swoop

1. Microwave last night's fish dinner
2. Insist that the door of the kitchen stays open so you can "air it out"

15 November 2006

WELCOME TO HOW-TO WEEK AT POWER LOVE!

Today's How-To: How to Find Your New Favorite Fiction Writer

Go here.

See also: How to Blatantly Self Promote

14 November 2006

WELCOME TO HOW-TO WEEK AT POWER LOVE!

Today's How-To: How to Make a Ridiculous Ass of Yourself

First, make sure you schedule a very important conference call first thing in the morning and when the rest of the participants try to talk you into scheduling it later, say something extremely intelligent like, "The early bird gets the worm!"

Second, on the day of the conference call, wake up really, really late. You can accomplish this in one of two ways:
a) When the alarm goes off, hit the snooze button fifteen times, grunting louder with each hit, as though the alarm has some nerve to bother you at such an unreasonable hour;
b) When the alarm goes off, turn it off under the logic that you need much more sleep because you were up way too late last night, but for good reason because, c'mon, those episodes of "Carnivale" are not going to watch themselves.

Third, Scramble out of bed, throw on yesterday's clothes, grab your bag, and run out of your dwelling.

Fourth, sprint to the el and when you get there, plow into the turnstile as though you couldn't see it and when the pain of crashing into an immovable object cascades over you, scream out, "Holy shit! Those turnstiles are hard!" Once you are sure everyone is staring at you, run to the stairs. Trip on your way up.

Fifth, when you get to work at 8:29 and you see all the conference call participants milling about in the kitchen, drinking coffee and chatting and having a generally lovely time, snap at them with a hearty, "We have a conference call in ONE MINUTE!" Wait patiently while one of the braver participants politely says, "The conference call is scheduled for tomorrow."

Sixth, be thankful for your corner cubicle and remain there for the rest of the day.

13 November 2006

WELCOME TO HOW-TO WEEK AT POWER LOVE!

Today's How-To: How to Find Inspiration

Recently, while spending my writing time staring into a void of nothingness, a place I like to call, "my blank slate," it occurred to me that inspiration is an elusive and, at times, bitchy partner in crime.

Sometimes she shows up and together you can pull off the grandest of trickery (er, I mean, stories); other times, she stays in bed, eating puffy Cheetos and reading fashion magazines, and then where are you? You're in Flat Character Contrived Plot Passive Verb Land.

Maybe you're not a writer--maybe you're a painter or a carpenter or a sculptor or a musician or any other artistically-inclined human, in which case, Flat Character Contrived Plot Passive Verb Land probably doesn't scare you much. But imagine hell with George W. Bush shackled to you and talking nonstop while you receive a neverending root canal, and you'll get where I'm coming from.

So, in an effort to support and advance Power Love's mission statement (Id qomo par breo, loosely translated: be kind always or shut the hell up), I will hereby explain how to find inspiration.

First, stare at things that are pleasing to your eye. Say you like the way the carpet looks in the hallway of your office. Stare at it. After a certain amount of time, you'll start to see shapes, more than likely a forest theme (trees gently shushing in the wind; ground cover crawling gracefully over, well, ground; wildflowers). Once you do--congratulations! You've just hallucinated without paying your drug dealer exorbitant prices for exotic club drugs.

Second, sit in a park. Look at trees and grass and, if you're in the city, someone else's dog as it pees on a post. Allow nature's wonders to fill your soul.

To recap, in order to find inspiration, stare at plants a lot.

12 November 2006




OK, if I have to get inspiration from a Red Eye ad, so be it.

11 November 2006

It's Dance Party Saturday Night and I'm listening to Shannon's "Let the Music Play" (let the music play, he won't get away, just keep the groove and then he'll come back to you), but I'm listening to a cover of it 'cuz I found this and I love it (the song and the site) and I have a real affinity for 80s dance music 'cuz it makes me all nostalgic for teen night at Crazy Rock when Crazy Rock had teen night and wasn't a "gentlemen's club" (like, yeah, really, I'm sure anyone's gonna believe there's anything "gentlemen" in Romeoville) and I've Aqua Netted my hair and I'm wearing paisley and later, I'm gonna listen to "Purple Rain" and cry my eyes out during the intro (I never meant to cause you any sorrow . . . ) and then later, or maybe, next week, I'll wear all black, rim my eyes in kohl eyeliner, and listen to The Cure, "The Head on the Door," and I will write really bad poetry and use a lighter to burn the edges of the paper and turn that in for my creative writing project in English and my teacher will say to me, "Either you have issues or you're a creative genius" and I will reply, cryptically, "Yes."

10 November 2006













That is all.

09 November 2006

This is the PowerTap. It records all kinds of information about my bicycle rides. I have recently discovered it is a big, fat liar. It says I am going significantly slower and generating much less power than I really am.

Thus, I challenged it to a duel. I marched up to it as it sat saucily on the handlebars of my dear, sweet Princess Cannondale (Best. Bike. Ever.) and I slapped it across the face with my dueling glove.

"PowerTap!" said I. "I challenge thee to a duel!"

The PowerTap looked longingly into the distance, but spoke not a word.

"PowerTap!" said I again. "We have a full season ahead of us! We are not to be trifling with numbers!" I am very exclamatory when challenging others to a duel. Duels have always brought out the exclamatoriness in me.

The PowerTap still refused to acknowledge my challenge. I am so sick of these inanimate objects stoically ignoring my calls to arms. I have this same problem with the vending machine at work. These things are spineless dirtbags.

Eventually, I gave up on the PowerTap. Clearly, it is not the dueling sort. I'm thinking it is probably more like the guerilla warfare sort, which means I better find camouflage bike shorts and sleep with one eye open.

08 November 2006

In order to sizzle with inspiration, check this out. Yet another cool thing I found here.

07 November 2006

Everday I listen to KEXP. This is why KEXP is great:
1. They play 120 Days
2. They play LCD Soundsystem
3. They play Twilight Singers
4. When they have bands play in-studio shows, the DJs behave like mellow fans and not obsequious sycophants
5. The DJs don't use phrases like "obsequious sycophants"
6. John in the morning is my favorite way to ease into the morning
7. John and Cheryl during fundraising time are very funny
8. They come to Chicago
9. They like Chicago
10. On the playlist on the website, during the last fundraiser, under the entry for the Motorhead song that was playing, John wrote, "Motorhead . . . fuck yeah . . ."

06 November 2006

I checked the rules at NaBloPoMo, but I didn't see anything about posting a post to another post on another blog. Perhaps this is something that has yet to come up in NaBloPoMo land and maybe I should write and tell them this situation came up and suggest that they make up a rule or some sort of protocol for this predicament because here I am posting a post like I promised to do, every day for one whole month, but really what I'm doing is referring to another post on another blog. But the other blog is my blog, so really this is like two posts in one day, so does that give me a free day? If I get carpal tunnel sydrome sometime during the 15th day of posting every day, will I get a get out of blogging free card because today I am technically posting twice? You know, in the '50s, during those marathon dance-a-thons, the ones where the girls wore the poodle skirts and danced with guys like Fonzie, they always got a 15 minute break, didn't they? You know, to go rest on their T-Birds and drink their "sodas" and talk about Eisenhower? When do we get a break from blogging? Huh? Did anyone ever think about that? Are there just millions of bloggers everywhere, blogging mindlessly, with no rest whatsoever, because nothing was specified in the rules? Huh? You see where I'm going with this? WE NEED RULES, PEOPLE! WE NEED STRUCTURE! Oh, and also, the other direction I was going with this was: check out Cracked Black Pepper because I posted the story I read at the 2nd Story reading on the 29th.

05 November 2006

The Ride of a Thousand Flats

These people don't know it yet, but they are about to embark upon a ride wherein they spend more time looking at bikes than riding them.








9 bikers
7 flats
3,245 jokes by 9 bikers as 7 flats were fixed







As every serious cyclist knows, beer and chili are the perfect post ride recovery meal.

This picture is neither beer nor chili.

04 November 2006

It's dark at 5pm. That sucks. It makes me want to eat mashed potatoes and warm bread with melted butter then curl up on the couch, under a fuzzy blanket and watch a cheesy romantic movie with a 30-second, hyperintense kissing scene and no plot then go to bed at 8pm and hit snooze when the alarm goes off in the morning and claim sleeplessness when I show up at work, groggy, with chunks of sleep in the corners of my eyes and a really, really bad ass attitude sitting invisibly but heavily right next to the chip on my shoulder. I'm glad it's Saturday.

03 November 2006

BIKE PORN

Orbea, meet The Readership. Readership, meet the women's '07 road bike from Orbea. Notice the tubing--smooth at all the joints. Notice also the shorter top tube that is not positioned at an obnoxious angle to the seat tube, as so many manufacturers pompously do with women's bikes. Notice also all this bike geek jargon I am writing right now. Please note I am just about to pee in my pants because I simply cannot stand how absolutely gorgeous this bike is.



Go ahead, click on the image to enlarge it. You know you want to.








That top tube--it's molded so that the end by the seat tube is rounded and the end by the stem is flat, I mean, MY GOD PEOPLE, this is a WORK OF ART--we're talking a Formula One grade M30S carbon frame AND it's purple, though the manufacturer says pink, but we won't hold that against them, AND it weighs about 0.00034g, which means it climbs like a MOUNTAIN GOAT and corners like BUTTER.

I feel lightheaded.

02 November 2006

How To Have A Great Time On A Cold Night

First, go to the Bistro.



The Bistro's friendly staff will give you complimentary lessons on wine chugging. As every serious drinker knows, wine is a drink best chugged.




Second, go see the Twilight Singers at Double Door.


Here are the Twilight Singers, beautifully photographed by moi with my art school developed, bordering-on-genius photographic talent. I know how to capture souls. Also, I meant for the fingerprint to be on the lens of the camera. Very arty.







Here is a room full of friends that I don't know.









Ever wonder what the women's washroom at Double Door looks like? Now you know.

01 November 2006





I'm gonna do this. And that allows me to post a picture of Yoda in a seal. YODA IN A SEAL!


There is no try, only do.