Category Archives: Music

Test Results

In which I’m totally healthy! …except for that nagging little Schizoid tendency.

Here are the boringly normal results of a test I took online (because I saw it on her site):

Personality Disorder Test Results

Paranoid || 10%
Schizoid |||||||||||||| 54%
Schizotypal |||||||||||| 46%
Antisocial |||||||||||| 42%
Borderline |||||| 30%
Histrionic |||||||||| 34%
Narcissistic |||||||||| 38%
Avoidant |||||| 30%
Dependent |||||| 26%
Obsessive-Compulsive |||| 14%

Take Free Personality Disorder Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

Luckily for me, people are starting to feel that Schizoid is actually just a personality type and not an actual disorder. (I’m really not very Schizoid, though, just your basic extrovert who sometimes holes up in her room and doesn’t answer the phone.)

In other news, I’m going bowling tonight. Tomorrow at two, I’m seeing Jolene for a MUCH NEEDED cut and color. Tomorrow at 8, I’m recording a live album with the Coyote Kings over at Sapolil Cellars’ tasting room on Main. Sunday, I am lying on KJ’s couch all. Day. Long.

All Hallow's Eve

In which there’s bowling, Halloween, gigs, sex, cooking, file size, debt, and the end of DST.

Every Friday there’s a company meeting. Management shuts off the phones for an hour and a half and we all eat lunch and get up to speed on various new policies and whatnot. Last Friday, however, instead of having a meeting we all went bowling. The whole office! And there were monetary prizes! They paid a dime per pin and five bucks per strike; I got $40 for bowling two games. It was pretty freakin’ bitchin’.

On my lunch break, I showered at home and grabbed my tambourine and my lead book and my makeup. I did my face while sitting at my desk and talking on the phone with customers. Shouldn’t my skin be clear now that I’m old? At 8 PM I clocked out and KJ drove me (and my bro, who tagged along to have a few beers) to Dayton.

I walked into the bar and ordered a cocktail and a Gardenburger right off the bat. The gig was a throw-away; we had a sub drummer, only one guitar player, a chorus machine, and a list of bar covers. I only sang about half the night.

The rest of the time I crowd-watched. Between sets, I was sitting outside on the ledge along the front of the building, smoking a cigarette. A drunk boy approached another boy in drag – he was dressed as a girl for Halloween, with fake boobs and a hairy chest – and looked up his skirt. “Aw,” he said, “You’re wearing shorts! Where’s that twelve-inch cock!” The one in drag skittered back, laughing. He was bar tending at the Elk’s next door and wasn’t quite drunk enough to be comfortable getting groped.

“Oh come on, now,” I observed. “You’d probably have squeaked like a girl if he’d been going commando, dude.”

The drunk boy turned and eyed me. “Well, yeah.” Then he marched right up to me, thrust his groin in the general direction of my face as he straddled me, and then he sat right down in my lap. He waved his cigarette. “Do you have a light?” he slurred.

A girl behind him said, “You have your lighter in your hand.” The drunk boy moved his hand behind himself so I couldn’t see it. “Light?” he repeated. He was dressed entirely in brown, my favorite color, but the skin around his eyes and mouth looked older than it should have. Party boy. Lots of mileage.

“Of course I have a lighter,” I said, and dug in my pocket for it, the pocket between my leg and his left thigh. “Let me get it for you.” He squirmed in my lap. He was so drunk he dunked half his cigarette in the flame before he got it lit. “Nice Zippo,” he mumbled.

I slapped his butt. “Nice ass, baby boy,” I said.

He giggled and made a vague nuzzling move with his head toward me and then got up to sit beside me with more grace than I’d expected. He pulled out his cell phone and made a call. It went to voice mail. “Your drug dealer’s not answering,” I observed.

He looked at me, terribly serious in the way that only very drunk people can be, and announced, “I am the drug dealer.”

“You’re adorable,” I said, and went back inside to sing more cheesy shit. The crowd, much to my surprise, stayed all night – in spite of not seeming to particularly like the band – and got drunker. I got drunker too. KJ and Jay sat and watched and wondered what the fuck they were doing there. My new boyfriend Baby Drug Dealer groped me a couple of times; asked me what I was doing later; even came up to the bandstand to say, “Play something really awesome now.” Later, I saw him asleep with his head on a table as we were schlepping gear out.

In the interest of full disclosure, I also saw a drunk girl’s right nipple. She told me I had great tits and complained that having kids had made her fat; I told her she was gorgeous. She showed me her Victoria’s Secret bra; a guy she knew asked for some nipple and – what the hell, we’re standing on the street and we’re drunk and it’s Halloween – she brung it. She was blonde, so the nipple in question was the palest of pinks. Yes, it’s true: all the cool stuff happens to me!

After the gig, Barefoot’s loaded van didn’t want to go home. I spent some time lying on the floorboards shoving a 4-inch copper wire jumper into a slot next to a fuse but the thing still wouldn’t shift out of first gear. He parked it at the cop shop and rode home in the Buick with us.

I wasn’t in bed until three in the morning, but I did get $100 out of the whole deal. And a boy in my lap. And a Gardenburger!

After fewer than three hours of sleep, KJ got up and went to work at nine. I felt really bad for him… but not so bad that I didn’t just roll over and go back to sleep until noon. He came home on his lunch hour and drove me back to G’ma’s. The weather was gray and overcast and rainy and really quite autumnal, so naturally I had a big huge pot of veggie chili ready when they (he and my bro) got home from work at a ten after six.

After gorging on chili, Kaje and I went to his place where we drank cocktails and watched trashy BBC America shows for awhile on the couch. Then we went to bed and ravished each other and passed out. Yay orgasms!

Sunday we slept in. I slept even more in than he did; he got up and made coffee and breakfast. (Best. BF. Ever. He can find the button, he never nags, he runs his own goddamned errands, AND he cooks.) Then we went for a Sunday drive and visited Walmart and the Asian food store on Issacs where I bought salad roll wrappers and sushi vinegar and a few other items in preparation for the arrival of my bento box next week. Sunday evening I went home early and realized that my iPod is now incapable of holding my entire music library… which means I need a new iPod. A nice new 120 gig iPod classic should probably hold me for a few years, but I don’t really want to buy a new iPod just yet. I want to buy a new laptop.

But first I want to pay off my surgeon, my dentist, and that personal loan I got from my mom to move out here (the Loan formerly known as The Great Exploding Jeep Debacle). I’ll be doubling up on payments to them these next couple of months and will then be down to simply paying my debt reduction program; I’ll be able to double-up on that as well.

Eh. Debt. Whatever. If you’d ever seen one of my student loan statements, you’d know I’ll be in debt until I die anyway so what the fuck.

Oh, yeah, so then the clocks were adjusted an hour. DST is over and we’re back to good old Standard Time. I hate DST. I hate starting it, I hate ending it, I hate adjusting my clocks an hour twice a year. Fuck DST. Seriously. It should be abolished, and if I have time later (pun intended) I’ll write to my representatives and demand that they abolish it. Again. (They never do.)

Overall, though, I’d have to say this Halloween beat last year’s hands down. Job, paycheck, gig, a BF, friends, and a stable life. No evil Uterine Monster, either. It’s nice to be a real girl. Too bad boredom and familiarity are setting in again so soon; I really do have a terribly short attention span. Or maybe it’s just the season change. Hurumph.

The New EP is In The Can!

In which I went to the studio last night.

Barefoot has decided that there needs to be a Mush Morgan EP to sell alongside Coyote Kings CDs at blues festivals. To that end, he’s organized the boys and recorded some tracks, and last night I went over to the studio to do some vocals.

I got three charts recorded in three hours. (That sounds like a long time but it’s pretty good, actually, to get a good take in an hour per song.) None of the performances were brilliant, exactly, but I’m sure they’ll do.

All three tracks were originals he wrote. Add the two covers we’ve already done, and presto! A five-song EP! I’m pretty excited to see how they sell at the Rainier Blues Festival, actually.

What I did this weekend!

In which a picture is worth a thousand wo- …oh screw it. Here’s some pix of Ritzville.

On Saturday, the Kings and I played the main stage from 1.30 to 2.30:

Ritzville Main Stage

And then we played a 2-hour set in the Pastime, a wonderfully reesty little bar across the street from the main stage packed with the Best Audience Evar™, from 4 to 6:

Pastime

It was mad wicked fun, and I signed posters and a guitar and posed for photos with fans (“Because you’re gonna be REALLY famous someday!”) and now I’m thinking I might just wanna play music for a living… if I can do it at venues with roadies and stage managers and sound engineers and complimentary bottled water by the case and a musicians’ hospitality lounge serving food and free beer.

Because that kind of gig? IS WAY FUN.

For more pics, visit Kaje’s Flickr set.

Failwhale, damn it.

In which I’m your geek, baby.

After several months of letting it sit there and collect dust, I installed that new 120Gb HDD into my A30 laptop. Then a few days went by – days during which the laptop was in its carrying case – and then I decided it was time to set the bitch up and copy my files off of my original drive, format it, and then get my iTunes library off of that failing external drive (it fails to spin up sometimes, which is uber spooky) and get my data organized.

So I set up the laptop, and plugged it in (because the battery only holds a charge for 4 minutes – I need to replace it) and…

…no power. None. Won’t light up. Damn.

So either the AC adapter has failed, or there’s a connection problem inside the laptop itself.

Fuck!

I have no laptop. I need to get the adapter on a multitester and see if it’s putting power through, and if not take the laptop itself apart and see if I can fix it.

Not having a home computer is upsetting me mightily.

It’s as if the universe doesn’t want me to have my freakin’ data in one place! I’ve been trying to get my shit organized for over two years, and can’t seem to pull it off. You have no idea how hard it is to get content off of CDs and onto my iPod! And my play stats are hosed! And no scrobbling!

In other news, I’m playing the Roosevelt Wine & Wheels Festival with the Coyote Kings tomorrow.

Playing the Ice Harbor Brewing Co.

In which there’s a trip to the Tri-cities.

I went and saw my stylist Saturday afternoon for a cut and color. I said I was doing a lot of gigs this summer and that I needed hair I could scrunch up into curls easily… so bitch chopped all my hair off! I have a totally asymmetrical, VERY SHORT razor bob and I’m still a little weird about it, but Curtis & Syl said it was hawt and teh BF likes it, so I guess it’s okay. Color’s good, at least, even if I don’t have bright enough highlights.

My new hair and I played a brewery Saturday night with the boys. (K’s pics of the event are here, because he’s even more of a cell phone camera whore than I am.) People in Walla Walla talk about the Tri-cities in rather the same way that people in Fairfield talk about Ottumwa, so I was surprised at how awesome the crowd was at Saturday night’s gig in Kennewick (which happens to be the town I was born in). They were enthusiastic, friendly, and they clapped after solos. They danced. They followed us outside during breaks and told us we were awesome. We got an ovation, even. The room sounded good and the vibe was great.

But, being a brewery the place only served beer – which I don’t really drink – so I had Pepsi and water all night and made K take me out for cocktails THE VERY INSTANT we rolled into W2 at 12:30a. He took me to the Stone, where we listened to three adorable twenty-year-old skater boys tell us all about their various broken bones and trips to hospitals. The bartender gave me a glass of merlot because he didn’t have a cork for the bottle and couldn’t save it. We rolled out of there about an hour later and went to K’s, where we stayed up late. Really late. Ahem.

On Sunday, we lazed around a lot and accomplished nothing of interest to anyone but ourselves. Monday, we bought groceries and vodka. K mowed his lawn. I made portabella capellini for dinner – a culinary triumph! – and we ate in the shed because the weather was being almost decent. I crashed at K’s again last night and caught a ride to work with him this morning.

I haven’t seen my own house since Saturday afternoon ’round 4:30, and I feel vaguely guilty about it.

In other news, my dress arrived today! Maybe it’ll warm up enough for me to actually wear it this summer.

In Vino Veritas

In which I do a gig I feel good about… and drink WAY too much wine.

Yesterday I came home on my lunch break and took a shower and put on jeans and cute shoes. After work I came home to drop Bindu off and smear on some mascara. By seven I was at the Sapolil Cellars tasting room on Main street. The joint was packed.

The owner hugged me and pointed to my co-worker, KJ, whom I’d invited to come. (He’d been sick earlier in the week so I didn’t think he’d show, but there he was.) I sat with him for a bit and then the gig started. He and I ended up hanging out all night and having a freakin’ blast, going to the sorts of events we wouldn’t normally go to. (As he said later, “I haven’t had this much fun in Walla Walla in years. It’s like we went to another town, man.”)

RB and Cookie played a couple of tunes, then I went up and joined them. We did a good, long set and then took a break. It was early enough that it was still light out. During our second set, we had a keyboardist and a harp player sit in, and people were dancing by the end. We even got called back for an encore. All in all, a good gig. And the cash money at the end didn’t hurt, either. (This band pays me. I love it.)

A., the owner’s daughter (whom I adore because she’s funny as hell), kept pouring me wine so by the time we left the joint around ten I’d probably downed at least an entire bottle if not significantly more. I prudently put my grandmother’s car in the garage and caught a ride with KJ. We followed A. to the Flying Trout tasting room. The wine there was served in beer cups instead of stemware, the crowd was younger, the decor was minimalist industrial basement, and the DJ utterly failed to impress me. I ran around drunk and friendly and probably annoyed the hell out of many innocent (read: less drunk) people.

The truth of wine being that I adore people when I’m wine drunk and love to accost them and talk to them about themselves, but I never shut up long enough for them to do so. Hah! It’s amazing nobody smacked me. Srsly. I had SO much fun!

There was a couple in the crowd dressed in snow suits. The guy had goggles on, and would push them up onto his forehead only when talking. I asked the girl why she’d decided to wear a snowsuit to a tasting room, and she said it just seemed like the thing to do. I met a skater dude in his late 40’s with tons of ink and got him to take his shirt off for me. I scattered two other conversation groups merely by approaching with my mouth running. I saw one of the chicks who works at the Starbucks I go to. I saw A., the chick we’d followed there, once.

After that it gets blurry. I bought some Cheetos at a convenience store at some point, but they were too gross to eat, and I could not now tell you what store it was. At one point I thought I’d lost my wallet but it was easily found in KJ’s car. I didn’t get to bed until the sky was beginning to pale in the east.

The first time I woke up today I didn’t dig it that much, so I went back to bed and didn’t really start my day until six in the evening! I called RB and apologized for not answering when he’d called earlier in the afternoon, checked in with Becca, tried to eat at Rosita’s (closed Sundays) and ended up with a 7-layer burrito and a huge raspberry iced tea. Went to RB’s, listened to a bunch of Wilson Pickett, and discussed our set list for next weekend at the Balloon Stampede. (We’ll be on the Pepsi stage from 5 to 6:30. Come see us.)

Now I’m home and the dogs are sleeping on the rug. I have a couple of episodes of Doctor Who to watch, and several movies to choose from. I think I’m gonna hold the couch down, lest it suddenly decide to float away, and rest up for tomorrow: I have to do laundry and mow the lawn.

My weekend was three days long!

In which I get an extra day off to play in a garage.

Saturday I took the day off work so I could do a gig. It was at a private party in a Morton building and it was cold once the sun went down and I schlepped gear and ate nothing but chips and potato salad all freakin’ day, but I still made more money than I would have if I’d spent the day at work. After the gig the drummer took me to the Milton-Freewater Supper Club, which hasn’t been remodeled since 1967 and is all red and retro and tacky and wonderful and I’m totally in love with it.

Sunday Gramma and I had a party basically so there’d be an excuse to make the “real old-fashioned two layer cake with homemade brown sugar frosting” we’ve been talking about for three months. In attendance were two aunts, two uncles, two dogs, two cousins, a second cousin, and two neighbors, and the official excuse was that it was a birthday celebration. The food was good (quiche, tossed salad, a fruit plate, cornbread, and chili) and the cake was awesome. I had a really good time.

I have decided that today will be a big fat movie fest, and I’ve been lying on my bed working my way through an entire spindle of DVDs a co-worker loaned me. It’s fuckin’ sweet.

Now I’m thinking of taking a $20 bill and walking over to Loney’s to buy delicious junk foods. Because I’m not afraid to get deep into the lazy decadence, oh no I ain’t.

Seeing Mother

In which my plans are quite suddenly changed.

Saturday night my entire band had a long practice. After, Curtis and I went out and Becca showed up. We met a wine writer from Seattle and hung out with her all night, even dragged her to after hours for a bit. I got drunk. Around three in the morning, Curtis and I finished up the curry and rice I had stashed in the fridge and he crashed in the front bedroom.

Sunday, the weather was GLORIOUS! Clear and breezy, and had to be at least seventy degrees out! We went to brunch at 26 brix (and let me tell you, the bloody mary was awesome) and then wandered aimlessly around town until Curtis had to go record with RB. We even stopped at the miniature airport and watched the enthusiasts fly their little planes around for awhile.

Monday, I did – among other tedious but necessary online things – my taxes. I’m getting a refund! (I was so poor last year that I actually qualified for EIC. Go me.) Apparently I’ll be getting $300 for my rebate, too, which is exiting because I’ll TOTALLY need it to see Amma this summer.

I was going to try to see Her in New York in July, but not only has the ticket for the dates I wanted doubled in price in the past 6 days, but it turns out that one of the other techs at work has already gotten those dates off for vacation – so there’s no way I’ll get them off, too.

Now I’m scrambling madly to get organized to see Mother in Seattle, since people are taking vacation days during all the other tour stops I’d like to go to (not only New York, but Fairfield and Chicago too). The Seattle programs are complex because there’s a day of public programs followed by a two-day retreat and then a public Devi Bhava. If I’m going at all, I either register for the retreat or I only see Mother for one day. Since it costs just about $200 to fly to Seattle I’d rather go for more than a single day… so now I need to sign up for a retreat with no on-site housing in a town where I know no Amma devotees. Gah!

(You know, I should have known this would happen. I contacted the Seattle satsang by email and am doing seva remotely – placing notices on various online boards about Mother’s visit – but of course it’s going to work out that I have to go meet the Seattle satsang properly, and probably work like crazy at the programs and the retreat too.)

In other news, Bindu’s going to the vet for blood work tomorrow. She’s gotten fat since we’ve been here (because grandmas are indulgent and feed dogs table scraps, and give them milk and lunch meat every single night before bed) and now she drinks and pees so much that I’m worried about diabetes. She’s exhibiting some other behavioral changes too, which is why I’m actually worried: she can’t walk the 12 blocks to work with me on Saturdays without a rest at the halfway point, and she seems sleepy and cuddly more than tired or overheated.

Send the good blue dog your non-diabetic thoughts, if you would, and I’ll let you know what we learn when the results come back.

Another Chichi Wine Event! (It's like I'm in wine country or something!)

In which I get money for nothin’. (But no chicks for free.)

First of all, I haven’t washed my hair in 3 days, and I just want to get that out of the way before we go any further. Full disclosure and all that.

Yesterday afternoon RB left me a voicemail message at work saying that Sapolil Cellars‘ musicians had canceled and did I want to sing for money? I said hell yeah, and walked over there after I clocked out of work at eight. I stood next to the grand piano and sang totally unrehearsed songs with a piano player I’ve never played with and RB on electric. Eventually I got a mic, but I did the first several songs totally unplugged. The audience was gracious and attentive, because wine is a very social kind of drunk.

The vintner gave me two glasses of really good 2006 Syrah wine, told me I was a great singer, and then gave me fifty bucks! Who could ask for anything more?

After the gig – if I can even call such an impromptu setting that – we mingled a bit, and then RB gave me a ride home. I had a bowl of lentil soup and an awesome baby spinach salad and went to bed.

I’m gonna put the cash toward a gig clothes fund. I have no cute gig clothes.