so... a post i spied on a random person's blog was the inspiration for this post. this guy listed all the songs he associates with his exes, and that got me thinking - what would i associate with the boys who have popped in and out of my life, for better or worse? without further ado...

(disclaimer: i've only actually dated a very small fraction of this list, so don't go thinking i'm a woman of a large and tumultuous history)

i guess i'd have to start with luke, who was my best guy friend during high school. i've since lost touch with him, which is unfortunate; while his childish silliness was sometimes annoying (and who am i to say anything about being childish anyways?), he was that rare friend you could depend on anything for. he made me a tape sometime while i was in high school, and the last song he put on it was smashing pumpkins' "eye". sample: "is it any wonder i can't sleep?/all i have is all you gave to me/is it any wonder i found peace through you?/turn to the gates of heaven, to myself be damned/turn away from light/it's not enough, just a touch" also, luke and i were devoted fans of the punk band rancid, and their song "sidekick" always makes me think of the dumb stuff we did together.

from luke follows his best friend danny, with whom, oddly, i can't associate any one song except bob marley's "i shot the sheriff". now, danny didn't ever do such a thing, but his friend ray shot him in the side with a bb gun at a new year's eve party. he claims it was an accident, but we all knew better. ;-)

chronologically, my next victim is owen. owen was one of those precious specimens that probably shouldn't have been allowed to leave the house after he hit puberty - he was adorable, but had zero zero zero social skills. [granted, i pursued him when we were both at the horrid age of fifteen, when everything beyond and sometimes including one's front porch can be awkward, but still] he gets the beatles' "help!", and the toadies' "possum kingdom" for its line "don't be afraid, i didn't mean to scare you", because he was honestly terrified of me. maybe jessica played up the extent to which he was scared, but i don't think she was kidding. thankfully, i only wasted a few months pursuing that dead end before i got to...

...will! ah, will. the first official boyfriend, the first kiss, the first sweaty palms, all that good stuff... our relationship was short and didn't exactly have the best end [am i good at understatement or what?], but i don't feel any real ill will (no pun intended) towards him. i don't really feel anything - we just kind of went our separate ways, and i'm sure he's at least caught genital herpes by now. [to call him a player would be, again, understating things a bit] ergo, i don't really associate any one particular song with him; rather, songs that were popular at the time - for example, primitive radio gods' "standing by a phone booth..." and the butthole surfers' "pepper", not especially for the line "cinnamon and sugary and softly spoken lies". i wasted the words "i love you" on him, but what can you do?

after will came the emotional trainwreck that was jimmy. melissa still has my eternal gratitude from kicking my ass out of that situation, but looking back on it, i can say that it was something i had to go through, if not only to understand what to do and what not to do when your self-esteem hits rock bottom. with him, i put tool's "sober" and alice in chains' "dirt". no further explanation needed.

on a lighter note we move to simon. simon was a kind yet odd fellow i met over the internet; we never met but exchanged letters for the better part of two years, after which he moved and disappeared off the face of the earth, probably in a haze of acid. i'm sad that i have no idea where he is, but i hope it's in a better place than small-town louisiana with his parents, which i think was where he was last time i talked to him. he made me a tape that i will probably take to the grave with me because it's so him - all i really know of this person are these fourteen or fifteen songs. my favorite of which is beth orton's "where do i begin", which i think adequately sums up what it would have been like if we'd ever met.

next is jerry. jerry was an exhausting person to know for many reasons, the least of which being that getting a straight answer from him was akin to pulling teeth. his song is the cure's "friday i'm in love", because when i finally got what i wanted from him (minds out of gutter!), it was on a friday, a cold, clear friday, and that moment made my entire weekend. after which everything blew up, and i started writing some heinous poetry.

post-jerry wounds were soothed by the smooth charm of matt, my second boyfriend. i don't really know what went wrong here - well, ok, i do; he cheated on me and was in his words so consumed by guilt that he couldn't even call me to tell me he thought we were better off not dating, but i beat him to the punch about six months before he was ready to do this, and when he finally did do it, it ensued in an all-night phone conversation at college in which he begged me to give him a second chance. i said no thanks, i don't need this stupidity in my life, and that was that. but before he went all weird, he was a really nice guy and i enjoyed being with him. we didn't see each other very often since he lived up in columbia, a good 45 minutes' drive from my house, but whenever we did hang out, it was always good. the only song i'll ever connect with him is the goo goo dolls' "iris", simply because it was playing on his dad's truck stereo one night when we were driving around and it was one of those cute romantic moments you want to last forever - until he did a u-turn in the middle of a sidestreet and plowed into a sapling.

so much for romance.

after matt came the emotional trainwreck of keith. but it was a sort of good trainwreck, since nothing bad came out of it. keith i'm almost positive was the first person i ever fell in love with, but he never knew this; we both knew we had feelings for each other, but due to distance and the presence of significant others we never, erm, consummated any of them, so to speak. in retrospect, this is probably a very, very good thing. he keeps moving and changing email addresses, and i've not spoken to him in about two years, which annoys me, since i'd like to know how he's doing and all. his song is sarah mclachlan's "witness"; one night when i was driving home from work (i can't remember if we worked that particular shift together or not), i had that song playing and it hit me - bam! - just to what extent my feelings for him were. alas...

i know that those of you at uva are going to laugh and probably groan at my next two entries, but i do have decent reasons for putting them on this list. next is peter; for all of his three-hour-long corner-you-at-a-party-and-lecture-you-about-his-lack-of-a-sex-life treatises and his perpetual pursuits of first-years, he's not a bad guy, and we've definitely had our moments. i consider him a good friend and a good teacher in the ways of handling bourbon, and one of my more fond memories of him is from the peach bowl trip my first year. he made a tape for the ten-hour bus trip, and two songs that i will always associate with him from that tape are billy joel's "only the good die young" and the charlie daniels band's "the devil went down to georgia".

of course, i also have cough some interesting memories from that trip associated with marshall. that was only the beginning of an intriguing nine months or so of cat (kat?) and mouse, culminating in two very messy evenings neither here nor there. i get the feeling he and i could have gotten into some real trouble had we actually dated, given my propensity to purposefully press his buttons and his propensity at the time to have very little patience for that sort of thing. thankfully, both common sense, more than a few beers, and (inadvertently) shannon harper got in the way of things progressing. his songs are nine inch nails' "something i can never have" and the red hot chili peppers' "scar tissue", both connected to very concrete moments - the first at the peach bowl, the second the morning after.

for better or worse, marshall was my last great stand before brian (no emory, bunky does not count), which is amusing in several ways only known to the three of us and rick. :-) i've had three years to accumulate songs with brian, and there are far too many to list here - we've got our own soundtrack going at this point, volume four, perhaps? anyways, the ones i can name off the top of my head include basically the entire catalogue of nine inch nails; depeche mode's "enjoy the silence", peter murphy's "i'll fall with your knife", they might be giants' "new york city", billy joel's "for the longest time", and jeff buckley's "lover, you should've come over". oh, and most of moby's catalogue, if not only because i got him hooked on it while driving to and from myrtle beach two years in a row.

damn, that took a long time. i'm ready for some tea, a hot shower, and bed.

by the way: my grammar teacher's status has been updated from 'mild annoyance' to 'i want a piano to drop on your head from a very tall rooftop and squish you'. updates to come as necessary.
posted by kat thompson at 4:27 PM

ohmygodlifeissoconfusing. - i feel like i'm eighteen again! i won't elaborate, but suffice to say that i had an amusing and fulfilling weekend. even better, we had a three-day weekend because yesterday was a holiday. (if a holiday falls on a weekend day, you get either friday or monday off) i love this country!

memo to president bush: you moron, the people who oppose your swift movements towards war in iraq are not a 'focus group'. i think there are considerably more than ten or twenty people not only in america but also worldwide who think you're not taking the right approach to this whole thing. granted, i'd hate to be in your shoes right now, but supposedly we elected you for a reason. open those big texas-sized ears of yours and have a listen, mmmkay?

tv alert: i am not at all ashamed to admit that i will be here on saturday night. out of camera range for sure, but i'll wave anyways.

hee hee...!
posted by kat thompson at 9:53 AM

good lord. i don't know what it is - it must be the constant sunshine we've had since last saturday - but i am in the greatest mood right now. the past week has flown by, and not even three straight days of buterbrod [open-faced sandwiches consisting of meat, cheese, and lots of butter that i have a strong distaste for] or my asshole grammar teacher's attempts at beating the interpretations of verbal aspect into the ground can swing me from this. for the first time in a long time i feel content about, well, everything- granted, there are a few things i wish would take care of themselves faster (one would swear that the russian electronic postal system was being run by snails!), but i am so insanely happy. of course, my inherent fatalism tells me not to exult for too long, because sooner or later something's bound to go astray, but for now, screw that. i am basking in this glorious feeling of happiness. pbbbbllltttt!

we got the frost-on-trees effect today due to overnight temperatures dropping sharply - i wish i'd had my camera out while i was walking today. combine that with the blue skies, the bright sun, and that impossibly eternal feeling that it's friday and anything can happen, and you have the perfect day. so, let's see: the last week in a nutshell...

valentine's day-night was strange. poor justin bought eighty beers for this party - he must be the only person i've ever known to walk into a store and say 'i want eighty beers'- and all was going well until this drunken kid decided to start arguing with someone else, and words escalated into a fistfight. of course, some well-meaning people stepped in to stop the fight, and they got punched too - aliyah's boy-toy got his nose broken, and two girls got slapped around a little bit - which effectively broke up the party, so those of us who didn't scurry home immediately afterwards went down to another floor to hang out for a bit. that lasted all of ten minutes, since this fat canadian cow was pacing around the room screeching 'why did they hit drew? he wasn't even doing anything! and ruslan! ruslan doesn't deserve that type of treatment!' [drew is aliyah's boy, and ruslan is the kid who organizes all those fun tram parties] yes, these two things were true, but there was no need to harp on it as she did. yoiks.

on saturday i took a long walk around one of the lesser-inhabited islands of the city, which had some really cool architecture and a tree planted smack in the middle of a road by peter the great. no, it's never being moved; yes, cars do drive at insane speeds around it. on sunday i fully intended to go ice-skating with a group of people, but when we got to the rink we found out that a thousand-ruble (about $30) deposit was needed to rent skates (i guess they've had problems with disappearing skates in the past). since three out of the four of us lacked a thousand rubles, we decided to go sledding on some nearby hills instead. well, by sledding i mean sliding down paths of ice that kids cleared out from under the snow - you know, you go faster and all. except we had no sleds, so we just slid down on our bottoms. i can't remember the last time i had that much fun - i felt like i was ten again!

on sunday evening, tanya went to a party and came home so drunk that she couldn't even open the door. how she even found her way home in the first place is a mystery to me, but who knows. i guess now i know how she feels when i come home from those raging eighty-beer-keggers at the dorms...

on tuesday i taught again, which was a bit more tiring than last time. the first two groups i had were really strong and a lot of fun to talk to - alas, no 'are you smoking?' moments, but still plenty amusing. i got invited to a discotheque party tonight, but i had to politely decline as i genuinely thought i had a lecture this afternoon from noon until five. see, tuesday morning i was told that i had a coordinator for the cultural component of my program, and that she wanted to talk to me about doing stuff such as museums and ballets. i got a note saying she was having a lecture on friday from noon to five, and i assumed that meant she was giving some sort of cultural lecture for five hours. it didn't occur to me that she might have been a teacher, with lessons to give from noon to five - oops! in any event, this means that i'll start to get doing fun stuff without having to pay for it again. we've already got tickets for 'swan lake' at the mariinsky on march 6. woohoo!

tonight could be dinner, could be dancing, as tomorrow probably/definitely will be. but enough of all this: i've got dinner to eat and life to live! hurrah!
posted by kat thompson at 10:16 AM

...and by 'a while' i meant four days. well... now that that bout of self-pity is over, i suppose it's time to move on.

i'm almost amused at this whole 'terror preparedness' thing going on back home, but that could be because i've got eight time zones' worth of space between myself and the supposed target of all this terrorism. i think what amuses me is that the craze to go out and get plastic and duct tape reminds me of the bomb-shelter craze of the fifties. one kid who was quoted in the washington post wrote, "when we seal up our 'safe room', what are we going to breathe?" indeed!

i saw 'sleeping beauty' at the mariinsky last night - crazy. the sets were amazing, the costumes must've been a bitch to sew (they were reproductions of the original costumes used in the theater's first production of the ballet in 1890), and the dancing - yeah, not bad. ;-) it was a damned marathon, though; it lasted four hours because all three intermissions were at least a half-hour. but, it was worth my ten bucks.

my kids on monday were interesting - although i have a feeling i'll be teaching different groups every time i teach. kids here have very interesting perceptions of life in america; when i told one group that i had a car, one of them asked, "is it a mercedes-benz or a bmw?" um... right. i got a lot of questions about the presence of gangsters in america, how often my family eats at mcdonald's, and what kind of music i like. i scored some points when i said that i liked harry potter, but i lost big time when i said i didn't care much for britney spears. now, to me, russian culture is fascinating enough that the level of enchantment i keep seeing with american culture shouldn't be necessary, although it has to be said that 95% of russian music makes me want to run away screaming, and i'm amazed that these kids seem to be so disdainful of their own culture. but, i guess the grass is greener, right?

valentine's day = party. there will be beer, there will be socializing, and i'm sure there will be enough distractions to keep me from thinking too much about how this is hopefully the last february 14 i will be spending away from the one person i love the most. you'd think i'd be used to it by now, but somehow it's not any easier than it was the first time, three years ago. oh well.

'lord, don't leave me/all by myself' - moby [i've got no clue where he lifted that sample from, so that's the best attribution i can do]
posted by kat thompson at 6:43 AM

i finished 'porno' already. i want to kidnap irvine welsh until he finishes writing the third part and then shows it directly to me, because it's not fair to end a book as he did this one. dammit!

i'm starting at my 'new' job today - same gig, just in a different place; closer to home, and paying twice as much as the old job for the same amount of time.

i also switched groups in school - i went up one level, in search of a class that wouldn't put me to sleep or urge me to harm someone on a regular basis. so far, so good, but my grammar teacher is a bit of an asshole. he can be dealt with, i suppose. [grins somewhat maliciously]

i don't feel particularly useful or happy or sociable right now. don't expect to hear from me for a while.
posted by kat thompson at 5:41 AM

irvine welsh's 'porno' has taken itself off of my birthday wish list, because i caved in today and bought it myself. i was wrong when i first claimed that it has nothing to do with pornography, though; the novel takes place ten years after the action of 'trainspotting', and good ol' sick boy is trying to establish himself as a director of adult films. i'm almost afraid to see what welsh is going to do with this...

kitty is jumping at and chasing invisible things on the walls, which is cute, but i keep hearing that she's going to leave and whenever i come home, there she is still. more of dima's stuff keeps accumulating, so i guess all i can do is wait and see what happens.

ever since i read this sentence many months ago, it's been one of my most favorite russian sentences ever: 'on ponimayet, shto on chevo-to ne ponimayet, no ne ponimayet, chevo immeno on ne ponimayet' (from zadornovu's story 'ninth wagon'). roughly, 'he understands that he doesn't understand something, but he doesn't understand exactly what it is that he doesn't understand'. i don't know - there's something so perfectly russian about that sentence that i can't quite explain. but it always makes me laugh to think about it.

oh, and a picture of lakeforest mall [for those not acquainted with my hometown, it's the mall ten minutes from my house] was in yesterday's edition of the st petersburg times, accompanying an article about the rise in recognition and celebration of chinese new year in the washington area. weird.

not in the mood to say much more right now.
posted by kat thompson at 12:48 PM

i've said it before, and i'll say it again: dave barry rules!

gossip alert: there's trouble in paradise! dima came home from the hospital friday afternoon, and he's been staying with us ever since - minus anya. anya's been calling about every five minutes since then, and he wants nothing to do with her - which not only amuses me greatly because it's funny to hear tanya yell 'dima, just pick up the phone and talk to her!' and to hear him yell back 'i don't want anything to do with her!', but also because this episode has probably falsely planted a tiny seed of hope in me that he'll move back in and bring the tv with him, and i'll get it back in my room. now, understand that a tv would only really be useful to me right now, because i've been sick since friday and have done little else but sit in bed and read and try to find a position that will allow me to breathe long enough to be able to fall asleep. stupid inconsistent weather, stupid sinus infections, stupid colds... and stupid me for leaving all my meds at home. grrr. although tanya does have this wonderful vietnamese aromatic balm that lets me breathe for a few minutes - but that's all that seems to help. i even made myself a huge bowl of taiwanese noodles for lunch - i figured if i put in all the spices that came in the package that might help clear the ol' sinuses up. [megan warned me long ago that if you don't want to start crying after your first spoonful of these noodles, only put in a very little bit of the flavoring powder and the soup stock itself. i in my infinite wisdom put in all of the powder and about half of the stock] well, two spoonfuls into it, the tears were flowing and i did indeed have to blow my nose, but that's about all the help i got. i could barely even taste the spices - which i think attests to the power of this particular cold, because such spices under normal circumstances probably would have sent me to the hospital. or at least in search of a lot of ice cream to dull the pain.

anyways, before all this stuffiness set in i went to a party on friday and met a gigantic contingent of americans. apparently they all came over here with ciee , and they all study at the university across town (but most of them live within spitting distance of megan and me). and, apparently, being with ciee means that they're chained to the organization of sorts - they have class from 9 to 3 every day, have private transportation to and from school arranged for them, and only have free time after classes and on the occasional weekend when something's not already planned for them. geez, talk about taking away the fun of discovering a new city and country for yourself. and the best part is? they're paying almost as much for this semester as i am for the entire year! suckers!

in any case, one of the first people from this group i started talking to had the unfortunate distinction of being one of the first people i've wanted to kick in the teeth since i was in volgograd. this girl's name is aliyah (spelling?), she's a sophomore at texas christian university, and she's from chicago but was born in rockville. lord, is she ever from chicago - should i say 'chicager?' - and lord, is she ever the sorority girl in texas if ever i met her. wearing way, way, way too much makeup and orange blush - who does that? - she just oozes desperate and fake. i don't know if i visibly cringed the first time she crinkled up her nose and cooed 'woooow, that's sooo interesting!' in response to something i'd said, nor do i know if i was ever that visibly desperate when i was a college sophomore - i certainly hope not - but i really had to try hard not to laugh in her face when i told her about possibly studying in moscow for grad school and she cooed 'like, you are totally my idol!' i actually remember looking around and wondering where the nearest wall was so i could bang my head against it rather than have to talk to her anymore. oh my gawd.

most everyone else in the group was pretty cool, the girls from george washington university notwithstanding - somehow, i knew where they were from even before they told me. it was just this feeling. i have a feeling i've found a drinking buddy in mike, the seattlite transferred to usc - i'm constantly amazed at how laid-back west-coasters are that i meet abroad. if they can tear themselves away from the clutches of ciee, i plan on hanging out with them in the future. well, maybe the boys, at least. [wink]

i saw a rather odd interpretation of gershwin's 'porgy and bess' last night - it was sung in english, but it might as well have been done in russian since the singers' accents were so strong that i could hardly make out what was said. that, and they cleaned up the lyrics - for example, 'i got plenty o' nuttin'' was sung as 'i've got plenty of nothing', which isn't quite the same. porgy was in a wheelchair, and not black - the only semi-black guy was reduced to a backup role. the orchestra was also split - the woodwinds and strings and horns were down in the pit, while percussion and brass occupied the left and right sides of the stage itself. i don't think the conductor told the percussion and brass sections that they were actually on stage, as they often played so loud as to overpower the actual singers - and in porgy's case, this was a minor disaster, as he didn't project at all. i was sitting in the fifth row, so i can only imagine how it must've been for people way in the back. all in all, though, it was pretty cool, since this particular theater likes to do interesting things with staging - and this performance was no exception.

well... time to shuffle off and blow my nose yet again. i think i've killed an entire tree in tissues in the past 48 hours alone...
posted by kat thompson at 2:41 PM