TRADING THEIR NEW BABY FOR A CHEVROLET
I've been on a letter writing binge the likes of which we've never seen. I think it's because of Ian's letter, but I wouldn't be able to tell you why. Well, I'm glad for it in any case, because there are lots of letters to write to zinesters whose projects I've enjoyed this summer, and it feels so good to really try to get in touch with somebody. I mailed three letters today and two yesterday, so how's that? My thoughts have turned to pretty san-x stationery and the upcoming Andy Warhol stamps. At least part of this in hopes of getting an awesome letter from somebody, just entirely out of the blue. I wonder how many zines that kind of need for communication fuels. Also somewhat mail-related, we moved this huge letter-sorting cupboard into the house today. It used to go in my mom's supervisor's office, but the Community Action code states that nobody is allowed to have more than two items of personal furniture in the office at a time. It's like a part of a post office or something, it's made by hand and amazingly heavy. My mom wasn't sure if we would all like it, but it looks like so much fun to me. I told her that I would want to have something like that in my house and she said, "Oh, really?" in a way that made it seem as if this huge wooden thing would be all mine when the time came.

I WON'T GET ANY OLDER NOW THE ANGELS HAVE STOLEN MY RED SHOES
My zine assembly got bogged down when I decided to watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory because it's just so good! The color has that mid '70s quality that I find so soothing, probably because I grew up with it. Lickable wallpaper. Sometimes I try to figure out where my aesthetic sense comes from, more or less unsuccessfully. It doesn't seem like I picked it up from any part of my natural environment, but when I saw the lickable wallpaper and the chocolate room and the everlasting gobstopper again, it all fell in.

I'm almost done with The World According to Garp, my official 600 page book of the summer. Currently it's very sad, but that's John Irving for you. The closer I get to the end, the happier I am that I got one of my coworkers to read it. He liked it more than he could say, and that was extremely flattering for obvious reasons. And now he's probably going to read at least a few of Irving's other books. Thank goodness. It'll take a while for him to notice the patterns I tried to hip him to: the bears, wrestling coaches, private New Hampshire Schools, and missing appendages that are par for the course.

KUDOS, I'M YOURS!
I've been having the best time watching old tapes of Saturday morning cartoons from the '80s while I assemble my zine. For those of you who were unaware, it's taking a really long time. I think I've only sewn together 15 of them so far, but I'm getting better. I gave my parents the first copy because my Dad extended far beyond his typical parental duties yesterday when he helped me get copies at Staples. The next one after that is mine. The two after that I mailed to Ram and Dave today. And that's it. 96 to go. I've been listening to My Aim is True, Trompe le Monde, Twilight to Starlight, and Surfer Rosa at least once every day. To borrow a phrase, this girl is poppy as fuck.

I practiced trombone in the morning today, and suddenly my tone was great. What a weird thing. I'm trying to decide between Donna Lee, Things to Come, Back Home Blues, and Oleo for my audition. Donna Lee is by far the most technical and impressive of the four, but I don't really like the song itself so well, and that's a problem with soloing in my opinion. Things to Come sounds okay, but the progression is kind of uncomfortable for me because I don't usually play over a big old slew of diminished chords. Back Home Blues sounds great from every perspective, and it's mostly just a C blues so it wouldn't be too hard to prepare for a solo over it, but I'm afraid it might not be technically demanding enough. Maybe if I just play it really fast. Oleo is a great song, and it's over the progression from "I Got Rhythm", so at least I'm familiar with it aurally, but you really have to shed to sound alright on that song. It's all easy chords, too, but something about the solo, especially the bridge, just falls flat every time I play it. If only I could hold a vote on blogger.

I got a great big package from Ian in the mail today. It had a Pennsylvania license plate folded in half with some magnets stuck to it, a big letter, a mixtape wrapped in caution tape, and a separate "meet the songs" letter that is as of yet unopened. Clap clap clap is all I have to say.

GALE PERRY IS AN ELEMENTARY TEACHER. SHE ADMITS TO WEARING A LOT OF PANTS.
It's about time for the big summer letdown. My trombone playing, for instance, hasn't exactly grown by leaps and bounds, and I don't have a huge sheaf of poems ready to shop around. To tell the truth, that's the whole of my disappointment. I had been bragging about how much shedding I was going to do over the summer, and how much ass I was going to kick when I came back, but my range has only improved slightly, and I'm not the TOTAL JAZZ BEAST I want to be. I guess I don't expect anything different out of summer, but damn. Somehow I thought this would be different. I have weird little moments when I don't care, I feel in the flow of it, and nothing bothers me. Yeah, I belong in the cast of My So-Called Life. Sometimes you feel like a toaster . . . .

By the way: The. Zine. Is. Done.
Love me.

WAITING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD
I'm copying the zine tomorrow, and probably collating and binding as soon as I get home. I am so excited to see this project all finished. I'm going to submit it to all of the distros that I appreciate that are accepting zines for submission, give a few copies to some friends, and the rest I plan on selling at school. I think I've decided against the whole spray paint cover thing because I did it for the last issue and because it's going to add a whole lot of extra assembly time that I don't think I want to add, and I think they'll look good enough just with the bells and whistles that I'm adding right now.

Tonight we had my deceased godfather's son over for dinner and I made a pasta salad with fresh tomatoes and handfuls of fresh basil. I think basil is my very favorite herb at the moment because it leaves your hands smelling so good after you pick it or tear it, and it has such a calming taste. Mom says I'm getting good at seasoning things as they need to be seasoned. Which is a good thing because I very seldom follow a recipe.

As of tomorrow, I will only have a week before I move back into my dorm and doubtlessly have a big freak out because I've missed all of my friends so much. There's a part of me that cringes when it hears super-excited, screamy college girls greet each other, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to have a hard time containing myself. And new books! And, and, and! <3 I think I'm going to make flyers for the elevators in Morewood about my zine. Somebody at CMU has to be interested in zines.

THIS IS JUST TO SAY
So the zine is done. Well, not done in the sense that I have a box of them sitting at my feet, or even in the sense that I have a box of copies to collate, but in the sense that it's all pasted up and ready to print. It's a really great feeling to have all of the typos corrected (well, the ones I care about, anyway), and all the pages in order and pasted onto flats and everything. It looks like I'm borrowing the car tomorrow to have it all photocopied. It feels really weird not to work on it right now. I've been hacking away constantly for the last month and a half. So, true to form, I'm drafting up another project . . . .

I WAS TALKING TO PEACHY PEACH ABOUT KISSY KISS
So I went back and ripped up some of my layouts, just like I said I wasn't going to a few days ago. But when you get down to it, I really want everybody to be able to read this, and my cramped handwriting just isn't worth it. I can finally say that I'm happy with every page in the zine, from every possible way of evaluation. Except for the cover, that is. Before I had some super-lofty plans for spray paint covers, but that's starting to look like way too much trouble. I don't want the zine to be so complicated to assemble that I don't make all of them at one time or that I never make another run. I guess I'm going to have an overnight moratorium on spraypaint covers and do some tests in the morning. Happily, though, I tried my new binding technique on a mock-up, and it looked perfect. I'm really glad that I'm not using staples this time, although by the time I'm binding zine number 76 I'll probably be banging my head off the table. Hey, I might just be asking my parents to let me borrow the car so I can drive to Washington to have it printed. That's exactly how close it is.

NOW THAT YOUR PICTURE'S IN THE PAPER BEING RHYTHMICALLY ADMIRED
You can tell that I've been hanging out with Scott and Ethan because my clothes reek of cigarette smoke. They're definitely out of control with the nicotine, but such nice boys. We watched a tape of the show from Scott's film class from last semester. Wow, there's nothing quite like amateur film. It was really taking me back to that opening at Pittsburgh Filmmakers that I saw with Dave. I don't think we knew each others' taste in art particularly well then, and I was so reluctant to trash anything lest I put my foot in my mouth, which meant that we watched certain horrible films a lot longer than we probably had to. This was a little different, though, because Scott could dish on all of the students while we watched it, making it a pretty good time. I'm sure that I'm a little biased, but Scott's films were great. The first short is about New Year's Eve, and he took phone messages left on his answering machine from New Year's a few years ago and followed the people briefly. He used my voice, which was cool. You can hear me saying, "Yeah, so Sahsa's party isn't going to happen because, like her dad came home . . . " It was actually the day that I wrecked my car with my ex-boyfriend in the passenger side. Wacky.

After that we played Balderdash, had some Indian food, (Aloo Palak is my all-time favorite, if anybody's keeping track) and called it a night. This morning I read most of Seymour, an Introduction and it's renewed my committment to being the kind of person who, for all conventional purposes, is said to write poetry . . . .