Last week or the week before my friend Christa pointed out that Jem was on Netflix streaming. She philosophized that since my birthday was nearing Netflix was seeing to it that all my favorite TV shows were being added to the service.

I joked that next they’d add “A Different World” next and release “Dawson’s Creek” on my actual birthday. Christa was also lobbying for deleted Tim Riggins’ shower scenes.

So imagine my surprise as I crankily trolled through Netflix looking for something that would hold my very grouchy attention (someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed today) when I discovered DAWSON’S CREEK STREAMING ON NETFLIX!

I very nearly pooped my pants and then promptly wrote on Christa’s Facebook wall in all caps and exclamation points.

Now as I type, I’m watching the Junior Prom episode (#9 on the 10 Best Episodes of Dawson’s Creek list) and pondering new things to ask the universe for. Netflix, you got 12 days to deliver on those Tim Riggins shower scenes lest you ruin everything.

Aside from my birthday, here are a few other things I love as I approach the beginning of my fifth decade on this planet.

• The name ‘Ormus Cama.” It’s the name of a character in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
• The Herblings, obviously.
• Greek Meatball Salad.
• Arguing with smart people on the Internet (occasionally dumb ones slip in, but I ignore them). For real I’ve been very Barry from “High Fidelity” lately. And, as my friend Marc pointed out, not “Walking on Sunshine” Barry but “How can your daughter like that song?” Barry.
• Ellen Willis (Still).
• Mad Men. For real. This season of Mad Men is giving Dawson’s Creek a run for its money as far as all time favorite show goes.
• Peanut Butter Cheerios. These might replace Nutter Butters as my favorite peanut-butter flavored foodthing.
• Spending a portion of each Sunday Family Dinner going over the heinous acts of Gayle King on the week’s CBS This Morning show (I might be a little obsessed).
• Also, Sunday Family Dinner.
• That next week I have a meeting with a potential client, someone who found me through my portfolio (and not, as far as I know, through someone I know).
• Also, I landed another new client today without ever putting on real clothes.
• Recently, I stumbled upon an exBF’s wedding pictures on Facebook and the only thing I could think as I clicked through the album was “wow, I totally dodged that bullet.”
• Almonds.
• Turquoise fingernail polish.

First before I begin my long-winded tale of woe I have to tell you that even though I got a bad haircut something spectacular happened at the salon today. I saw a dude get a perm. I SAW A DUDE GET A PERM! And it wasn’t just any old dude getting any old perm. No. This was an old, balding dude whose hairline started at the top of his ears getting a perm. It was an old bald mullety perm. It was GLORIOUS! — yes all caps, exclamation point.

Now on to my tale of woe.

Ever since I lost Jenny to the Hellmouth that is Eden Prairie, I’ve been in the market for a new hairstylist. I had been with Jenny for so long I forgot the nearly unbearable awkwardness that is finding a new stylist. It’s as bad as dating. No, it’s worst than dating. At least after a bad date you don’t have to walk around with the trainwreck that was all the hope you misbegotten-ly put in another person. (shut up, I know it’s a made up word but I have a bad haircut and therefore get to make up stupid words.)

Just like dating, with your hairstylist chemistry is everything, and it’s just as hard to find. I think the last five or six years with Jenny had washed all the previous bad haircuts from my mind. Luckily, as Sister #3 was listening to me whine about my new awful hair she reminded me of some of my worst cuts. And there were some bad’uns.

My new style is a bad’un. It is not the one pictured left. Also, just to be clear, that is NOT A PICTURE OF ME. This is a picture I showed the stylist to explain the kind of hair color I like. I’m usually not a picture-bringer a “make me look like Michelle Williams”er. Though I do wish they’d make me look like a red-headed Michelle Williams.

Since this was the first time I ever met this lady I thought it would be smart to bring a variety of things so she’d get a little bit of what my hair tastes were. This is, of course, all sort of pie in the sky sorts of hair tastes, because let’s face it I never wash my fucking hair. But if I were to wash it and put some effort into styling it, I’d like it to look like the kinds of hair in these pictures.

My hair doesn’t look like anything in any of those pictures. My hair looks nothing like me. I look in the mirror and I say to myself, “this is not my beautiful hair. this not my wild hair. Hair how did you get here?”

I know how it got here. It got here by scrunching. As the stylist was cutting and she discovered my hair had “some natural wave” she begin to “scrunch.” I felt like I was stuck in that dream where you’re being chased by a psycho-killer and you can’t run or scream.

Now, I get to plead a little bit of ignorance in the way this all unfolded. I have really bad eyes. In fact my eyes are so bad that I do not get out of bed without putting my glasses on first. So when I sit down in a hairstylist’s chair and take off my glasses, I’m very nearly blind. I can see super fuzzy shapes but that’s about it. I put all my faith in the fact that I accurately communicated what it is that I was looking for and all my trust in the hairstylist understanding what I meant.

That didn’t work for me today.

Sister #3 kept reassuring me that it “wasn’t that bad.” Which are the exact words you want to hear after spending a ton of money on a new hair color. “It’s just that your roots are so light and your eyebrows are so dark,” she said.

I did take some pictures to show the Internet but my vanity will not allow me to post them. Hell, my vanity wouldn’t even allow those awful pictures to sit on my camera for more than 38 seconds.

Because I am cheap/poor, I’ve decided to fix this my own way. I’m hoping to have it done by the big birthday party next weekend. Two words: Manic Panic.

I worry over Oregano and what I have diagnosed as failure to thrive. I beam at Mustard and the leaves that sprout two inches over the lip of the pot. I think that perhaps Garlic Chives has something that is not Garlic Chives in its pot. I notice that at last there are signs of life in Lavender and Marjoram. I ponder Googling what the hell you make with Marjoram. My favorites are the ones that leave their seeds in the dirt — Savory, Sage, and Thyme.

Before my friend Nimrod Hotrod turned herb-raising into a competitive sport I was only moderately curious about my ability to properly cultivate these things. Now, of course, I’m in it for the glory. I may not be many things, but I will most certainly be a better Herb Gardener than Hotrod. I will, of course, win easily because I have grown mine from seeds and he had to start from seedlings. We can all agree that growing from seeds makes one a far superior gardener, right?

Right now the biggest danger to The Herblings is Paco. I left a spot on the windowsill for him but he seems to prefer all the other spots on the windowsill. We had a moth stuck between the screen and the window situation last week that nearly killed us all. It involved a lot of shouting, and me holding back Paco while also using a sheet of paper to escort the moth outside to safety. Yeah, yeah. I escorted rather than squished. It seemed like less work with the extra-added bonus of not killing anything.

In the epic battle of The Beatles vs. The Stones, I come down firmly in The Stones camp. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t also love The Beatles. In fact, I’d say The Beatles were the soundtrack to my 19th year. That’s not how I old I was when Beatlemania hit US shores. No, it was 1991 and I had discovered old Beatles’ records at the Chippewa Falls Library. I played The Beatles so often the winter of 1991 that one of my younger sisters still loathes their music to this day.

Even with that small-scale Beatlemania, much of what I knew about the band is the kind of information you get from pop culture osmosis. The kinds of facts you’re not sure how you learned, but know nonetheless. From Liverpool, played in Hamburg, screaming girls on Ed Sullivan, Maharishi, Yoko, Lennon shot in 1980. . . that kind of stuff. Also, who hasn’t heard about the mysterious “fifth Beatle?”

If you read Baby’s in Black the fabulous graphic novel by by Arne Bellstorf, you’ll learn all about one of the candidates for fifth Beatlesdom, Stuart Sutcliffe and the time The Beatles spent in Hamburg.

For real Beatlemaniacs this book might be old hat, but for me it was a revelation. I knew nothing of Stuart Sutcliffe, the brooding artsy Beatle who falls in love with a German art student Astrid Kirchherr.

The book focuses on Astrid and Stu’s relationship and how despite a language barrier, they fall in love. It’s really sweet. Astrid’s pretty rad. She’s a photographer who hangs with all kinds of artists and convinces Stuart to go to art school in Hamburg. She’s the woman who took those early Beatles’ photos where they all have Elvis-y pompadours, before they adopted the mop-top look that was popular with the Hamburg artsy crowd.

As Astrid and Stu’s love grows he has to make a choice between the woman he loves and the band. As you know he didn’t choose The Beatles. If you’re already familiar with this story you know how it ends. I had no idea. After finishing the book I proclaimed, “that’s the saddest fucking thing I ever read.”

It is and it’s good. Baby’s in Black is one of those great books that are engrossing and entertaining while being totally educational at the same time.

Around 8:30 I poured a cup of coffee and checked on the herblings. In case you are wondering they’re doing quite well. I was a little worried about the Parsley, but there are signs of life in the bucket. The mustard is a bit of a drama queen and will fall to the ground should it be in need of a sip of water.

The sun was shining, the breeze blowing, the outside smelling like what drinking from a garden hose tastes like and I had that “holy shit! this is my life” moment. This is what I do. I sit next to breezy, sunny windows and drink coffee and say stupid things on Twitter and work.

This all had extra significance today, because it was on this day in 2009 that I was laid off from my last “real job.” Can you believe it? I can hardly believe it. Since then I’ve managed to scrape together enough freelance work to pay my mortgage for thirty-six months. THIRTY-SIX MONTHS! I’m amazed. I’m more than amazed. I’m dumbfounded, starstruck, and just a little bewildered.

People, I have been cubefree for three entire years. I cannot even begin to figure out how to thank my lucky stars for this extended stroke of good fortune. Each year when this anniversary rolls around I say that I just want to make it through the summer without having to get a real job. It’s worked so far, so I’ll say it again. I just want to make it through the summer without having to get a real job. I have big plans for this summer, not the least of which include Library Mondays with The Tibbles and a writing a fucking novel.

I’m lit from within with the beatific joy that comes when you discovery your deity of choice. My deity is called Ellen Willis and she was a writer who worked as the first popular music critic for The New Yorker. My bible (thus far) is Out of the Vinyl Deeps.

Like any recent convert I’ve gone on a mission to get those around me to open up their hearts and let Ellen into their lives. I’ve done a very poor job of trying to convert others around me. I say poor because I’m still so new in the light of the glow of the joy or whatever, that I can’t quite properly explain why my way is the one true way. I usually just say things like “amazing” and “changing the way I listen to music” and “so good.”

PEOPLE! You know how I have spent the last kajillion years searching for a female perspective on Rock & Roll? You know how I have begged everyone to suggest something that would tie in feminism and what it means to be a woman and a fan of rock music? Well I found it and it was very nearly everything that I had hoped it would be. The only way it could have been everything I hoped it could be is if Ellen Willis were my contemporary, someone born in 1972 and not 1941. If she were writing about music today, the music I’ve experienced in my life. But then, I suppose, most sacred, religious texts aren’t about the here and now. They’re about the then and there.

Today when I was writing about this book on MN Reads I mentioned that it was hard to explain what the book meant to me and what it was like to read it without breaking into tears. Reading it filled a hole in me that was much more profound than I thought. Ellen Willis’ writing put a social, cultural, and, most importantly, feminist perspective on Rock & Roll that my soul needed. I didn’t realize how much, until I now.

Here is a little bit from the holy text:

No, all I ask of The Beatles is a little taste. When Bob Dylan renounced politics, he also renounced preaching. “Revolution,” in contrast reminds me of the man who refuses a panhandler and then can’t resist lecturing him on the error of his ways. it takes a lot of chutzpah for a multimillionaire to assure the rest of us, “You know it’s gonna be all right.” And Lennon’s “Change your head” line is just an up-to-date version of “Let them eat cake”; anyone in a position to follow such advice doesn’t need it. pg 81

The male-dominated counterculture defined freedom for women almost exclusively in sexual terms. As a result, women endowed the idea of sexual liberation with immense symbolic importance; it become charged with all the secret energy of an as yet suppressed larger rebellion. Yet to express one’s rebellion in that limited way was a painfully literal form of submission. Whether or not Janis [Joplin] understood that, her dual persona — lusty hedonist and suffering victim — suggested she felt it. Dope, another term in her metaphorical equation (getting high as singing as fucking as liberation) was, in its more sinister aspect, a painkiller and finally a killer. Which is not to say that the good times weren’t real, as far as they went. Whatever the limitations of hippie rock star life, it was better than being a provincial matron — or a lonely weirdo.” pg 126

He was not boring. I was. I’ll get to that in a minute. The reading was so much fun. He read a little, he sang a little, he very diplomatically tried to answer a question asked by a man who didn’t realize he wasn’t really asking a question or saying anything that made any sense but uttered a lot of large words that seemed coherent. Also, note to all authors: more music at your readings. If I ever finish writing a book and get it published and do a reading I’m totally going to make someone come and play some music tangentially related to the book. It will probably be my friend Wolfdogg, since he’s the only guitar player I know. This would be much easier if I were multi-talented like Dylan Hicks, but I’m not.

But this about what happens when you are boring, not what happens when you go see a multi-talented author and singer read from their new book. Obviously.

No, what happens when you are boring is that you go to Grumpy’s with friends you haven’t seen in ages (in this case Jags & Vodo) you end up talking about potato salad.

See, I invited Jags and Vodo to my “40th Birthday Soiree.” The quotes because Jaycie, my niece, has dubbed this the official name of the party. There is much Sister Club excitement about my impending birthday. In fact we spend a lot of time during Sunday Family Dinner brainstorming “themes.” And by we, I mean Sisters #2 & #3 and Jaycie. So far they go back and forth between a Minnesota Twins theme (because I wear, often, a Minnesota Twins shirt that I bought for $6 not so much because I’m a huge baseball fan but a huge fan of $6 shirts. I’ve been known to say I’d wear the shirt just as much if it just had ‘$6′ on the front) and a rainbows and unicorns theme. I mostly ignore them during the debate and just try to con The Tibbles into believing they have to get me forty presents for my FORTIETH! birthday.

When I invited Jags & Vodo, cityfolk, to venture out to the wilds of Shakopee on June 2nd to celebrate nearly forty years of me (the party is before my actual birthday, the last weekend of my thirties) I gave them my best sales pitch. It went something like this:
“Yeah, my sisters are throwing me a big party. It will be fun. There will be potato salad.”

This, of course, prompted Vodo to be all “Oh, potato salad, of course I’ll be there.”
And I was all,”Dude, I just learned how to make potato salad and it is amazing.”

And because Vodo can never just take my word for anything he had to goad me about the ease of making potato salad. “Isn’t it just potatoes and mayonaisse?” he asked.

This from someone who obviously never, ever made potato salad. Jags then chimed in about how her grandma made excellent potato salad. Then I explained the different theories on potato salad and how for years I could not make a decent potato salad until I read this fascinating article about it. We continued to debate the merits and/or ease of potato salad and what kind of potatoes to use. After about ten minutes into the discussion I turned to Vodo and shouted “SEE? POTATO SALAD IS IMPORTANT.”

So that’s what happens when you’re boring, you get rather non-boring, even interesting people to discuss the merits of potato salad.

As part of the portfolio, I created a slideshow with a metric crapton of old I Will Dare designs. I don’t have them all, sadly. I’m a bad historian. Luckily for viewers of that particular slideshow, I could only upload ten slides. That means their eyes are spared from some of the more heinous HTML + hexidecimal colors I foisted on the unsuspecting websurfers of 2001. I’m sorry 2001, please forgive me.

Also part of this whole portfolio refresh? Making JodiChromey.com and IWillDare.com look like they came from the same person. Since I don’t blog at jc.com, I send all the blog links over here. Having the two sites look so different made me feel a little multiple-personality disordered.

This new look makes me feel like I’ve finally shrugged off 2003. Not that 2003 was bad. I rather enjoyed it, I think. You could look in the archives if you wanted to check.

By bringing the two sites so close together I think I’ve finally accepted that workjodi and jodiwilldare are one and the same. And more than that, it’s okay to show the world who I am — radical opinions and copious swearing and all that jazz.

It’s taken me a long time, nine years I suppose, to get here.

When I worked at Hell, Inc. I lived in constant of fear of being “discovered.” It was as though I had a secret online life and somehow that was bad. Of course, most of that was in my head. All my damn coworkers read I Will Dare, they just never said anything about it. Minnesota and all that.

It wasn’t until I worked at The Nerdery that I began to see my online activities as an asset and not a liability. If ever a place let you be who you are, it’s The Nerdery and even then I wasn’t completely comfortable with it.

Being who you are is hard. Being who you are all the time in all situations is super hard. It sounds really fucking stupid, but it’s true. You would think with the continuing popularity of social media it would be easier, but that just allows people to construct an even more elaborate artifice to hide behind.

The thing is, everyone can tell when someone is a phony. They’re the ones with the “laser-like” focus on whatever crappy keyword is they want to be. It’s as though they only have one, single interest and that’s all they’re allowed to talk about. What a drag.

Becoming holistic Jodi isn’t the only way I’ve let go of 2003. I also let it go in the way I approached the look of I Will Dare. For the first time ever, I’m not putting full posts on the front page of the blog. This is one of those things that matters only to me because nobody ever visits the homepage except for me and Google’s spiders. Most everyone else either reads this in some sort of feedreader or visits from a link to a single post.

Why I held on to this archaic way of presenting a homepage, I’ll never know. I think I thought someone would complain about readability or selling out or some such bullshit. There are times I forget that this whole site exists solely for my amusement.

So long 2003, hello 2012. Just you wait. As soon as I convince Multi-Grain Peanut Butter Cheerios to sponsor this shit I’ll be fully up to date. (Yes, I’ve given up on selling out to Nutter Butters because they just refuse to take the bait, and by bait I mean occasionally mentioning in a post how damn much I want be sponsored by Nutter Butters.)