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.)

It’s been a long time since a book has made me actively angry while reading it, probably not since Downtown Owl. But I’m here to tell you that Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst is so poorly written I’m puzzled as to how it even got published.

What’s even more puzzling? This book is getting some pretty decent reviews and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. Do these people not notice the misplaced modifiers? The strange way sentence structure and basic grammar? The annoying habit of introducing characters without mentioning their names only to revel them four paragraphs later so that you’re all “Who the hell is Petey?”

The book is a memoir about a “wacky” family helmed by a wannabe novelist father and an alcoholic mother who uproot their four daughters from their swanky St. Louis life to live in New York where they allegedly struggle financially and, I guess, are eventually ruined. I don’t know for sure because I quit reading right about the time Jeanne goes away to college at the 100 page mark.

My complaints about this book are almost too numerous to list. First, it’s never firmly set in time. I know the family leaves St. Louis in 1976 to spend a year on Long Island so the dad can work on his novel. But after that, I have no idea when some of the events are taking place. I suspect that Darst is around my age, but there’s not a whiff of the 80s or 90s to be found or, you know, how old any of them actually are when some of the events take place much less when those events take place. This makes the reader feel groundless and floaty.

Also, Darst talks about how poor the family was because her dad lost his job and refused to get a new one and her mom never worked. She says at one point they couldn’t even give her lunch money. However, later on not only do they hire a math tutor for her, they hire an exterminator, pay for at least one year of college for two of their daughters, one of whom attends Vassar, the dad sinks thousands into a software project, and there is much talk of the elaborate meals her mother makes.

This is not poor. This is not anywhere near poor. Perhaps this is poor to the 1%. I wouldn’t know because I actually grew up in poverty, where utilities were often shut off for lack of payment, and we qualified for free school lunches. While I’m used to (if not still generally annoyed) by people being unable to recognize their own privilege (hell, I still have a hard time recognizing it myself), to categorize this kind of lifestyle as “poor” is offensive.

If you were to listen to me reading this book you would have thought I was doing a bit from Really?! with Seth & Amy from Saturday Night Live. Like, for instance, when I read this bit about how her dad would write her school papers:

. . . he usually got terrible grades at Bronxville High School, where his obscure and plentiful high literary references from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to a Voltaire pun to the thick of Faulkner — usually lost teachers.

REALLY?

Ugh. This was a pick by my Rock & Roll Bookclub and I cannot wait to discuss it tonight. I only paid $5 for the book and even at that price it was a total ripoff.

After I joined the CSA I decided that I needed some homegrown herbs to go with my super-spiffy, locally-grown herbs to go with them. I tried to grow herbs last summer, but it didn’t go well. Madison ever the counter jumper and eater of everything, made it nearly impossible to keep herbs indoors. I moved the herbs outdoors and they were promptly flooded by a deluge when I wasn’t home. Apparently, it was not the right time.

But now that it’s just me and Paco, I think I can grow me some dill. Paco’s not a counter jumper or an eater of anything but catfood. In fact, he can’t even get on the windowsill where I’ve stored the herbs unless I put a chair there first. And I do keep a chair there, I just made sure that no herbs were in his spot.

This new CSA-sharing, herb-growing phase of my life disturbs me a little bit not only because I’m still scarred by The Great Hippiefest Incident of Aught Seven, but because I am not a hippie. I don’t want to be a hippie. But here I am, acting all hippie-like. Barf. You know what makes this even worse? I didn’t tell you about the patchouli-scented hippie organic deodorant my niece found in the bookcase last weekend.

What’s happening to me?

Interlude: I thought about going back and high-fiving that kid but by then I was in the toothpaste aisle on the never-ending quest for cinnamon-flavored dental floss. I’m pretty sure I could find a Sasaquatch, the Yeti, the Loch-Ness Monster, and probably a suitable boyfriend before I find cinnamon-flavored dental floss. For real people, if you find some buy it. You could probably auction that shit off on eBay for some serious cash.

Two: While I was searching for cinnamon-flavored dental floss, a woman entered the toothpaste aisle. She was talking loudly on a cell phone. I didn’t catch what she was saying, but that’s only because I was too busy laughing about how she had not one not two but THREE copies of Fifty Shades of Grey cradled in her arm. Like I said on Twitter, I wasn’t sure if she were buying them for her bookclub or if they were Mother’s Day Gifts. Both options crack me up.

Sunday as I finished Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail I kind of sighed sadly and wished this book had been around when I was a young twentysomething woman. While the story is uniquely Strayed’s the meaning, the lesson, the whathaveyou feels universal. Mostly it’s this: you are strong and wonderful and can do hard things even if you think you can’t. Also, yes you may be wounded, you may struggle with the ghosts of your past, but it’s going to be okay.

Chances are even if I had this book when I was a twentysomething the meaning would have been lost on me. I was a unique, wounded snowflake. Eye roll. Just like everyone else.

This is not to take anything away from Strayed’s book, because it’s fantastic. She’s a wounded snowflake too, but unlike most of us she writers with the kind of bravery and unsparing eye you don’t see very often.

In the summer of 1995, twenty-six-year old Strayed decides to get the hell out of Minnesota and hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) from the Mojave desert in Southern California all the way up into Oregon. Strayed decided that hiking the PCT would be a chance for her to get her life together. She wasn’t doing well: struggling with the grief of losing her mom so young (mom was in her mid-40s, Strayed was 22) and the family that splintered apart after the death; dealing with a divorce, and a flirtation with heroin addiction.

So she chucks it all and heads to California with a giant backpack she called Monster; a pair of hiking boots she’d soon learn were too small; and a heaping helping of gumption.

The story weaves back and forth through Strayed’s time on the PCT and all those things worrying her back in Minnesota. Surprisingly, both stories are equally engrossing. Never once did I wish to get back to the Trail or back to Minnesota. Wherever Strayed was in her story, I was right there with her.

What amazed me the most, as a reader, is that I was constantly worried about Strayed. Logically I knew she made it off the PCT just fine. I knew the story was taking place in 1995 and she was writing it at quite a far remove. I knew she was, in fact, as I was reading touring the country and had recently come out as Dear Sugar at The Rumpus, and yet emotionally I was scared. I didn’t want this person I had developed quite a bit of affection for to be harmed.

It’s hard not to develop affection for twenty-six-year-old Strayed. She’s so flawed and stupid and brave and smart and charming. And the best part? She recognizes all these aspects of herself and of the decisions she made and she never shies away from telling us the stupid things she’s done even though she’s an intelligent woman. She never makes excuses for her behavior. All she does is explain what was going on when she decided to do this or that. But what I liked the most was that there was no grand epiphany. There were teeny tiny epiphanies all over the place about a lot of things and people, which is how life is, isn’t it?

I don’t read a lot of nonfiction. It’s usually not my thing, but if I could find nonfiction like Strayed’s memoir that is tense and funny and smart, I’d read it all the time and never stop. Ever.

Have I mentioned lately that I hate having my picture taken? Well, I do. It’s unnerving and weird and makes you feel like the vainest person ever. Blargh. I have a recurring nightmare that involves commenters from the Strib talking about the hideousness of my double chin. Barf.

But this isn’t about my vanity or the fact that I haven’t colored my hair since October so there’s a lot of shiny silver hairs running mad around my head.

No, instead this is about how all the hard work I did this weekend was undone in the name of staging.

As soon as I got off the phone with the reporter where we discussed the picture I set about cleaning up this joint. You might think I exaggerate my own filth for the sake of humor, but it is not hyperbole. I’m serious, my house looks like it’s in soft focus because the combination of dust and cat hair makes everything look kind of soft-edged and hazy.

A few weeks ago I was at Atom & BFK’s house for dinner and waxed poetically about how clouds of dust occasionally break free from the ceiling fan suspended twenty-feet in the air a waft gently down to the floor to join all the rest of the dust. Sister #2 likes to make me feel better about the state of my house by saying it gets so dusty because I have no cross breeze and also that fan suspend twenty-feet in the air.

But the truth is, I’m a bad housekeeper. It’s just me here and I can go weeks and weeks and probably months without ever really using the diningroom table for anything other than a place to heap crap I don’t feel like putting away. Also, paw prints in the dust. I’m not even lying.

So anyway, this weekend I cleaned my house and put all the books in order. It was a chore. Such a chore that Jaycie came over to help me dust and alphabetize the fiction. It was a lot of fun and I was more than a little proud that she went home with at least five books she wanted to read.

With the house all nice and cleaned and in order I spent most of the day in a jittery anxious state of “why did I agree to let them take my picture.” That mostly disappeared once the photog arrived. She was super nice and fun to talk to and asked questions while she snapped incessantly.

Then she stopped and said, “Do you think we could stack some of the books around on the arm of the chair?”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked as I hauled myself out of the La-Z-Grl and started grabbing books from the case and putting them on the arms of the chair. “This is how it usually looks. I just cleaned up because I knew you were coming.”

I didn’t mention the dust though. That will just be our dirty little secret, right Internet?