no boys allowed in the room!!!!

i dunno -- i think chasing makes sense if you genuinely like the person. otherwise you just sit there pretending to not care and that doesn't work when both people do it, now does it

chasing worked for me, though i didn't do it with the embarrassing fervor i had done it in the past

also this is like 150,000 xposts, but riding to and from social events is pretty much the reason that i can get myself to go to social events like 90% of the time

i'm seriously thinking abt winterizing my mountain bike this year! at least for neighbourhood jaunts (my road bike is too much summer fun, don't want to wreck it)

i think my new answer is to just let my true loving self shine through any silly anxieties these days tbh. getting over caring abt what people think as long as i'm not hurting anyone, right? embrace the weirdness

that's my motto
it's part of the true unfettered glory of one's 30s imo

the only time i have to rein it in a little is at work, but students aren't allowed to see full on 100% me anyway. too vulnerable!

OTM

I didn't even realize how liberating this actually was until Jeff and I were at this free outdoor concert that was well attended by many cool kids and I started to get anxious about whether I was reading as appropriate hip for my surroundings and it hit me: I'm a 37-year-old fat lady here straight from my business casual lawyer job and of COURSE I don't fit in, but I'm really happy to be sitting outside and watching this band I really like and *mental bird-flipping to all concern attendees*.

Let's address some typos, shall we? "Appropriate" should be "appropriately" and "concern" should be "concert."

Sheesh.

if you're over 30 and you're still making yourself sick about what other people think, yr doin it rong

i didn't go to pfork at all, but that's because i forgot when it was and i was on vacation

heh, i read it as "concerned attendees" and that made sense too!

i'm totally unconcerned about being too weird or uncool because i'm "old" - i was at a friend's house about a month ago, and looking at his hipster roommate's tape collection, which is in the kitchen, and commented that it really resembled my tape collection circa 1987, and hipster roommate got a bit defensive, and we got into an argument about what was the best New Order album - he disputed my assertion that it was Power Corruption & Lies, but it turned out he really likes to argue, so I think I actually rose in his estimation.

Oh, the concert in question was the Caribou show in Millennium Park. I didn't go to Pitchfork either b/c it's hot outside and we're moving plus fuck portapotties. Another thing I get to not care about now that I'm over 30: prioritizing sanitation and personal comfort over wanting everybody to think I'm the kind of person who doesn't care about portapotties or filthy dive bar bathrooms. It turns out I do care. I fucking care a lot.

xp Of course it's Power Corruption & Lies (although I am very fond of Brotherhood in a totally uncool way).

"Age of Consent" has an eerie habit of coming up on shuffle on my ipod when i'm leaving a show or party having had bad guy chasing experiences

I am listening to that right now. Which is actually not that odd since I put on PC&L because you just mentioned it.

hahaha re: prioritizing sanitation - like how at age 28 i was travelling and suddenly was just like fuck this hostel shit we're staying in a hotel. never go back.

lol - roxy is on tour and can't contribute to this thread right now

YES. The days of using a bag of my own dirty clothes as a pillow are OVER, motherfuckers.

Well, Roxy is a rock star so that's different.

also - sleeping on mattresses on the floor - i don't care if i lost punk or boho cred or whatever, i really like sleeping on an actual bed

as long as it's a mattress and not a futon, i'm okay with it being on the floor.

We just bought a real bed w/ headboard (the first I have owned since I went to college and my parents cleared out my teenage bedroom!), but the delivery date is after we move and I'm loathe to move anything unnecessarily so we're leaving the metal bed-frame thinger behind and going back to mattress-on-the-floor for however long it takes them to deliver the bed.

I've been reading a lot of home decorating blogs in an attempt to not suck at decorating my home and I have noticed that putting the mattress right on the floor is kind of trendy again.

i don't care about trendy, i'm in my mid-30s. i like the elevation that a bed provides, it's a kinda regal feeling

another advantage: cats won't be able to hide underneath for sneakattack.

my parents have had the same crummy mattress on the floor for my entire life (my first bed was a mattress on the floor too)
not surprisingly, this has made me long for a really tall cushiony bed
mattress on the floor with no box spring reminds me of the sad scene of duckie's bedroom

haha totally. duckie listening to the smiths, tossing cards into a hat.

please please please let me get what i want

mattress on the floor with no box spring reminds me of the sad scene of duckie's bedroom

i thought that was the coolest thing when i was a teenager, though!

lol - Jenny - I was thinking the New Order "Age of Consent" topic - not the mattresses/hostel topic

Me, toooooooooooo I tossed so many cards into hats. It's funny. I was supposed to identify with Andy, but she was so defined by the dudes around her, that instead I just desperately wanted to be Ducky.

HA, sarahel, okay! Haha.

i tried for years to find a Ducky-like jacket! That was my vintage store holy grail for a while.

i never tossed a single card into a hat in my life
that scene made me think that duckie might be homeless/a squatter/orphaned, but as a kid i always thought that when one character never had on-screen parents and the other one did (see also: some kind of wonderful)

i mean, i didn't REALLY think he was a street waif (he did go to school and try to do his homework), but the thought crossed my mind

yeah i was mildly curious as to duckie's home life situation. i didn't think he was a squatter but i did think maybe his parents weren't in the picture and he was renting a room somewhere.

but if he was renting a room he probably would have to quit high school and get a job so no.

but almost all of those 80s teen movies had minimal parental presence! My mom referred to the characters in those movies as "pod children" because they never seemed to have any parents, as if they were generated from pods like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers

but john hughes was invested in at least getting a representative moment of parents being awful onscreen. and harry dean stanton is fairly prominent in pretty in pink. kids bitch about their parents in john hughes movies at least. with duckie, it was like his entire life involved trailing andie around.

Pretty in Pink means a lot to me, guys.

yeah, i just remember the distinction between the ones who did and the ones who didn't more than the overall absence of parents

watts - no visible parents, has no one to eat with
keith - dad is obsessed with his future, eats dinner with his family every night

duckie - throws cards angrily into a hat in his sad graffiti room
sam - unemployed pop cares enough to buy her a dress (albeit an ugly one)

lloyd - has a sister, but don't remember any parents (were they dead?)
diane - affectionate overzealous dad

surely there are more, but those are the ones that i remember most clearly. it didn't help that in english class we were always reading about little picaresque street urchins.

yeah, but you only get a moment, then the parents conveniently disappear in order to further the plot. this bred years of resentment of my parents who were around a lot (like they never went on vacation, and my dad was a school teacher so he was home all day during the summer) and neither cool or awful.

xp - i liked some kind of wonderful more than pretty in pink because keith's parents seemed more like my parents in terms of their regular presence in his life, plus Watts had a cool car and played drums - and of course, there was Duncan

shit, english AND spanish class
i was under the impression that the world is very full of industrious orphaned waifs on a journey

I always assumed that Duckie had parents but they were of the sort who did not care if their son spray painted his walls or slept on a mattress on the floor. So either super permissive hippies/artists or drunks. Or both. The Glass Castle by Duckie Dale.

oh yeah - lots of orphaned waifs in english class!

that seems plausible

xp

There were parents all over the place in Sixteen Candles and Weird Science.

those parents went on vacation!!!!

god i LOVE weird science

i totally had a Watts moment in my early 20s - where i dressed up in pseudo-chauffeur garb to pick up my best friend (who I had a huge crush on) and his gf at the airport.

that's crazy sarahel!

he was also a painter, he later became my bf

Did you play drums? Where were your parents during this time?