If you’re going to put chili powder in something, even if you consider it to be not that much, warn people.

I was at Big Bowl down on Rush street tonight and I ordered pad thai, which is traditionally a very sweet dish, which is (almost) never spicy.

I took a few bites and realized exactly how spicy it was (not much to most people, pretty damn spicy to my insanely bland pallette), then noticed that there were small pieces of hot pepper in it.

When I called the waiter over to ask, he mentioned that they also put some chili powder in the sauce to give it a kick. I asked to see the menu again, and of course, no mention of hot peppers or chili powder.

I can understand why they didn’t mark it spicy, because it wasn’t too spicy, but throwing chili powder into something can really irritate people with a low tolerance for spice. Like me, for instance.

It’s not as big a deal to me, since I only get rather unpleasant indigestion, but to somebody allergic to chili powder this could have been a serious problem.

So please, if you ever start your own restaurant, warn people if you put spices in there. You don’t have to mark things as spicy, just tell people what you’re putting in your damn food.

Thank you.

I’m turning into a vampire. Or something.

I can’t sleep at night anymore, and I’ve therefore been finding it increasingly difficult to stay awake during the day.

I end up doing a lot of work in the middle of the night (hence most things on the weblog are posted at about 3am) becuase of class and stuff, but I’ve really turned into a nocturnal creature lately.

Part of it is that I just don’t sleep that much, period. Yesterday and today I slept a lot, mostly because the two days prior i had slept a grand total of five hours becauase of this video production final project I’ve been shooting (hence no weblog), and have to work on again on Monday.

For some reason, though, even if I manage to get into bed at a relatively decent hour, I suddenly become not as tired and end up reading many pages of my 1,000 page Truman biography, which is interesting but is kind of counterproductive when I really need to sleep.

Not sleeping at night, of course, leaves me really worn out during the day, so I fall asleep in about two thirds of my classes. Well, actually, this has gone down since I discovered that doing the Daily‘s crossword puzzle will actually keep me awake, though not necessarily paying attention.

Then I end up taking a nap when I get home from class and starting the whole stupid cycle all over again. Clearly, this is not a good sign for my summer job, since I have to be there at 8:30am every morning, and it takes me about an hour to get there from my apartment.

Oh well. It could be worse.

I could be talking in a Transylvanian accent and telling people I vant to suck their bloooooood.

It’s difficult to explain this little thing to people who aren’t part of the incestuous little circle of us lot writing these things.

I was working on a project when I ran into Nate, who apparently reads this, since when I explained my irritation with my haircut he mentioned that he read about it.

“He read about it?” asked one of my partners. I explained meekly that I have “a weblog thingy.” He replied, “and you write about your…haircut?”

This is not a bad question, since people who don’t know a number of people who post their obnoxious bitching and whining for all the world to see really have no conception of why anyone would want to do this in the first place.

Everyone that writes one of these has a reason they do it. I do it as a public venting of my grievences of my gripes against the smaller things in life and the stupidity of society in general, and I think to a certain extent everyone does this out of a desire to feel heard.

Really, I do this because I’m not a standup comedian. If I were a standup comedian, I could just do this and make a living and call it a day. But I don’t really have the timing to be a comedian, even though the guy with the lazy eye at the CVS in Spring Valley used to tell me I look like Jeaneane Garafolo (I wish).

But this is kind of a hard thing to explain to people unfamiliar with the phenomenon of the weblog, or people who think of weblogs as simply people bitching about politics or world events, when there is a plethora of other things to bitch about.

They don’t have to be important in the great scheme of things. They just have to be important enough to the person writing about them for them to actually, you know, write. It helps if you’re funny, though.

Because then, at least, you don’t bore the shit out of people.

I’m really glad that my tuition money is going to useful studies.

Now I think I understand why the Onion sometimes gets letters from people who think that some of their stories are real.

Thanks, Northwestern!

(thanks to Sarah Wolff for this one)

I waited four years for this?

I’m one of the world’s larger Sheryl Crow fans, and I have to admit I’m really disappointed in her new album, C’mon C’mon. The main reason: filler.

It’s not even that most of the album is filler. It’s that half the album is filler, and her last two albums have had absolutely none, with plenty of good b-sides to spare. In fact, I would have been happier if she tossed crap like “It’s So Easy” and put good b-sides like “Sad Sad World” and “You Always Get Your Way” on there.

“It’s So Easy” is the key example of what’s wrong with this album: Half-assed writing and pointless guest apperances.

Sheryl wrote this with her sister, which is nice, but I cannot for the life of me understand why her A&R people insisted on having this half-baked piece of crap song recorded for the album. Crow desperately tries to sweeten the deal by dragging Don Henley into the mess (she used to sing backup for him, now he sings backup for her, and we all laugh together), but it only succeeds in making the song even whinier.

The beginning and end of the album tell the story of what this album could have been had Crow decided to put more effort into it. “Steve McQueen” is a glorious revival of the Steve Miller Band sound of yesteryear, but other songs that try to revive Sounds of the 70′s fall flat (see: “Diamond Road”).

“Soak Up The Sun” is a nice little piece of piffle, ranking right up there with “All I Wanna Do” in Crow’s catalogue of Songs You Like At First Then Hear Seven Million Times And Get Really Fucking Sick Of.

Quality dips at “You’re An Original” (which I really hope Sheryl realizes the irony of Lenny Kravitz singing backup on, since he is one of the least original people on earth) and doesn’t come back up for air until track 11, the lovely ballad “Abilene”.

One song that could have been good is “Safe And Sound”, which she performed on the “Tribute To Heroes” telethon. The song is absolutely killed by the fact that the main note in the song is just barely out of Sheryl’s range, and you can really hear her voice strain on that note. If she had bothered to drop the song a step, it would have been in her range and it would have sounded great. Instead, it sounds like she’s deluded herself into thinking that her voice cracking makes her sound more emotional.

It doesn’t. It just sounds like she had already recorded all the instrumental parts (of which there are many) and decided to just say fuck it and keep the vocal line at the same pitch instead of trying to pitch-shift it.

The last two songs really make me angry, because they show how good this album really could have been. “Hole In My Pocket” and “Weather Channel” are two of the best songs Sheryl has written, but I fear that most people will have stopped listening before they get to them.

All in all, if you’re a serious Sheryl Crow fan (even one a good deal less serious than myself), this album is a disappointment, especially after the near perfection of The Globe Sessions.

If you’re either a casual fan or kind of know her from the radio, you’d probably like the album, because it’s got a good number of good songs, which is a lot more than can be said for most albums right now.

WARNING: If anyone reading this knows any of my parental units, don’t tell them about any of this (you’ll see why below). I should state that none of these various parental units read (or even know about) the weblog, at least not to my knowledge. And if they do, they shouldn’t tell me they do, because then they’ll lose their link to my gripes against them.

I knew it was going to be an odd day when my mother called me this morning. There are two major things wrong with this sentence.

1. “my mother called me”

It’s Mother’s Day. Granted, it’s a Hallmark Holiday, but traditionally, isn’t the child supposed to call the mother, not vice-versa? I think this may be attributed in part to the fact that my mom’s birthday is tomorrow (or today, technically), and she expects me to call for that and thus decided to absolve me of calling two days in a row. Or my mom could just be nuts.

2. “this morning”

My parents know my sleeping schedule, especially on the weekends. I NEVER get up before noon on a Sunday unless I have some sort of pressing work issue. I know my mom has been quite displeased with this ever since I started regularly sleeping until 2pm when I was about 13 or 14, but she gave up on trying to drag my ass out of bed when I was 16.

I ended up talking to her, half asleep, for about twenty minutes, I think at which point she may have realized I wasn’t particularly, you know, conscious, and decided to let me go.

So that was an odd event. Then my dad called and tried to convince me to come to Atlanta after finals, telling me there was a Melissa Etheridge concert at Chastain Park June 10th. I declined since a) I have numerous finals due June 10th and b) tickets to this Melissa tour are about 90 bucks a pop, which I already coughed up for her “live and alone” tour, which was really fucking good, but unfortunatley I don’t have that kind of income to dispose of twice. Other than that it wasn’t a remarkable conversation.

20 minutes after I hung up with my dad, I got a phone call from Ray Ann, my stepmom. This is kind of an odd event in and of itself, since while friendly, she and I are not particularly close since she and my dad got married after I left for college, and she generally doesn’t call me. It’s generally “Say hi to Ray Ann for me” or “Ray Ann says hi,” which I have no problem with, but which made me surprised to hear her voice on the other end of the line.

This is the part that requires the subterfuge on the part of anyone who knows my folks: Ray Ann suggested that I come down to Atlanta to surprise my dad for Father’s Day. It sounds like it’ll be fun, and hopefully I won’t surprise him enough to give him a heart attack or something. However, the snag in all of this is that I start my summer job the day after Father’s Day, and I don’t want to be either stuck in Atlanta or jetlagged, since I have to get up at 6:30am to be there on time.

However, it’s a free trip (and Ray Ann knows my weaknesses: she promised a good steak dinner while I’m there…mmm…steak….) at a point where I will quite likely have a very strong desire and a small window of opportunity to physically flee Chicagoland for a couple of days, since I will have just finished finals.

And it will actually be nice to see my dad.

So I guess the long and short of this is that I’ve wound up with a free trip to Atlanta, a moderately smaller phone bill than I would otherwise have, and a great deal of confusion about which one of my parental units is the craziest.

Ah, family. Can’t live with ‘em, so I live in Chicago.

Yes, despite the fact that I didn’t manage to drag my lazy ass out of bed until 3pm, I actually managed to accomplish a few things today. I:

* Managed to catch up on my reading for my upcoming Gender And Society test. Don’t ask me what it says, I’m P/Ning the class (i.e. taking it pass/fail), so I really, really don’t care. But at least I’m caught up!

* Defragmented the hard drive on my computer. OK, granted, the computer did this itself, but it desperately needed doing. It was starting to tell me that plaintext files were associated with Winamp (which is a music player) and that Word files were associated with Outlook Express (the world’s shittiest email program). So now my computer is happy again. We’ll see how long that lasts…

* Edited the project with the partner I’m trying not to kill in three hours instead of the anticipated twelve. It’s amazing what the power of really wanting to get the fuck out of a room can make you do. And it means I won’t have to waste energy trying not to kill him tomorrow.

* Watched Ocean’s 11 (the Soderbergh version) and Chicken Run. It’s nice to do something because you want to do it for a change.

All in all, I’d say this was a fairly successful day.

You’d more than likely say, “Ellen, this entry sucks. Why are you not funny and random today?”

And I’d say nik blot gworny quando floo!

Attention passengers, due to work on the tracks, we will not be stopping at the Morse or Jarvis stops. If you wish to get off at either of those stops, alight the train at Howard, and take the southbound Red Line train.

I heard this announcement for the second time today. They’re doing a bunch of track work on the northbound side of the line of the el that I take to get, well, pretty much anywhere other than Evanston, and to get to two stops, you have to get off at a third stop, then take the train going in the opposite direction to get off at your stop.

The weird thing I see here is the term alight. I was unaware that anyone actually had actually used this term anytime since 1946, at least in the United States, and not outside of a book.

There is no reason I can find for the use of “alight the train” instead of “get off the train,” “exit the train,” or even “dismount the train,” though the latter is clearly most acceptable if you plan to backflip off the train.

There is really no use for this word in the context of the Chicago Transit Authority. Even the definition linked to above states that alight means:

“2. To set down, as from a vehicle; dismount: The queen alighted from the carriage.”

The queen may still alight (albeit from a Rolls Royce), but the drunks on the el trying to get back to the liquor store at Jarvis get off the train.

It’s that time: When my day was so hideously boring that there’s really not much I can say.

I feel some sort of obligation to continue to update this weblog, since I’ve managed to do it every day for the last couple of months. But today was just sort of a non-day.

I got up really late because my one class (2pm Gender and Society) was cancelled, took a shower, ate lunch, screwed around for a while, went to lab and spent three hours learning about the joy of AVID editing, then came home, ate dinner, watched the Simpsons and then read for about three hours.

Then I had a beer and tried to figure out what to write.

It’s an odd feeling, having your existence seem reduced to the bizarre shit that happens on a daily basis. It’s even odder to feel that your day is incomplete when nothing weird happens.

Well, okay, weird things did happen today, but as Obscure Store shows, they happen in great volume pretty much every day. It’s just that none of them happened to me personally, and this, certinaly, is an unusual occurence. Maybe that’s the weird thing that happened today: Nothing weird happened.

Though there’s a distinct possibility that it’s the beer talking.

I went and got a haircut today for the first time in about five months, and I have run into my usual problem: In order to get my hair short enough so that I will not immediately need another haircut, they have to cut it just a wee bit too short for me to get it in a ponytail.

This drives me batshit.

I really hate wearing my hair out because my hair seems to have one eternal goal, which is to fall into my face and piss me off. I always end up inhaling a big strand sooner or later, so I just wear a ponytail.

The problem is that you can’t go with the half-assed ponytail. It just doesn’t work. The hair falls out the sides, and because you were trying to hold it back, it rebels by shooting way out the side of your head and making you (or me, in this case) look like a complete idiot.

I tried the hat method, but my good hat has gone missing, and my other hat (yes, I’m down to only two, believe it or not for those of you who knew me in my previous life when you couldn’t pry any of my hats off with a crowbar) makes me look like a moron, and does nothing to combat the outward sprout of my hair, further confirming my idiotic look.

I’m going to try the sunglasses-as-hairband thing tomorrow, which has proven fairly successful in the past. The only snag: It’s supposed to rain. Oh well, the rain will plaster my hair in place.

Hopefully.