I just wrote another Craftytown entry. I'm still kind of flailing around there. I haven't really figured out what I want to (and can) say. It doesn't help that we're in crunch-time at work and I don't have time to wander around downtown during lunch. I do want to post a review of the new expensive craft-ish store - it's called KOMJ or something (four letters that don't make a word). I'll have to stop in sometime today first.

I went to the open mike at Harry's last night - and where the hell were you? I got there at 10:30 expecting it to be packed and there were three people there. Henning hadn't even started playing. Eventually I spied L hiding in the smoky moonlit corner and I joined her. It was a surreal night. Weird performances, each unique and odd. I don't want to dis anyone who has the balls to go up and perform so I just won't say any more. It was cool to see Jeff play; he uses a sequencer (not sure that's the right name) to play with himself. (Heh) He'll play a few bars and hit a pedal and it will play what he just played in a continuous loop. So he plays his own backup guitar, kind of. He also had a drum machine in there. Really cool sounding.

Tonight I'm back on schedule, hosting dinner-and-TV-night with the girls, A and T (who are 17 and 14, for those keeping track at home). I feel bad about T, who was frustrated she missed out on a massive trip to the mall I took Saturday with A and three of her friends. A couple of them were buying birthday gifts for T so it's kind of good she wasn't there. Instead T went with some old White Brook friends to the Easthampton Fall Festival (a trade show with a bunch of boring booths in the high school gym) and then to Fright Fest at Six Flags, but she said it wasn't fun. T is trying to be polite to her old E'ton friends, who adore her, but she really has never felt much of a connection with them. She connected immediately with her new PVPA friends, who are as smart and creative as she is. She seems happier than I've seen her in a long time. But what do you do, if your old friends just aren't who you want them to be?

I had a similar situation in jr. high and high school; I was part of a sizeable clique of nerds and geeks, but my sister and I never felt totally comfortable with them. They wore makeup and perfume and (most) were overweight and in marching band and were kind of judgemental and had fluffy pink bedspreads with white poster beds and didn't have any creative outlets at all. The boys were similar except either painfully tidy and uptight (polo shirts, khaki shorts, and white izod socks pulled up to their knees), or really slobbish and messy (one had a fabric-covered three-ring binder that was shiny with french fry grease). So my sister and I picked the three people we felt the most affinity with - a creative band-member girl, an artsy sorta-punk newcomer, and a messy boy - and we clung together at parties. After school we'd get together with one or another, making art, reading Shakespeare aloud (for an English class), or playing Super Mario Bros on Nintendo. At night, if it wasn't freezing, we'd walk "downtown," i.e. the two strip malls nearest our suburban development (which had a movie theater, a 24-hour diner, a supermarket, a K-Mart, a Burger King on one side and a McDonald's on the other, and a row of tiny stores), singing Elvis Costello songs and trying to get the harmonies right, talking back to the cars full of semi-scary guys cruising the neighborhood who'd stop and ask us if we needed a ride or wanted to "party", spray-painting tropical fish with a stencil on the new housing development's cement culvert that the skateboarders had taken over. It still wasn't perfect but we did the best we could.

It was pretty wild to see how everyone had changed the summer after our first year in college. A couple of the uptight boys, who had gotten into prestigeous schools, came back complete drunks and potheads. A couple of the girls really let loose and now frequently "hooked up" at parties, where they would drink until they blacked out. A few of them ended up dropping out of good colleges to go to community college. They had all worked so fuckin' hard in high school they were completely burnt out by the time they reached college. Mamas, dont let your babies grow up to be high-achieving perfectionists with insular social lives, because they make really bad choices when they find out what they've been missing.