You want to go the Magnetic Fields show. You want to see them more than you can even possibly articulate. We know this, and so we are going to make you embarrass yourself publicly for a chance at two free tickets.
The best MF songs in my opinion are the ones where Stephin Merritt says things to imaginary lovers that you couldn’t imagine saying out loud. Whether the result is funny (”Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits”) pathetic (”Please Stop Dancing”) or just painfully honest (”I Think I Need a New Heart”), Merritt’s best work is when he (or one of his proxies) speaks directly to the beloved plaintively. Even if it has a smirk or a joke connected, they’re the kinds of statements you probably shouldn’t ever actually SAY:
“Please stop dancing in my life. I will never be your wife.”
“Shitfaced, the moon is nearer. /Sober, you’re old and ugly.”
“No one will ever love you for your honesty.”
“When the time comes to say goodbye…And in the morning I’ll be gone for other towns and other lives. I’ll catch the first train bag in hand and I won’t miss you and you won’t cry.”
“Be vicious, vain, and vile. Everything’s yours to steal if you’ll just smile.”
“You don’t have to talk to me the way we used to talk for hours. We don’t have to talk at all, but may I send you flowers?”
For two tickets to the MFers at Lisner on February 4th, post a story about the time you said something to someone that you really shouldn’t have– where you said a phrase that you still cringe about, the words leaving your lips like bees slipping into a hot car stinging the shit out of the driver and you crash into a jersey wall.
It doesn’t have to be something you said to a bf/gf, just something you wish you could take back, something so honest but so wrong that Stephin Merritt couldn’t even put it in a song.
(I’d give you an example but I couldn’t think of any since I always say the right thing, right ladies?)
(actually for me it might be when I called Bob Mould Bob MOOOOLD when interviewing him. Let’s just say there was a brief silence. Fortunately he didn’t hold it against me, nor did he hate me for calling MAL Weekend “That Leatherman Conference” as if it was a bunch of construction workers comparing pocket tools, which actually, if you think about it, um, nevermind.)
OK GO!
my friend’s seeing eye dog was begging for my chocolate one day at lunch and i said “you wanna go blind?” i still feel like a complete ass when i think about it.
January 15, 2010 at 1:36 pmit wasn’t intentional. that’s what i always say to dogs when they want something that will kill them.
January 15, 2010 at 1:37 pmbwhahahahaha. That’s fucking funny right there ^
January 15, 2010 at 1:38 pmJealous, I want a blind friend so bad. I have so many questions.
January 15, 2010 at 1:50 pmCale – just find a blind person and start talking to them. They’re not going to recognize you on the street so you can just ask anything you want.
January 15, 2010 at 1:53 pmI want a friend where we can hang out tho so it’s not just me yelling questions at blind people on the streets regardless of if they can see me or not. But I mean, it’s not like it’s that easy to find a blind person, you’d have to troll the streets for like a week.
January 15, 2010 at 1:56 pmI almost cannot bring myself to type this but describing it in a public forum might help me let go of some of the guilt I still feel so here goes. I have this amazing ex-boss that I have stayed close with even after we no longer worked together. She and her husband had two children, an older boy and a younger girl. The older boy – who was ten or so at the time – had developed a rare form of cancer, had been undergoing chemo, and had lost his hair. And was being incredibly brave about all of it. So brave, in fact, that you almost forgot sometimes that he had cancer and had no hair under his jaunty cap. Which is exactly what I did when I was over for dinner and was playing with his little sister with him – and his parents – in the same room. She had a much-loved doll that was literally falling apart – more specifically, when I picked it up, a large chunk of its hair fell on the floor. To which I said playfully “Oh gross! Let’s go find some glue and see if we can’t fix this!” I realized the second after it came out of my mouth what a horrible thing I had just said. They are the most kind and amazing people in the world, so of course after a few beats of stunned and uncomfortable silence, we just changed the subject and pretended it never happened. (It occurs to me in retrospect that she may have even cut the doll’s hair on purpose in solidarity with her brother because she was like that, even at such a young age.) So not only was I a callous idiot, but I was a callous idiot in front of a young child with cancer. I’ve never gotten over it.
January 15, 2010 at 2:30 pmIn your defense, hairless dolls *are* gross.
January 15, 2010 at 2:39 pmWhen I was 12 years old my parents got divorced. It really didn’t affect me that badly. Before the divorce there was fighting after the divorce there were two sets of Christmas presents. I split the time living half the time with my mom and half with my dad. My dad taught high school and my mother was a teacher at the college of nursing at UM. Because of their jobs and thier liberal/friendly nature they often had students over to thier respective houses for dinner and whatnot. So I met a lot of 18-25 year old people around the house.
One day my mom explained to me that she had an ex-student Laura who had recently gone through a messy divorce, had 2 very young kids, and needed some help getting her life together. She would be coming to live with us for a while while she got her shit together. “A while” turned into a LONG while, but I didn’t mind at all. Laura was amazing. Probably 24 when she first came to live with us, she was super fun, would take me for rides in her camero, would watch skate videos with me, would give me advice about girls, would rent me VHS movies that my mom would never had rented me, etc, etc…Oh and she was drop dead gorgeous! Around the time I was 15, Laura had been living with us for about 2.5 years, and I had been painfully in love with her almost the entire time and I was starting to think that she “liked me back”. I decided to tell my mom. I was like, ” I think I’m in love with Laura and I think maybe she likes me, and it’s hard because she’s so much older, but I don’t know what to do”.
My mom looked at me and said, “Honey, oh my…you do realize that I’m a lesbian and that Laura and I have been together for over 3 years now?”
No mom, I didn’t realize that. Probably should have. Now where’s that hole for me to crawl into.
January 15, 2010 at 2:48 pmI’m still ashamed of this one.
Senior year of high school, they read off the superlatives over the loud speaker. When they read off one girl’s name, which I won’t mention, without thinking I quipped, “What did she win, laziest eye?” (she did have one). Her best friend was sitting right behind me and said, “You’re probably the worst f***ing person alive.”
At that moment, she was right. Kids are so mean.
January 15, 2010 at 5:10 pm“I have an intense hatred of the elderly,” followed by a long rant against old people, on a first date, to a girl whose most beloved and cherished family member was her 90-something year old grandmother.
January 15, 2010 at 8:32 pmMy mother is still pretty pissed with me for choosing the day my grandmother died to reveal that sometimes I have homosexual proclivities. She was not in agreement that this was an amusing distraction.
and also, once to a gentleman caller, “I’m sorry that you will be unable to fill out the condoms of the only size I have present.”
January 16, 2010 at 12:19 pmI was incredibly lost and my car was out of gas when my(ex)boyfriend called me and broke up with me. Preoccupied with being stranded on the side of a road, I responded “oh my god! i’m going to die!!!”
Later that day, nearly all of our mutual friends called me to make sure that I hadn’t killed myself
January 17, 2010 at 11:56 pmI’m visiting my sister in Chicago, which is always an experience in her luxurious River North life vs. my grubby Northwest one. I went with her to her super-fancy gym, David Barton, where they have a DJ, its on the river in the same building as Japonaise, and everyone looks HAWT. If Chicago was Middle Earth, these people would be the elves and I would be the dwarf. Anyway, we’re in this spin class and this really hot, tanned instructor in a sport bra and tights comes up to ask if I needed help with the bike. She’s perfectly, elvishly slim — but for the noticeable bulge in her stomach. We finish adjusting the bike and then I was like, “Thanks! And hey, congratulations on the new addition!!” And she was like, “What addition?”
January 18, 2010 at 8:19 amMy best friend and I were drunk and talking about relationships and I told him I don’t think Asian guys are attractive. He’s half Chinese.
January 18, 2010 at 6:25 pmyou’re in the clear tho cause half asian guys are totally attractive
January 19, 2010 at 8:07 am
There was this one time I used a bad word in a bar and a friend of mine interviewed a comedian and used my instance of using the bad word to pretty much build his entire interview around.
I’m not skered of saying the bad word, and my friend got owned by the comedian, I just wish I hadn’t said it so that my friend wouldn’t have had anything to base his interview off of and then he’d get fired from his free job writing on the internets.
January 15, 2010 at 12:53 pm