Here in Katie’s Head

I stayed in with Kyle on the Eve. First New Years Eve since childhood that I didn’t go to a party. It was nice.

2007 was a good year for me. A year ago, I was clawing at the walls trying to escape. And now I’m perfectly content to stay where I am. I don’t know what 2008 holds for me. I’ll keep working on my karma and maybe this one’ll go my way too.

Things that scared the holy living crap out of me

1. The prospect of leaving Wichita. Doing the math, I’m currently losing about $14k a year in potential salary. That sucks. But home is where the heart is and I’d rather be blissfully happy and underpaid than miserable on top of a pile of money.
2. Spinning class.

Things that I learned

1. The gym does not suck.
2. How to use a scroll saw (sorta).
3. I have the capacity for actual change.
4. There are grownups in the workplace who behave exactly like children. I thought the stories were all exaggerated for comedic/dramatic effect. And then I was given the silent treatment for a month by a coworker who had forbid one of her supervisees to talk to me for reasons she did not care to explain to him.

Things that I have yet to learn

1. Self-discipline.
2. How to keep my cards in my hand. I cannot keep a secret and I cannot hide my strategy.
3. Patience.

Things that made it to frequent rotation on the iPod

1. Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
2. Bishop Allen’s The Broken String
3. Ben Lee’s Ripe

There is a theme there if you can spot it.

TV shows that I discovered and loved

The only new show that I really got into was Friday Night Lights, which is surprisingly good (besides the wholly out-of-place murder storyline in season 2). Continued good stuff from Weeds, Dexter and How I Met Your Mother. I’ve recently been watching old seasons of The Wire and I’m excited about the new season.

Things that make me want to adopt a life of violence

1. When a reader calls in and needs me to explain how to type a search term into a search box.
2. Tailgaters.
3. Absurd inefficiencies of large companies.

Things that made me want to keep going

1. The way that some wrongs beg to be righted, and so, with patience, things will improve.
2. Knowing I have a safety net.
3. And more than anything, having a top-notch partner in crime.

Things I hope to do in 2008

1. Maintain a regular workout schedule. (Status: On track. Went to the gym at the crack of dawn this morning.)
2. Keep on track with get-rich-slowly plan. (Status: On track. All of last year’s raise is being split between 401(k) (maxed out company matching) and the rest goes into savings. This year’s raise will go into a Roth IRA.)
3. Pare down personal belongings. Stuff I don’t use goes to Goodwill. Take recycling in more often. (Status: Um. This is the one I can’t seem to get up off my ass and cross off. May I win the war against laziness in ‘08.)

Posted: 10:18 pm · Category: Memories · Comments: 3

When I was in seventh grade, I interviewed my paternal grandfather about growing up during the Depression (he was born in 1915). He told me about how he wore the same button-down shirt and corduroy pants every day for two years. And that he worked as a paper boy — delivering the same newspaper that I now work for, he recently reminded me — when he was in college.

(As an aside, I’ve always thought our Kansas history courses sorely lacked the common-folk experience that I find in Grandpa’s anecdotes.)

My grandparents all spoke German at home when they were kids. I don’t think they spoke it much around my dad and his brother and sister — although that may be because Grandpa spoke low German and Grandma spoke high German, so they didn’t agree on the right way to say things.

Grandpa turned 92 this spring. There are many stories that he can’t remember anymore. And at Christmastime when we sing carols, because he can’t hear so well, sometimes he gets lost on the words and starts singing the German version of the lyrics because that’s how they sang it when he was young. But sometimes he tells great little stories — and when he does, a hear a German accent that I don’t hear other times.

My dad emailed me this today:

Katie,

I was visiting with my Dad today. I thought I would tell you his stories ( to help me not forget). I was asking him about his grandfather — the one that immigrated here from Ukraine. Dad pronounced it Ukaraine.

Dad’s grandpa got off the train in Peabody, and wagons took people to the Moundridge area were he had enough cash to buy a square mile of land. He had his wife and two girls. Three more girls and five boys were eventually born here. At some point he moved to Butler county and farmed for a while, and then later moved to the Aulne area (in Marion County). He was a skilled orchard man, good with grafting of trees, and usually had the best orchards in the area.

Dad was telling me that there was a saying about his grandpa, which he told me in German and translated as “He gave him one like Lohrenz gave the tom cat.” Evidently some tom cat was coming around the area and causing problems. He caught the cat by the hind legs and swung him around his head and over the house. The cat landed about a block away and took off like a bolt. Someone in the next town, ~20 mile away, reported that the cat was still running scared there.

I called Dad later to ask a little more about this story. Dad remarked that a story that cast his grandpa — or any Lohrenz, really — as a badass tough guy doesn’t really ring true. It seems, down through the generations, all us Lohrenzes think of ourselves as thoroughly harmless but outsiders find us distinctly more intimidating.

Posted: 11:12 am · Category: Family, Memories · Comments: 1

I took one history course in college, History of Journalism (subtitle: four hundred years of news and booze). The professor told us if we learn one thing, it should be that there’s nothing new in the world. Everything’s been done before, history just repeats itself.

This year I’ve been obsessed with making forward progress. Take better care of myself, lose weight, do good work, make my home into a place where I actually feel at home, let my hair down and enjoy being single, etc.

And for the past couple of months, the universe is making it increasingly clear that it’s time to loop back into the next iteration of whatever cycle I’m stuck in.

Last night I had a date. I’m driving to this guy’s house and marveling at how fluidly my muscle memory guided me there. Because my first serious boyfriend once lived just a couple blocks away. I drove that route countless times. I resist the temptation to pull onto his street and see if his old roommates still live there. Their kids must be, damn, five years older now? They probably don’t even remember stealing my glasses and making me hold them up in front of the mirror and giggling as if babies wearing glasses are the most hilarious thing that will ever exist. They don’t remember posing for countless pictures. They never knew their photographs decorated my blog for a couple of years.

On this date, I go off on my age-old rant about how frustrating I find it that a good half of my brain is taken up with the most useless information ever: song lyrics. We laugh about how we still remember the words to all the Raffi tapes we had as children. I may not be able to recite the song off the top of my head, but if you start playing it, the words spill from my mouth. Every lyric from every tape I listened to as a child, every Top 40 song I’ve heard more than a couple songs, every album I’ve ever owned, it’s all taking up space in my brain. And what utility is there in that? None.

Sure, they might help out with a few trivia questions. But because so little space is available to the vast world of non-song-lyric trivia, it won’t net me a win.

I could use that space for remembering work stuff or my schedule or those errands that I keep forgetting. I could use that space for attaching names to faces. But no.

And on my way home — remembering the many times that I tried to see just how fast I could take that highway onramp in my inherited Grand Marquis, the times I drove home floating on air because I was young and in love, the times I drove home in tears because I was young and in love, the times I drove home at 90 mph because I was young and under curfew — I listened to an album I haven’t heard in five years and sang along with every word.

Oh, and that five-years-ago boyfriend? He’s moving back to town and wants me to play banjo in his band. (Note: I do not play banjo. I do not play anything.) We’ll see.

Posted: 11:02 pm · Category: Boys, Memories, Music · Comments: 1

The conversation has taken a decidedly geeky turn when my mouth opens and the words “I was once named Resident Babe of alt.music.tmbg” come out of my mouth. (Historical proof that this, unlike all other “facts” on this blog, is not made up)

At this point, a firestorm of thoughts is ignited.

1. I used to be a really big dork.
2. I used to have fans.
3. Is item 1 entirely in the past?
4. Is item 2?
5. How come in some conversations I’m totally on fire while other times I’m not? I think alcohol is a factor (especially with regards to my likelihood to root for outlandish causes, discuss personal topics in detail, or tell my friends how much I love them), but I would also like to blame the conversation. partner(s).
6. How is it possible that being declared “resident babe” of the They Might Be Giants newsgroup in 2002 is relevant to any conversation ever?

I went home and resolved to figure all of this out.

I haven’t yet. I have, however, (re)resolved to figure other things out.

Posted: 10:06 pm · Category: Age, Geek, Memories · Comments: 1

I got a google hit today from the search string “when good Katies go bad.”

My first reaction was a giggle, but then I started to think, you know, I’m sure there was a turning point. And after a few seconds I realized that there is no contest over exactly when I lost interest in being a good girl all the time.

From a diary entry written later that month:

I remember thinking, when he lit it, that he did it very skillfully, very believable for the part he was playing.

And I remembered that on the first night we met, he said that he “never smoked cigarettes.” Even then I didn’t believe him one hundred percent.

And I was looking down the street when he said, “Look at me, I’m being sexy here.”

My eyes flashed back to him.

He drew slowly on the cigarette, his head tilted to just the perfect angle, the perfect look in his eyes, and he was right.

He was sexy.

And right then, I remembered that we said we were just friends. And I remembered that I do not have relationships with men that are ever absolutely free of sexual tension, but I was usually good at keeping it from becoming a problem.

But in that moment, where I watched him carefully exhale, I didn’t want to keep it from becoming a problem. I wanted this problem.

Still, I didn’t kiss him until half an hour later.

(We’d gone to a costume party that night. Thumbing my nose at the theme of the party, I’d gone in drag. These day’s he’s the one cross-dressing. A shame, really. He looked stunning in his suit that night.)

And so, dear google user, that is the story of the moment when this good Katie went bad.

Posted: 7:50 pm · Category: Boys, Memories · Comments: None

When I was 18, I hopped on a plane to spend two weeks with my friend Brandon, who was living in the Bay Area at the time.

(We grew apart pretty quickly after that summer, and there was a period where we didn’t talk at all — and that was my fault. I remember feeling a huge sense of relief when I IMed him and he was actually glad to hear from me.)

I have a handful of stories from that trip, some (police chase, meeting an internet A-lister) more entertaining than others (meeting an off-duty mime, meeting a creepy dude who runs porn sites).

On my last day there, we spent several hours hanging out in Berkeley, accompanied by the mime, who bought a skateboard and wouldn’t shut up about how cool it was (maybe all mimes are chatty when they’re not miming?).

After wandering around Telegraph Avenue for a bit, I came up with a brilliant way to permanently honor my Big Exciting Vacation. You see, the last words out of my mother’s mouth before I left for the airport were, “Don’t get any tattoos or piercings.”

I was so getting a piercing.

I remember being taken back to the little room where they did the actual work. It was like a doctor’s office, complete with educational brochures and anatomically correct models of body parts. It seems like every doctor I’ve visited had some kind of model, usually an ear or maybe a heart, or if it was the girlie doctor, it’d be a model of the internal reproductive organs. But at the piercing salon? It was external reproductive organs, complete with all the possible piercings a person could get.

When Brandon saw this, the blood drained from his face and he had to look away.

And then in came the guy who would do my piercing, with his stretched ear lobes — probably the largest I’ve ever seen. It occurred to me at this point that boring girls like me who come in thinking that getting a naval piercing is scandalous probably annoy the shit out of him. He was nice, though.

The procedure was quick, and just as painful as I expected. And I went home with my newly scandalized belly button and knew that it was (a) foolish, (b) something I’d outgrow, and (c) something Mom would find out about eventually.

I think it was about six months before she found out from my cousin, who has a history of spilling my best secrets.

Two years later, tired of replacing the cheap hardware that kept coming unscrewed and falling out, I let the hole grow closed. At that point, I’d written it off as a childish impulse that fell far short of actual scandal.

Another two years later, I’m itching for a new permanent-yet-harmless memento because every time I look at my tummy and see that scar, I smile.

What felt at the time like my first official action as an adult was really pretty juvenile. I have a crappy memory and can’t remember things I did last week, but I remember almost every moment of that two-week trip because, I think, that was the turning point where my life became both complicated and interesting.

Posted: 5:01 pm · Category: Memories · Comments: 2

I had dinner with an old friend tonight. Over the course of three hours, we swapped every bit of gossip (”…you will never guess who I saw last week…”) and tale of indiscretion (”… I told him I needed a photographer …so we were somewhere in the library stacks … strategically placed books …”) we could remember from our college years.

And now my throat is sore from laughing, and I’m still recovering from some of the more shocking ones.

So for all my other high school friends: Let’s hang out because I now have a new batch of dirt to share.

Kidding.

Unless you’ve got dirt worth trading.

Kidding.

No really, I’m dying to hear.

Posted: 12:57 am · Category: Memories, Misc Friends · Comments: 2