Last week's music roundup.

All day every day, music is with me. Whether it's playing from my iPhone, Pandora, or various radio shows on the IHeartRadio app. I don't exactly know what to call this (I'm sure I'll get a genius idea sometime), but I feel like sharing what I'm listening to - maybe I'll do it weekly, maybe not.

Radio:
I don't listen to conventional radio that often. Once in a blue moon when I'm in my car and bored with my iPhone music, maybe. A few of my diehard listening habits are as follows:

IHeartRadio: Nothing but Sixx Sense. If you don't know what Sixx Sense is, it is a radio show hosted by Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx and Kerri Kasem. Amidst the music, they are always going back and forth and being snarky with one another, and they have fun little ditties like 'Rock Facts' for every day, things like that. Also banter about everything from current events to making fun of Nikki's new workout regime as he gets ready for tour. Available on the IHeartRadio app, or on various radio stations from about 7 PM on five days a week. Sometimes the music he plays makes me WTF a bit, but everyone's entitled to their opinions!

Pandora: I've created a variety of different Pandora stations, all dependent on my mood. Sometimes I like listening to electronic music, sometimes pop-punk, sometimes 80's metal, sometimes poppy stuff. As of right now, my radio stations are as follows: Combichrist radio, Born This Way radio (Lady Gaga song), New Found Glory radio, Powerman 5000 radio, Motley Crue radio, Alkaline Trio radio, Hawthorne Heights radio, City and Colour radio, and finally Pink radio. I don't lie when I say I have a myriad of different musical tastes to go with whatever day of the week it just so happens to be. Mostly, I'm playing three stations: Combichrist radio, New Found Glory radio, and Motley Crue radio. I get a good mix of many different sounds that way. The ads still piss me off, though.

On iPhone:
About 80 percent of the time my music shuffles, unless I'm really into a certain artist. This week was a bit of a half shuffle-half listen to albums kind of week. It helps get me through the day when I can air-drum behind my desk or laugh to myself about a funny lyric.

Looking at my play history this week, there are some definite winners for most played:

GWAR: Scumdogs of the Universe - One of my favorite albums of all time, and the second Gwar album. Sometimes, when life gets weird, you want to shut your brain off and listen to nothing but songs about murder, fucking, and outer space. Gwar is the band for you in that respect. First track "The Salaminizer" is one of my favorites... forever. It also makes me chuckle when it's what I'm into at the office, since I get the absolute best looks, especially during "Slaughterama" as they explain how to hide money from a hippie... in a way only Gwar can.

Turbonegro: Scandinavian Leather - Yesterday, I just needed to listen to a party band. Turbonegro are that band. And after you spend six hours spinning Scandinavian Leather over and over... shit just gets fun!

Every Time I Die: The Big Dirty - Another fun 'party' record, if I do say so. My favorite track is 'We'rewolf' for nothing more than the lyric, 'But I didn't put my hair in a ponytail for nothin', so if I'm going home alone I'm not going at all'. Live they're a great band, and The Big Dirty is one of my favorite releases of the past few years.

Pink: Greatest Hits... So Far! - Doesn't seem it, but Pink is one of my favorite 'pop' artists. She's uncompromising, does what she wants, throws the middle finger to anyone who doesn't like it. May not seem it, but she's an amazing role model for strong women everywhere. "Heartbreak Down", an unreleased track, is one of my absolute favorites.

That's it for last week!

Don't crap on my head and tell me it's raining.

In which a bird craps on my head and I don't realize it...until I sit down on my bus ride home.

Last Thursday was any other day at work - sit at the desk, look busy for a few hours, go home. While I was walking to the stop (which is about a block from the building where I work), I felt something hit the front of my hair. Because the guys I work with can be jerks and are always throwing something at me, I looked over to the walkway where they typically walk. Nobody there. So, like a crazy person, I spin around and look around - nothing. A girl definitely saw me doing this and I just uttered, "That was awkward." and went and stood at my bus stop.

Fast forward about five minutes or so, and I get on the bus and sit down.

Now, one thing to know is that I have a penchant for both over-the-top accessories (rhinestones, etc) and obnoxious outerwear. Since it hasn't been too cold, I've been opting to wear my purple leopard print (faux) fur coat. This coat is amazing. I've had it since high school, and it truly feels like it was made for me (if that doesn't make me sound like a crazy person). I can pull off prettymuch anything. Anyway.

I get on the bus, grab poles for dear life on my walk back to the furthest left seat in the back corner of the bus, put my feet up, and get out my book (currently Henry Rollins' 'A Preferred Blur') to read on the way home. I look down, over to the right a little bit, and what do I see? Oh yeah. Bird shit all over the lapel of my jacket. And it wasn't just a little bit. Let me spare you the details, but I did take a photo of myself to survey the damage to my hair.

What can you possibly do when a bird craps on you from above? NOTHING. There is NO reason to get all bent out of shape about it, because you have no control (unlike that whole Dave Matthews Band bus incident a few years back...) So what did I do? I laughed. I giggled about it and probably looked like a crazy person doing it.

Imagine it: black-haired girl with bird crap down both the front of her jacket and in her hair laughing about something that's obviously ridiculous behind sunglasses.

However, I learned that a bird taking a dump on you may or may not be bad luck. Seriously, Google it! Well... at least there's that.

A parking ramp run-in.

For once, I wish they would stop replacing real people with fucking robots.

It was Monday, it was colder than it should be at this point, woke up late (a weekend of sleeping on couches did me in when I finally got to sleep in my bed - fuck the alarm)... wound up screeching into the $7/day parking ramp seven minutes after I had to be at work and getting upstairs where I made no eye contact and just got down to work without making fucking excuses. I haven't used "my alarm didn't go off" yet this year, and I didn't want to waste it on a day when I was just too comfortable to get the hell up.

The day ran slow - painfully so. Coming off of a three-day weekend, I think that getting up late was just the icing on the cake and was the precursor for a day of disaster. I even went so far as to realize that I had left the last $5 I had in paper at home and only had $2 in quarters. Great. Had to hit up a coworker for a five-spot, and all but ran like hell out to my car.

Perfect, great, wonderful. Get to my car, the jackass that parked next to me that morning had left so I could actually get in, I opened the windows and cranked some music (Gwar, as it happens to be lately), and headed out. All I wanted was home. Get downstairs, feed my $5 bill and the change I have into the meter machine that replaced a real person a few months ago.... when the last quarter I put in just. won't. go. It keeps coming back. I had no other change but that quarter, a nickel, and a couple of pennies. Fuck. I pull it out of the coin return and the fucking thing is so mangled that it's no surprise the machine wouldn't take it.

So I dig. And I dig around in my purse for a lone quarter that I know HAS to be floating around the bottom of my bag from a few too many nights drinking and needing jukebox money. No dice. What did I find, though? A business card case, a utility knife, an eyebrow filler pencil I have NEVER used, a giant binder clip, about three pens I'd stolen from the office... and not a fucking quarter. Nothing equating to a quarter.

Because there was nobody at the window (that's now blacked in for maximum nap comfort), I did what I thought I had to. Backed up and prayed for a goddamn good samaritan to be behind me in the rapidly expanding line.

I ran up to this woman's window and obviously scared the shit out of her (I guess seeing a black-haired girl in a black corduroy jacket with a Pabst button and another reading "I'm a crafty motherfucker" makes people uncomfortable - who knew?) so I begged. I told her that all I had was that quarter and it was mangled and all I NEEDED to get out of that fucking ramp. She didn't have a quarter, but handed me a dollar. I thanked her - man, I don't even know if I would give someone looking like me money sometimes - and ran up to the machine, put the dollar in, grabbed the change, ran it back to her (along with my maimed quarter), ran back to my car, got in, and pulled out before the arm went down. That really just happened.

Whoever you are, nice minivan lady, thank you for not being too scared of me to help me out in my time of ridiculous need. Last time I ever pay for that shit in quarters, I'll tell you that.

Work and writing.

When I get off work, I want to run like hell some days. I feel like I spend eight hours a day like a square peg being shoved into a round hole. Most days, I have absolutely dick to do in the time between 8 AM and 4:45 PM - and it's not that there isn't work coming in, but when you type a hundred words a minute there probably isn't an office that can keep you elbow deep in work. At least I know mine can't. My fallback is data entry, and the one day I tried spending the entire eight hours doing it I found myself nearly passing out at my desk all afternoon. Real classy. "Hey, Liz, you got some drool on your chin, there.."

Not that I'm getting all 'Office Space' on the whole thing, but it's getting hard to take anything about this job seriously anymore. I don't make enough money to keep myself afloat, I don't have a real reason to care... I've been told from day one that I'm essentially disposable, so why work my ass off? Some days I just wake up with the best intentions, look over at a drawer of nice dress clothes versus a pair of jeans with studded belt and a sweater, say "fuck it", and wear jeans and tennis shoes on days that aren't Friday. We don't really have a dress code that anybody sticks to - this means you, 55 year old man who wears jeans and various Star Wars, Pink Floyd and Devo t-shirts all the time... hell, he came in in a Sulu yellow Star Trek uniform shirt once. Not even kidding. So the fact that the department's office assistant is a heavily tattooed bitch on wheels isn't a huge problem. Which, in a world where some heavily tattooed individuals take the 'high road' of filing for federal disability so they don't have to work... should feel like an accomplishment, right? Meh.

Definitely did not see myself rotting away in offices as I was growing up. I had fleeting thoughts of how awesome it would be to be a writer, a librarian, or, for chrissakes, a professional wrestler (we aren't all smart in third grade).... and you know what? I sat down at a computer in about fourth grade, got good at it, and now look at me. One of the faceless yes-men trudging into an office every day. Fuck. How did it happen? I did attempt college a few years back - for an Associate's degree in Funeral Service (I figured hell, I like animals more than I like people and I've helped put animals down so hanging with dead people can't be too bad...) until I couldn't pass the simplest damn biology class the school offered. That was the world telling me "Liz! Go back to being a writer, you idiot!" So I attempted 19 credits per semester while working 40 hour work weeks in order to obtain my Associate of Arts. Guess what happened with that? Yep. Burned out. Quit. And not just a little bit - in the 'oh my god, if I go to one more class, get sexually harassed by one more fucking biology teacher, if my boss won't get off my ass about my hours, when's the last time I slept?' gonna-blow-your-brains-out kind of quit. Total shutdown.

After that, I decided work was going to be it, for 'awhile'. I always told myself at about 19 that I would be self-reliant on writing by time I hit 25. Didn't seem too tall an order, things were looking up... yeah, until that whole burnout thing happened, leading to me moving back into my parents' basement and still clawing myself up five years later. No, I've never had a clear-cut idea of what I want. I've never been able to look at my life and say that, definitively, I needed to do anything but write. It's been the only constant. And guess what? I've been ignoring the itch for about two years or so as it stands right now.

Right now, the damn itch has turned into the plague, the 'Pox, whatever you want to call it, and instead of ignoring all the goofy ideas that float into my head every day, I'm opting to put them down, put them on a blog, and make a total jackass of myself for the world to see! Hey, at least it won't just be me feeling like a jackass in my head anymore... right? And maybe, just maybe, it'll get me one step closer to not rotting away in an office for the best years of my life. Summer's coming, after all.

What do you hate about what you do for money?

Introductions suck.

nerdy nerdy with one of the cat kids!

As a precursor to all that is Liz, I just want to say that my give-a-shit busted a month ago, or so, and life has been not only a little dangerous and full of some days wanting to firebomb the office where I spend 40 hours a week... but also a little fun. I've been exploring parts of myself I haven't seen (or haven't wanted to see) in awhile, if at all. It's been ridiculous and has led to a little bit of drinking on the weekdays, but more than anything, fuck, I feel inspired.

In the past, I have been a horrible blogger. Even as I type this, I have two blogs that essentially sit ignored about 95% of the time, waiting for a day when my brain will be overflowing with content and people will pine for my next words... yeeeah, that's not going to happen if I don't put some work into it. Though my blogging track record has been horrible, I've realized over the past couple days that 'wow, sometimes I say some really funny shit', and because Livejournal is sooooooooooo 2005, I haven't really had much of a place to vent... anything. Unless you count the journal I bought about ten years ago that I finally decided to use (once every week or two, honestly) out of frustration and there being just... too much goddamn paper in my house that's unused. That was a former obsession.

I would go to Barnes and Noble and pine over the journals. Ones with cartoons on the front, embossed leather, fat, skinny... you get it. And most of the time, I would buy, buy, buy! Until about six months ago, I didn't really understand what 'budgeting' was, until my dad opted to take the reins of all things financial on my behalf and whip my ass into shape - figuratively, of course - what kind of lady do you think I am? If there was anything involving a whip, me, and my father, that would just be creepy. Now, I'm basically flat broke about eighty percent of the time, and find myself near hyperventilation at spending more than ten dollars on ANYTHING. Thanks, Dad. No, really. I may want to go on a strangling spree sometimes, or hell, just buy a pair of jeans or shoes once and awhile and can't.. but you're helping me and that's what matters - fuck if I've wanted to help myself sometimes.

Now that that's out of the way... for the moment, I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I work a soul-sucking public sector office job five days a week which involves me sitting at a desk doing data entry most of the time and making about five dollars less than I should be. When I'm not doing that, I host bar trivia and make money running my mouth on a microphone and playing pretty awful music. And when I'm not doing either of those two things, I am doing or in love with a wide range of the following: drinking (whiskey, PBR), hanging out with my cats (cat lady, holla!), knitting, going on buttered cinnamon raisin toast binges, driving to Green Bay once a week, going to tattoo conventions, being loud, smelling bread before I eat it and paper before I read a book, cross stitching, reading, listening to spoken word of all varieties, driving to nowhere in particular late at night, swearing way too much, singing along to bad pop songs in my car, baseball, getting tattooed, being obsessed with random 80's hair metal... you know where this is going. I'm ridiculous. I drink too much sometimes. I'm rad. I'm Liz.

Who are you, and what do you love?