aunt mary

i'll give you a run down on my freaking phenomenal colorado trip in the near future, but i forgot to tell everyone this little gem of information.

my aunt mary kicks ass.

she goes to one of those pretty big churches around here. not particularly my style, but they sing nice songs about jesus and i try to imagine that i'm outside at camp lutherhaven or my brother is attempting to sing next to me. that helps. i like to go because the music is great, and worship has always been about music for me; but i do have a confession. sometimes i get distracted.

there is a cute guitar player. this is the part of the worship where i totally feel like a little teenage girl at camp and stop listening to the music. instead i think about him being my boyfriend. but unlike teenage girls at camp, i squint my eyes to the stage to see if he has a ring on his left finger, which he DOESN'T (score). this is a skill i'm getting extremely good at. my friend mara, who i visited in colorado, was amazed at my ability to spot a married man. it's a gift.

so i showed up to mary's house the other sunday because i was hungry and didn't want to cook dinner and she informed me that she is trying to set me up. WITH THE HOT GUITAR PLAYER. here's the thing though -- i hadn't told a soul about the semi church crush on the guitar player, mary just happened to think that he would be someone i would like. it's true though, typical sarah type: church guy, guitar player, kinda scruffy, skinny, tallish. soooo typical. and so great.

i thought it would end there. i figured that mary was merely talking to the secretary that works with him (he's the assistant worship pastor) and mentioned me, assuming that would be the end of it. mary apparently is not giving up. i asked her today about it, just to be funny and razz her a little bit for it, and she informed me that she WROTE AN EMAIL ABOUT ME to the secretary that is going to pass it to hot guitar player. i still don't know his name, but i'm guessing the entire church office will soon know mine.

i'm not really concerned about it and i honestly don't think i will ever meet this guy (my charm doesn't come across as well on paper), but the best part is when i asked mary what my selling point was. she said,

"i basically wrote that you're not a southern girl, but you clean up well. i didn't mention the tattoo. that should be a good thing. he doesn't seem like he likes the southern type, given his appearance."

at least i clean up well, dirty hippie that i am. thanks, mary :)

music schizophrenia

once again, friday i didn't work (i slept for 11 hours, proof that i normally wake up at an ungodly hour) and moseyed to my coffee shop, coffee underground. i have mentioned before that i enjoy this place because it reminds me of the northwest, although clearly not in the expeditious fashion of bringing beverages to you. regardless, i also enjoy it because all the music is chosen my the baristas. unlike the same cd that plays in every starbucks you go into (which i'm surprised doesn't make the baristas want to put their head on a pike), the customers get a little taste of who the baristas are.

in moscow, the coffee shop where this practice was most prevalent was one world cafe. courtney would usually play some feminist rants (ala fiona apple), sarah would rock with usually some chill pink floyd or zeppelin, and evan (our favorite gay barista) would destroy all hopes of studying with a ridiculous dance-electronica nightmare. and yes, he made sure to play the britney spears album as soon as it came out.

this led andy and i to check out who was behind the counter before we decided to stake our studying claim at one of the tables. if it was evan, it was sisters' brew for us (which i've already discussed would play this weirdest elevator musak ever).

in this way it's exciting to go to coffee underground. friday, though, the music was frenetic at best.

i didn't manage to write down all the songs, but they would switch from 90s to oldies to 80s and back again, with zero regard for genre continuity. it went from "the heat is on" by glen frey (ugh) to a chuck berry song to "maniac" from the flashdance soundtrack (trivia: name the artist) and then to something by hootie. it was quite possibly the oddest string of songs put together in one half hour block...and yet i couldn't leave.

the music was so distracting, so mysterious, that i had to keep listening. i was done with my iced tea (which means i had been there for no less than two hours) and i had no other grad schools to peruse, but yet i was grouted to my chair. i have the same feeling when i see a large woman in tight leopard print clothing: you want to leave, yes, you want to run and hide...but you can't. maybe there will be disaster. maybe the woman might literally FALL OUT of her ensemble, and maybe the next song the barista plays will be german death-metal and the old southern women in the coffee shop will revolt.

now i understand fully why the ipod shuffle was invented.