these past few days

i feel bad for the radio silence here.  the more that happens in my life, the less happens in this space.  my mind is constantly swirling with mileage and camping sites and wwoof hosts that allow dogs and mail drops and plane tickets and oh crap i need to figure out insurance, when is bixby's vet appointment, how are all these bugs getting in my house, what am i going to do with all my books, etc, etc, etc, and etc.

last weekend was amazing.  i saw holy ghost tent revival in someone's backyard, an old friend of my had organized a house party and i was one of the lucky ones invited.  it was incredibly hot and incredibly buggy and incredibly incredible.  all lights and sweat and hands reaching for the stage and the night sky.  blackberry ginger ale and whiskey in a water bottle.  letting the horse eat grass out of my palm.  a piano left in the barn, all of its keys stuck, the front of it missing so you could see all of the hammers and strings.  honey wheat beer that was mostly foam.  we woke up early and groggy the next morning and the three of us got breakfast at a place where the waitresses called you honey.

sunday was a raleigh flyers game (professional frisbee, who knew?) with some of the people i played frisbee with last summer, realized i was terrible and didn't like driving on i40 in 5:00 traffic, and decided to mostly just go to the parties instead.  it was a million degrees, and they'd set up a kiddie pool in the parking lot.  between each quarter we'd run out of the bleachers and into the pool and stand in ankle deep lukewarm water, trying to finish our beers before the next quarter started.  gosh there's something magic about summer.  despite the sweat and the sunburns.  because of the sweat and sunburns.  because of the beer in the kiddie pools in the parking lot.  because of the crazy thunderstorms we've been getting lately.  because of the sun.
and friday night with high school friends and cards against humanity on a blanket and thanks for the pizza, again, and a free pass for a movie, any movie, when the film didn't work and we didn't get to watch hunger games after all.  a crummy waitress.  tables that turned into benches and listing everyone who ever lived in our neighborhood and also went to our high school.  looking at every dog.

then monday was ballet class followed by drinking beers and talking shit because we are ballerinas, after all.  and thursday was the same, this time without the ballet class but with empanadas and margaritas and empanadas and my orange dress and holy MOLY empanadas, if i could do the heart eye emoji here i would.  oh and wednesday we ("we") made the best dang pasta OF MY LIFE, groovy little penne guys called "garganelli" with basil cream sauce and tomatoes and spinach and i am drooling thinking about the leftovers i'm going to eat today.  kimmy schmidt fist pump!  we also watched game of thrones, season 5, episodes 4-6.  i liked it better when sansa was married to tyrion but whatevs, she'll either be dead or married to someone else soon enough.  #thanksobama.  we're in the home stretch!

what else?!  bachelorette and floor time.  bixby panting at me.  getting rid of things.  getting rid of things.  getting rid of things.  bixby lagging behind on walks, and me saying you better get your shit together, dude, cause there's going to be a lot more of this.  getting ready.  party on saturday!  i haven't thrown a party since camelot, but i've got twinkle lights and a whole lot of macaroni, and i'm not sure what else you need.  can my life just be this good all the time, except maybe without the feeling that i'm possibly going to explode?

oh, shakori.

i went to shakori this past weekend, like i've done so many times over the past few years, knowing it would be my last one for a while.  it was wonderful.  the sun and the mud and the music made their appearances, and i basked in all of it.  it was maybe my laziest shakori to date - i spent about half my time there in a hammock (guys, i'm sold.  i need an eno stat.) and fell asleep by 11:00 each night, cinderella style, except instead of turning into a pumpkin i turned comatose and had to be walked to my tent because my eyes would not stay open.  but i saw holy ghost, and dr. bacon, and big fat gap and bombadil and ancient cities and big mean sound machine.  i ate curry with rice and samosas from the indian place like i do every year and mexican corn on the cob from the new food booth for the first time.  i met so many wonderful new people (hello cat hat!  hello chicken!  hello jonah!) and saw so many people i love who i rarely see outside of shakori.  it was a beautiful way to spend the weekend, and i am so grateful that a magical little place like shakori exists.

my phone stayed in my tent for the most part, so pictures are sadly few and far between, but here are a few of the moments i experienced.

big fat gap!

excalibur, my unexpected tent guest

my view for 50% of the weekend

the wood brothers

highlight of shakori: wearing this bear costume.  there was a bubble gun in the pocket that i made ample use of.

 happy shakori!

wicked

i still can't get over the fact that this happened.  i don't win things.  my name is never the one drawn.  but last night, when it mattered more than usual, it did, i won, it was.

kickass seats and all.

i showed up two hours and forty-five minutes before the show started (thank you, no traffic, thank you, speedy little car), waited the fifteen i had cushioned in, and talked to other people about the lottery and about wicked and about how nervous we were.  this was her fourth time.  i don't handle suspense well.  i was heart-pounding, butterfly-stomached, fully expected to go home dejected.

i didn't.

i put my name in that drum and they wouldn't say how many tickets they were giving away but they called out eight of them and then the woman yelled out "ANNA MARTIN" and i couldn't believe it but i busted through the crowd up there, actually shaking as i counted out the fifty dollars for two incredible seats.

and then i had to call sarah and squeal about it.  and squeal about it more when she got there.  and repeat over and over, through dinner and drinks and wandering around tobacco campus, "i can't believe we won."

the show was AMAZING.  i spent a good part of it grinning up at the stage.  i'd never seen it before, but it always seemed like one i should see.  and that was true.  i don't know what to say about it - the lights, the voices, the dancing flying monkeys, the green and the dancing and the emerald city, fiyero who looked like someone we couldn't quite place, the singing, the songs, the voices, the voices, the VOICES.  elphaba.  and glinda.  the dresses.  the set.  the sister.  dr. dillamon.  the hidden jokes.  the lights.  the voices.  the lights.  the voices.

it was one of those nights where i was so struck by how my life is MINE.  and it is fantastic.  it is wholly fantastic, and when you don't get your way it makes it that much better when you do.  i'm so lucky, in so many ways, and i'm so lucky to win when it really counts.

nobody's baby, everybody's girl

you know when you find a song and it feels like it was written just for you?  

this is my song.

i keep running around

trying to find the ground

but my head is in the stars

and my feet are in the sky

well i'm nobody's baby

i'm everybody's girl

i'm the queen of nothing

i'm the king of the world

last friday, this friday

the mallet brothers

i swear he's not a tiny person, it's just the angle.  also - this is what my bangs are doing now (?!)

campfires & constellations

oh goodfellows.  ohhhhhhhhhhh goodfellows.

mike blair and the stonewalls (doppelganger: muppet band)

bands and bands and bands!  jp!  kaitlin!  bands!

and i didn't even care that my hair was disgusting

this weekend was the busiest, so fun, but something almost every second kind of fun.  sarah and aileen and a couple of their friends and i went to a contra dance, and it was guy heavy, so i wound up dancing every single one with a lot of really good dancers and it was so so good.  i hadn't been in forever and sometimes, i don't know, i get all funny feeling about it.  i'll be there and i'll be two dances in and someone will dance a little too close or step on my foot or swing me poorly and the whole thing makes me feel nauseous about dancing and i have to go because it doesn't get better.  but that didn't happen at all - i was so pleased with the dances and the partners i had and sarah was SUCH a trooper and stayed the whole time, even though it was her first time, it was really a great night.

saturday morning bix and i got up and it was cold cold cold, so i bundled way up and we hit the dog park.  there were just two or three other dogs when we got there, but as it got warmer, more people came and bixby had a wonderful time.  we stayed for probably an hour and a half, so he was good and tired when i left to play paintball (say what?).  so for sarah's birthday (stencer) we went to frankie's fun park and played laser tag and other sarah (swerner) had a blast and kicked ass and shortly after found a living social deal for paintball and asked if we wanted to go, and having very little idea of what we were getting ourselves into, stencer and i said "sure!" and then as we learned more and more about paintball got more and more terrified.  but we put our game faces on and drove out to the middle of nowhere and walked past all the scary looking guys decked out in camo and got our guns and masks and played paintball.  well, swerner played paintball.  stencer and i did a lot of hiding behind things and laughing at how ridiculous we looked and hanging out at the checkpoint for a good long while whenever we got hit.  in the end, we gave our leftover bullets to some guys that we'd chatted with before the games, and they were all really sweet and they flirted with us and one of them might join stencer's volleyball team and one guessed our names right on the first try and one was wearing neon green and purple leggings under his red fleece pants.  and then we left and got margaritas and queso and all was right with the world.

rough & tough paintball faces - swerner did not get the memo.  also our initials spell ASS.

we had to kind of hurry the margs & queso bit because stencer and i were going to a concert at cat's cradle.  scythian - who i had heard at shakori and she had heard at merlefest - is a folk rock kind of band, they played a lot of irish music but then some scottish and some ukranian and they brought the opening band up to play their west african drums with scythian's fiddles and accordion.  the danciest music, we spent the majority of the concert jumping and clapping and grinning and trying not to spill our cider.  i adore live music, i will go to about any show, and this was one of those that i'd been looking forward to for a while and knew i'd have a wonderful time but i got there and squirmed up closer to the front row and remembered that i actually didn't know any of their songs.  but they played "cause her hair was black and her eyes were blue" so i sang along with that and they encouraged audience participation like nobody's business so the guitarist would have us do backup oooohs or the fiddler would get us to echo their lyrics, so i never felt like a worse audience member for not knowing every (any) song.

sunday was meet up with people day.  i had coffee twice (and by "had coffee" i actually mean i hate coffee, so i got chai in the morning and hot chocolate at night, it's funny how getting coffee just means going to a coffee shop and ordering whatever the heck you want) plus mina's because it's a sweet little place and nothing ever stays there and i want mina's to stay and insomnia cookies because yum.  and i made it out to open studio and threw a vase, not a very great vase but it's a vase, and trimmed a couple things.  i went to trader joe's to get a couple things (read: cheese.  i went to trader joe's to get cheese because ain't nobody does cheese like trader joe's does cheese.) and when i was leaving, i saw this old man with an old seeing eye dog at a crosswalk.  the dog looked at me and looked the other way and then very very carefully took its owner across the road.  the intersection is more diamond shaped than square, so the dog didn't quite do it right - he went sort of out of the way and the two of them had to loop back but he was being so careful and so sweet and caring and trying SO HARD to do it right even though he didn't that i got all teary and had to give bixby an extra snuggle when i got home.  dogs!  nobody's got hearts as good as dogs.

and that, friends, is more than anyone ever needed to know about my weekend.

spontaneity (or, being spontaneous or, the last bison)

yesterday after work i got on instagram and the last bison had posted a picture saying they were playing in durham and of course i love the last bison and sarah also loves the last bison so i texted her at 5:32 and sometimes things just come together because she was all for it.

so we went!  they put on such a good show, they always put on such a good show.  their music is - gypsy folk rock alternative?  it's wonderful.  when the lead singer plays the drums you can feel it all through you, in your heart and your stomach and even the hairs on your arms.  the fiddler is the happiest person on the planet.  the percussionist sometimes plays goat hooves.  i've gotten to see especially the younger boys grow up - i've been following the band for the past couple of years and when you go from 17 to 19 you look different, and it's just neat to be able to see that.  plus they're all connected - siblings and wives and fathers and friends in this happy-heavy-wild gypsy band.  and!!  i found a boy to dance with.  i'm not shy asking about that anymore, and it's okay when they say no, but it's best to find a group of guys and ask which one of them can dance because there's a decent chance one of them knows what they're doing.  so i did that, and one of them said yes, and we danced to one of their slower songs.  he knew how to shag so we made wide circles behind the crowd, swaying and spinning.  and then i went back to sarah and we danced too, jumped and clapped and sang when we knew the words.  live music like that catches me up in a way that nothing else can, and i spent the whole concert just shining smiling.  such a good night.

ps i used to never be able to remember their name, and i always wanted to call them the lost buffalo, teehee

this song on repeat, all day.  for a cozy kind of sad.

cat's cradle

bombadil last saturday - they played my favorite favorite song by them, cold runway, the first time i've heard it live, even though i've seen them what, five times?  losing count now.  it's so funny to see these guys standing up there, i've been to their house, i saw a movie with a couple of them, daniel goofball danced with me, stuart and i visited the lemur place in durham.  and then they're the main act at cat's cradle - macklemore played here last year, neutral milk hotel played recently, death cab has played in the past - it's not entirely a small town stage.  and they're so good!  and so fun!  i haven't been to very many concerts recently, and i need to change that.  getting caught up in the music and the crowd and the lights and the energy is one of the closest things to magic i experience.