Just got finished shooting a bunch of stuff for the biography channel and now I'm on my way to red eye in car number 69. Good thing I'm too mature to point that out. (Or to poing out that this is the second time I've gotten this number. That's a missed joke quantity of 138). Anyway, clearly I'm very important. I guess that's all I have to say.

Oh and this is very last minute, this red eye, or else I'd have sent out homemade jam with little cards attached announcing this appearance. (As per my usual.) What's that? You aren't on the jam mail list? How sad! How can you preserve the appearances? Get it? (Off to shoot myself now)
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Yeah that’s right, you… Don’t even start with me right now because I am just not in the mood. I’ve had it up to here with your sass, your lip, your guff, your backtalk, your sassafrassyness and your general indecency when it comes to things involving mustaches.

Okay, so I wasn’t going in that direction, but the word didn’t come to me fast enough so mustaches will have to do.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go study celebrities for this thing I’m doing tomorrow, but I have my eye on you, senor.

Anyone know how to make a tilda? Anyone? Little help with the fucking tilda?

Boy, I am in some mood.

Actually, the above was meant as a joke, or perhaps the beginning of a monologue to be performed in a small Latin American country, but the reason I’m in this mood is because I’m currently involved in the most retarded disagreement with someone over who blew the other one off first.

AND IT’S GETTING IN THE WAY OF MY READING UP ON JULIA ROBERTS AND MR. T.

Michael Ian Black is hilarious and I say that as someone who totally knows him and by that I mean we exchanged a couple emails and he told me to ask David Schwimmer why he, Schwimmer, who directed MIB’s movie Run, Fatboy, Run is “such a fag.” He probably didn’t want me to repeat that though, that’s how close we are. He says things to me in emails that he doesn’t want me to repeat. And here I am, just going on and on and on about our private correspondence.

But it’s not just the long letters he sends me which are private and very long and handwritten in Lucida Grande 10 pt. Our relationship is more than just epistolary. Once we talked on the phone… on the radio! The radio you get on your computer! Michael Showalter was also there but he was actually there in person, and I was sitting on his lap. It was like a very competitive game of musical chairs that only I was playing.

Anyway, Michael Ian Black wrote this, and it’s funny. That’s what all the above exposition was leading up to.

And yes I do think I’m better than you because I use big words.

And the way I misspell them? I find that refreshing and encourage you to do the same.

Well, let’s just say I don’t feel good about it.

Interestingly, I learned that this mournful gem (as performed in my head, that’s what it is. Like a sad emerald, or a doleful opal, or a dispirited topaz) is from Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. I thought it was from some musical about a circus. Is there a musical about a circus? Goodbye And Thanks For All the Rubber Shoes? It’s Always The Poodle? Honk is a Four-Letter Word? (that last one could also be a musical about traffic). Carnival?

I thought it was from Carnival, but I was wrong.

Unfortunately now I have that free credit report song in my head because that one sits in there ready to jump in whenever there’s a silent moment. It’s like mold. Or rust. Or pink eye (a germ which is apparently always around, waiting for a weakness in your immune system).

I would never try to replace you, loyal readers! I just want you to have more friends to play with.

Back in 2002 I spent a few days on Loon Mountain in New Hampshire interviewing teens for a story for Seventeen about Christian rock. I haven’t thought about it in awhile—about how fans of the band Skillet are called pan-heads, or about how I could count on a deformed baby’s more-than-ten fingers the number of times I heard about people who suffered from a “Jesus shaped hole in their heart” or about the kid who told me he tried to commit suicide after engaging in premarital sex. My original draft of the story actually led with him—I couldn’t shake the image—but, understandably, it wasn’t quite right for the magazine’s readership so I reworked the piece.

I also hadn’t given any thought to a striking and gregarious young singer I interviewed named Katy Hudson until I saw her on Gawker tonight as Katy Perry. Man she’s changed except kinda not at all.

Here’s what I wrote about her then:

Katy Hudson is a charming 18-year-old singer-songwriter with big blue eyes and messy hair dyed jet-black. She has an effortless star quality, but she’s also the kind of girl who makes you feel like her new best friend by whispering secrets in your ear and grabbing your arm to tell you something when she’s excited. Katy recently signed with the Island/Def Jam label (ironically, home to Jay-Z and Ja Rule), and she’ll be marketed in both the secular and Christian markets. She’s worldly and rebellious in a cool-kid kind of way: When some of the cute, tattooed roadie boys walk by backstage, she flirts with them. “Hey, Ethan,” she yells. “We’re talking about sex!” This gets Ethan’s attention. “I love boys,” Katy says. “Being 18, you gotta love boys.”

Katy has a steady boyfriend, but she doesn’t believe in sex before marriage. “I know what it does to people,” she says. “One night my boyfriend and I went a little too far and I felt like I’d fallen so far away from God. I doubted myself and my strength. I was so weak at the time in my relationship with Christ.”

If someone is going to have sex, however, Katy absolutely believes that person should use a condom: “Some Christians think that if you use a condom, it’s premeditated. So nobody uses a condom at all and they have sex and get pregnant the first time.”

The original piece isn’t online but I found it reprinted here.

I’m not sure how I feel about her image flip-flopping, I’d have to think about it more and the vigorous and less-than-honorable marketing of Christian music is a topic for another post, but I suspect I’m one of the few people who remembers this singer in her previous incarnation and/or has firsthand knowledge, hence this post.

Actually, you know what, I will talk about the marketing: I remember being frustrated by the way certain bands and their publicists got really slippery when you… wait, no, I’m actually not going to talk about this now. I’m too sleepy to hit all the points.