Hey Elise // by Elise Hu

There are places I remember in my life (though some have changed). The time I spent in South Carolina and Texas happens to overlap neatly with that of Rob Teter, Marshall Hood, and their band(s). It wasn’t until young Rob was in DC over the weekend that I realized how much that overlapping influenced my larger journey.

I met teenagers Rob and Marshall — and their pal Jeff Brown — in their last year of high school and my first full year in Spartanburg, SC, their home town. I was doing a story on the minor musical resurgence of Spartanburg, and the boys, who were 17-year-olds playing old Americana tunes as The DesChamps Band, were abuzz. They performed for the photog and me on Marshall’s parents back deck, and I turned a quick story, below. (This is embarrassing, as I was age 23 and sounded like a 12-year-old.)

A year later, I started my new TV job in Austin and the boys had disbanded to attend college, but never stopped playing music. Marshall had moved to Austin, too. That’s where he met Phoebe Hunt, an Austin native and one of the most talented young fiddlers around. A few months later, Rob and his buddies from college in New Orleans joined up with Marshall and Phoebe to jam, and through circumstance and serendipity (a spot opened up at MerleFest), they became The Belleville Outfit. The boys took a break from college, converged in Austin and followed their musical journey. (Spoiler alert: It worked out for them. The band was not a flop.)

Because I found them for that story when they were so young, I feel a real familial kind of relationship with some of those guys. I got to know Uncle Seth and Cousin Warren and moms and dads. Rob and I reminisced about the fall night in 2007 when the band came over to Casa Hu-Stiles at 3am after a “meh” gig to help finish off the beer and food from a party we threw earlier that evening. Queso-blurred memories.

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The one time I met Chuck Klosterman I totally whiffed my pickup line.

For Christmas, Matty got me a set of Chuck Klosterman Hypothetical Cards. (If this sounds lame, he did get me other stuff, too, like a TripIt PRO account! I was most excited about that and promptly started updating my TripIt on Christmas morning.)

Anyway. There is one hypothetical on each card, and they involve situations like what you’d do if you came home to a trashed house and Shaquille O’Neal was in your shower, or whether you’d own up to the fact you accidentally got selected to be saved from a meteor crashing to earth. Stuff like that. Every time we’ve been in the car since I got the cards, we have chosen one hypothetical to talk through or argue about.

But the reason I enjoy Chuck Klosterman hypotheticals so much in the first place is because of this one — the one about cheating on your girlfriend:

“This question raises a larger point about everything we pretend to understand about relationships, and particularly what we assume we understand about monogamy (and when infidelity technically begins). So while your answer to this question might seem unambiguous, the criteria you use to reach the conclusion are generally more important than the answer itself.”

If you haven’t considered this one, read it through. Once you’re done, we can have a conversation about it sometime over food and beverages. Regarding whose side I’m on, I’ve consistently held my position and am happy to defend it. Then again, if you’re a friend of mine that goes drinking with me, you probably already know whose side I’m on.

The Beam

Over the summer, I attended a WordPress meetup for the free barbecue. The place was a meat market in more ways than one.

One of the few women in attendance was my friend The Beam, who got hit on by a developer from Living Social, the instant coupon company. His pickup line went something like this: “We have a two-for-one deal to Regal [movie theaters] right now, if you’d want to go…”

So I couldn’t help but wonder*: With the proliferation of Groupon and Groupon-wannabes, is it now cool to use coupons on a date?

I like to ponder these vexing relationships-in-a-digital-age questions, so I started doing some reporting. A quick search online led me to plenty of heated debates and conflicting blog posts, and the people I trust, like Friend Matt, were just as undecided about it as I was:

Is it attractively frugal? Retro enough to be hipster? Or just cheap? Is there a threshold — 10% off is lame but 2-for-1 is worth it?

Like any relationship exploration, what works for one couple doesn’t work for others, la la la. And let’s assume that we are unpacking this idea for early-stage couples, because I know my partner-of-eight-years would not think twice about using a Groupon for a two-for-one deal at Popeye’s Chicken with me, and vice versa. So let’s focus on fledgling relationships. The various approaches:

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In transit at the Warsaw Airport. (October 2011)

My friend Patrick Terpstra wrote this of his year: “‎2011 was like riding a tilt-a-hurl after eating seven corn dogs. But it sure beats watching from the ground.”

I can’t disagree. I did plenty of plane riding, which is the most consistent memory of this year, besides saying goodbye and hello to a lot of people I really love. To rewind:

The Year I Flew Around the World, Twice: After saying goodbye to Texas and The Texas Tribune, I spent 99 days this year away from home, logging 78,931 miles in the air to 29 locations including places like Warsaw, Poland (for fun) and Boise, Idaho (for work). Not proud of the carbon footprint but I can now glide through security like Ryan Bingham.

Don’t Look Back in Anger (I Heard You Say): It felt like a pretty angry and destructive year, didn’t it? My second favorite emotion*, outrage, seemed to abound. I write this as tens of thousands of Russians protest in the streets, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya take their shaky steps toward self-rule, and socioeconomic dissatisfaction continues at home. We said goodbye to Osama bin Laden, Amy Winehouse and Steve Jobs (none of whom were picks in my clearly talentless celebrity death pool), an earthquake-tsunami combo led to radiation disaster in Japan, and we experienced a rare earthquake in my new hometown of Washington, D.C.

Favorite Video of The Year Is Also My Favorite Song: “Ching Chong (It Means I Love You)”
After a UCLA student went on a crazy rant about Asian people in the library, she faced a backlash so large she had to quit college. But Jimmy Wong turned his rant response into art — one of the catchiest songs of the year, and an instant viral video. It will get stuck in your head, so if you haven’t seen this, you’ve been warned.

Speaking of Asians, My Most Memorable Welcome to Washington: The Crazy Guy in Starbucks
There was one morning after the devastating Japanese earthquake when I went into Starbucks in Chinatown, natch, when a random guy off the street wandered in, started yelling at people in line, stopped at me, and said this, to me: “Fuck you, go home. You deserved the earthquake.” Then he told the rest of the line we were all going to die. Yep.

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My recent tumble into a marathon 84-episode viewing of Felicity, the series, just ended. (Thank God, because I really need my life back.) Clearly I have a few sistas out there who have slipped into the same situation and felt compelled to blog about seeing a decade-old coming-of-age TV series all over again, so I’ll contribute just one post to the revived pantheon to Felicity.

"What if this pen cap was a treat?" Sean Blumberg, as played by Greg Grunberg on WB's Felicity.

Among my favorite running gags on the show are the nonsense ideas cooked up by Sean Blumberg, the random guy who was 27 years old but hanging out with college kids. So this time around, I actually paused to write down his ideas and inventions as they were introduced on the show. To wit:

Lact-Oh’s
Milkless cereal. There’s milk baked into every O. So you just add water, and the water hydrates the evaporated milk.

Bagel Knobs
Like doughnut holes, but bagel holes. And you can inject fillings into them like cream cheese, butter, lox spread. “It’s gonna be a big, huge item,” said Sean.

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A scene from The Paper, one of my fave newspaper movies.

A few weeks ago I rounded up some friends — at the last minute — to take part in the pub quiz at The Argonaut, an H Street bar that’s annoying to get to and yet always packed. My sorry teammates will probably never forgive me for sharing this, but of the 12 teams that took part in a seven-round pub quiz, our team — Quantitative Pleasing — placed last. We blame the small size of our team (four players compared to the 10 plus that other teams boasted), and two ridiculous categories: “Name that Cat Breed” and “Comic Books.”

The ignominious “prize” for coming in last place is the losers get to choose a category for the next week’s contest. We chose “Movies About Newspapers” and quizmaster Michael was nice enough to send me the questions, even though our team was unable to make it to see these questions presented live. See if you can answer them. In true pub trivia fashion, no cheating with your mobile devices!

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Holy S, my Hollywood fantasy is coming true in a film to be released this fall, The Ides of March. And it’s about the drama of dueling presidential campaigns. My head is going to burst.

Like any self-respecting journalist, I spend 90% of the run-up to a deadline either procrastinating or scouring the internet for ways to procrastinate. These are the aids in my deadline avoidance this weekend:

Esquire’s Guide to Marriage (complete with a quiz!)
Writers take on the beginning, middle and end stages of marriage with short essays. I love the “middle” essay, about fighting. As for the quiz, my husband-of-nearly-one-year Matty scored in the “she’s probably not going to leave you anytime soon” range, which is respectable. He did lose 100 points somewhere in the middle for saying “guy time” within the last six months.

Jimmy Lai Animates the News
My first exposure to Taiwan’s NextGen Animation was after the Tiger Woods scandal, when an avatar for Elin Nordegren chased the cartoon Woods with a golf club and bashed in the front window of his Suburban. By 2010, I was fully obsessed and went to NextGen’s YouTube page after any major news event, to see how the animators imagined things going down. The man behind the cross-cultural meme tells the NYT, “I could make a big business out of recreating the amazing images of the news, because what we get on TV is always the last bit of image. What happened before that image is always missing.” The interview gets really funny when he starts talking about the inspiration for his Asian clothing line, Giordano.

The Queen Pop Needs Her to Be
The Times runs a piece similar to a NY Mag cover feature of a year ago, about the workaholism and artistry and post-modern brilliance of Lady Gaga. Fun fact: Even with all the costuming and elaborate stagecraft and dancing, Gaga never lip syncs at her shows. I really gotta go see her live sometime.

What the Frack is Going On?
If you haven’t seen it yet, you gotta check out The Fracking Song, which is both an educational and entertaining explainer of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. No, really.

“I don’t think I bought their CD.” -Matty, on Ace of Base

The other night, at the Hu-Stiles housewarming weenie roast of 2011, I took a lot of grief for the Ace of Base music on my iTunes. But if you pay closer attention, the music and lyrics performed by those clever Swedes offered all kinds of lessons for life. I picked out some of the most important takeaways from my favorite Ace of Base selections — “Don’t Turn Around,” “The Sign” and “Beautiful Life.” While I really enjoyed “All That She Wants” when I was in sixth grade, I found the message of the song to be a little too slutty.

Life is demanding without understanding
This seems like a simple lyric, but really, it’s a succinct expression of the human condition. The work of great artists, philosophers and theologians can justifiably trace back to this premise.

You can do what you want just seize the day
Perhaps Mark Twain said this better, but it’s riffing on the same principle: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you did not do than by the things you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the tradewinds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” (For me this means eating a lot of food and traveling a lot of places. But apply it however you’d like.)

Take a walk in the park when you feel down
I modify this to include any hike and bike trails, namely the one on Town Lady Bird Lake in Austin. But this is some solid, practical advice from my favorite early nineties Swedish pop band.

If you wanna leave, I won’t beg you to stay
Ladies, this is an important one. As Chuck Klosterman says, “Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.” Look out for number one. Value yourself over a man who doesn’t care about you enough to stick around.

No one’s gonna drag you up to get into the light where you belong…(Where do you belong?)
This is my daily inspiration. Doesn’t need much explanation.

Let’s start with the distraction that’s also an effective meeting starter: The Inception Button. As Reeve says, you can “add a little drama to any mundane situation” by calling this up and pushing the button. You remember how intense that soundtrack was. Now you can use it to, say, announce you’re going to the loo. Or that you’re going to be late. Or that it’s time for lunch.

For our next selection, some Passover fun:

Reeve also recommends the distraction below because “the concept is great,” even though the execution is only okay. Check it out, especially those of you who are fans of the Academy Award-dominating film, The King’s Speech: