whoa.

For those who don’t know iTunes, there’s this nifty feature called Party Shuffle where it will make a playlist from all your music and list it onscreen so that you can quasi-pre-edit it… it just picks stuff and throws it up there. I get fun combinations sometimes (alternating Django and Bob Dylan for seven songs, e.g.) but never like this.

[clearly the title:]
Faithless Love :: Najma
[start sequence]
I love being here with you ::Diana Krall
I Smell Trouble :: Ike and Tina Turner
…[unrelated song]…
You Think You Are So Generous, But It's The Most Conditional Anything I've Ever Heard :: Yuka Honda
Just Go Away :: Blondie
Let’s Get Retarded :: Black Eyed Peas
Let’s Stay Together :: Al Green
…[2 unrelated songs]…
I Shall Be Released :: Bob Dylan
…[unrelated song]…
My Man’s Gone Now :: Nina Simone
Epitaph For My Heart:: The Magnetic Fields

Freaky. Is someone trying to tell me something? I can’t imagine what.

Other recent adventures in bizarro world: recently received the spring/summer Anthropologie catalogue from Marmee in a package of January New Yorkers and other delights… I am looking through the overpriced trendy clothes, salivating and being scandalized at all the skin showing*, and I start thinking, hmm, this location looks really familiar. Then I start flipping through the pages, getting more and more convinced—look, there’s a trishaw! That looks like the Dutch House Museum in Galle!—and ultimately land upon a picture of a train station with the unmistakable name of Unawatuna. (With a skinny, leggy, scantily clad woman looking bored. Classic.) Yup, it’s Sri Lanka! That’s my beach hangout, yo.

I am amused. Suddenly I realize that all the extras in the photos are ordinary Sri Lankan people. I always thought the picturesque locals in their catalog were, like, other models. Though the fact that their extras are usually crusty old farmers and stuff like that. There’s a priceless shot in the catalog of a model getting blatantly ogled by two guys. My life is like that! I could be a model!

I remember belatedly that Marmee told me about this. Also my friend Puma who lives in Una and runs a magazine production company actually arranged their whole shoot—just before the tsunami. She just didn’t tell me who it was. There’s this lame-o note in the back of the catalog saying “oh we left right before the tsunami and we are so so sad; we dedicate this ‘book’ to the people of Sri Lanka” (scare quotes mine). How awful is that. I should make a t-shirt saying “I survived the tsunami and all I got was a fake dedication in a catalog masquerading as a piece of art.” I bet that would make the Sri Lankan people feel so much better about losing their homes and relatives and stuff.

*That is such a common pair of emotions that there should be a special word for it: scandal-ivating? salivandalized? The latter sounds like a technical term for defacing public property by spitting on it.