Photo: Cover art, The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground

This post continues where this one left off, as an homage to another really rad old-school band. It’s dedicated to Grimes, with whom I listened to the Velvet Underground on repeat through most of high school.

Here’s the sample song drill:

Go to the iTunes store.
Enter beginning underground in the search box.
Click on one of the versions of “Beginning To See the Light”.

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To everyone who tried to find naked pictures of Janna Svenson online after reading this post. Apparently, there are none. You can direct your complaints to AskMen.com.

A highlight of my workday is anticipating the latest Starbucks interpretation of my name. While Jana is the most common and most accurate attempt percentage-wise, Janet, Janis, Juana, and Denice have all made appearances, and I remain astounded at the steady onslaught of new variations.

Janna misspellings and mispronunciations are so common that I am actually rendered speechless when someone gets it right the first time. I pronounce the first a in my name as in aha! or aaaah, and the J as in Jell-O, not like Yanna or Hanna. However, the a as in rad mispronunciation is so common, I don’t even notice it. I have had many an awkward moment in which a friend finds out he or she has long been using the wrong a sound. For example:

Friend: Oh my God, I’ve been pronouncing your name wrong.
Me: What are you talking about? No, you haven’t.
Friend: You just said your name is Jaaah-nah. That’s not what I call you.
Me: Oh, umm…oops. My bad.

Now that I no longer have my sister to threaten bodily harm to people who call me by the wrong name, I need to work on that clarification thing.

I can understand a mispronunciation, but Starbucks employees almost always butcher my carefully enunciated spellings. This only serves to underscore the knowledge that I am getting a second-rate coffee experience on workdays. The coffee at Peet’s is so much better, and they cleverly disguise their identification system with computers so that you have no idea how they are spelling your name. Not only this, their system is actually unnecessary after a few visits because the (long-term!) employees remember who you are and greet you by name. Peets, are you listening? Downtown Oakland is calling you.

I’ve been doing lots of manly stuff like hoisting boxes and assembling various Ikea items lately, so I decided to get back to my girly roots with a manicure and pedicure. I went to The Nail Spa in Berkeley, a small, locally-owned business that is both charming and well-run. Equally importantly (and outside the norm), they sterilize their equipment in an autoclave, which is the only foolproof way to avoid dishing out Hepatitis along with soothing salt scrub. I left with all twenty nails buffed, scrubbed, filed, polished, lotioned, and painted a lovely shade of orchid. Mission accomplished. I have now validated my second X chromosome in a most stereotypical manner.

After my appointment, in a move my car-addicted friends will deem insane, I chose to walk the sixty-seven blocks back home. I did this out of curiosity, to get some exercise, and to avoid having to take out my BART ticket with just-painted nails. The walk ranged from borderline sketchy to up-and-coming yuppie, with a healthy dose of hipster on the side. For other crazy walking-prone people, I would recommend it only in broad daylight and (obviously) not on a rainy day. The highlight was stopping at aforementioned rad business Mama Buzz for an excellent cup of iced coffee.

If you’re within walking (or driving or BART-ing) distance of Berkeley and want a good, disease-free manicure, check out The Nail Spa. If you go more than once, the owner will greet you by name.

I noticed that several people have wandered by Project Janna by Googling “janna”. Curious, I did the search myself and found that out of more than three million hits, this site is #22. That’s pretty good, especially considering other Jannas of the world include Janna Svenson, a model described by AskMen.com as

a tall, tan, blonde Scandinavian with large breasts who likes to appear naked on the Internet.

In Berkeley, of course:

Retroblogging: purple sand at Big Sur.