Feed on
Posts
Comments

Wherein I fail, once again, to be sensible

Jan 15th, 2011 by

Some while back, I took it upon myself to acquire about 3 yards of SCREAMING ORANGE corduroy.  At the time, my intention was to replace my beloved and utterly worn out orange pants of yesteryear.

Yes, I am the sort of woman who will wear a pair of orange corduroy jeans so often as to actually wear them out.

So I was looking to replace them, and you have no idea how hard it is to find orange corduroy. I’d found some somewhere online and decided “here goes nothin'” and ordered it. It turned out to be several shades more obnoxious than my old jeans and I just couldn’t really feature making an entire pair of pants out of it.

So, of course, I made an entire suit out of it.
IMG_4749

I am apparently constitutionally unable to make a proper, sensible, interview-appropriate, grown-up-lady’s suit.

The closest thing I have is as seen below:
My first ever suit (made about 6-7 years ago)
Unfortunately, it is made out of a very heavy weight outing flannel, and while it looks sharp, imposing, and perhaps slightly gangstery, it’s also STIFLING to wear in a normal office setting. I wear the jacket as a coat in middling-cool weather. The pants don’t see much use as they have no pockets and pocketless pants are useless to me.

Then, there’s this ridiculously minty bastard of a ladies-who-lunch suit which I constructed in a desultory fashion over the course of about three years:
IMG_5649
Not a-tall sensible unless you are Jacquie Kennedy, whom, of course, I am not.

My other suit is a rather giddy affair with bias-cut flounces and an *ahem* assertive plaid pattern:
IMG_9400

One of these days, I swear, I’m going to buckle down and make something sensible and conservatively styled in a nice, coffee-brown herringbone tweed or similar. I really ought to, since my current “interview” suit is this dreadful, boxy Anne Taylor affair with a pencil skirt I can hardly walk in, and a long, insufficiently fitted jacket that makes me look like Strong Mad in pinstripes.

Posted in Fashion, Sewing | 4 Comments »

Things I shouldn’t have eaten, but did.

Jan 7th, 2011 by

I’m given to understand that pica, the compulsion to eat non-food items, is fairly common in children. Sometimes it is a symptom of a dietary deficiency, but sometimes it falls into a very broad category I like to call, “little kids are inscrutable little weirdos.”

I should know. I was an enthusiastic little weirdo myself at a point.

Obviously, I’ve already admitted my erstwhile paste-eating tendencies – at least twice. But I feel that I should elaborate a bit on the proper technique, since it’s considered rather chic to have techniques for things. There are techniques for brewing the ideal cup of coffee or tea, how to create the optimal slice of toast, and how best to savor a roasted potato. These techniques are often completely esoteric and entirely subjective, and so based on being full of useless and nebulous opinions, I’m going to hold forth on how best to eat paste.

Paste is best consumed in very small portions at a time, much like gjetost cheese, the flavor of which is best when it is shaved into paper thin bits. Paste comes with a built in server; the little whippy plastic spatula attached to the lid is perfect for scraping off a thin curl of subtly sweet and minty paste for the occasional snack. Under no circumstances whatsoever should you dig a big glob of paste out and nom it down like congealed Nacho cheese. The delicate flavor is entirely lost then!

Okay, on to other inappropriate things I ate when I was around 6 years old.

  • Paper – when I was a little rat, I was known to eat paper. The edges of my workbooks and notepads during my early years of elementary school were always gnawed to a greater or lesser extent. I never ate textbooks, library books, or my own books, but I had no compunctions about the throwaway workbooks or notebooks. I didn’t eat all of the paper I chewed. Some of it I just treated as flavorless, fibrous chewing gum. Mom griped me out more than once for leaving dried up wads of chewed up paper in the pockets of my jeans and jackets. Or for letting it go through the wash.  Mimeograph paper and the old, shiny Xerox paper were off the menu, however.  Both were incredibly foul and almost certainly rampantly toxic.  Though as lousy as they tasted, you’d have a hard day’s work ahead of you if you were indeed set out to poison yourself.
  • The binding of my Phonics workbook – Normally, I only shredded the edges of my workbooks and chewed on the shreds but I discovered that the glue holding my phonics workbook together was quite tasty, and by the end of my run in 1st grade, I could have convincingly palmed off the old “dog ate my homework” lie, if the state of my workbook was to be taken into consideration.

    I’m not entirely sure why it occurred me to taste and then later devour the bindings of my Phonics workbook, but I expect it had something to do with the scent of the glue. It had a similarly sweet mintiness that I associated with postage stamps, Publisher’s Clearinghouse stamps, and Kindergarten paste, so I must have made the logical inference that it would taste similarly. It did. And so bit by bit, I picked shreds of the binding loose and savored that delicious, sweet adhesive.

  • Bits of string – another short lived craze.  I ate bits of string and yarn for a while, but then, my overactive imagination suggested to me that the string might tie my guts up in knots and kill me, so I stopped doing that.  But for a brief, glorious while, I must say that I enjoyed the sensation of swallowing short lengths of fuzzy acrylic yarn.
  • Sand – another non-food item that I ate for a brief while, somewhere around age 6 or 7.  Not because it tasted particularly good, because I can’t say it had much of a flavor.  I just enjoyed the sensation of swallowing it, much like I had done with string.  But one of the older girls at school caught me in the act of wetting a finger, dipping it in dirt, and licking the mud off and informed me that I’d get worms.  I’d seen the cat when he had worms and wanted no truck with intestinal parasites, so I gave up eating dirt, too.

Nowadays, I’m a responsible adult who doesn’t eat anything not intended for human consumption. People look less and less kindly upon the eating of school supplies the longer you’ve been out of school. Much like lifting your skirt to show off your new, super-cool undies*, you’re not likely to get away with certain behaviors once you’re older than 5.

*not my undies – though darned if they aren’t super-cool!

Posted in dumb things I have done, nostalgia, Utter Silliness | 4 Comments »

When your time is not your own

Jan 6th, 2011 by

I distinctly remember the point in my life at which I became aware of the concept of “free time.” It was in the first grade.

I’d taken to school with a typical childish exuberance. You got to be amongst other kids, eat as much paste as you could snaffle unnoticed, and learn stuff. Somehow, the teacher was going to show me how to read, and that was the main event as far as I was concerned.

I went to a one-room rural school from kindergarten through 8th grade:

150_5002
Generally, there was one teacher and maybe 12 kids, which sounds like an amazing student-teacher ratio, but you have to bear in mind that this teacher might be handling children in every available grade.

This meant that the teacher juggled subjects and age groups sequentially, and would often start one group on desk work while taking another group through a lecture. If she had a student who was a fast worker, she’d have to give them extra work to do, or allow them to amuse themselves quietly until she could start them on something new.

In the first grade, before I’d learned to read properly, I was at a bit of a loss when I’d completed my worksheets, so I was allowed to mess around quietly with art supplies or go play with the toy supply that was kept on the stage at the end of the classroom.

My first school play performance. (December 1982)
Stage in use, Dec. 1982.

These were mostly intended for use at recess time on those bitterly cold winter days when it wasn’t even worth it to throw the kids outside for 20 minutes. Within the treasure trove was a 5-gallon bucket 2/3 full of Tinker Toys.

When I was 6, Tinker Toys were among my favorite things in the world. I’d blast my way through a phonics worksheet or rows of practice letters in order to get to the bucket of Tinker Toy joy.

One day, our teacher commented on how much I seemed to enjoy playing with Tinker Toys during my free time. The phrase “free time” was a new one on me, so I asked her what it meant, and she explained that “free time” was time in which you weren’t otherwise occupied with required tasks (though obviously in language that a first-grader would actually understand).

From then, I’d have to say that one of my top goals was getting and enjoying my free time. This meant that I was often a sloppy, slipshod student, and nowadays it means that I’m pretty unwilling to take on overtime if it’s not required.

I may have graduated from Tinker Toys to sewing patterns, but I’ve still got to say that being able to stick stuff together in my off time is a great source of satisfaction for me.

Posted in nostalgia, Utter Silliness | No Comments »

Lists of words

Dec 27th, 2010 by

Words which are not at all rude but can sound that way if spoken in the right tone:

  • buzzard
  • crust
  • ramrod
  • gizzard
  • fusty
  • crock
  • bustard
  • golden custard plugging sun on the beach

Words and Phrases which are very rude, but also make no earthly sense

  • cock-smoker
  • Cockswoggler
  • cock-gobbler
  • scrote-weasel
  • turd-bailer
  • fuck-bucket
  • assbasket

Gratutious silly words

  • Undies-burgler
  • parakeet
  • Alas, poor Yorick
  • yorgi, yorgi, yorgi
  • Bunjie
  • Rumpole
  • fungible
  • intransigent

With apologies to Frye & Laurie:

Posted in Gratuitous Cussing, Lists, Utter Silliness, Words I Like | No Comments »

Mundane pleasures

Dec 16th, 2010 by

I was reading the erstwhile blog of Rob Coombes, musician and former astrophysicist, most well known as the keyboard player in Supergrass. He’s an amusing man, and I wish he’d return to his blog – it is a lot of fun. Anyway, what got me going today was another abandoned blog, of which he’d been a team member, Triumph over the mundane which is exactly what it says on the label.

I was also raving to Joel the other night about some of the stupid little things that I get perhaps a disproportionate kick out of, particularly mundane things at work. So, for your boring pleasure, are some of the incredibly ordinary activities that I find delightful for the most flimsy of reasons. Maybe you know what I mean, and I hope you do. There are some mundane experiences that are just a total hoot for no very good reason. There are reasons, oh most certainly there are, but they’re very silly or trivial ones.

  • For example, I really like using the paper puncher at work. It makes this satisfying “CHUNGK” noise. There’s also the tiny joy it stores up in the tray of business-paper confetti which I’m privileged to dump out every couple of weeks; it’s a miniscule festival in the copy-room trashcan. The comb binder is even better, but I don’t use it as much. But it punches through the paper with a satisfying crunchy-clunky noise, and yields a much larger, fuller tray of pleasantly rectangular “confetti.”
  • And then, sometimes you open a can or a bottle or a jar that has a plastic or foil seal bonded to the top of it that you have to puncture to get to the goods inside. Sometimes, you can rend it asunder with just your thumbnail, but sometimes you have to give it a good stab with a scissor or a knife. In either case, it’s strangely satisfying.
  • Some computer keyboards have gratifyingly clicky keys. The one I use at work is great – good and noisy. When I was a kid, we had a Commodore 64 at school, and the shift-lock key was delightfully clicky. It locked on with a staccato “tic-tik” and released with a “tik-tic.” It was called into play every time we started up the computer as the command for the boot disc was Load “$”, 8 And in order to get that “$” you’d go shiftlock 242 shiftlock, 8
  • I am perhaps abnormally satisfied with my current selection of pants. I went to the thrift shop last Saturday and bought a crapload of brown pants. I seriously own like 7 pairs of varying shades of dark-brown pants, mostly corduroy, and it makes me so happy that I don’t hardly have to even think about covering up my butt. The pants! They’re all basically the same! Man, talk about convenience! Okay, so I have an olive green pair, one black pair, and one cream khaki pair, plus those black-and-white striped flares, but the controlling interest in my selection of bifurcated butt-coverings is dark brown.
  • I really like the sound of a loud free-hub.  When I was a kid, I seriously coveted a grown-up bike without a coaster brake, so that you could backpedal and get that extra loud “zizzzzz” noise.
  • I get totally jazzed if I put together a particularly cute outfit.  Seriously, a really good outfit can set the tone of my day.
  • Likewise, if I have some excellent leftovers to look forward to, lunch time can be a real pick-me-up.  The first half of the work day, I’m faintly gleeful because I’ve got a great lunch to look forward to, and the second half of the day, I’m all satisfied because I had a delicious lunch and it was fab.

I’m not sure how to classify myself.  Am I hedonist because I live for the pleasures of life.  If so, I’d be a damn low budget hedonist.   A sensualist?  Maybe, but people tend to think of sensuality in terms of sexuality, and I’m definitely not Madame Sexy McSexalot.  I mean, I enjoy it and all but it’s not like the central focus of my life, so I’m a bit unwilling to stick myself to that label.

One of my operating philosophies is that if I have to do it anyway, I might as well have some fun with it.  Hence decent cookery, fun clothes, and making a game out of a lot of the daily, repetitive stuff I do around the office.

Posted in biking, Distractions, Fashion, meta, Utter Silliness, Work/career (vague as to avoid doocing) | 2 Comments »

In which my eyes deceive me

Dec 13th, 2010 by

I did such a huge double-take on my way to work this morning that it actually involved flipping a Huey and going back for a second look.

I passed a house that I’ve probably ridden past fifty times. It’s a pretty basic early 20th Century foursquare, with a rough-cut native limestone first floor and a second floor clad in clapboard siding, and a hipped roof featuring a dormer window. Like many such houses, it has a broad front porch with stairs flanked by short, lumpy, stone pillars.

Only this morning, I could have sworn that one of the pillars was actually a stone bullfrog holding a parasol.

So I had to double back and check it out.

Sadly, it was nothing so amusing.

There were two bowl-shaped flowerpots set on top of the pillar, and the bamboo holder for a Tiki torch leaned up alongside of it.

Sometimes, I like my world better.

On the bright side, there really is a super-cute bungalow house up in the Old Northeast that actually has a pair of concrete alligators for its stair rails. You may think I’m kidding, but I am so not!

Posted in bike commuting, Distractions, Utter Silliness, Well I'll Be Darned | 3 Comments »

Nostalgia flicks showing in the Dream Theater today

Dec 12th, 2010 by

I pretty much dedicated today to cleaning and organizing my sewing room, no mean task for a packrat who often uses said room as a dumping ground for stuff I don’t know what to do with.

I’d recently bought a few more of those Sterilite/Rubbermaid boxes with the clamp-on lids and decided that today was the day that I’d sort through my costumes and vintage clothes and get that stuff organized and put up, as well as sift through the cardboard boxes of ephemera and maybe cut down on some of the bulk.

Among the things unearthed, re-packed, and stowed away neatly today was my old cassette tape collection from highschool and my early college years. Loads of shitty music in there. A few gems, but a lot of totally embarrassing choices, ’cause that’s what being a teenager is about: listening to horrible music that will make you cringe at a later date. My collection wasn’t very big, as I never had any money, and lived out in the boondocks where exposure to new or non-mainstream music was pretty limited, but there was enough there to fill a boot box.

Among the treasure trove was a surprising buttload of Dream Theater. I was really, really into them for a while, circa 1994-6. I’d kind of forgotten how much I dug them back in the day, but as I re-stacked my tapes in date-released order, as I used to always do, it started to come back to me, the magical summer of ’95, and all of its awkward coming-of-age glory.

The summer of ’95 was the summer between my senior year of highschool and my freshman year of college. I was so excited at the prospect before me that I felt like a fizzy bottle of soda sparkling and bubbling all over the place.

I’d had pretty much shit luck with boys up to that point. I’d only had one boyfriend; a relationship which was handled terribly badly by both parties – go figure, we were both 15 at the time. I decided that ’95 would be the summer that I would make myself cool and savvy and desirable to boys.

Apparently involved in said endeavor was listening to hours and hours of nerd rock and reading every bit of classic science fiction I could lay hands on, riding my shitty old Huffy for 20 miles a day, and doing truly insane quantities of sit-ups. To put a perspective on things, at a point not much earlier in my unsuccessful boy-chasing career, I thought it would impress boys a lot because I could not only lay rubber out of first gear in my Volkswagen, but that I could also chirp ’em in 2nd and 3rd. Sadly, it didn’t seem to bring the boys to the yard. In retrospect, I suspect that my prowess in destructive driving may have cemented the local opinion that I wasn’t the type of girl who liked boys at all.

Anyway, during my nerdtastic 18th summer, I listened to Dream Theater a lot, on my Walkman, while sitting on the front steps in the hot sun with lemon juice in my hair, hoping to make it blonder. I’d just bask there, eyes closed, daydreaming and spacing out to lengthy, meandering, electrified, latter-day prog rock.

Not a bad way to while away the time waiting for college and (theoretical) excitement to begin.

Posted in dumb things I have done, nostalgia | 1 Comment »

Things I like & Things I don’t like #1

Dec 9th, 2010 by

New minifeature over here. I’ve decided that I can’t waste all of my brainfarts on Twitter or Facebook. Not when I’ve got a perfectly good blog to yammer on. So now, occasionally, I’ll post pairs of things that I have liked and disliked recently.

  • I like riding past a house at night that has the lights on, and one of the family’s cats is sitting in the window.
  • I don’t like when people use me as the butt of their insult humor.  Not because “OMG U’R BEEIN’ MEEEEEEEEN TO MEEEEE” but more because I do a lot of self-deprecating humor so it’s more like “thanks for biting my lines, butthole”

Posted in meta, Things I like & Things I don't like | No Comments »

My pussy was in quite a frantic state!

Dec 7th, 2010 by

Oh but he was! The trauma of his annual trip to the veterinarian for his vaccination boosters brought out Griswald’s inner Mr. Humphries (or Niles Crane, depending on your decade and side of the pond). His histrionics are impressive, if you don’t have to share the cab of a pickup with his yowling, howling, frenzied dramatics.

Griswald, in his traditional fine form, pissed himself while we were on the way to the vet’s office. We couldn’t have been even halfway there when the unfortunately familiar stench made itself known.

Minnie, in her own traditional form, was perfectly well behaved, only griping periodically, most likely about being confined in her carrier rather than about the car ride itself. Griswald, however, carried on as though he were being eviscerated. Very. Slowly. For as big of a pill as Minnie can be, she’s quite a ladylike pussy in the car.

Once we got to the vet’s office, Grizzo was just fine, though of course he took his siren wails back up for the ride home. The vet toweled Griz off a bit and mopped out the bottom of his crate, but I almost think that made the stink worse.

Of course, I decided I’d get clever on my way home and take the highway back. I drove on State Ave all the way there (about 50 blocks, I might add) and I’d driven back from the vet’s before on the highway (the last time I took Ruby in), so I figured it would be nice to get home that little bit faster.

Well, due to the frenzied caterwauling (and the fact that I really needed to pee, my own self) I was distracted and took a wrong turn. Not only that, but I didn’t realize how wrong until I found myself crossing the Riverside city limits.

I swore so vehemently that the cat even shut up for about 30 seconds. Found an exit, took it, and got going back the other way. I had to go almost all the way back to where I started, and ended up doing about 40 blocks on State Ave. anyway. To the sensation of a full bladder and the stench of a panicked, piss-soaked cat.

And so, of course, when we got home, I couldn’t just let the cat out of his crate and call it a day. Nooooo, I had to do the leftover dishes, clear out the sink and counter, fill up the sink with lukewarm water (with a splash of vinegar, to cut the pee smell), grab the cat by the scruff of his neck, and swish him around in the sink for a while. I kind of dunked him up and down and stirred the water with him, so as (I hoped) to rinse as much pee out of his fur as possible. I didn’t even bother soaping him or anything. Just make it as quick and relatively painless as possible. In five minutes tops, I was sopping him up with a big towel. He spent the rest of the afternoon hovering over a heat vent, ears held flat, licking himself vigorously.

But the upshot of the whole affair is that his fur is now more gloriously soft and fluffy than it’s been in ages. The vinegar rinse really brought out the body and shine, not that he cares especially.

Grizzo, putting his big old furry face right up in the camera

Posted in Car Drama and trauma, Cats, Gratuitous Cussing, Oh, for fuck's sake | No Comments »

This house is cleared

Nov 25th, 2010 by

Last Saturday, I got invited to an exorcism at a liquor store.

Well, the exorcism wasn’t at the liquor store; I was at the liquor store when the invitation was extended to me. The exorcism, supposedly, was to take place in this new church in an old warehouse in the West Bottoms.

It is a church whose exterior decoration consists of a vinyl banner, the artwork of which I mistook to be the promo for a tattoo parlor until I read the text, part of which features the ambiguously Orwellian slogan “Freedom is Waiting.”

So, I was waiting outside the liquor store, minding the bicycles while my friends were in getting some beer for later in the evening, when I was approached by two very strange kids. At first, I mistook them for Mormon Missionaries, as they had that wide-eyed, well-scrubbed, slightly-frenetic/slightly-dazed demeanor, but it was a boy and a girl, rather than two boys or two girls.

At first, they were just like, “hey, what’s up?” and I figured they were going to try to touch me for gas (beer) money, but instead, they made me an offer that was damn hard to refuse.

And before I carry on, I need to mention that both of them had pronounced and matching lisps. I don’t know why, but both of them thpoke about ath dithtinctly ath Thylvethter the Cat.

So this young couple were all like, “hey, whath going on?” and I was all like, “Not a lot, just babysitting the bikes while my friends are in the store.”

Weird Lispy Kids: “Cool, cool. Are you riding for thome cauthe?”

Me: “‘Cause it’s a nice afternoon’s all.”

WLK: “Yeth, it thure ith. Thay, if you’re free later on, you thould check out the thervithes at the new church down here. They’re pretty itenthe.”

Me: “Intense? How so?”

WLK: “They’re really powerful – thometimeth thome thcary thtuff happenth. Latht week, they actually performed an exorthithm. It wath like nothing I’ve ever theen before!”

At this point, I was of two minds:
1. Back away slowly, make no sudden moves.
2. Encourage the crazy people to make with the crazy for my personal amusement.

I’m sure you can guess which choice I made.

The Lispy Kids waxed enthusiastic about the strengths of their “pathtor,” on how strong he was in his faith, how much he believed in and preached from the Bible, and so on. They got pretty wound up at this point and decided that it was just too mean to keep all of this spiritual joy to themselves.

They invited me to the “thpethial thervithe” that was going on that evening, wherein heavy proceedings were promised.

I had to reply with a “regrets,” as we were beering up for Stupid Movie night. Also, I had serious doubts as to the entertainment prospects of sitting in on an exorcism as a Godless Infidel. Because I’m not a Believer, I expect my experience of the exorcism wouldn’t be nearly as powerful as that of the Lispy Kids.

I’m pretty sure I’d find myself sitting on a hard bench or chair, waiting for some windbag to get done sawing on about Jesus and shit before some delusional dillweed or perhaps a planned accomplice came up to the front and started acting all growly and thrashy as the preacher-man shook him around a bit and hollered out some “Spiritus Sanctus Klaatu Barata Nictu” mumbo-jumbo and threw the poor sod to the ground, apparently drained of all demonic force.

In short, I anticipated the experience to be exceptionally tedious and taxing all credulity.

Not unlike:

Posted in Adventures, biking, Oh, for fuck's sake, Utter Silliness, Well I'll Be Darned | No Comments »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »