New Things

1. New Gym Shoes

Grey and navy cross trainers from, I think, New Balance? Maybe? I don't remember the brand. Anyway, new gym shoes.

2. Sephora Makeup Haul

Urban Decay Primer Potion. Kat von D Autograph Eyeliner in "puro amor". Cargo Hands of Hope eyeshadow palette.

3. Five new long sleeve black t-shirts from Target

Generally speaking, I only wear long-sleeve black t-shirts. (Sometimes I wear Dave's button-down shirts, but I would prefer to wear only long-sleeve black t-shirts. Ever. But they're hard to find in the summer. So when winter comes, I stock up.)

4. A copy of Push by Sapphire

The book that the movie Precious is based on. A fast read, a few hours at most. I can't wait for the movie.

5. Studio Fixes

A clip-on lamp and plastic sheeting for the space I'm moving into at the clay studio. After almost three years of being exiled, I'm returning to the studio.

Cranes

Flocks of Sandhill cranes; Ditch walk with Kelly First, Kevin, Dave, and Lewie. Last Sunday?

Very Tired

It's been over a week since I put any new words here. I've been spending some--a lot--of time online, reading blogs with feminist or anti-racist themes and that always makes me feel a bit...introverted perhaps. (Hey, it's better than the celebrity gossip sites I was somewhat addicted to six months ago.)

I stay off of the "big" feminist websites because, not unsurprisingly, they tend to be some of the most unabashedly classist and discriminatory sites on the web. Seriously. It's disheartening to see that the face of internet feminism is largely white and upper middle class. Of course, that really highlights the fact that women of color (and people of color in general) and poor people don't have an internet presence because they often can't afford the equipment or the fees or perhaps even the time it takes to become internet savvy--and there's nothing much on the internet that would really speak to them if they could.

So yes, looking at these things makes me feel, as an underrepresented presence on the internet, very tired.

Poetical!

Yes, I shamelessly lifted this from The Nation online.

What Whoopi Goldberg ('Not a Rape-Rape'), Harvey Weinstein ('So-Called Crime') et al. Are Saying in Their Outrage Over the Arrest of Roman Polanski

By Calvin Trillin

A youthful error? Yes, perhaps.
But he's been punished for this lapse--
For decades exiled from LA
He knows, as he wakes up each day,
He'll miss the movers and the shakers.
He'll never get to see the Lakers.
For just one old and small mischance,
He has to live in Paris, France.
He's suffered slurs and other stuff.
Has he not suffered quite enough?
How can these people get so riled?
He only raped a single child.

Why make him into some Darth Vader
For sodomizing one eighth grader?
This man is brilliant, that's for sure--
Authentically, a film auteur.
He gets awards that are his due.
He knows important people, too--
Important people just like us.
And we know how to make a fuss.
Celebrities would just be fools
To play by little people's rules.
So Roman's banner we unfurl.
He only raped one little girl.

Gram's House

Taken at dusk, a photo of the street in front of my grandmother's house.

Jay Smooth--s It Out

Because the child rapist Roman Polanski case has made me mad enough to spit, insane mad, stark and raving, I've started to look around the interwebs for people who have the ability to think rationally about the whole subject and to form coherent arguments that include the idea that child rapists should suffer consequences for their crimes. (Because a lot of people are arguing that they shouldn't and that makes me feel murderous on top of the mad.)

Anyway, this is Jay Smooth, and he has something to say about that:



Tiger Beatdown
This Week, In Reasonable Discourse: Why You Are A Lynch Mob of Art-Hating Glenn Beck Terrorist Hitlers

A Bunch Of Randomness

Apropos de nada, here is a photo of David in a giant bee costume. (Please excuse the quality of the photo as I was trying to take a very quick pic in Target.)

Kind of reminiscent of this guy, no?

What do you think of Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize? Man, I think it's pretty damn fabulous. Is there anything that man can't do? (Besides fix our healthcare system, I mean. But I don't hold that against him. I blame the Republicans who want to do nothing but destroy our country like bratty little children because they lost big in the last election.)

I've come the the realization recently that I'm just not writing enough these days. I've sort of lost my voice, and when that happens, I tend to lose my way.

Dave and I went out and bought a new futon and frame, and a new futon to fit our existing frame. We actually picked it up at the place where we've been buying our futons for the last twenty or so years. It's an independent, woman-owned business, which makes me very happy. We have to pick up our stuff on Monday. Yay!

After, we had to go to Target to buy some new sheets (t-shirt/jersey sheets) and some freezer containers because I made soup. Yeah, the weather's getting colder, so there must be soup. I made vegetable soup with sweet potatoes and parsnips as the standout ingredients. (It's also got onions, carrots, celery, kale, squash, tomato, and three kinds of beans in it.) It's simple and yummy, and I froze twenty-eight cups worth of it for various lunches and such.

It's balloon fiesta time and day before yesterday, I woke to the sound of a balloonist hitting the propane burner on his balloon as he came over the house. I knew instantly what it was and thought immediately of the nearest open fields where he might be trying to land. That's one of the best things about growing up an Albuquerquenia, knowing that sound from childhood, I mean, from the days in late September when the skies fill with hot-air balloons, and, if you were lucky, having one land in your schoolyard.

 I haven't been to the fiesta in a couple of years, so that photo is a bit dated. But you get the idea.

I've been netflixing a run of old MST3K episodes, focusing mainly on the Joel episodes. Do you even know what I'm talking about? MST3K (or Mystery Science Theater 3000) is an old cable TV show in which Joel (and later Mike) and his three robots (Gypsy, Tom Servo, and Crow) watch old movies and make hilarious comments about them. Joel was the original host--and creator--but he dropped out after a few years and the head writer took over. I know, I know, doesn't sound like a million laughs from my description. But it's seriously funny.

But you don't have to take my word for it. Here's a sample from the show, where they make fun of an educational short called "What to do on a date." (It's long, but hang with it.)



"Hey, guys, what's a weenie roast?" BWAH-HA-HA-HA!

Strange Bedfellows

I'm an internet addict. There, I said it. I spend a lot of time at the New York Times online website which is where, at five a.m. this morning, I found an op-ed piece by Nicholas D. Kristof called, "Let Congress Go Without Insurance."  Kristof suggests that, like the American population, eight percent of Congress should be stripped of their taxpayer-funded insurance benefits. (I personally think it should be 100% as a penalty for the complete uselessness they've exhibited in providing the American people with a workable health care system.)

Turns out that taking away their benefits wouldn't do much, as one commenter points out that the average Congressperson has a personal net worth of 1.2 million dollars. People with that kind of dosh can afford to take their chances on the open market, no? Of course, even with that kind of personal wealth, they'd better pray that they don't get cancer, which would bankrupt even the wealthiest of them under our current system, I think.

Not that it would make my bitter little heart glad to see that happen.

Another Harvard study released in May found that in 2007, 65% of personal bankruptcies had involved high medical bills. Most of those people had insurance. But even with insurance, their annual out-of-pocket medical bills averaged over $17,000. [. . . W]here would you rather get cancer? In America, you have a modestly better chance of surviving most cancers for 5 years. But there's a 1 in 4 chance you will lose your life savings and a 1 in 10 chance you will have to beg for food or rent, while in France, the whole thing will cost you nothing.

(That's from The Economist, by the way.)

Oh, and you know what else makes my bitter little heart glad?

Child rapist Roman Polanski was denied bail by Swiss courts. Turns out they think he's a flight risk. Huh. Wonder where they got that idea.

In fact, for days I had to stay off the major news sites because of that very child rapist. For all the days that his ugly rapist face dominated the headlines, I had to stay away because just looking at his ugly bloated face made me feel murderous. Reading about the way he and his supporters are trying play the victim card on behalf of a man who drugged and raped a thirteen-year-old girl made me feel murderous.

I made myself stop reading stories about it when I read a commenter, more hatefully bitter than I, suggest that it was a shame that Hitler hadn't managed to kill all the Polish Jews. (In case you don't know, the rapist's family were Polish Jews and many of them died in concentration camps.) I read that and my flinty little heart felt glad that someone was as poisoned by this whole matter as I have been. Oh, I'm getting to the point where I can read stories about it and I can even read comments from rape apologists about it, but I still can't look at his ugly, child rapist face without feeling hatred well up in me.

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!” --Roman Polanski

That quote was from an interview he gave a year after he pled guilty to the statutory rape charge (in exchange for having six related felony charges dropped) and fled the country to avoid sentencing.

I don't know what kind of person believes that this man doesn't deserve to face consequences for raping a child, but apparently those people are out there. Some of them are quite prominent. Among those who believe that child rapists should go free is, unsurprisingly, Woody Allen, who you may recall began a sexual relationship with the adopted, high-school-aged daughter of his lover, Mia Farrow. (Allen, incidentally, was accused of molesting his own seven-year-old biological daughter, though a judge found the evidence inconclusive based as it was on the star-struck, partially destroyed reports issued by the psychologists who tested the girl.)

So there it is: Health care and the treatment of child rapists. The internet makes for strange bedfellows.

Short and Sweet

Things That Make Me Feel Stabby:

1. The Neighbor

I'm housesitting right now and the woman next door makes me want to leave a flaming bag filled with Crunch's turds on her doorstep. (And he's a big dog, so it would be a hefty bag of shit, you know.) I'm too tired to type out why she makes me feel all vandalous, but she is six different kinds of annoying.


2. Rape Apologists and their new poster boy, Roman Polanski

I don't just want that man extradited and imprisoned, I want that fucking pedophile stoned to death.

And Surprise!

Things I have enjoyed lately:


1. Hours and hours of Supernanny on the Style network.

I have an enormous crush on Jo Frost. She makes me feel like the possibility for sanity exists.



2. Coffee with real cream

I don't usually put cream in my coffee, but there's tons of it here in the housesitting house, so I'm using it. YUM!

Teh Tarik & No Sleep

That is a completely random photo. Well, okay, it is not completely random. It was actually the photo with the most views yesterday on my flickr account.

That is a photo of a Nescafe machine in Singapore. I took the photo mostly to show the unusual (to me) offering of "Teh Tarik," a popular tea drink in Singapore. (Teh tarik is "pulled tea," a milky tea that is frothed by pouring it from one container to another. (I did not buy a teh tarik from this vending machine, by the way, as I was already drinking a coffee that was included with the price of the airport lounge I was in.)

Et Cetera

My sleep has been crap over the last couple of days, starting with an uber windy night a couple of nights ago. I'm staying over with Crunch at Paul and Judi's, so of course the sounds of the house are unfamiliar and it's hard to sleep anyway. I've gotten used to the usual sounds now, but a couple of nights of the unfamiliar sound of trees and bushes being blown about and crashing against the windows means that I don't sleep at all. Crunch is of course no help, as he is suffering from the worst gas ever and makes it his mission to fill the bedroom with noxious fumes.

Instead of sleeping, I end up netflixing hour after hour of a British TV show from the 90's called As Time Goes By. Have you seen it? It's worth a watch, even if you don't have insomnia.

I also surfed around the net and found this cool and strange site called Beautiful Cervix Project, a series of daily photographs that a woman (with help from her boyfriend and a headlamp) took of her own cervix. It is very amazing. You should go and have a look.

I also started a blog entry about strange things white people do at weddings. (The chicken dance, for example, made me think that white people were insane when I first saw it done at the wedding of a coworker in the mid-90's.) But that got too cynical too fast, so I abandoned it.

I've also been eating way too much in the middle of the night. Last night, after midnight, I had half a 32 oz. container of plain, lowfat yogurt mixed with vegan omega-3 and -6 oils. And an apple. And a peach. And a pickle. And some feta. (No, not all mixed together. Just grazed over the course of several hours.) I find that I eat a lot when I am tired and can't (or won't) sleep. I just eat and eat and eat. (There are several studies suggesting that this is not unusual for many people, and that lack of sleep may be related to obesity.)

I finally got to sleep around five a.m., and woke up about an hour later than Crunch is used to getting his walk. It's 10:30 in the morning now, and I think I'm going to need a nap soon. Or some teh tarik.

+1

We went to a wedding yesterday. Two of Dave's coworkers, Yusuf and Colleen, were marrying. (Yes, each other.) Dave doesn't work directly with either of them, but he does play games on his lunch hour with them, so he was invited. I, of course, came along as his +1.

The pic above is part of the little favors given to guests, a small tin of m&m candies, personalized with the names of the happy couple and the date of the event. Very tasty. Just by chance, the colors of my dress, the green and purple job, turned out to be the exact color theme the bride chose for her wedding. In fact, the green of the m&m's were the same color as the trim on my dress, the same dress I decided makes me look like an eggplant. (Well, at least I tried wearing color.)

See? Here's a pic of me trying to decide which color hose to wear with the dress.



(I was wearing the light gray hose and I put the black hose over, which looks awful, but it was a fast and dirty way to make a decision about which to wear. Of course, I decided on the gray hose, then changed my mind and wore the black ones. I should've stuck with the gray, but something about the light colored hose made me think my legs looked thick as tree trunks. Blurgh. See, if I had just worn all black, it wouldn't have even been a problem.)

So, want a photo of the happy couple?

Here they are:



Sorry, it's not the best photo ever, but I don't know if they would want their faces plastered all over my blog--and also it was the one photo I have that shows the following: The groom's mother (Jamila, I think was her name) and the little teepee that the bride made as a child that was presented to her by her father during his toast. (He was a sweet guy, I think, bringing that little project with him to the wedding to present to his daughter.)

We ate well, drank well, and had fun. That's more than a +1 has a right to expect, I imagine.

Borrowed Finery & Mitote

Look at that craziness! That is the contents of Kelly First's vintage jewelry collection, which is on loan to yours truly for the upcoming wedding I'll be attending with Dave. There are some really gorgeous pieces in there, but my favorites so far are these earrings:

That's kind of a blurry pic, sorry. Here's a side view that's a little better:

Yes, they're clip ons. My smashed earlobes may take my mind off the pain of wearing heels all night though, right?

And how about these rhinestone earrings?

I don't think I could get away with these unfortunately. But I did wear them while brushing and flossing last night, along with a rhinestone headband that I'll also be wearing.  I may pick out a necklace and a couple of gorgeous cocktail rings too, though probably not a bracelet.  I've just never been a bracelet kind of girl.

Kelly First also turned out to have the perfect gray satin clutch, so I'll have that. And I brought her scarf and pashima collection home to try to find something that goes with my dress. The most beautiful one is a gorgeous floral print, dark and elegant, silk backed with velvet. It doesn't match my dress at all, not in any way, shape, or form, but it is so beautiful that I almost thought to put my new purple and green dress in the closet and instead wear a black wrap-around dress I have, just so that I could bring this beautiful scarf.

But no. I'm committed to trying to wear a color other than black.

Aerobic Mitote

So it's been about a month since I went to water aerobics (!) and tonight when I met with my aunt at the pool, she had to catch me up on all the latest gossip, including some big mitote that happened a couple of weeks ago. Yes, that's right, there was some sort of altercation at the pool while people were standing in line waiting to get in.

Let me give you some background:

There's this young woman, probably in her early 20's, and she comes to aerobics with her mother. The daughter is a piece of work, let me tell you. First, she is a total chola wannabe, covered in shitty tattoos. I mean, covered from head to toe. There is not a space on her body (except her face and hands), including her neck, that isn't tattooed. She likes to pretend that she's all tough, but she's really like bully tough (which is what happens to cowards when they try to act tough). When I first started at the pool, I noticed that she never, ever paid. (It's, like, all of $2.50 per class.) She'd bypass the line saying she had to go change into her suit and then, suprise, she'd never come back out to pay. That went on for several weeks before she finally got busted not paying. After that, she bought a 10-class pass card. Then she'd bypass the line, knock on the door to the lifeguard's office and tell the lifeguard in a snotty voice, "Punch my card. I have to go change." It was kind of annoying that this dizzy bitch still pulled that shit and jumped the line, but at least she wasn't trying to get out of paying.

But last week, she tried that shit and someone in line called her out on it, asking why she didn't stand in line like everyone else. My aunt was witness to it and she said that the cholita wannabe went all apeshit, saying stuff like, "Let's take it outside then," and "I'll call my uncle. He's a state cop."  (Who says shit like that? Seriously. I used to know a snotty young woman whose father was, like, head of the sherriff's department and she would say shit like that, too. "Do you know who I am? My dad's the head of the sherriff's department." Like that was going to make people do her bidding. Mostly she got laughed at. Just once, I wanted to see her call her dad and have him show up and knock some goddamned sense into her.)

Anyway, chola-wannabe wasn't at the pool tonight, so the conversation was all about her stupid behavior. Can you believe it? People like that piss me off. The really lovely thing? This woman has four children. No joke. Yes, she's probably teaching them all that kind of behavior as well. (When I first found out she had four children, I told my aunt, "Well, someday you and I will be supporting her kids, three of them in jail and one--the good one--on welfare.")

Ugh. Idiots.

Here is a hella funny chola makeup tutorial. (I love it when she tests her chola "eyebrowns" and yells, "Ay!" when she pokes herself in the eye putting on eyeliner.)

A Splashing Success

There's a crappy cell phone photo of Dave's bun from dinner last night. It was stuck all over with what looked like irregular poppy seeds but which turned out to be ground black pepper. My guess is that someone--some hungover someone perhaps--did actually mistake pepper for poppy seeds and then decided to serve it anyway. I guess if you add a pat of Wholesome Farms butter, then everything is gonna be all right. (Doesn't Wholesome Farms sound like a name dreamed up by some corporate executive who plays golf all day and gets three million dollars in annual bonuses? It sounds bogus, I mean. Can you imagine a farmer calling his farm "Wholesome Farm"? No, you can't. I don't like it when butter lies to me, dammit.)



We had dinner at Flying Star last night because I wanted pancakes for dinner. Dave had mac 'n' cheese. We skipped dessert (because you can't justify dessert after eating pancakes for your main course, I'm afraid. Those are the rules.)

Under the category of Other Things That Happened Yesterday:

Dave got a haircut. It's very, very short. He likes it. I think he looks like this guy:

Either of those guys, actually, but slightly more like the one in the glasses.

Just joking. I actually like Yoko Ono. It's just that Dave has a beardish type thing on his face and he wears glasses.

So, yes, the haircut.

After, we went to Target. I still had to buy a pashmina-ish thing for the wedding because the mall shopping trip didn't pan out. I looked over the clutches, too, but that has been a bust all around. (It's homecoming season right now, and all the little high school girls foraging for cheap finery are making it impossible to find a cheap clutch.) Then there had to be all the little things one needs to buy when one is unaccustomed to going out: hairspray, for example, hosiery, nail polish in a gray color that matches the gray pashmina-ish thing. (Dave picked out two shades of gray nail polish for me, actually. One is a kind of opaque silvery gray with a purplish tint. One is a softer, more translucent gray. I think I'll wear the softer gray on my fingernails, the opaque gray on the toes.) Of course while I was buying hosiery, I decided to stock up on bras. Why not?

I get dressed up about once every two years, so I don't mind splashing out, as the Brits say.

Crunch and A Day at the Mall

Crunch and I are spending some time together for the next couple of weeks. Everyday we take either two or three walks. He's such a handsome boy that he draws all kinds of attention. Seriously, it's not unusual for people to slow their cars down or to stop completely in the middle of the road to look at him or to ask questions about him. I'm not the friendliest person in the world, so I hate those kinds of interactions. I really only put up with them because Crunch seems to enjoy it.

This morning, a woman called across the road, "Is that Crunch?" (This has happened perhaps three or four times, where someone recognizes him. Once, it was even a man who had never met him, who only knew of Crunch from his wife.) She brought over her little cocker spaniel who she said only loves Crunch. She (the spaniel) doesn't like any other dog in the world, only Crunch. "She pines for him," the owner said. (I did not roll my eyes. Much.) But funnily enough, after Crunch and the little spaniel had their little tête-à-tête and we had continued on, I looked back and there was the little dog, standing in the path, just looking at Crunch while her owner tried to pull her away.  Crunch, ever the boy, just went along his merry way. 

The Purple Dress

"Every one of the ten girls in the store had little pork-chop-and-fried-onion dreams every night of becoming Mrs. Ramsay."

--O. Henry, "The Purple Dress"

After the morning walk, Dave and I went to THE MALL. I actually hate THE MALL. Hate it. It's like a nightmare from the claustrophobic collection. But we went because we had to buy Dave a suit for the upcoming wedding we're attending. (Dave's convinced that he in his suit and I in my new dress (and Kelly First's borrowed vintage jewels) are going to be overdressed. Better to be overdressed than underdressed, I think. And I also think that he's just trying to get out of wearing a suit.) Anyway, we found Dave a suit, with the help of a very odd but very competent salesman. Men have it so easy. Dave bought the first complete suit he tried on in the first store we went into. (Yes, he did have to try on perhaps four jackets and two pairs of pants to get the sizing correct, but that was it. Now he has an outfit that he can wear to weddings and funerals again and again without anyone blinking an eye. Me? I try that with a dress and I'm toast. People notice when women wear the same dress again and again.)

But my treats came after the suit buying. We walked down to Sephora and looked endlessly at makeup. Lucky Dave. I ended up buying some eyeliners in gray and beige, a brick-red lipliner (Sephora brand all), Benefit Benetint, and some lavender-scented blotting paper. I actually only bought the Benetint because I've been reading about it for years; I've wanted to try it, but it's about $30 a bottle, which is a bit rich for my blood when it comes to just trying out something. Sephora, though, let's you try before you buy and even though it was just a swipe on my hand, it was enough to convince me that I wanted to really give it a go. It's pretty stuff, and smells nice, like roses and saints. I don't think it'll be my favorite thing ever, but I'm glad to give it a go.

So my dress for the wedding is not black (a shocker to anyone who knows me), but purple and green. (No, seriously.) It's not patterned, but solid purple, edged with a soft green band at the neck, sleeves and hem, with the same green used as a belt detail. I have purple satin open-toed pumps to go with it. I just need to find a few accessories, a clutch and pashmina, perhaps in a soft gray. I'm going to borrow some of Kelly First's vintage stuff, maybe rhinestones, maybe a jet necklace or two. (I don't think I could pull of a tiara.) If none of that stuff works, maybe I'll put a big purple flower in my hair and call it a day.

Dave's suit is black with a white pinstripe. His accessory? Well, I guess that would have to be me.

Inappropriate Things

This is my training group in Omiya, back in the days when I first went to work for an English language school called Aeon. (I always called it The Kaisha--kaisha means company in Japanese--when I wrote about it before because I was working there and I didn't want any casual surfers to find my blog. Of course I was "found out" by one of the trainers, an experience I documented.)

But that's not what I intend to write about.

So this is my group:

I'm in the middle, at the back. The guy in the light blue shirt to the left of me in the photo was named Joe Lo. We called him J. Lo. The guy to the right of me was named Simon. He grew up in Brooklyn and despite his happy little smile, he was pretty tough. Someone tried to mug him once in Japan, two Japanese guys with knives, and he fought them off. The two jokesters at the bottom of the photo, the guy in the dark blue shirt and the woman in the powder blue shirt, are Brandon and Juvanka. Brandon was very, very religious and something about Japan rubbed him the wrong way almost from day one, I think. Juvanka, while walking down the street one day, was stopped and questioned by the police because they thought she was a prostitute. The woman to the right of Juvanka in the photo, this woman:


...God, what was her name? Ugh. I can't remember. I roomed with her (along with Anita, the blonde woman at the far left in the group photo). It was such an unpleasant experience that I made a point of not getting her contact information when training was finished.

Okay, I just went back and searched some old group emails to find her name. It's Tia.

Let me tell you about Tia.

Tia was from San Francisco and she carried a picture of her deceased pet parrot in her wallet, the wallet that was stolen from her the first week in Japan when she went clubbing and picked up some JP guy and went to a love hotel with him. He took her wallet, leaving her a thousand yen bill (about $10) on the nightstand, about enough for a train ticket back to Omiya from Tokyo. She came back to the training house the next day, our day off, and decided that she wanted the room to herself to sleep off her hangover. Anita and I grudgingly vacated the room. Later, when she was up and Anita and I were going to bed, Tia decided that she wanted to play some music. Anita asked her very politely to turn off the music and Tia turned off the music but she got very angry, angry enough that she started crying, saying that all she wanted to do was listen to some music and why was that so wrong and boo-hoo and all that kind of crap. Anita was, like, thanks for turning off the music. Goodnight.

Tia. Well. She obviously had no real ideas about boundaries. She once asked to borrow my deoderant. Yes, my deoderant, that thing that makes you not stink when you rub it in your pits. She had forgotten hers and didn't want to spend the money on a new one. I declined her request, but I had the feeling that she waited until I left the room and then used it anyway. She was that kind of person.

She lasted about a month at her new school. One day, on her break, she decided to take the train somewhere and go shopping for shoes. She caught the wrong train back and was over an hour late. She had missed a class that she was supposed to teach. When the manager of the school confronted her and told her that her behavior was inappropriate, she got upset and quit.

I was reminded of Tia today because I was telling Judi about the upcoming nuptuals for a couple of Dave's work buddies and how I’m really just Dave’s plus-one for this wedding but that I still have to buy a dress and shoes and send a gift. That led me to tell her about the Japanese wedding I attended (the bride was our eye-candy of a receptionist named Akiko) and how the appropriate gift to bring to a Japanese wedding was thirty-thousand yen ($300) in brand new bills. That was if you were going stag. If you were going as a couple, the cost rose to, I think, fifty-thousand yen.  The after-party cost another six-thousand five hundred yen ($65). I think, after the gift and after party and transportation and so on, I probably spent close to $600 to attend Aki's wedding, but that was fine because it was like $600 tuition for a culture lesson.

In for a penny, in for a pound was my eventual Nihon motto.

So that was not necessarily inappropriate, just unusual. Judi's inappropriate story? Well, she and Paul were once invited to dinner at a "friend's" house. It was clear, Judi said, that the "friends" had had a party the night before, a party to which Paul and Judi had not been invited. For dinner the friends served leftovers of those deli party trays--still on the trays. Judi was just insulted by the whole thing. And who wouldn't be? Ick.

Other inappropriate things? Hmmm. A "friend" once invited me and Dave out to visit her in El Paso and once we were there, we found out that basically we were The Help for a birthday party she was having for her mother. That was back in the days when I was too polite to say anything, so of course we ended up helping her cook and serve the food and drinks at the party. Luckily, the live-in maid (a Mexican woman who was begrudgingly paid one hundred dollars a week) did the clean up.

Classy.

Appropriate/Inappropriate is something that I struggle with all the time, wont as I am to speak my mind in all situations, even when it would be better for everyone (but most importantly me) if I remained silent. But when I measure my penchant for that against the everyday inappropriate behavior of others, it seems like not such a big deal.

Just now, for example, I was at Whole Foods with Kelly First and this clueless blonde hippie wannabe blocked the entire produce aisle taking her sweet fucking time turning her cart around while simultaneously perusing all the little veggies in the vicinity. I finally said, rude as I could make my tone, "Excuse me." (If Dave had been there, I would've said to him, within earshot of that woman of course, "It must be nice to be the only fucking person on the planet." Because I majored in aggressive, but I have a minor in passive aggressive.) And the woman's response? She blankly said, "Oh....uh..." and I just rolled my eyes and moved past her.  But then I noticed the two children (one perhaps three, one perhaps four, dirty little tow-headed, hemp-clothes-wearing hippie children with unkempt hair and crusty nostrils) at the other end of the aisle, pushing one of those fucking annoying carts for little kids, just careening around, getting in everyone's way. And who do you think those children belonged to? Yes, that's right. GRRRR.

Yes, it's true: I think in general that reproducing is inappropriate. But if you do decide to spawn, do the rest of us a favor and get a goddamn crate, like a dog crate, to leave your filthy spawn in while you go out shopping. Thank you.

Me, Myself, and Eye

Ugh. My eyebrows need some work, no? I never, never, never--well, hardly ever--groom my eyebrows. I don't like doing it, so I don't do it. But the scads of makeup how-to-ish videos that I've been watching on youtube recently have convinced me that I need to do something with my eyebrows.

Yikes.

Ten Kinds of Cheese, Louisa May Alcott, and A Decent Pair of Scissors

There's Lewie chillin' in the garden while Kelly First and I picked tomatoes for dinner. He's not much help when it comes to picking tomatoes. He always blames it on a lack of opposable thumbs, but I think it's just pure laziness.

 

Those are some of the tomatoes! Look at those beauties. The big ones went into this tomato concasse:

 

That was intended to accompany Kelly First's rendition of Jennifer James's goat cheese ravioli with tomato concasse and garlic confit with basil. 

Here's a wordless story about goat cheese ravioli.

 

  

Hmmmm. I may have skipped a few steps in there. And I'm not showing you the full extent of the spread which also included a salad, bread, olives, and a peach clafouti with vanilla ice cream for dessert. And I'm definitely not showing you the aftermath of the feast, in which four shameless people devoured a feast for ten. Man, do we eat well. In addition to the two kinds of goat cheese that went into the ravioli, we also made a few ravioli with goat feta. And we had parmesan crackers that I made. And there was parmesan and manchego to go on top of the ravioli. And then there was the cheese plate that Kelly put together. Dave counted up ten different kinds of cheeses with our dinner.

Are we mad or what?

I woke up with a cheese hangover this morning--which was not helped by the two big bowls of vanilla ice cream that I had for breakfast. I am no longer allowed to have ice cream in the house, by the way.


The Rest of the Day

This morning, I helped Dave get ready for his trip to see his mother. That necessitated a trip to Target to buy a Wii with a fitness board, or whatever it's called, for him to give to her for her birthday. Yes, I know it sounds funny that Dave is giving his mother a Wii for her birthday, but it's actually quite a serious present. She has Parkinson's Disease, and recent research suggests that using Wii and Wii Fit in particular can potentially help Parkinson's patients. (All research funded by the makers of the Wii, no doubt.) Anyway, he's gone up to see her and deliver the Wii. What a good son, no?

In the afternoon, I skipped out on a much needed walk in favor of reading a book online, something I have never done before. I was prompted to do it by a random blog entry which mentioned Louisa May Alcott's young adult novel Eight Cousins. I first encountered the story in a set of books that one of my mother's friends passed on to me when I was about eight years old. I'd lost track of the set, but I found the novel online, so I spent the afternoon reading it. It was not entirely unpleasant to read a novel online, so I went ahead and read another Alcott novel, An Old-Fashioned Girl that I also loved when I was younger.

Strangely, after finishing up Eight Cousins, I went to sort through a random box of books from the dreaded storage unit and guess what I found. No joke. It was the set of Alcott novels that I thought I'd lost track of. No freaking joke. That box of books has been sitting on the patio for the last week, waiting for me to sort through it.

Scissor Sisters

The last useful thing I did this afternoon was watch a bunch of youtube videos from a woman named Kandee Johnston. (Yes, she claims that Kandee is her real name.) She's a makeup artist in L.A. and she's just this happy little elf of a woman who makes these cute little youtube videos about hair and makeup and style concerns. In one series of videso, she takes a pair of scissors to a handful of t-shirts and voila, comes up with a bunch of cute little '80s-style tops to wear.

You know where this is going, right?

Here's a story:

When my cousin Josh was about three, he got his hands on a pair of scissors and, boy, it was like he got the key to unlocking all the secrets of the universe. He cut open his beanbag chair, I seem to remember. And he cut several inches off his curtains. I think he cut his own hair. And most famously, he cut the whiskers off the cat.

Me, I just cut up a bunch of old gym t-shirts. They look pretty cute, too, if I do say so myself.

Creepy Frog

Here's a photo of my backside:



And here's the front:



This is one of the vintage embroidery patterns that Kelly First scored at an estate sale and passed on to me. It's the creepy frog. I've stitched it up twice and the creepiness of it hasn't worn off yet. In fact, it might seem creepier now.

Today was Therapy Thursday! And my head hurts. I have a headache.

I Miss My Cats

I rarely laugh out loud at things I find on the internet--and Dave can tell you that I have little patience with sites like I Can Haz Cheezburger or Cute Overlord. But this guy, Simon Tofield, who does these "Simon's Cat" animations, has the market cornered on astute, humorous cat observations. See for yourself:

First Things First

Mini Road Trip!

On the road back from Taos:



Dave and I went up to Taos for part of the holiday weekend. (Thanks, Kelly First & Kevin, for the condo loaner!) Once there, surrounded by all the beauty of the Taos Ski Valley, we basically ensconced ourselves in front of the television and watched "Iron Chef America" and parts of the Discovery Channel series "Planet Earth." And we ate. Lots. And I took a long bath and read.

It was nice because two of the things we don't have at home in The Casita are a television set and a bathtub. So those two things equal a vacation for me at least.

Dave wanted, too, to take the scenic route home, so we ended up driving through Taos and lots of other little tiny New Mexico towns like Chimayo and Madrid.

We had a really great time!

(Craftiness, by the way, continues at Rosa Craft.)