Oh, my stars and garters!

Happy spring

Eric and I went swimming today. The water at Stacy Pool is very tolerable. I accidentally frog-kicked a little kid in the chest. He was neither hurt nor fazed. The lifeguard was playing Metallica's Ride the Lightning. I practiced doing flip turns. My flip turns stink. We got tacos and horchatas on the way home. They were great. We might do it again tomorrow. That's all.

Be gentle with yourself

I'm off this week because I can be. Bad work times loom in the nearish future, and I must inoculate myself against them with aimless, semiproductive in-town vacations.

Yesterday I accompanied my sister to a hippie herb place. She wants to quit smoking, and having tried the patch (burned her skin) and sheer willpower (pfft), she's looking for a little help.

Jill settled on a tincture (fun, alliterative fact: there's no tax on tinctures!) that's supposed to heal your lungs and help you feel calm. I don't know about that. I do know that it tastes so foul that you'll probably be driven to kill yourself just to get the gurky aftertaste out of your throat, thus ensuring you'll never smoke again.

The herbs certainly seem to be working for the woman who sold it to us. She was so preternaturally calm and pleasant that I wanted to thump her in the forehead just to see if her serene expression would change. She tried to sell my sister a concoction of essences that would help the body's natural healing tendencies govern its negative urges. Jill can explain it better than I can; I had to busy myself with a display of incense-infused lightbulb rings during the spiel to avoid snickering or coughing "bullshit." I should have asked if they had a tincture that will improve my manners.

The genuinely nice woman also gave us a sample of nicotine-free "herbal smoke" that tastes like a curious combination of dry leaves and bacon grease and made my face feel muzzy for a few hours. I remain skeptical, but I wish my sister the best of luck.

Beanie!

By Jillian and me.

(Can't see it? Click here!)

Say it with scorpions!

Vickie really liked the peach lambic she tried when she was here, but she can't find it at home. Now I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to ship alcohol to New York state. Section 601.11.7 of the USPS Domestic Mail Manual says nein on the booze-mailing, but I'm going to check if our respective state laws will let me use a private carrier like UPS.

So far, the research hasn't been a total waste of time; I did learn that, even though you can't mail beer, you can send live poultry, bees, and scorpions through the U.S. mail. Also certain cold-blooded animals, so long as they "do not create sanitary problems or obnoxious odors."

Huh. I think I need to hunt down some scorpions and find someone to mail them to. (Dear Aunt Thelma: Surprise! xoxojoo)

Anyway, if anyone knows the rules of private carriers, or the bendiness thereof, please let me know. And shh! Don't tell Vickie, so I can delight her with beer. Or bees.

Watchful

I want the giant ugly thermometer/compass/watch on Boing Boing today, but it's $150. Also, it looks like it might not work for very long. Call it a hunch. The company that sells them got really horrible reviews online, too. Not all are recent, but it's enough to keep me from making an impulse buy like this.

But it's so hideous! And it has a thermometer!

I pouted about the watch that should be mine for a while, and then I started looking at other watches--I probably need one anyhow--and found a ton of styles that were way cooler, at least on paper. In addition to the compass and the thermometer, they have barometers and altimeters and heart-rate monitors and all kinds of cool shit on them. I would love to go around with a barometer strapped to my wrist. That would make my life 10,000 times more fun, I'm absolutely sure of it.

The problem is that, without exception, those watches are very sporty and very sleek and very ugly. Not funny-ugly, just functional-ugly. I think I could put up with an ugly watch for the sake of the barometer, but there's a certain clunky, analog Jetsons-style charm to the first watch that I just can't let go of.

Cute garbage is still just garbage, right? Right?

I'll definitely have to sleep on this.

Wow, work has been slow enough today that I've had the luxury of obsessing over this for the past three hours. Also, Melinda brought a pecan pie to share. I really like my job today.

I forgot I even had a pedometer.

According to my pedometer, I walked .12 miles in the grocery store to get fruit, popcorn, and frozen dinners. It's a big grocery store; I imagine a full-blown shopping trip could take a half a mile or more if I were very disorganized and kept having to run back to the other end of the store because I forgot bread. Or limes. I always forget to get limes.

So, were you completely riveted by my pedometer story? Yes. Every word was a single polished pearl, Joolie! I found it of marginal interest at best. Your stupid.   View Results

My dull day, in pictures

I woke up late, which left me little time to decide whether I could pass my hair off as "fun 'n' sassy" instead of "sloppy 'n' unhygienic."

Work was okay. I probably could have taken a nap if I hadn't gotten rid of my office chair in favor of sitting on an obnoxious exercise ball.

I came home and watched TV.

Why won't you let me put in spaces, Typepad?

Then I played laser pointer with the cats.

Why must I employ this bullshit white-text workaround to get the spacing I want?

    
Finally, I drew some pictures and posted them.

Mild bust

Well, that was a dreary, unproductive day off.

I did go bowling. Bowling's one of the many activities I truly stink at but still find fun. Unlike, say, putt-putt golf, which I truly stink at and also loathe. At least with bowling you can toss a few balls into the gutter and get out of everyone's way, instead of holding everyone up by taking 17 strokes to get a stupid ball into a stupid cup. God, that game is stupid.

Anyhow, I bowled a 63 and a 51 today, to give you an idea, but it was nice to hang out with my sister and watch her boyfriend try to make all these fancy splits. So bowling was all right.

Then I got a roll of pictures developed. Not one of 24 was satisfactory. I found those odds unlikely, but there you have it. I'd taken one picture last weekend that I'd taken great care to frame and looked so lovely and unexpected through the lens. I couldn't wait to get it back, but then when I saw it, it looked like something I'd taken just to get rid of the rest of the roll. So you don't even want to know about the ones I really did take just to get rid of the rest of the roll.

I also went book shopping, but Half-Price can be tricky. Sometimes it takes considerable energy to plow through the dreck, and I often draw a blank and find myself completely incapable of pinpointing my own interests in order to find books on those topics. Then I feel like an incurious dullard.

I mean, I have interests, honest, but they don't generally fall under specific categories, like Egyptology or Texas Gardening. I just like, you know, stuff. Funny things. Fucked-up things. Exceptionally well-written things on topics I don't ordinarily care that much about. (Anyone have any suggestions?)

I did get a book of Edward Gorey interviews and a few American short-story anthologies. I need more of those like I need a second navel, but sometimes I find a short story I like and find out the author has this whole body of work previously unknown to me, which is pretty cool.

I miss the Guadalupe Half-Price, which seemed cozy and was crammed with books that semi-logically bled from topic to topic throughout the store. The new Lamar location is huge but feels too well-managed and doesn't seem to have its inventory totally fleshed out yet, and the Research location, where we went tonight, was sparse and completely disorganized. Eric was disappointed too, although I don't know what he's bitching about since he found a pictorial history of train wrecks and a CD of the People's Temple Choir with a recording of the Jonestown suicide. 

Oh, laundry. I did laundry.

Enough. Why am I complaining? It wasn't even a bad day. It was a so-so day. It was fine. It was Presidents' Day, for Christ's sake. It was a federal holiday that most people don't even get off on a drizzly Monday in February. What the fuck did I expect, a unicorn parade? Oh, but it just doesn't feel like Presidents' Day. I'm dreading the post-Presidents' Day letdown, it just goes by so fast anymore. Oh, and I took ugly pictures and can't find anything to read. Crabbyass.

Sheesh. I feel better already, although I'm still legitimately sad about Half-Price.

Presidents' Day

Single and singularly jowly, James Buchanan served as president from 1857 to 1861. He distinguished himself by basically sitting on his ass for four years, hoping the growing North-South rift would go away on its own.

He also advocated the admission of Kansas as a slave state, when history tells us both that slavery is wrong and that Kansas should never have been admitted into the union but instead neatly excised from our land mass and cast into the ocean, wheatfields and all.

Here's to you, James Buchanan, our third in a series of lame, crappy, or boring presidents!

Previous profiles:
Warren Harding
William Henry Harrison

Sweet lady vanity

Woo hoo! My hair is (technically) long enough to pull back for the first time in about three years. I wish it would hurry up and grow so I can be a pretty pretty princess and swing my locks all around and flip them impatiently over my shoulder and sweep them dramatically off my face.

And then I can begin to notice how much shampoo I'm using, and how long it takes to dry, and how I never do anything with it anyway, and shortly after that despair will set in at how it hangs limp and frizzy down my neck and gets in my eyes and my mouth and gives me backne and gets all sweaty and sundamaged and inappropriately strange and bendy, until I can't take it one more second and storm into my hairdresser's, sniveling and beseeching her to get rid of it, just get rid of it right now, for the love of god get it off me, it burns, burns like fire, and, after all that time and effort and maintenance, walk out looking something like this again:

I can't wait!

Much, much better than a poke in the eye!

The show went really well. More importantly, it was extremely fun. The people came. They were nice. The band was good. The keg got floated. Eric even sold several things. Yay to everyone who came out, and especially everyone who helped. Eric was really stoked.

The centerpiece:

I put a few more pictures up here. I need to go back and take more and better pictures of the actual artwork. It'll be up at End of an Ear for at least another three weeks if you want to stop by and check it out.

It's been a very busy few weeks. I kind of have that now what? feeling. Today we were delightfully worthless. We slept in, waaay in, then went and ate a huge Vietnamese-food lunch with Roone. We also taught him how to use the neti pot, watched COPS, and drank a shitload of coffee. You tell me a better way to spend a cold, damp Saturday.

Hey, Renoir! Suck a dick!

We hung the art show tonight.

Without giving too much away, here's Eric wielding a hammer.

And here's Dan assembling a glass shelving unit from IKEA.

I felt all swelled up and proud to see all the things Eric's been working on in bits and pieces over the years matted and in one place. It looks really good.

The art show in Seattle was cool, some old friends showed up and we made some new ones, and the people who ran the record store it was in couldn't have been nicer. Still, I think it means more to have everything up in a place that our friends own, in a city where people know him and love him, see him around, have asked him to do 7" covers or posters for them. I think tomorrow night's going to be really fun. Seriously, you should go. (Friday from 6-9 p.m., End of an Ear record store, 2209 South 1st, beer, lemon bars, music by Black Magic Sound Company with John Yaklin of the Nervous Exits, etc.)

Ok, now I have to make 28 title cards for tomorrow night. That's going to rule.

Smell, chlorophyll, raising hell

One of the side effects of using the neti pot is that my sense of smell has improved. And you know how smell and memory are linked? I keep getting weird waves of melancholy and de ja vu just from smelling something seemingly neutral. I get a whiff of dog fur or candy or the humidity outside, and all of a sudden I think of some random Saturday morning ten years ago or a car trip I took when I was little. I've been thinking about things and minor events I haven't remembered in years, if ever. Nothing earth shaking, just a strange little thing I've noticed.

Check this out: Photosynthesis prints! Vickie told me about Binh Danh, who affixes negatives to a living plant leaf, fries it in the sun, and encases his successful prints in resin. People are so cool sometimes that I just want to spaz the fuck out. Anyway, I want to try this. The article says maybe only one of five prints works, but it's worth a shot.

Here's an example of the embossing I've been doing, in this case featuring good ol' Monsty. I don't know if you can really tell from the picture (unless you're reading this in the future and happen to have some fancy Tactile-O-Vision computer screen), but the image is slightly raised. It's so easy, and I get to use a heat gun! I promise not to shoot you in the face with it.

Art plug!

Come drink free beer and rub elbows with such luminaries as me, my family, and John Y.'s new band, Black Magic Sound Company. And Eric, of course, who is currently dabbing noxious chemicals onto Plexiglas in preparation for the big event. Then go see the Paranoids and the Transgressors at Beerland. That's what all I would do on Friday night if I were you.

Game over!

Vickie left today. The house seems kind of empty now. She taught me a bunch of printing techniques that I'm dying to try out (did you know you can emboss pretty much everything?), but maybe not tonight. I'm pretty tired from running around all day and then staying up until five in the morning playing Katamari, smoking, and yakkity-yak-yakking all week. It was great.

Vickie, Dan, Eric, and I took pictures up and down South Congress yesterday afternoon. Click the group photo for more.

Pinhole Pals

My friend Colleen gave Dan and me paper pinhole camera kits for Christmas. Because I lack opposable thumbs and have no patience, mine turned out to be a misshapen gloppy-glue electrical-tape disaster. Also the film advancer knob fell off immediately and I exposed two entire rolls of film in a row while trying to learn to use it. It was nearly dead to me (no patience, remember), but Vickie encouraged me to just try it. It leaks light like crazy and looks worse and worse every time I use it, but if I can get a picture like this out of it, I'm happy. 20 second exposure, indoors. Yep.

Whoops!

Vickie's totally hooked on We Love Katamari. It's only been about 27 hours since she picked up the controller and she's already about three-fourths through the game. Hee!

Dance, dance, my puppets!

Roone's going to accuse me of catblogging, but I don't care. If you have a cat, it's absolutely imperative that you run out and buy a laser pointer this minute.

It turns out you really can herd cats. In fact, you can totally make them do your bidding, as long as you restrict your bidding to watching them do back flips off the wall in pursuit of a little red dot.

Stepjewish

The big bar mitzvah weekend in Dallas is over.  My stepmom and her family are Jewish, so I've attended a handful of Jewish services, weddings and funerals and the like, but I've never attended a full service. It was three hours long, mostly in Hebrew, with more sitting and standing than a Catholic Mass, which until now I have always considered the pinnacle of strenuous religious tedium.

But my cousin did great, by all accounts, the rabbis were warm and funny, and at least you can kind of move around and talk a little during the prayers. (Unlike church, where my sister and I were reduced to amusing ourselves by noiselessly and relentlessly digging our thumbnails into each others' arms. The first one to wrench away, whimper, or giggle lost and risked getting yelled at on the way home. Often we'd draw blood before anyone surrendered. I really didn't like going to church.)

The post-bar mitzvah party was insane. Picture a totally fun carnival, except substitute a buffet table with pad thai and rack of lamb for the funnel cake stand and patch in some solemnly attentive hotel staff in place of the leering carnies. I availed myself of the chocolate-dipping fountain and the open bar while the kids danced with the hired MC, made music videos, rode a virtual surfboard, got their fortunes told, and jostled for the neverending shower of schwag that was flung from the stage.

And did I bring my camera to record this frenzy? I did not. But I did get some dress-up pictures:

My boy looks adorable in a yarmulke.

My boy looks okay in a paper Steak 'n' Shake frycook hat.

Oh, and here's the graffiti that awaited me when I got back in the car at the Waxahachie rest stop. Aww.

Vickie gets here tomorrow in about 26 hours, and I have the whole week off to entertain and be entertained by her. This pleases me greatly. I have to go wash my sheets now because that is just good hostessing.

The things

New favorite thing: Venison jerky. A venison hookup is a beautiful thing. I can't deny my you-killed-Bambi attitude toward deer hunting, but if it's going to happen, I'll gladly make use of the meat.

New least favorite thing: The Highland Mall Dillard's. Why do department stores want $50+ for 100% polyester print tops? It is a mystery.

Last call!

Eric and Roo, like all bartenders, have always struggled with the challenge of getting people the fuck out of the bar at closing time. I understand it's a delicate procedure. People are having fun and don't want to stop. People are about to hook up but need a little more time to close the deal. People have been drinking steadily all night and all of a sudden want to pick a fight with any muhfucker triesh to tell them whaattado.

It's tough to pry all those people off their chairs and herd them out the door in a relatively short time. Some bartenders firmly work the room at closing time, taking glasses from people's hands and pointing them to the door. Some bartenders screech down the minutes after last call until they're hoarse.

(Lovejoy's is particularly bad about this. I've always hated that they're perfectly happy to sell me a $3.50 beer at a quarter til and then spend the next 15 minutes relentlessly screaming at everyone to get out while I try to drink it. If you wanted me to go away at 1:46 so damn badly, you shouldn't have handed me a delicious pint at 1:45. Actually, they're closing in a few months, so that's what they get. In your FACE, Lovejoy's! I'm totally kidding; I really like Lovejoy's and am sad it's going away, last-call behavior notwithstanding.)

Some bartenders politely and discreetly give their customers to understand that the bar is closing. (No, really, it's true. I saw it at the Driskill once!) And some bartenders wait until the last minute and then blast horrifically unpleasant music to drive everyone out. And so on.

Eric and Roone have usually employed a combination of all the above techniques, but they really like the passive abuse. They take a vicious, somewhat puerile pride in exposing their generally laid-back patrons to experimental recordings of things like jets taking off and bass amp feedback filtered through industrial fans. But now Eric has automated the method with his revolutionary mix cd, which he calls the 17-Minute Solution.

In theory, it'll work like this:

1:45 a.m. Last call. The cd is inserted.
1:45-2:00 a.m. Low, inoffensive ambient noise plays in the background while everyone finishes their drinks. It's pretty pleasant but nothing that will make anyone want to stick around and rock out.
2:00 a.m. The closing announcement is made. The bartenders begin to collect/wrest glasses from people.
2:01 a.m. Steve Fisk's loop of some guy saying, "I wish I were dead," over and over starts to play.
2:02 a.m. The glasses have been collected; the bar is closed, really, for real. The recording level on the cd shoots up a thousandfold, and ungodly, ear-splitting feedback by the Incapacitants fills the bar.
2:02:15 a.m. The bar is completely empty, save for two smirking bartenders. Y'all have a good night, now!

(I throw out the names like I'm familiar with them, but I'm not, really. I don't like noise. Of any kind. Actually, when Eric was demonstrating his cd, I fled his room, then turned on the shower and curled up fully clothed at the bottom of the tub, rocking myself and whispering, "Shh. Shh," until the water ran cold. It's really awful.)

It's set for test drive the next time Eric and Roone close together. For extra vile goodness, Eric goatse'd the cd with a Sharpie:

(You can click on it and make it bigger if you don't mind looking at cartoon genitals. Which of course you don't. Sicky.)