Oh, my stars and garters!

Memory lane

I was looking online for houses to rent (anyone know of anything for August?) and ran across a couple of familiar properties, both of which made me laugh pretty hard.

One was the duplex unit adjoining my ex-boyfriendish-type-person's (that's the most precise term I can come up with; let's just say the arrangement went on for way too long and did not make me feel like a pretty princess) old place, which was across the driveway from the cool little house where Wain used to live. It looks more like a work trailer on a construction site than an actual duplex, but everyone has to live somewhere, and at least the rent there is still cheap.

The other property was the real prize. It was a unit for rent in the apartment complex where I lived in the mid-90s. It was a shithole.

Actually it's still a shithole, as near as I can tell, but now it's a shithole with stained concrete floors, funky tile, stainless steel appliances, and more than twice the rent.

The courtyard photo was the very best part of the listing:

The Photoshopped landscaping and awnings are brilliant. It looks like a Sims house! And who wouldn't want to live in a Sims house? Or at least a Sims triplex?

Seriously, how bad does it actually look that they had to do that? And why stop at a few plant beds and some grass? If you're going to misrepresent your property to make it look better than it is, why not paste in a waterfall and a few frolicking unicorns? How about slapping some stained glass windows on the front, and, while you're at it, throw in a blowjob machine and a free fried chicken dispenser?

I think I've done enough lease searching for tonight.

Shopping

I got a rhino necklace yesterday from Happy Owl Glassworks. I'm placing the blame squarely on Average Jane for leading me to this delightfully unnecessary puchase. I almost bought the naked mole rat, because that's perfect. Unfortunately, I didn't like the colors nearly as much. I wish I could afford their NMR coasters, but I could buy a whole damn table for that much.

While I'm throwing links around, please visit the Guayabera Shirt Store for all your high-end guayabera needs. You might not think you have any, but listen, you never know.

I have to stop talking about buying things now. It's bad for me.

Finds

Eric and I went for a walk tonight. We saw nine million fireflies and one bat, which is the kind of firefly-to-bat ratio I prefer.

I thought this was kind of cool: I just recently noticed this very tiny cemetery, really just a cluster of graves, from the 1800s. The freaky thing is that it's just sort of stuck in the middle of a median between two highways just north of the airport, where you exit 71 to merge onto 183 North.

   

I have driven past it at least 50 times and never saw it until this month, when I was dropping Jennifer off at the airport. I did a double take, but by the time it registered, I'd sailed right past it.

I found it on Google Earth, did a little web research (it's the Davidson-Littlepage Cemetery, and it's on what used to be the family farm), and made a mental note to check it out sometime. When Eric and I picked up Dan from the airport Sunday, I pulled over on the way back so we could take pictures.

There are only five graves, and there's no road access; you have to cross two lanes of highway traffic and a lot of high grass to get to it. Someone had mowed inside and all around the gate, so they must have pushed the mower across the road to get to it.

That's the story of the weird little graveyard. Not much to it, but it makes me wonder what other cool shit I'm tripping over every day but never see.

Why did I clamp on this hideous lamp?

It's Eric's birthday, which means we ate a lot all day. I had breakfast tacos, chili-cheese dogs with tater tots, and a tableful of sushi. Oof. We should really have a vomitorium for occasions like this because then I could have had dessert too. Maybe the next house we live in will have one. I don't need anything fancy. A concrete floor with a drain will do. Anyway, it was a good day. I like that Eric guy a lot.

Speaking of purging, I found this sad thing yesterday when I was digging through our junk closets, looking for things to toss during bulky trash pickup week.

The blue-fuzzy-shit part used to be cylindrical, the way a lampshade should be, but over time the inside lining grew brittle and cracked and the base got bent to one side. The whole thing slumped over. At that point, it was magically transformed from a lamp into a severe fire hazard in the shape of the ant-stripped corpse of Thing 1 or 2.

I laughed for a really long time yesterday when I found it, all the way in back on the top shelf, behind a pile of VHS tapes. I couldn't believe I'd saved something so ridiculous looking, let alone bought it in the first place. I must have really liked it to have saved it for that long. I guess I can still see the appeal, but I stood on the porch and hurled it onto the junkpile at the curb without any qualms: Bye, ugly lamp. Bye forever.

Dorkcycle

The bike art show was great. We rode our bikes down there, figuring that it would be kind of lame to drive to a bike-friendly event. The wind was so strong that getting there was kind of a bitch; I decided about halfway there that it would have been much smarter to throw the bikes in the truck and park north of the party so we could ride in for appearance's sake.

The great thing about the wind was I could smell the party a full block before we got there. It smelled like bodies, beer, pot, and what I thought was patchouli but what Jennifer later identified as amber oil. It's a very particular smell that means you're either about to have a really good time or you're about to eat tempeh. In this case, fortunately, it was the former: We drank beer. We talked to people. We looked at art. We watched people tool around on bikes and bike trailers. Eric sold his painting very early and was pleased.

Sold!

Finally, it was time to go. Jennifer's ride had already left and she was leaving with us, but--shit!--we didn't have a car. However would she get home? Um. Hmm. Fuckity. Gosh.

Well, duh, there were only about fifty yellow bikes right there for the taking.

The deal is that they fix up old and donated bikes, paint them yellow, and set them loose around town. If you come across one, you can ride it, but you have to leave it for someone else once you get to your destination. The only wrinkle is that you're not supposed to lock them up, so if you run into the store or something and someone else takes it, you're out of luck. So we fudged a little, locking Jennifer's loaner bike to ours when we stopped to eat on the way home. Our intentions were good, though, and we followed the spirit if not the letter of the law. Once we got back to my neighborhood, we took it up to the Monarch Mart with us and propped it conspicuously in front of a coffee shop for the next bikeless person to find. Thanks, Yellow Bike Project!

Pro motion

Ok! Saturday is the Yellow Bike Project benefit party/art show. Eric and I both have something up. He whipped out a nifty little painting for it. Me, I mangled my lino cut and opted to frame a photo instead. (Do not ever buy the super cheap frames at Jerry's Artarama, by the way. You will be sorry. They are so crappy as to defy logic or description, but basically they nick if you so much as breathe on them, the glass is actually a very static-happy and impossible-to-clean acrylic, and they're not even the size they say they are. I don't remember what they're called but make sure that's not what you're buying. Hate. Them.) (O. K. Over. It.)

Anyway, the party is at Gallery Lombardi; there will be beer, art, music, and bikes; suggested donation is $9; it's for a good cause; if you need us Saturday night, that's where we'll be.

Gold star on the chore chart!

I got off work, talked to my stepmom, folded laundry, cleaned my room, shredded junk mail, biked to the store to buy a light, nourishing dinner, paid a bill, wrote a letter, and took out the trash. It was a five-hour frenzy of productivity, I only paused a few times to smoke a cigarette, and it was all on four hours' sleep. Oh, and I read a bitchy story about Laura Bush in last month's Vanity Fair somewhere in there, too.

That was my night.

I want a gold star, but I guess I'm having it right now in the form of a whiskey and water. Ting!

Joolie still hate early

I'd like early a lot better if I'd gotten to sleep before four this morning. Oh, well. Being tired is boring; complaining about being tired is stultifying. So fine! I'm fine! And wide awake!

Just had a lazy conversation with my coworker about bodies. We decided humans would really be better served by a a light, strong, flexible exoskeleton. As it is, having a body is like being handed a plastic grocery bag full of hot offal at birth and being told not to drop it, ever, on pain of death. Or something to that effect; it made sense at the time.

I told you I was tired.

Joolie hate early

Japanese hardcore and another year

Great stage banter: "I can't speak English. Do you understand? Do you understand? I can't speak English. So! Fuck you!"

I took this at midnight on Saturday night, right about when I turned 31. Aside from accompanying Eric to a hardcore show, I celebrated by swimming and having a few people over for beer and meat. There were lots of strawberry-based desserts. I made sludgy drinks out of pineapples and vodka. St. Murse sang his neti pot song. It was nice.

Heels toes

My sister, left; me, right.

My sister took me to get my first pedicure today.

It was a little weird. I didn't really know what to do or where to look as this stranger crouched down, poking away at my nails and halfheartedly massaging my legs. Then came the callus shaver, which was disgusting and therefore my favorite part. My heels were horrible and gave up a sizable pyramid of what looked like mozzarella cheese. Jill actually gasped and then cracked up when she glanced over and saw the flurry of dead skin that was coming from my feet. I guess I needed it.

My sister says pedicures make her feel pampered, like a queen, but all the impersonal poking and snipping and scrubbing made me feel more like I was at the dentist than anything else.

That's fine, though. Now my feet are soft and shapely and my toes look like cute little jewels, and I got to keep the hilariously flimsy flip flops they gave me to wear in the drying machine. The pedicure is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

My slightly crappy but extremely cool new purchase:

Today I got a JOBY Gorillapod. I saw one on Mochi's blog, and thought I needed one.

You can wrap the little legs around railings and such.

(I know these pictures are blurry, but keep in mind I was taking them with a mirror, which I held with my shaky little hands. Not the tripod's fault! At least, I don't think.)

You can just use it like a regular tripod.

Best of all, it can be converted into a base for a headcam.

Actually, the headcam isn't too good. It's even harder to keep your head still than your hands, and you have to be really careful to get the little legs to grip your skull so the camera doesn't slide off your head and smash into the ground. So actually it's really stupid, and dangerous besides. But the point is, I can wear my camera as a hat and run around taking blurry pictures of my friends, and I think that's hilarious. Who can argue with that?

She can't.

He can't.

She was skeptical, but ultimately decided to give me the benefit of the doubt.

Ok, in summary, the Gorillapod was an excellent purchase in every way, except I forgot to mention that it's not a very good tripod because it isn't stable. The part that attaches to the camera quivers slightly when you press the shutter, which, come to think of it, is an extremely huge drawback in a tripod. I can get around this by using the camera's two-second delay, but it's still pretty lame to sell a tripod that actually makes the camera less stable.

Oh, well. Nothing's perfect, and it's not like I can carry a full size tripod around in my purse and wrap it around a tree branch when the spirit moves me. So fuck it, let's just say I love the JOBY Gorillapod, and we can all get on with our day.

In your FACE, Pat Robertson.

God told Pat Robertson the U.S. coasts will be hit by storms this year. Also, he says God is calling for a slight chance of tsunamis.

That's quite a prophesy, Pat. No one but you or maybe God can say with any certainty that hurricanes would hit during hurricane season. No one but you or God could say that natural phenomena may or may not occur in any given year. I must say, y'all are really on top of things.

But check this: God told me the sun would come up in the morning, and he said there's a decent chance my cat will take a shit in the side yard instead of the front planter bed in the next 24 hours. If I'm right, you just might want to rethink who's got a personal line to the lord.

Bitch.

(Yeah, I just realized the idiocy of pointing out the obvious about someone pointing out the obvious. Me saying Pat Robertson's a nutcase bozo is, if anything, an easier call than saying there will be hurricanes this year. That's okay. We like to go out on a limb, Pat Robertson and I.)

The hidden talent; The case of the misplaced thumbtack

Work today has been incredibly taxing. First I counted 400 address labels. Then I flipped some pages. So if you have any pages that need flipping, or 400 of something that needs to be counted, let me know. Because I'm here to tell you I can flip and count the shit out of some shit. Meanwhile, my college diploma hangs on the wall across from my bed, beautifully framed and silently mocking me every morning when I wake up.

I woke up to something else unpleasant today: a thumbtack in my pants. It was horribly confusing and disturbing. Then I remembered that as I was dropping off to sleep last night, I noticed one of the tacks I use to keep my bedroom curtain up (I am nothing if not classy; educated and classy) had fallen down. I remember thinking, Oh, that's bad, I should really nnnngh right before I passed out. I guess it landed in my bed. But no harm done, other than the slight emotional scarring that accompanies waking up to the presence of sharp foreign objects in one's pajamas. I'm still not totally sure how that tack worked its way in there, but life is full of mysteries, stupid or otherwise.

Work summary

Easiest supposedly bad month ever. We only worked one weekend straight through, and never stayed past 2 a.m.

We had entertainment at the party tonight, as Melinda came to the bar straight from her tap lesson.

Also, Amy and I wore the same pants to work every day for a month. See?

Now back to regular life, although we get a soft landing in the form of working night shift the rest of the week. I see swimming in my near future, and the completion of an art project. But no tap dancing classes for me, and for sure no stripey pants.

I have been so lazy this weekend.

Like, practically too lazy to eat. Mostly I've just been eating fruit and grabbing random cold cuts or a chicken leg out of the fridge when I get hungry, unless Eric makes or brings me food. That's lazy.

My excuse is that I worked both days this weekend. Yesterday was busy for the better part of nine hours; today we basically stood around eating leftover birthday cake for two hours and went home. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

I read most of Poisonwood Bible this weekend, which still manages to touch without much subtlety on on all of Barbara Kingsolver's usual themes, but it's much more ambitious and satisfying. See what you can do when you just apply yourself a little, Barbara?

I also did laundry and drank beer, and it seems like I've been hanging out with Roone a lot, but he keeps showing up at three in the morning after I've been engrossed in said book and beer, so it always feels like I dreamed it the next day.

Circadian, schmircadian

I'm probably about to lose my precious night-shift schedule. The upside is that I'll get to make weekend plans again, which I'm not knocking, but it's been so insanely nice waking up around 11 or noon and then spending several hours drinking coffee, reading, bike riding, swimming, running errands, having lunch with friends, and sitting on the couch with Eric watching stupid TV before I have to be at work each day.

Without a doubt, this is the schedule my body wants to be on. I always get enough sleep. I'm getting a lot done,  I've lost some extra slug weight, and I just feel more like myself.

I used to be chronically sleep deprived, and I guess I was used to it. I was actually pretty proud that I could get by on three or four hours a night, sometimes less. Never mind that I was prepetually crabby (oh, sorry, late teens and early-20s self, I mean cheeky; quit giving me the finger and get some damn rest), ill, and often exercised the judgment of a retarded possum; never mind that I'd end up sleeping 16 hours at a stretch at some point every few weeks to make up for it. All that without the benefit of amphetamines. Really, they'd have been wasted on me.

Now I have very little tolerance for that grainy, achy, help-my-muscles-are-dissolving feeling that comes from night after night on six hours or less. Still, I can't seem to shut off before two or three in the morning, no matter how tired I am. I thought maybe I'd just sort of grow out of that, but I thought I'd have grown out of a lot of things by now.

Project

Eric and I are going to have artwork in the Yellow Bike Project benefit party at Gallery Lombardi on the 27th. Which is great! Except I couldn't think of anything to do for it for the longest time. Which was not so great!

I had the idea that I could take pictures of myself riding my bike with the stroboscopic flash, so there'd be multiple images of me and the bike. Then I figured I'd project the best one onto a canvas, trace it out, and paint it. Except the pictures didn't really turn out that well, and also I forgot that I can't paint. Oops. At least it was fun taking the pictures.

Then I was running out of time, so I thought I'd go to my fallback idea, which was to just do a lino cut print of my bike, which in my opinion is very handsome. So I traced it out and got ready to carve. Then I looked at it again and realized how incredibly boring it was going to look. Like, Here! Here's a bike! Yep, this sure is a bike!

Argh.

Tonight I added some details to the bike and the background, and now I think it's going to be okay. Not spectacular, maybe, but respectable, and hopefully pretty cute.

Now there are only nine days left until the deadline. Eric's got just half the painting he's doing finished right now and I haven't even really finalized my idea, let alone started carving; we'd both better start making some damn bike art.

The end!

Shit fit

I was outside having cigarette at work when my coworker asked me what had happened to my arm. Huh? I looked down and saw two or three dark, ominous-looking splotches that I couldn't immediately identify. So of course I shrieked as though I were being chased by rabid leopards and started slapping frantically at them.

The resultant sticky ooze told me I had just smeared birdshit all over my arms.

Well, bleah, but of course it was birdshit. The benches in the smoking area are always at least a little shitty, and what the hell did I think those blotches were to elicit such a disproportionate reaction? Rapid-onset melanoma? Leeches?

Well, it wasn't as serious as all that, but it was extremely disgusting. I went inside to scour my arm up to the elbow for a while.

When I came back out, I treated myself to another cigarette, and that's when my coworker Larry called me Joolie Poo-lie. You need a timely, clever, and hopefully very short-lived nickname? Go see Larry. Tell him Ol' Poopy Arms sent you.

Oh, you kids...

Saw this Sunday night. I also now know the original message was "TRY A FRESCATA."

Hmm...SCARY FAT? FARTY EATS?

SCAT FEAT?

Go ax Eric

While I was sitting on my ass at work, Mr. Overachiever here went to the hardware store for supplies, chopped up the rest of the tree in our front yard, put the limbs in the city-approved bags, shopped for groceries, filled the fridge with beer, and started a huge batch of his tortellini-vegetable magic soup. Well done, sir!

Junk heap

We rent, so we don't have the full complement of lawn equipment. We have a lawnmower and trimmer and some hedge clippers, but no chainsaws, axes, or saws, or anything like that. Which is why Eric spent most of yesterday afternoon hacking up a small tree that had fallen during one of the 8,000 storms last week with a machete. After a while, I asked him to yell "Hi-YA!" every time he swung. He humored me for a while, which made the whole spectacle that much more disturbing and therefore entertaining, although he reports it made his task no easier.

I did my part by picking up downed branches and cutting back the vine jungle that's threatening to take over the side yard, where I rarely venture. So rarely that I found a cluster of empty beer bottles that I'm pretty sure came from a party we threw at least six years ago. I also found a car floor mat, a tuna can, the tips of a glove, a bungee cord, and a big piece of filthy, coarse cotton. All very mysterious, but I'm guessing it all washed in from somewhere. Aside from the long-forgotten beer bottles, we're not in the habit of tossing garbage in our admittedly unkempt yard. We're trashy, but not that trashy.

Storm

I had the best drive home tonight. Lightning, rain, debris, streetlights and stoplights out, happy shirtless frat boys running around screaming in the downpour, and Bollywood music on the car radio. Everyone's commute should be so entertaining.

The drive wasn't too crazy; the storm unleashed its worst right as we were getting out of work. Most people left, but a small group of us hung back for a while, waiting for it to die down. We watched the rain gust up and swirl around in the wind and made cracks about the wisdom of standing in front of the bank of giant windows that happen to face the building's flammable-materials storage area.

We also uncovered a gigantic stash of bizarre catalogs in the office area next to ours. Most of them were of the country-living variety, with cheeky cat-themed doormats and plastic cups printed with slogans like "Instant diva: Just add wine!"  The best one had a mystical wizards-'n'-shit theme that for some reason featured one, um, personal massage item about every three pages, so it was like, Amulets! Chalices! Dragon-themed toilet seats! Fingertip vibrators! Tailored wench costumes! That and the lightning kept us entertained for a good thirty minutes.

Finally, the rain slacked off just a bit, and we made a run for the parking garage. Later I found out we got 2.5 inches of rain in less than an hour. It was totally fun. Now I'm damp but cozy, drinking a glass of Duvel and swapping exaggerated storm stories with my boy and my roommate.

Super Super Duper Value Menu!

Yes! I knew we had a photo of this somewhere! I already blew the joke in the last post, but this is the best Wendy's sign ever.

Here's the second-best Wendy's sign ever.

The truly weird thing is that later Eric discovered there really is a benefit that encourages you to buy five Frostys (Frosties?) for a dollar, all in the name of fighting juvenile diabetes. So the sign is mostly accurate; I just doubt Wendy's was that honest about the irony.

Photos courtesy of Eric, signs courtesy of one of my minor heroes, whoever you are.

Super Duper Value Menu

Someone's been rearranging the letters on this sign for years. I think "TRY A CAT" is pretty good, but it doesn't even come close to my all-time favorite: "TRY OUR SPICY COCK--IT'S ROUND."

In which I try to better myself

Typepad is being a butt tonight. I'm still getting free service from the last time it was being a butt and they lost one of my files, though, so I can't complain too much. I should probably back all this up at some point, although I have no idea how to go about that.

I got a haircut today. When Stacey, my friend/hairdresser, asked what I wanted, I just shrugged and said I wanted a trim and a little more shape. So she snipped around for about 15 minutes, cut some bangs in, and released me. I like that; I never know what I want anyway, and I don't really care, so long as I don't leave looking like I have ringworm. And then I got a bonus when I got to work and got compliments all night long. I was feeling pretty cute by the time I went home. Stacey gets a completely sincere "woo hoo!" for her efforts, and you know sincere "woo hoo!"s are pretty rare these days.

After that, I went to a boutique to see if I could sell some shirts on consignment.

Wain printed a few shirts based on this drawing a while back, and I was wearing one when I went into this shop about a month ago. The owner liked it enough that she asked me if I had more because she could probably sell them, and I said no, and she said, why not? and I said, I don't know.

I asked Wain if he could do some more, and he agreed. So I went back today, clutching my shirt, and if you know me, you know I never do stuff like this, so I was feeling all proud about that and cute from my haircut.

But when I got there, the owner was in the middle of what sounded like a pretty intense personal phone call. I didn't want to interrupt, so I browsed for a few minutes through all the cute stuff that I like but would never actually spend money on. Finally, I just slipped out the door. Maybe I'll go back later. Maybe I'll get Wain to print them anyway and try to sell them elsewhere. Online, maybe? It'd be a little weird selling something I would probably never buy myself, but I guess people do that all the time.

My pissy prayer

Grant me the strength to keep me from wanting to kick people in the shins for no good reason, like the perfectly innocent girl at the grocery store who was blocking the entire soap aisle because she was smelling all the soaps, when any idiot could see I wanted to smell all the soaps too and also had to be at work in an hour, and obviously my desire to smell all the soaps and choose the best-smelling one was way more compelling than hers; or from wanting to drag the guy who pulled right in front of me at an intersection when I was on my bike and verrry sloooowly drove through the yellow light, leaving me stuck there when it turned red, out of his car to smack him about the head and face while explaining why his actions were wrong, so very, very wrong, and how we both could have gotten through the light if he'd just let me do my thing because some people in the world have a sense of fucking urgency, and then leap into his driver's seat and back his own car over his stunned carcass before getting back on my bike and joyfully pedalling away; and of course I would never do these things, but it makes it so much easier to think of myself as a relatively nice person who is not overly concerned with sad, petty frustrations when I don't even entertain such thoughts, I mean, really, amen.

Assblogging

I apologize for this, but it was really, really important to Roone that I take a picture of his butt bruise and post it here. I'm not sure why it meant so much to him; I think probably because he's drunk. I'm pretty sure he won't think this was such a great idea tomorrow, so I kind of feel like I'm taking advantage of him. Yes, it's true, everyone. I take advantage of drunk people. Next I'll start talking little kids out of their lunch money, and then I'll convince old people to wipe out their retirement accounts to pay for driveway sealant treatments that they don't need.

Shit. 

If you want to see Roone's gnarly ass bruise, it's after the jump.