Category Archives: Leisure Time

Get off Your Knees and Start Juggling

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So, last night I took my sister to Warren G, which, who knew what that was going to be like? I had to know. Before one of the openers even started, this guy came by and sat next to us and was all HELLO LADIES. He began explaining his shirt, because there were some things that were important for us to know.

“This shirt cost $30,” he said. “Who pays $30 for some COTTON, I said?”

“You?” I ventured.

“I did!” he said. “I have had four shots of Patron and three long island iced teas. This is my third. Do you want a drink?”

“No thanks, I have to work early,” I said.

“AHHHH if someone offered me a drink I would say, ‘HOW MANY? THREE?”

“You’re very kind,” I said.

“I had to get this shirt, though, because it says 1984 on it, and that is when I was born, and there are UNICORNS and I am a Sagittarius, so it’s PERFECT. Do you want this?” he asked, offering me the rest of his tea.

“Oh no,” I said. He gave us the eyeball.

“Are you two…a couple?” he asked. This happened again later after some drunk girl was hanging on me as support, she asked me if my sister and I were a couple as well. Please don’t touch me. I don’t get out much.

Morgan was flipping out about it a little bit.

“WHAT’S THE DEAL?” she asked. “I’M A MARRIED LADY.”

“Oh,” I said, looking around. “We are not wearing tube tops. There’s just not enough flesh showing. I mean, you’re wearing a scarf.”

“I’m cold,” Morgan said.

“Look at these hip hop bitches,” I said. They were all with doofy looking guys who were wearing three times as much clothes as they were. “I could get some of these hip hop bitches if I had a few DUIs, a penis, and a couple baby mamas.”

“Well, you’re close,” Morgan said. “All you need is the penis.”

Grynch was the best part. We’re going to see him when we can. They Live! was pretty good also.

Hey Guys What’s Going On?

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I got stabbed by a “well-meaning” doctor last week who gave me some vaccine that caused a crazy reaction.  At least there was no medical mask over beard hairs. BARF OUT. Ladies only, yall. Long story short, I was kind of jacked last week. No podcast, no nuffin. Last Saturday night I was a samurai hobo with Ruby, except this time the sake was terrible and I couldn’t finish it.

Ruby took me to see the comedian Arj Barker, whom you may know from Flight of the Conchords fame. I do not, since I only listen to the videos on internet, but I heard him on the radio once and he seemed okay to me.

The funny thing was before the show, when we discovered that the Showbox decided to perpetrate a cruel sociological experiment by setting up some of the bar/counter seating with an odd number of chairs. This resulted in an empty seat next to me. Presently a short man, possibly even a midget, walked up with another chair and brandished it at us slightly.

“Could I get you all to move just a couple of inches,” he said, in an entitled-dick voice. He was with a lovely, tall blonde woman who looked like she was wishing she were somewhere, anywhere else as she assiduously looked off to one side as he harangued us.

“If we moved over,” I said, with logic that was approaching epic levels, “she will get bumped off the end of this bar.” I pointed to a hapless woman at the very end who was looking concerned.

“If we could ALL just move TWO INCHES,” said Entitled Dick.

“I don’t know these guys and I don’t want to get ANY closer,” Ruby said, indicating the men next to her and making me love her even more.

He took one last run at it: “Just TWO INCHES.”

“That’s what she said,” I said. He squinted at me, but it was getting loud in the club.

“It is VERY CROWDED,” Entitled Dick said.

“That is because you are horning your chair in,” I said.

Finally Ruby and I passive-aggressively scooched our chairs over the tiniest bit and he squeezed in.

I quickly forgot about him and went back to enjoying my vodka tonic and chatting with Ruby. I couldn’t help but notice out of the corner of my eye he spent the entire time before the show on his iPhone, poking it and scrolling around while his companion looked around and over his shoulder, bored. I had a moment of wanting to pull a “IS THIS DICK BORING YOU, BABY?” but I restrained myself when I remembered I am not actually Justin Timberlake.

Right before the opener came out Entitled Dick took a phone call and he pulled his companion and left. Two men that we did not have a traumatic history with swooped in and took their seats, which was great with me.

GOD HELP ME all I want to do today is listen to “Landslide” and eat spray cheese out of the can.

Dear MF Diary: Pillaging the Countryside

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Today P. decreed it was berry-picking day, and he is sort of like a human Farmer’s Almanac that someone drew porno comix on part of and another part got some fish sauce on it, while part of it is torn out and replaced it with a stack of free recipes they give out at the grocery store. But if you can find the right page, you’re golden.

We were out for about an hour and got enough for two pies and a mess of jam. He is laying in supplies for the long, hard, 45-degree winter that we will have here in the middle of the city with a store within two blocks.

Later I fucked off with Ruby and we watched Julie & Julia. When I was on blog break this spring, Ruby had a one-off book club/dinner party wherein we discussed the book and ate an AMAZING five-course meal that was recipes from MtaoFC. I can say, YES, braised cucumbers are incredible. And I like aspic, which, I am pretty easy sell on cute animals being shoved into molds, so that was nice. As a result, attendance at this movie was fairly compulsory for us.

It is tempting to flippantly dismiss the movie the way many people have by saying, “Well, it is half good.” This is true, but the Julia half is REALLY good. I tend to think the other half is not the actors’ faults, though the script has some explaining to do. I really think they should have gone for gold and done the Julia bio. All the other half did was reminded me what an insufferable whiny brat the author is, which Ephron’s script really downplays, especially in regards to her job.

It was fun to watch a reenactment of Julia’s relationship with her husband of many years, whom she was madly in love with. Of course there is a bunch of revisionist type history out now, saying well, no, Child wasn’t a saint, in fact she was a homophobe, and I think it’s pretty shit that Child denounced Julie, saying that she was not taking the book or the practice of cooking seriously. It’s fairly lame to make a statement like that about how one’s cookbook is used–it’s not like Julie was using it as a doorstop or something. Has anyone else cooked their way through all of MtaoFC?

BUT as I was enjoying the interaction between the onscreen Childs, Ruby leaned over and whispered, “Julie is divorcing Eric, you know?” I did not. It kind of colored the whole rest of the movie, in a way, which was no big deal. At the end the little wrap-up text rolled by saying when the Childs died and that the author lived in Queens with her husband. “Why does it say that,” I demanded. “They broke up after the movie,” she replied. Ah. Well, the first divorce is always the hardest.

Ruby always makes me laugh with her crazy ideas.

“So the back-to-school thingie is happening soon,” she said, by way of feeling out whether I was at all interested, and specifically, interested in going to the party with her.

“Wait, you want to PAY MONEY to go to an irritating party with assholes we hate?”

She started laughing.

“Hey, misery loves company,” said our other lunch companion.

“Let’s just go back to Gainsbourg that night,” I said.

I love September and am actually looking forward to it.

It is also important for you to know that my short-term memory has returned, after taking a year off.

In Other News: “There is Nothing Between Us and The Grave Except Food.”

Strudel is very fixated on the idea of death lately. I can remember being in the backseat of my grandmother’s car at her age and being struck with the realization that everyone I knew was going to die, and my grandmother was probably going to go first. My eyes filled up with tears at the thought.

Strudel wants to talk about it a fair amount now, and I sense she is looking for some kind of hedge to get us out of it. “What if I do this or that? Do we have to die then?” She looks for assurances that I will be very old when I die, and I tell her yes, yes. This is a more worthwhile lie than Santa.

“Would you rather die, or become a tree?” Strudel asked me, as she was putting one of her puzzles together on the floor of my room.

“I would rather become a tree.” I replied.

“Me too, but I am going to be Stoic.”

“What does “stoic” mean to you?” I said.

I recalled I had used the term earlier while we were berrypicking and her father was whining about getting small blackberry slivers in his hands. “How do you stop that from happening?” he said. “You just have to be stoic about it,” I said.

“I don’t know what it means!” Strudel said. “Some day we will all be below the ground, and no one will know where you are, or where to find you, and you could be under a sidewalk and people would not know.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I will never NOT love you, but when you are dead I can not call you.” she concluded.

This Fall I Don’t Know If I Survived

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“SJ COME HAVE SOME WHITE WINE OVER HERE,” my neighbor, Elsa, shouted at me from the open picnic tent they erect every summer and spend most days under. Strudel and I were just getting home from her school and it had been a long tense day of no new work coming down the pike. There’s nothing like being the most expendable person at work with nothing to do due to corporate bottleneckery.

The tent is an oasis, containing shelves, a radio (which blares classical, smooth jazz, or Edith Piaf depending on the day), patio furniture, a miniature Swedish flag, and loads of booze. Also, Elsa and her partner Steven. It is carpeted with green close-cropped Astroturf.

Elsa went into the house to get wine and something for Strudel. Elsa turns the color of toast in summer and with her white-blond hair and clothes is very striking.

“How are you feeling, Steven?” I asked. About a month ago Steven had a giant brain tumor removed.

“GREAT!” he replied, in his rich booming voice. “Much better. I’m just taking it easy.” He lit a cigarette. Steven retired from radio voice-over work about a year ago and has been a regular fixture in the yard since then. He and Elsa are usually drinking and shouting and watering their lawn and grilling.

“Here, honey,” Elsa said, pouring about half a bottle of white wine into my giant glass. She brought a box of raisins and a tumbler of root beer for Strudel, who shunned the mysterious dark beverage in favor of rootling around the raisin box with her grubby fingers.

Steven made his way up, slowly, and moved towards the house.

“Poor Steven,” Elsa said to me, quietly. “Our living room looks like a pharmacy with all the chemo drugs. And he never got his vision back in his left eye. Did you see all his scratches?”

I recalled then that I had seen a scratch on his head and one on his arm.

“Yes.”

“His balance is all off and he fell on the stairs out here the other day,” Elsa said. She told me horrifying stories about steep medical bills and the limits of insurance.

As usual, we traded news and gossip about our neighbors. Elsa mentioned that the old lady who lived in the house across the street from ours (before the house was knocked down and replaced with three townhomes) hated everyone who lived in my duplex on principle.

“Isn’t that funny?” I said. “We took her roses before they bulldozed everything. I thought it would be nice to keep part of the old neighborhood.”

“And they look so nice,” Elsa said.

“Elsa is the neighborhood patrol!” Steven said, teasing her.

“It’s not gossip if it’s true,” Elsa said.

“It’s ALL TRUE,” they said, almost in unison.

Talk soon turned to what I was up to, and Strudel’s dad.

“P. LOOKS JUST LIKE GEORGE CLOONEY!” Elsa declared, pouring me more wine. “Don’t you think so, Steven?”

“He’s a very handsome guy,” Steven said.

“Are you two going to get married, do you think?”

“I doubt that,” I said.

“How long have you two been together now?”

“Uhh…Six years,” I lied. It’s funny how no one really knows we broke up a year ago. How do you explain these things to people?

“Well, that’s great!” Elsa said. Eventually George Clooney came home from work, set his backpack down, and had a beer with us.

Finally we made our excuses and went home so I could make dinner.

Elsa and Steven seem like such summer people to me. Suddenly they look much older, and I worry about them this winter when the weather will chase us all indoors and everyone on the street becomes strangers again.

It’ll Be a Breeze

This is a nice cover, but a little fast for my taste. My sister and I used to argue about this. She thought the song was about a break up, and I thought it was about death and leaving the person you love the most. Today I found out it is about being in a coma.

Sunday Morning, Composting

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Me: LOL.

P.: You could just laugh, you know.

Me: TMW!

Then I did laugh.

Me: Ooh, I think I just peed a little.

P.: Public urination! Classy!

Me: Hey, you try making two babies. Out of your vagina.

I am eloquent today! The tomatoes are coming on! YEAH!

Appalling Personal Problems That A Person Cannot Hide, Not Even for One Night.

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ETA: whatladder says this is a DO NOT EAT WHILE READING post. I say WALK IT OFF, PUSSY. You have been warned.

I went out to Calgary and I told the story so many times I don’t feel like telling it again! I went, it was fun, the end. You saw the pics, probably. “Critics Declare Buttcon 9 a Success.” Really, the most fun conference I have ever attended. Buttcon 10 is in Iceland, so I had better start saving up now.

I think what I want to talk about what a wreck my skin is. That’s more interesting anyhow. THIS IS MY HOUSE I’LL DO AS I DARN PLEASE. So, I have keratosis pilaris, and pretty much always have since I was a baby. When I was a kid, this affliction was known as “I don’t know why your skin does that, weird, huh?” I didn’t really realize what it was until I read about it on Tomato Nation, and I had that OH moment. The cool thing is that it starts clearing up between twenty-five and thirty, so my skin looks fine most of the time. But if something goes wrong now typically I can’t go, “Woe is moi I have skin affliction,” I have to say, this is a ZIT. Alas.

I have a history of just attacking myself, too. Years of fucked up skin combined with pretty good healing ability has made me somewhat fearless. I used to beg to pull my sister’s teeth when she was a kid and I would do home surgery on someone else in a second, if they let me. So my thing in more recent years has been what I guess are sebaceous cysts, where sometimes I will get a zit and it will just NOT go away.

My first experience was this monstrosity on my back, which was a zit that looked done and felt done, but would refill itself repeatedly. It got larger and larger and I could feel something lurking under my skin. So in the past year or so I got one in one of the worst places–under my BOOB. Right where my bra sits. I would prod it and I could feel something was in it…pirate’s booty? Spider eggs? Jeff Goldblum? Sorry, I am still running that into the ground from yesterday. It wasn’t funny then, either.

I was trapped in the hotel Saturday night with my sleepy kid, kind of bored and knocking around. Lewd texts I sent went ignored. TV was meh, as usual. But I had a pair of tweezers and a magnifying shaving mirror in the bathroom, and I noticed as I took my bra off it was sore again. Hmm…

It was a pretty easy operation as these things go, unlike the first time, which was on my back and very hard to reach. I could see the center and grabbed it after a few tries with my tweezers. What always sticks with me is the feeling of pulling some relatively hard object out of a hole in my body. I can feel it sliding out and then I have this THING that causes me sometimes a year-plus of irritation. I am the princess, and it is my pea. It is HEAVENLY having them come out, no joke.

Then I have the huge hole that goes down to forever and I am like CAN I SEE MY LUNGS through there? GRACIOUS. And it does not bleed. The next morning I woke up and it was a krillion times better, and today it is just a little scar. GO TEAM HOME SURGERY!

In Other News: FUCKING WHOOPS TIMES INFINITY

Franny: AUUUGH, Mom, what IS that at the top of your website???

Me: That. Is a wound. On a man’s. Leg.

Franny: That looks like a BAD one.

Me: Yes, but they sewed it up and he is okay now.

Franny: Okay, good.

FAIL!

A Weekend of Domestical Bimboness

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I think I decided to turn my brain off this weekend. No challenging books were devoured, no useful writing was done, and shoes were lusted over. Some weekends are like that.

Because of the aforementioned Betty Crocker “bio” reading I decided to make an orange chiffon cake. [Thoughts on “Finding Betty Crocker”: the author could have spent more than 45 seconds thinking up a title.]

Out of season, but still delicious. Chiffon cakes were entirely “new” cakes when invented, meaning not butter or sponge-type. The secret was vegetable oil and an unholy shitton of eggs.

The drawback is that though it stays moist for quite a while, the cakes don’t taste of much. This one has orange juice, zest, and candied orange peel on the top to gussy it up.

You mix the flour and other dry stuff with the zest and oil and juice, and then you get to my favorite part, which is gently folding the stiff egg whites into the batter.

Then it bakes for an hour and LO! it can be friends with Halo’s cake.

Other than that, I was like teeny tiny crafty. I glued fat blunt plate back together (it exploded apart tragically at some point), after getting some proper glue and mooching a cocktail glass off P. who bought it at Goodwill this weekend. Goodwill was fricking groovy and yielded clothes for littleley and biggie people and a tablecloth and this hilarious plate.

Does this make you want to start a niche blog about hilarious plates with poor grammar? I can smell the book deal already. I almost replaced my elegant top plate with this one, but I snapped out of it and hung it on the wall above my stove instead.

I have been saying this over and over all weekend as it is written. P. says, “I KNOW. sigh.”

So, the tiered plate will go in my LBJ room in my future bed and breakfast, next to the photo of The J swinging his dogs around by their ears.

And while wandering around the fabric store waiting for my seamstress (who fixed part of my robe before snapping a needle, and sewed up a loose seam on the dress I was wearing on F-Off England day), I found tassels. Tassels class everything up, IT ARE A FACT. I guess I have grown out of Hello Kitty cell phone charms. :'(

Today I gave up any pretense of trying to do anything and went to the Fremont Market with Srcsmgirl.

I think I needed the weekend off like whoa. Happy weekend! Was it good for you?

New Pitch, Krumpy!

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Up betimes and into my office, to commit further acts of devilry.

Notes:

“Half” refers to No Brane Babby. If you don’t know about Babby Hope Faith, you should look into it so you can be fully appalled by my tastelessness. I understand that some people enjoy being appalled and I am here for you.

Also it is interesting to note that a GIS for Denise Richards (I almost used Denise instead of Cleese) yields mostly full body shots including nude ones one the first page of results. This was not the case with Abraham Charles Vigoda.

In Other News: Two Short Stories About Last Night

Ruby took me to KEXP last night to snap some local rock dudes, which she does on the regular. It was tiny and hot in there and I was starving, so I ate and drank at the adjacent Holiday Inn bar.

After the first show, one of the rockers offered me a CD, which is presumably full of their rockings, and Ruby took the opportunity to say, “SJ listens to (stage whisper) HIP HOP but we are trying to get her to branch out.” The rocker guy withdrew his hand after giving me the CD as if he had just taken a great risk by giving a poore leper some alms. I think he was mostly reacting to the tone of Ruby’s voice, but it was pretty funny.

Translation: “Here,” Ruby says, “take pity on my friend Herpes Helen and give her some REAL music.”

When I walked into the Ho-tel Mo-tel Holiday Inn bar a familiar sight greeted me: a white guy, probably in his 50s, drinking alone. Countdown to comment on the personal appearance of woman entering who just wants a fucking cheese burger in 3…2…

“HEY you should probably get out of the SUN,” he bantered. HYUK HYUK.

“Yeaaah I always look like this. I’m Irish.” No eye contact.

“Oh, I was talking about your hair…er…sorry if I’ve offended you.”

“What can I get you?” interjected the bartender, who was attractive, looked to be about my age, and puts up with this for a living.

I ordered scotch and the dude continued to flail a bit. “That one’s on me,” he said.

I considered being huffy and prideful and shutting him down, but you know what? That’s a stupidity tax, man. I enjoyed a free scotch just as much as I would have enjoyed one I paid for myself.

“I’m really sorry,” he said again, awkwardly.

“You have to try harder than that to offend me,” I said. “Cheers.”

A Free Strudel Is No Picnic

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So, Strudel finished school! Now she is ready to apprentice with the village tailor. Ha ha, don’t I wish. We went to lunch at the Rocking Wok, which changed my favorite dish, the honeydew beef. It was still good, but not as delishus as before. It used to have little crispy basil leaves in it, and now has minced peppers.

We went for ice cream and a walk around the neighborhood after. She surprised me by ordering the lavender honey ice cream instead of a more kidalicious flavor like chocolate.

I have also decided to emerge into the amazing year 2003 and actually use my flickr bucket instead of spamming my blog all the damn time. YEAH five years from now I might even have a Bookface.

Behold a flickr ZZZZ

Going out with Ruby tonight. Apparently she is going to snap pix of musicians and then we are going to drink Not Absinthe.

Dear MF Diary: Change Tastes Like Carrot Caek

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Dear Jankateria,

Freddie Reynolds was staring at me by the senior locker bay today! I found a dollar on the ground! And my camera cable came! It’s been what, a month ffs?

In November, we made an Obama cake to celebrate. Pardon my ghetto non-cake professional skills, but here we be:

Here are the girls helping me make it. If I let Strudel continue, assuming she never got bored, it would have taken her FIVE HOURS to shred carrots. No lies.

Here is Hester Prynne all asplodie:

:'(

She is put back together now, but still no hard drive. Soon, soon.

The tail end of the fall harvest happened. Garden vs. Storebought. FIGHT!

We have a new layer, El Bandito! She makes wee eggs. Currently she is broody. Probably a good time for that, as it is cold as fuck.

Today alternates between dance party and snow

Also, my moar fight shirt came in the mail. MOAR FIGHT! I made this. By the power of Photoshop!

Speaking of dorky internet shit, I applied to be a community manager for a gaming software company. There are so many interesting jobs out there. I’ve decided to think of my relentless applying to jobs and interviewing as my hobby. I may continue this after I get a real job, even. I can now write a cover letter in 41 seconds.

ETA: I was all scattered a little and forgot to post a couple:

Frozen Calliope:

And the top of the Xmas ficus this year. Sorry your arms got cropped, Michelle! Blame US Weekly!