perpetual huddle

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retcon

as you can see, friends & family,
i have stopped updating this blog.
working on it started to feel like
another chore for my to-do list
instead of an exercise
in creative discipline....
think i'm splitting hairs?
so do i. maybe i'll just
take any excuse to quit
doing anything i really care
about, hopefully just before
it can count as an accomplishment
or a failure. too bad nobody's counting.
i'll probably resurrect perpetual huddle
if there's a time when i trust myself
to actually write instead of get all ocd
about linklisting every magazine article i like.
for fun, scroll through the archives to find
all those entries i backdated.

p.s. read dogs & water

sunday afternoon

one summer i lived in bellingham
in a house filled with music.
all the boys who lived there
played at least two instuments
and together they called
themselves "same as castles."
glin (the one on the left)
was one of the real
bandmates/roommates,
while i was staying rent free
in a largish closet, just
recuperating from school.
he'd always take breaks
from practices to follow
me out to the porch
and bum a smoke.
he made me feed
his vicious flying squirrels
when he was out of town.
he took me to my first
strip club ever... in canada.

now he's finished an album of his own
"later days" and i haven't been able
to get the first song "disappearing trick,"
out of my head for at least a week.
i sing it in the shower and hum it on the bus.
of course the whole album makes me nostalgic,
but i think i can assume it should
make anyone feel something like nostalgia
even if they've never cannonballed
into toad lake on a hot sunday afternoon.

go listen to asthmaboy on myspace
or download the whole album here, for free.

aug. 13 new yorker pg. 26

ebony spleenwort...
densely covered the trestle
between 104th and 105th Streets.

The Kingfisher

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world--so long as you don't mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn't have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water--hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
I don't say he's right. Neither
do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly

--Mary Oliver

no duh

muni no signs
on the bus ride to our school picnic
i asked the kids what
these signs meant.
samantha gave me
an exasperated look
and easily rattled them off:

no smoking
no barbecue
no dancing
no toothpaste
and
no perfume

lesson plan

thursday august 8th

under science:

"miss huddle will wear
her constellation socks."

r.i.p. gracie

what oprah knows for sure

A-

i gave blood today (pause for applause).
last time i donated was outside
officemax in a mobile unit.
basically, i was stuck in a stuffy van,
a needle dangling out of my arm,
with my regional manager yammering
away nervously in the next bed,
and heckling the tiny asian girls
who couldn't give a whole pint.
i had the last appointment,
so they told me not
to climb stairs without a friend,
kicked me out onto the sidewalk
and drove off.

this time i donated at the irwin center
and now i want to hang out there every day.
first of all, the building is super-strange.
the parking lot is paved like a patio,
and landscaped with corkscrew topiaries.
there are also three fountains out front,
the water dyed the color of blue-raspberry.
inside, everything is round and dim,
designed to be soothing.

the sign-in clipboard
has a built-in digital clock.
they give you a t-shirt
before you even fill out
the paperwork.
in the waiting area
there are good magazines,
and even a book-swap nook.

once you're in back the nurses
are all lighthearted and unhurried.
they call you by your first name
and ask you how you're feeling
with genuine concern every couple minutes.
they joke with you about the tropical fish tank
and your friend's iron levels. apparently,
laughing keeps your blood pressure up.
you squeeze a little foam ball
as a cradle gently rocks your bag of blood,
and before you know it, you're finished,
with a hot pink bandage around your elbow.

where else could you
lounge in a recliner,
pretzel crumbs all down
the front of your shirt,
drinking cranberry juice
through a bendy straw,
and feel totally self-righteous
while you're doing it?

after you sit up slowly
they usher you into "the canteen,"
a round bar stocked with packets of oreos,
where you get to wait for at least another 15 minutes
while another nice lady serves you more juice.
the stools are padded,
the counter, cool marble.
there's a big plasma-screen tv
set on close-caption,
more good magazines,
and a bunch of brochures
calling you a hero.

its 56 days until i'm eligible again,
but my best friend is going to pound
some iron supplements and give it another shot,
so with any luck i'll be back next weekend.

Labels: come here often?

block quote: totally forgetting

I bought a black chiffon spaghetti-strap shirt and jacket once. The salesperson told me I couldn't wear it with corduroy. There was a sense of danger in her voice. It didn't sound like merely a "fashion don't," but rather a word of serious caution, as though the combination of the two fabrics might result in an explosion. She repeated the warning as she bagged the garment. She was troubled by an uncanny sense that I owned a lot of corduroy. The military must have bunkers full of carefully separated corduroy and black chiffon secreted away somewhere in Nevada. It's one of those tigers we hold by the tail, like the A-bomb. I never wore the black chiffon shirt and evening jacket. Too risky. I buy impulsively sometimes, totally forgetting what I look like and how I spend my time. Amazingly, the fantasy of going out someplace kind of fancy, on a night when I wasn't wearing corduroy and had shaved, lasted long enough for that shirt and jacket to make the cut through three moves and countless closet cleanings.

--paula poundstone, there's nothing in this book i meant to say

the year of the bellydance

listen to charlie schroeder's
funny little radio story,
originally aired on
weekend america,
about him enrolling
in "dunk dreams,"
a class to make you jump higher.
i like the good-natured tone of the piece.
plus, he interviews his mom... always endearing.

who's prissy now?

out of entertainment weekly's
25 greatest action movies
of all time, goldfinger is #19.
this morning i found the item
posted on my bedroom door.
listed among its merits:
Sean Connery
in a powder blue
terry-cloth onesie.
great minds think alike!
anyone who can find
an actual captured still,
of the bond bathing outfit
wins a kiss on the mouth.
but for now this pre-007
ensemble will have to do.

non-alcoholic... i can feed it to my kids

If you can't quench my thirst
What you in my fridge for?
What you wanna live for?

scroll down the a.v. club's first annual absolute best issue
to "best skeleton in the closet of a famous rapper"
for the full audio clip of notorious b.i.g.'s "pepsi freestyle"

block quote: i could do that much

She bought me a little Wurlitzer electric piano. It must have cost two years of saltwater taffy savings, and it was only a tenth of the instrument that I had sold for a few hundred dollars after my father died. She showed up at my place the day of delivery, hiding her face in excitement and fear. "I thought you might want something to practice on. And to work with. While you're... while you aren't..."

read the next three paragraphs, here.

i typed them straight from the page,

without looking at the keys.

it was fun, a little like it was my own.

i haven't had much time to blog,
but i'm almost to page 500
in the time of our singing
a vast novel by richard powers,
broiling with hyperbolie, epiphany,
music, and race.
my commute is long.
the book gives me a lot to think about
as i struggle to find my place
at a school in the bayview
district of san francisco.
the kids at work, especially the girls
come to think of it, only the girls,
are always asking me what i am.
even though i can count the other white
faculty and students on one hand,
they're not asking what you'd expect.
"what are you? a mother? a sister?
a teacher?" they grin, and maybe
hop on one foot while they ask,
but they demand the answer.
i try to avoid the question,
usually by laughing indulgently
and saying "i'm certainly not a mother!"
or "i guess i do have a sister.
she lives in seattle.
do you know where seattle is?
its in washington state."
today one of them caught me off guard
i stopped, halfway through tying
a new bracelet on her upturned wrist,
accused again of not
being something,
or at least,
of not knowing it.
"miss huddle,
what are you?"
the sparkly beads
slid off the string,
one after another,
hitting the floor.
i snapped "actually,
i'm a writer."
she started crying.
i bent and reached
for the first bead i saw.

today on aol

mindless pap. hanson on gadgets
rivals only sheriff uses pink to deter prisoners
for the america online grand prize in journalism.

buy a dead squirrel on ebay

amys taxidermy

on the same page

after a long drive up the coast
as we re-entered our neighborhood
my best friend said. "i kind of want
to go to that ... comic book shop...?"
i just nodded.
nothing says "three day weekend"
to me quite like standing
in a fluorescent-lit storefront,
"casually" browsing
the trade paperbacks
for new compilations
by my favorite authors
or "just looking" at the selection
of TNG action figures.

i left data behind,
but i walked out with fell,
a promising warren ellis
and ben templesmith collaboration
about a homicide investigator
exiled from downtown,
sent across the bridge to a haunted
wasteland called snowtown.
sadly, it turned out to be an awkward read.
the panels are almost all close-ups,
drifting with luminous aquatint clouds.
templesmith uses computer-aided
blurring in lieu of action lines.
the images are gorgeous,
but they're an uneasy fit with ellis's
in-your-face gross-out prose.
detective fell with his suit, tie,
and little shock of neon blond hair
just can't pull off the muscular straight-talk
that makes you love spider jerusalem.
forget the feverish gunmetal menace
of snowtown, ellis needs the gritty
sprawl of transmet, its bustle,
its blunt lines and bright colors.

i love smoking

our new roommate brought
with her tons of i love lucy on dvd.
it is bizarre to watch as a woman,
but it is also shocking
to see a celebrity
openly shilling cigarettes.
there she is, lucille ball,
lighting up, taking a long drag,
and repeating the name philip morris,
without a hint of irony.

skip the speech-bubbles

another random find from the sfpl
graphic novels cart, bluesman book 2
bills itself as "the second stanza
of a 12-bar graphic narrative
in the key of life and death."
the artwork lives up
to this ambitious jacket copy;
it pours out of the page,
with some of the same weary
and uneven power as the music
it seeks to imitate. the bright scratches
feel like an old-time recording.
the writing, on the other hand,
is more than uneven.
the dialogue swings so disconcertingly
between the tough-talking wisecracks
of a gumshoe in a hard-boiled mystery
(I don't think you rightly appreciate
the ever-deepening pile of shit
that you are standing in, Mister Johnson
so pardon me as I waive a handful
of it under your nose...)
and the sweeping platitudes
of an unspecified narrator
reflecting on a parable
of u.s. race relations
(There is a dignity,
I think, in celebrating
our fortune together
this way. Rather than
as you would have it--
forever divided.
Until there is not enough
left for even one man
to bother calling his own.)
that halfway through
i just stopped reading
and listened to the pictures.

they do?

They say a moonlit deck
is a woman's business office.
--the lady eve

hankie parachute

at the maker faire
the folks from techshop
gave me the chance to machine
my own brass weight
on a metal-lathe.
i wore safety goggles.
i tightened chucks
and turned cranks.
the gold coils shivered
away from the spinning rod,
as the bits pushed inward,
cutting the base, the shoulders,
the cap, and finally, shearing
the whole thing off to drop
onto the shavings below.
the finished product looks
like the antique brass
weights in granddad's bindery,
only it is brand new.

it has a magnet inset
in the base, but i can't bear
to part with it just yet,
so the fridge will have to wait.
i like to feel it
heavy in my palm.
i like to run my thumb along
the sharp edges.
technically, it is insignificant,
an elementary exercise,
a trinket from a hipster conference,
but holding it, i call my dad.
"i miss granddad" i say.

i get lost trying to explain
how it reassures me of something
i can't seem to put words to,
so i try to explain the whole faire instead.
the botanicalls booth was clever--
your plant telephones you
and asks for water in a funny voice!
the homeschooler in me rejoiced
at madame ovary's shameless eccentricity,
and her sticky wands made of trash.
charles benton's kite aerial photography
is both neato and transcendent.
he uses rubberbands and balsa wood
to form images of the world
that couldn't wouldn't exist otherwise.

at this, dad interrupts me to
tell me that granddad
used to trick out his kites too.
in fact, granddad rigged up a device
to send parachutes
made of old handkerchiefs
sailing up the kite string,
and when it hit the top,
they released.

the brass of the weight
holds the heat of my hand.

amazon.com

I remember Dole pineapple rings
on a bed of lettuce with cottage cheese on top
and sometimes a cherry on top of that.
--joe brainard, i remember

i tried green apple and i tried the strand,
but guess who came through for me in the end...

walkman time capsule

um it is now um 12:05am on october 24th, 2005. it is now technically the last day of long weekend. i have gotten almost exactly no work done. i'm 22 years old. my father was married at this age. and to motivate myself i am making this record of what i'm doing. uh-- it's supposed to be a record of the fact that i'm working. ... so, i'll, uh, just keep you updated. my room is a pile of shit. i have upturned umbrellas. i have typewriters separated from their typewriter containers. i have, um, fork and knife sets that you might use when you're camping. ... anyway ... i'm just gonna keep cleaning until i've got organized piles for each of my classes, and even if i don't get any work done tonight, if i just get prepared to do work, if everything is just clean and prepared to do work, then i'll just fall asleep on my sheetless bed and everything will be o.k. ... cause i feel like i'm capable of doing work, but. alright! better get started!

mother's day

my best friend loves
the movie shirley valentine
and said the main character.
reminded her of me.
i saw it and it reminded
me of my mom, so
i sent it to her
for mother's day.
in retrospect,
maybe not the best gift
for a holiday celebrating
sacrifice in the name of family.
i should have clarified on the gift tag:
mom-- please don't abandon everything
and move to a foreign country without warning!
just don't be afraid to enjoy the view
from a table for one every once in awhile.

homesick

the internet can never
bring me the smell
of fresh baked bread
wafting out of le panier
as i pass, but now,
thanks to streetnote,
at least i can listen
to this guy rap about pot
in pike place market.

loyal porter

last night, as i packed for
my weekend trip to monterey,
the tag on my discount jeans
caught my eye for the first time,
"the loyal." a name that sounds
a little boring, but trustworthy,
like a girl who spends her weekends
birdwatching with her mother.
then, today, on the drive south,
mom and i stopped at REI
to get me another pair of pants.
the ones i found are perfect.
they're asphalt gray ripstop fabric
and the pockets zip shut.
i love them.
but, i have to admit, for a moment,
the name of the style stopped me short.
right in the midst of all that adventure gear
i chose "the porter pant." the porter,
a person hired to carry burdens
up and down the same trail day after day.
its not that i'm especially brand-conscious,
but the marketing types at these big corporations
spend a lot of time and energy
matching visual aesthetics,
intuitive word-assumptions,
and a consumer's desire
for an certain identity.
why couldn't i have chosen
a pair of the "ventures"?
why not lead an expedition,
plant a flag? why not "the riptide,"
for that matter, irresistible,
and just off the shore?
my hesitation was ended
by two thoughts.
1) i know, at least,
that i'd just look silly
in the "overboard short"
and 2) if you read further down
the tag, you'll notice the porter pant
does have "a gusseted crotch for mobility,"
which sounds both
almost unendurably practical
and perversely comic,
which sounds about right to me.

bad poetry and good

i was recently asked to ghostwrite
another blog. according to the author,
this is a perfectly reasonable request
because "all [i] do is steal [my] [material]
from [her] all the time anyway!!"
i refused, but promised to at least
give credit where credit is due,
for this great quote she found
in sound and sense. perrine
via carles, tells it like it is
for your general edification:

And here, perhaps, we should discuss the kinds of poems that most frequently "fool" inexperienced readers (and occasionally a few experienced ones) and sometimes achieve tremendous popularity without winning the respect of most good readers. These poems are frequently published on greeting cards or in anthologies entitled Poems of Inspiration, Poems of Courage, or Heart-Throbs. The people who write such poems and the people who like them are often the best of people, but they are not poets or lovers of poetry in any genuine sense. They are lovers of conventional ideas or sentiments or feelings, which they like to see expressed with the adornment of rime and meter, and which, when so expressed, they respond to in predictable ways.

april

she's no lucy, but
beagle or something's
keen reminder of fall
on a warm spring morning
caught me off guard,
i was suddenly grateful,
nostalgic, and wary.

my first baby box

one of my co-workers brought back
a kit for new parents as a resource
for each toddler-room teacher
from a meeting she attended downtown.
basically, the kit is a mint-green cardboard box
covered in photos of multi-ethnic kids,
a little thinner than a shoebox,
with a plastic handle on the top.
inside it has a bilingual board-book,
Frisky puppies play.
Frisky puppies chew.
Los perritos retozones juegan.
Los perritos retozones mordisquean.
and a magnet for california's
less catchy equivalent of mr. yuk,
the "poison action line,"
along with a bunch of brochures,
pamphlets and booklets
about early childhood development,
full of clinical, but cheery, bulleted lists.
When you discipline your child:

Talk your child in a serious, but loving, voice.

the whole thing was a little troublesome
for a woman whose chosen career
is often seen as a kind of
extended mommy-training...
that said, it was immensely
satisfying to carry a briefcase
for a day, cardboard or not.

dad's night

i'm like the dad.
i have one night
a week to cook.
last week i made
the easy meatloaf
from allrecipes.com
this week i made
the chicken marsala
from epicurious.com
i think the leap from
watery beef and ketchup
to shallots and fresh sage
is pretty impressive,
but i don't think i can maintain it,
and i don't know where
on the internet to look next.
maybe i'll call mom
and ask her for one of
her famous soup recipes...
or maybe i'll call and ask dad
if i absolutely have to have waffles
for a legitimate "breakfast for dinner,"
or if he thinks i can squeak by with pancakes.

punch, roll, & crimp

as a former officemax copy center
employee i got excited about
the durable and attactive
spiral bound menus
at tawans, but i had trouble
describing the coil inserter
to my dining companion.
this australian chick
does a much better job.

taste / gustation

tonight the velo rouge cafe screened
two documentaries by local directors
one about native american salt songs
and the dying culture that needs them
one about a man-made salt sea
and the dying birds that need it.
i ate a lemon pasta dish
topped with fresh ground pepper.

happy anniversary

i can't believe its been
six months already!
i'm still trying to catch up
on polishing up my drafts,
but they've multiplied
from 9 or so to about 75,
a good sign... i think...
but a little overwhelming.
one day at a time, right?

psychic dojo

my best friend ordered psychonauts from gamefly,
for old time's sake, because we both loved
it in college. she wrote a final paper
on it and i featured it prominently
in a presentation i gave to the local rotary club.
its still the coolest video game ever created!
in it you're a little psychic kid at a special
summer camp for honing your mental powers.
you collect figments of imagination,
sort mental baggage,
and fight the internal censors.
most of the action takes place
in other people's minds,
and all the levels open off
the collective unconscious.
seeing it again,
i'm not only reminded
how great the game is,
but how lucky i am
that i still get to hang out
every day with a person who
can truly appreciate gems like this:
He isn't dead, his astral projection
just got kicked out of my mind.
And I'll kick your *ass*tral projection
out of my mind too if you don't get moving!

inbox: upcoming

if you live in new york city
and don't see as much serious
avant-garde dance as you should,
go to prism on monday april 23rd at 8pm.
an old acquaintance of mine, biba bell,
emailed me with news of her upcoming show,
and i thought i would pass along the invitation.
the performance will occur in judson church,
a great venue with a remarkable history.
i saw urisov (her choreography collective).
perform once, in a garage, a couple years ago.
i watched from the slanted driveway
with a drippy cup of spiked lemonade.
the girls wore only nylons and turtlenecks,
the boys wore turtlenecks too, and false eyelashes,
the rainbow kind, and nobody cracked a smile.
despite the cold, the cement, the cheap booze,
and my personal bias against dance without music,
the sheer intensity, in particular, of biba's
creative spirit and the power of her
presence as an artist held me still,
kept me absorbed. each breath
was deliberate, and audible.
rarely do i get to experience art
so very cerebral and so very physical
at the same time. this new level in her evolution
sounds exponentially more absurd (jogger-dudes?),
and abstract (repetition, refraction & lack).
i just wish it was happening
in my neck of the woods. so, again,
point is, you go, and tell me all about it, ok?

terrible twos

ingredients for a mouse mess:

ritz crackers
oreos
corn flakes
milk
cheese
apple
orange
banana
jam
peanut butter
sugar
manzanilla olives
pickles
catsup

1. mix together
2. watch 15 toddlers
drop their jaws in awe.

aunt flo's nut cake

journal; the short life and mysterious
death of amy zoe mason
is just as insipid as you can imagine
a mystery novel in scrapbook form
written by sisters who halfheartedly
claim they "found" it, would be.
its full of victorian etchings,
yellow lace, pressed flowers,
and vintage postage stamps,
with a "secret" plot so obvious
the clues are literally highlighted
for the reader. as i was eating
my best friend's perfect
half-vegetarian lasagna
i made her look at the book.
she quickly pointed out
that it is chock full of recipes,
and that we should make one for dessert.
we didn't. but adam gopnik's article,
cooked books, about that very trend
(elaborate food prep descriptions
and recipes in current fiction.)
popped up in the new yorker
during my after-dinner visit
to the loo. he makes a bunch
of scopious and fussy points
about cognition and cooking,
but reading between the lines
he seems to be saying recipes
are lazy writing. in the case
of aunt flo's nut cake
i couldn't agree more.

you are the chosen one

for a non-fangirl it was awfully fun
to watch joss whedon's
not-so-blond future slayer
go from ambivalent
kick-ass chick
(hair down)
to all-grown-up
kick-ass chick
(hair up.)
conquer your fears!
take your own
hero's journey!
slip all 8 issues of fray
one-by-one out
of their plastic sleeves,
and read them in full view
of the public on the bus to work.

hindsight

i was surprised to see in an
onion interview with mindy kaling,
who i only knew as kelly from the office,
that she'd co-written and starred in matt & ben.
as soon as i read that fact her image lit up
and i recognized her in retrospect,
always such a weird sensation.
i saw matt & ben many years ago
at a tiny theater in new york,
in what seems like another life,
with a big group of friends from rpt.
i'd love to say i was a trendsetter,
but i'm sure we went because the tickets
were dirt-cheap. in fact, we took turns standing
while we watched... i miss those guys.

boring zine wins me over

my latest random find from the main library's

"graphic novel" cart, the snakepit book,
is a collection of daily 3-panel strips
by a guy in the austin punk rock scene,

who's life is painfully tedious and shallow.
its page after page of the same...

...go to work, get wasted, see a show,
go to work hungover, get wasted,
go to band practice, watch a movie,
get wasted, go to kinkos hungover...

... for 100s of pages. i constantly wondered

why i was still reading. but, i did keep reading

and by the time i was done, i liked it.
maybe its because the main character
is essentially a smiley face,
and all those pages of smiley faces
activate a primal happy-reflex,
or maybe its because it reminds
me of my bike-messenger artist
ex-boyfriend, or maybe
even though my life
is tedious and shallow
in a totally different way
from his, the book captures
the hum-drum pleasures
and pains of an ordinary life
so perfectly, that something
in me can't help but applaud.
plus, you can see his drawing skills
slowly improve over the years, which is fun.

classic rock

speaking of the postmodern novel,
how 'bout some collaborative hyper-fiction?
http://www.myspace.com/176387641
is a work in progress, not for the squeamish
or the internet-illiterate, about a pervy janitor
and a few other residents of fairlawn, plot tbd.

block quote: we cannot skip

"Kaatu," Gladys said in a mysterious howl, and here we could skip ahead if you know what I mean. It is always tempting to skip past words we do not understand, the parts of a relationship which confuse us, and arrive at a nice clear sentence-- "They clearly weren't in love anymore," or "The yellow-billed magpie can be found exclusively in the coastal valleys south of San Francisco Bay, and there are three common words beginning with the letter A that describe it," or "She was wearing some sort of cape," all of which appeared in the report filed by the surviving and more talkative detective. But we cannot skip to that or it wouldn't be a love story. We cannot skip the way we look in photographs, or our own affectations, or the way we like our coffee, or the way the people we love like their coffee, even though they like it some bad, bad way. We must suffer through all of it, without skipping any tiny thing, and anyway it was a shawl she was wearing.

--daniel handler, adverbs

this grown-up book
by "lemony snickett."
claims to be about love,
but it's more an exercise

in language for its own sake.
it interlocks carefully,
without being neat.

it layers and loops back

on itself; the vocabulary

becomes personal. i don't

recognize his version of love,

but the way he describes it

reminds me of the difficulty

of trying to describe

what any certain important

word means, like when i try

to explain what i mean by "loneliness."

this particular effort is so keenly

in evidence that i can't decide whether

or not to forgive the book

for the elements that make me

want to dismiss it as just more

annoying postmodern fiction.

the action is beside the point,

always on the verge of flippant.

the prose is stylized, too pop

and too pretentious

at the same time.
i'm on the fence.
i should reread it.
i skipped too much.
have you read it?
can you weigh in?

yum yum

lunch at pizza orgasmica.
dinner at foreign cinema.
thank god for rich relatives
and the food they treat us to.

mixed media brain freeze

my step-grandma (i call her nana)
is in town. nana's an artist.
she's the one who taught me
how to walk through galleries,
how to look at and talk about art
as you see it. the new de young
was at the top of her to-do list.
i felt like a ten year old girl again,
all dressed up in her sunday best,
nervously trying to mimic the pacing
and gestures of the truly sophisticated.
that said, the charles sheeler exhibit
was so fun, i couldn't help but shed
a little of my self-consciousness.
as you move through the space,
as you turn from piece to piece,
the images repeat in different forms,
film, photograph, painting, drawing.
its like a three-dimensional grown-up
version of those spot-the-difference
puzzles. along with this oddly
satisfying kind of visual deja vu
you get a real sense of his process.
the images grow more and more rigorous
without quite crossing over into abstraction.
when we had finished with the museum,
nana and went to see a movie.
after sheerer's clean planes
the painted veil was too lush,
all tense closeups of eyelashes
in dappled sunlight or misty vistas
at twilight. my brain ached
like a tooth might if i'd followed
piping-hot black coffee
with a scoop of raspberry gelato.

block quote: judge a book

I splashed water on my face, put on my robe, and headed downstairs. Already my headache was receding. After I started the coffee, I went to the living room window to look out at the day. The temperature had risen again--what could have been snow became a downpour during the night, and now the sky was a redemptive blue, the pale pastel that often follows a rain. Birds sat in a convivial row on the nearby utility wire. Elongated drops of water hung beneath them, shimmying in the breeze. I watched the birds for a while, waiting for the invisible signal that would have them all lift off together, but it did not come. They sat content, enjoying their version of a coffee klatch.

--elizabeth berg, the year of pleasures

covivial row? coffee klatch? must we?
you can just hear her reminding
herself to be "precise" and "vivid,"
congratulating herself on her
alliterative personification,
her use of rhythm, almost prose-poetic.
to be fair, though, as you can see,
i knew what i was getting into.
i'm much more of a man-writer fan
(steinbeck & graham greene,
warren ellis & wallace stevens,)
but every once in awhile i pick up
a book like this. of course,
i'm so merciless with them
only because i am terrified
that this over-articulate, cliched,
and womanish "creative-writing"
would be all that came out,
if i ever really tried.
what scares me even more,
is that i know it's what's coming out now,
and i only wish i could accomplish
what these talented and hardworking
authors have, whole novels,
when i can barely manage
a contemptuous and precious
little blog, much less a short story.

check out this "comment," a very funny post
from a parallel universe: sunday, april 08, 2007 2:05 pm

everything wobbled

4.2 earthquake
as soon as i thought it was safe to crawl
out of my closet i got back online,
because they aren't real
unless the internet says so.

waking up

the snowy day

i owe my childhood studies
professor a personal apology.
in our picture books class
i ranted that the snowy day
was the perfect example
of dull and politically correct
children's literature, with a token
african-american character.
i had a point to make, loudly,
and at length. i accused anyone
who defended ezra jack keats
of being a tedious liberal.
now that i work at a minority preschool
and scour the library for good
books to read in class, i see
i couldn't have been more wrong.
"the snowy day" is a rich
and delightful little book,
the kids love it and i return to it
over and over again at story time.

(bright eyes, brown skin on the other hand... ...)

self-inflicted

slowly ripping all the hair
on my legs out at the root
with the medieval torture-device
know as the epilady
drastically raised my
DIY beauty-treatment
pain threshold.
plucking my eyebrows
or waxing my armpits
can never really phase me again.
in the same way, sitting through
all 116 minutes of the excruciating
chinese avant-garde masterpiece
what time is it over there?
this weekend in new york
forever raised my
experimental film
pain threshold.
when my best friend
sat me down for a bit
of kenneth anger's new dvd,
the nonsensical and sluggish shorts
(rabbit's moon, puce moment &
fireworks) seemed almost quaint,
and barely made me wince.

i want a TARDIS machine

TARDIS machine
dr. who
so hip!
so bbc!

nyc trip

this weekend, i flew to new york.
i traveled across six months
and into the melting snow
to meet a boy again.
he and i spent
most of our time together
getting lost and eavesdropping.
in roughly chronological order,
other activities included:

as soon as i arrived, adding my avatar to his wii
alongside jesus, tyra banks, & his roommates.

killing time at the odessa cafe
until tony, of kropps & bobbers,
could cut my hair. the salon peaked
my sophomore year, when i had a shaved
head, still wore hipster political t-shirts
and lived rent-free next door.
nostalgia.

browsing at st. mark's comics.
i picked up a transmet
to read on the plane ride home.

wondering how i become the girl
who drags a boy to the louis comfort tiffany
exhibit at the metropolitan museum of art
then demands to know if he really likes it,
or is "just pretending." high maintenance!

watching a broadway show (thanks
to an infusion of cash from a relative.)
the first half of the musical spring awakening
was raucous and delightfully squirmy.
the second half was pointless and dated.
the music was loud and too poignant,
the staging, distracting. all those blue bulbs.

browsing at the strand.
i was shocked to find
that in their 18 miles of books
there wasn't one copy of
joe brainard's i remember.
the man behind the counter
suggested barnes & noble (!),
then wrote the isbn number
on a post-it in cursive so beautiful
i instantly forgave everything.

lunching at the telephone bar and grill,
one-on-one, trying to talk about feelings.

watching mafioso, a funny, sad
tender and suspenseful old movie
about the mafia, and about life.

smooshing into prune,
with a gang of seven,
trying to act sophisticated.

getting dropped off at the
blue & gold bar by my aunt and uncle,
with enough hugging and reminders to "have fun!"
that we could have been toddlers
on our first day of nursery school.

lounging around in the bachelor pad
of my best guy friend from college
listening to recording's of big bang tv's
first gig, a smashing success.
keep it up, snoogles.

trying not to lose my composure
in the cinema cafe as my rolling
padded armchair kept drifting
backward from the table.

clenching every single muscle
in my body with unbearable tension
as elderly francophiles get into a shoving match
during a screening of the already
nerve-wracking what time is it over there?

block quote: mormons

On the morning of the July 24, Pioneer Day, Dan got up, prayed, and felt prompted by the Lord to saw the barrel and stock off a 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun that he had been storing at his mother's house. While he used a hacksaw to cut down the weapon in Claudine's garage, Ron, Ricky Knapp, and Chip Carnes loaded their belongings into the Impala. Among the items they placed in the car were a .30-.30 Winchester and a .270 deer rifle. As they were lashing some items onto the vehicle's roof, a troubled Carnes told Ron, "I don't see any reason for anybody to kill any baby."

--john krakauer, under the banner of heaven

pure nonfiction smut!
(thanks ianhifi!)

long live citizen journalism

i spent the morning at the mayor's
bayview town hall meeting
and the afternoon trawling
the internet for recaps.
(do not read as "looking for
photos of myself online.")
the sfist post captures
the way the actual meeting felt,
like a bit of political theater
in a school gymnasium,
spiffed up for the occasion
with vinyl banners,
half full of aggrieved citizens
and half full of commissioners.
before the show, some guy
commented on gavin's drink,
to nobody in particular,
"how much you wanna bet
that's an irish coffee?"
activists interrupted
gavin's self-congratulatory
"brief introduction,"
then left, still shouting.
we all laughed nervously
and started over as people moved
to fill the empty folding chairs.
gavin was irritated,
"i didn't come here because
i want to avoid the issues.
i came here because
i want to confront them."
people yelled that they hadn't had heat
all winter, that all the kids' computers
were stolen, five times over.
the coos charts were colorful
ribbons, with print too small to read.
the charts were followed by a huge
satellite photo mounted on foam-core,
"this is your neighborhood."
people who knew each other waved
across the crowd. an old woman in
a leopard-print hat spoke passionately
against the planned shutdown of
the alice griffith housing development,
then slipped outside for a smoke with the cops.
halfway through, i slipped out too.
at the "jobfair" out front, i grabbed
a couple free samples of dentyne ice,
and chatted with a cynical cameraman.
his videos will be up on youtube soon.
meanwhile, the san francisco chronicle
piece is painfully dull, "Newsom
promised to have his staff
look into the issues."
and too pretty. even through
i recognize the faces, it looks
more like that episode of the wire
with the town hall meeting.
you know the one,
in season three, where
all the residents cautiously
applaud city officials for the
concrete results of all their
innovative new policies.
that's the meeting he wished
he was at... at one point,
he even muttered "you can't win
with these people."
you could just sense
him posing the whole time,
hoping when he looked for
photos of himself online
they would be flattering,
hoping that the images would tell
the story he wanted. poor guy.

good news: thanks to community
pressure, the city admitted that the
the child development center
is "an embarrassment" to them
as its landlords. they have committed
to providing brighter lighting
and tighter security on the weekends,
in order to prevent theft and vandalism.
they'll also promptly complete routine
maintenance on the grounds,
like powerwashing the building and
cutting back the trees that threaten
to take over the parking lot.
not a glamorous victory,
but much-needed.

colts

which superbowl team
should you root for?
now off to last minute
snack platter shopping.

what did one fly say to the other fly?

hey, fly, your dude is open.
-- prarie home companion joke show

dear media diary

my best friend called me to tell me
that the whale watching had been canceled,
so i should meet her and her brother and his wife
downtown for a matinee of pan's ladybrinth,
which is like fantasy for adults, which is supposed
to be good. on the way out the door i picked
up the mail, and sorted through it,
throwing the bills back in the box.
i got a note on thick italian stationary
in a matching envelope from my friend
who is training to be a doctor, a rare gift.
i finished it at the bus stop, then pulled
the rolled up new yorker out of my
coat pocket. on the trip downtown i read
a piece about a man with a small life.
in the meantime, both of them,
the son and his mother,
lived in the murky, antiquated
house, in peace and in silence.
each morning, a cleaning woman
came, bringing with her
the groceries he'd requested.
it ended up as such a new yorker
piece of fiction though, nothing happens
nothing happens nothing happens
then something happens
that doesn't make any sense.
i was nostalic for the heart of the matter
which i had just finished reading.
it didn't dissapoint me at all.
in fact, it surpised me, and surprise
is the opposite of dissapointment.
i hopped off the bus.
on the street for a moment,
i heard some kind of marching band
street musicians. it was loud and cold.
the spring in my step suddenly
said "dammit, i love this city!" even
if i couldn't allow my actual mind
to think anything so simple and corny
as those words. it wasn't this city,
anyway, it was any street in any city,
these particular people walking by
and also any people walking by in any city.
the bustling crowds! and just before
i pushed triumphantly through
the doors to the westfield center
i thought it was any people in any place.
as the temperature changed in a few steps
i looked up in front of me.
i'd been to this new mall once before,
to see a movie with my best friend's brother
and his wife, and starting now i had never left.
i thought how crowded it was, and dazzling,
how full of all these hateful shopping drones.
what a long and irritating walk
i knew it would be to the cineplex.
photos can't seem capture the scale of this place
it so fully stuns you into submission, that at the door
i had the sensation of "steeling myself," usually
reserved for the aftermath of a disaster.
i charged, head down, toward the first
escalator. i must never waver.
i must find the people i know.
we are going to see a movie together.
i didn't like it when thing caught my eye,
especially scoop-necked shirts or kiosks full of jewelry.
when i finally reached the theater area
i couldn't seem to make out individual faces.
people's scuffy san francisco outfits looked
dirty against the pristine carpet, and too studied.
as i scanned the lobby i remembered
how last time i'd been here i'd bought
a huge cookies 'n' cream milkshake,
overdrafting my account, and making me queasy,
so i couldn't enjoy the roast beef sandwich my best friend
brought me to eat for dinner. i didn't see her
or her brother or his wife anywhere so i asked
where the bathrooms were. the ticket-taker
said they were downstairs, between the bloomies
and the borders, so i took the elevator
down one floor into a gleaming white tunnel
that kept turning at right angles and never
seemed to end until i came to a door.
the sign on the door had the image
of the mall's rotunda etched into it,
on frosted glass, behind the "lady."
i went through the door of the stall and used the toilet,
which flushed automatically, and put my hands under
the automatic tap and thought i guess i have to go
back upstairs, when my best friend came banging
through the bathroom door and stopped short
and said "there you are." we both looked puzzled.
she said "i saw you get into the elevator
and you didn't see me so i followed
you down into these white halls. weird. where
were you going?" i told her i couldn't make out
individual faces so i decided to go
to the bathroom. we took the elevator upstairs
and i hugged her brother and his wife .
we went in to see pan's labyrinth.
the forrest in it looked the same as the forrest
in children of men, which is the only other movie
i'd seen at the that theater. they were equally
powerful and unrelenting, torturous, epic
creative, and honest. we walked out
through the mall and rode the bus
home and my best friend sat
on my yellow armchair and read to me
about dido in the from the fagles
translation of the aeneid. i asked her
if "the heart of the matter"
could be considered a tradgedy.
it couldn't really,
but i wanted to bring it up,
because it was so good
and i cried at the end of it.
then we drove to taco bell
to get strawberry soda
and we talked on the way
about classic tragedies, mostly
about pity and fear.

insectoid queen

which lego minifig are you?

more than you ever imagined

when i saw this trailer
i laughed one sharp laugh
liked i'd been punched
in the stomach, then
sat with my mouth agape.
my best friend did a verbal
double-take "did they just say
bridge to ... terabithia?" yes,
disney mutilates beyond recognition
yet another slow, tender, and elegantly
written storybook for children
with overzealous c.g.i.
and (dare i even say it?)
layered arm-warmers.

my new second-favorite poem

Here you are

It’s such a relief to see the woman you love walk out of the door some nights
for it’s ten o’clock and you need your eight hours of sleep
and one glass of wine has been more than enough
and, as for lust - well you can live without it most days
and you are glad, too, that the Ukrainian masseuse you see every Wednesday
is not in love with you, and has no plans to be, for it is the pain
in your back you need relief from most, not that ambiguous itch,
and the wild successes of your peers no longer bother you
nor do your unresolved religious cravings or the general injustice
of the world, no, there is very little, in fact, that bothers you these days
when you turn first to the obituaries, second to the stock market,
then, after a long pause, to the book review, you are becoming
a good citizen, you do your morning exercises, count
your accumulated small blessings, thank the Lord
that there’s a trolley just outside your door your girlfriend
can take back home to her own bed and here you are
it is morning you are alone every little heartbeat
is yours to cherish the future is on fire with nothing
but its own kindling and whatever is burning in its flames
it isn’t you and now you will take a shower and this is it.

--michael blumenthal, new yorker

my old second-favorite poem.
its much funnier, but a little too crowded.

-->

dogfight --> what have they done to the rain? --> malvina reynolds --> little boxes --> weeds

lights! camera! plaque-tion!

marketing now longer affects me like
it did when i was younger. for instance,
all the cartoon detectives and free dvds
in the world cannot disguise the fact
that listerine's agent cool blue
bubble blast plaque detecting rinse
is just the blue liquid version
of those evil red dye tablets
you used to have to chew
at the dentist to shame
you into brushing.
oh well, at least now i know how to reveal and destroy the invisible, but deadly, residue left by my favorite dessert accessories, the gourmet kitchen's midway magic deluxe grape camo sprinkles (with flavor explosions!)

fashion! fashion! fashion!

my best friend visits the threadless
site weekly to check out new t-shirts,
all limited-edition and all cheap.
the site is pretty, clever, easy-to-use,
and so internet-age participatory
that it makes my teeth hurt...
send in a photograph!
vote & comment on designs!
earn street team points!
(seriously, click on the link
so i can earn street team points.)

one down

crossword

the simple online interface of the
washington post crossword puzzle
pulls up the correct clues instantly,

and allows you to type in the answers,

navigating horizontally and vertically

with the arrow keys at the flick of a pinkie.
it also offers the specific and useful

"check" and "reveal" options.

the virtual generation
has invaded even this last
bastion of arcane vocabulary,
historical trivia, and ambitious puns.

my best friend just finished

the thursday puzzle

in a mere fifteen minutes.

can you top that, you retirees?

you with only your clipboards

and your wooden pencils,

calling into the next room for help,

and smudging the newsprint

with every mistake?

name-dropping an in-law

the savages will be premiering at sundance.
i hope soon afterwards it will be
playing in "a theater near you."
funny, sad, and grown-up movies
like hers deserve a wide release
and i have my fingers crossed for this one.
congratulations, auntie tam!

but it is the movie i'd like to see tonight

the creators of little britain
combine their fat jokes, their fag jokes,
and other lowest-common-denominator
humor, with a dry wit, a gift for mimicry
and impeccable comic timing.
the juxtaposition makes for comedy
verging on the sublime.
(transcript of my favorite mr. mann sketch)
the whole show reminds me of
and old s.n.l. sketch, just a split-screen
with the title "highbrow" on the left,
and "lowbrow"on the right.
on the lefthand side a man
in an ascot with a tidy mustache
repeats a bit of famous repartee--
lady astor: winston, if you were my husband,
i should flavour your coffee with poison.
churchill: madam, if i were your husband,
i should drink it.
and on the righthand side a man
in nothing but overalls hops around
making faces and squeezing
a whoopee cushion over and over.
it is still the single funniest most
perfect sketch i've ever seen.

block quote: by its cover

the twentieth wife
by indu sundaresan
is historical chick fiction.
just as you would guess,
from the saturation and fonts
of the dust jacket,
it takes "show don't tell"
a little too seriously.
not only is it adjective-heavy
and chock full of "colorful verbs,"
but there is just a certain
cadance to the language.
that irritates me beyond words.

Ghias beg brok away from the group around the fire and, picking his way past the animals, trudged to the tent where his wife lay. Barely visible in the flying sand, three children crouched against the flapping black canvas, arms around one another, eyes shut against the gale. Ghias Beg touched the shoulder of the elder boy. "Muhammad," he yelled over the sound of the wind. "Is your mother all right?"

oh! not to mention the unrelenting italics

A few zenana women sat under the peepul, ghagaras gathered over their knees.

my granddad passed away last night.
the image above is a scan of the snap
that clasps shut a book we made together.
it is a prototype for a larger journal,
coptic bound, a trial run at a difficult inset strap,
with scaled down pockets in each signature,
made from recycled manilla folders.
i have included the full text
of a short writing exercise of mine
from a couple years ago, here.
it is about book mending.
the piece doesn't do justice to the subject.
it is embarrassingly pompous, awkwardly framed,
and only perfunctorily edited,
but i am posting it for my family
so that, if they want, they can see
a little of how i view some

of what i shared with,
and learned from,
my granddad.
i'll miss him.

stepping out of the old year...

100% cotton
and into the rain forest in my new bathrobe (thanks carles!)

moodzones

watch!
harmonychannel.com

latest mop bandit caper a flop!

Attempted Burglary: Nov. 4, 9:20 p.m., 400 Block of Funston Avenue

A woman was at home when she heard a noise coming from her hallway. While investigating, the victim saw a mop handle sticking through her mail slot, trying to reach a foyer where her purse was. The victim yelled at the suspect, who fled the scene leaving the mop handle stuck inside of the mail slot.

-- police blotter, the richmond review

cliff notes?

i don't know how i escaped
guy debord's the society of the spectacle
in all my media studies classes,
but since i've felt a little lost
in the spectacle myself lately
i picked it up
and i am lost in it.
i grasp at the simplest
statements. then they run on
and i realize that this man
is using words in that 60s
way that people with ideas
got to use words which
was sitting down to write
your your philosophy of
how it all works, your theory,
and just making your words
mean what what you mean,
a personal vocabulary.
this becomes nettlesome
for the rest of us when you
publish it. what does he mean
by "global" and "above"
and "life lived"? i thought,
what i need to understand
this book is a book group. no.
but a very serious book group,
with one person who knows
all about the book and things
related to the book and can
help the rest of us discuss and
understand it. so like a college
class? shit. for now i'm going
to just kind of read the words
and let them flow through
my brain and see
what catches.

thanks for the reccomendation

The police department and the armed forces are the two arms of the power structure, the muscles of control and enforcement. They have deadly weapons with which to inflict pain on the human body. They know how to bring about horrible deaths. They have clubs with which to beat the body and the head. They have bullets and guns with which to tear holes in the flesh, to smash bones, to disable and kill. They use force, to make you do what the deciders have decided you must do.

-- eldridge cleaver, soul on ice, 1968

I'm the decider, and I decide what is best.

-- president bush, april 2006,
on why a secretary of defense
known to sanction torture
was to remain in office

dear santa

my secret
christmas wish
is to be listening
to owen pallett
on boxing day
and it is snowing.
what's yours?

women are funny

Nancy Pelosi Wants Congress To Want To Pass Bill

WASHINGTON, DC—The newly elected Speaker of the House accused fellow congressmen of being "distant" and "merely placating" her.

have you seen?

i'm lucky to come from a large
and unabashedly geeky extended family.
its traditional for us to stay in touch
by sending each other
manila envelopes full of clipping,
with no letter, but maybe a post-it
saying something like
"thought you might be interested..."
the uncle nicknamed "uncle fun"
(collects wind-up toys, introduced
us to the secret life of machines)
has kept up the tradition digitally,
sending me two great videos
in as many weeks,
luckily, both embeddable.

Have you seen the PythagoraSwitch video? It's twelve minutes of delightfully ingenious entertainment. "PythagoraSwitch" is a Japanese kids program. This video is a compilation of the Rube Goldberg machine type segways used during the show. The soundtrack is the show's theme song and the phrase they keep singing is Japanese for "PythagoraSwitch." I came across a couple recordings of the show on You Tube and found it clever and engaging -- it really challenges kids to see the world in different ways and to think logically and, at the same time, creatively.

Have you seen these amazing Windwalkers?

owls in the roadhouse

after a huge thanksgiving dinner with
my favorite sister's roommates
we migrated to her boyfriend's house
for a twin peaks marathon.
it has been ages since i've heard
the watery sound and glitching
of a well-worn vhs tape,
but in this case it was perfect that
the tv itself seemed possessed.

mario & danny

this week's episode of the soup
included clips of both mario lopez, dancing up a storm,
and danny bonaduce, self-destructing,
without any mention of the good old days
when they were onscreen pals and chatty co-hosts
on the man view, (officially: the other half).
the boys were constantly "consumer testing" beds
by jumping on them in silk pjs, or hot tubs
by stripping down to their bannana hammocks
and splashing around. enjoy this classic clip
in which they take off their shirts
and do a little good-natured boxing
for all the ladies out there.

incidentally, joel mchale, host of the soup,
used to be a regular on my hometown's
very local sketch show almost live!
as you may have gathered,
this post is a case study
in the horror that is
not having cable.

impeccable

the velo rouge cafe was screening goldfinger
just as my best friend was getting off work.
i only caught the beginning, but let me tell you
i am seriously disappointed in the internet gods
for giving me hundreds of copies of this photo,
but not one picture of bond
in his stunning poolside ensemble:
a baby-blue terrycloth jumpsuit,
with a gold zipper plunging
from collarbone to navel,
ending in baby-blue terrycloth short-shorts
not only short enough to expose the full length
of those luxuriantly hairy thighs,
but even short enough to hint
at the enticeing possibility of a glimpse
of 007 scrotum. did i mention the belt?
well, the outfit has a slender belt,
described by judith timson
of the globe and mail as "prissy."
oh judith, you may say "extremely unfortunate"
but i say "timeless classic."
they just don't dress 'em like they used to.

rolling stone

jon stewart and stephen colbert... is an o.k. interview, made laugh-out funny by the subjects' savvy & rapport.

Q: A fake news show, "The Daily Show," spawned a fake commentator, Colbert, who makes his own fake reality defending the fake reality of a real president, and has government officials on who know the joke but are still willing to be mocked by someone fake. Your shows are like mirrors within mirrors, using a cycle of fakery to get to the truth. You've tapped into a sense in society that nothing, from reality shows to Bushworld, is real anymore. Do you guys ever get confused by your hall of mirrors?

STEWART: I didn't know we were going to have to be high to do this interview.

COLBERT: I think we see it less as a hall of mirrors and more as one of those slenderizing mirrors you can buy that you see in catalogs that make you feel good about yourself before you go out the door.

sascha baron cohen --the real borat-- finally speaks is billed as a peek at the "man behind the mask" but the whole thing plods along over a blow-by-blow of the evening in a pedantic "what it really means" call-and-response that isn't resisted one bit by its obviously exhausted subject.

But the America that Borat discovers on his cross-country trek here -- rife with homophobia, xenophobia, racism, classism and anti-Semitism -- is all too real.

"I think part of the movie shows the absurdity of holding any form of racial prejudice, whether it's hatred of African-Americans or of Jews," Baron Cohen says.

A waiter places a complimentary appetizer in front of Baron Cohen.

bertha jorkins

my fabulous~furs; the finest faux fur
catalog is "celebrating the season of gorgeous!"
how do i know 'tis the season to be gorgeous?
i, several months ago,
under yet another pseudonym,
went hogwild at catalogs.com,
ordering every free catalog
i could get my cursor on.
for a few items and some fun copy
check out my flickr slideshow.

a very small pleasure

let me loose in a library to browse
and slowly but surely i'll gravitate towards
the books about small living spaces.
today i sat in the aisle
on one of those rolling stools
absolutely transfixed as i flipped
through the photos and blueprints

in the very small home,
i'm not particularly interested
in architecture, design, or decorating,
but little houses suggest the joy of forts
home as snug, self-built, & self-contained,
as a cosy and livable survival-cubby.
the maggie b.

then again, the ones that make it into these books
are very cosmopolitan too, "all open and communicating".
i like them with false floors of transluscent white material,
with strangely-shaped windows, spindly chairs
and state-of-the-art showers. very spare,
clever, without room to be fussy.
mon oncle

much of the charm, of course,
is imagining a pefect little self
who'd fit, content and put-together,
in the perfect little home.
in reality, i'm sure i'd be cramped
in any of them, and i'll have a new favorite
with the next book i run across,
but for now if i had my pick
i'd settle for life in this ingenious house,
built on a narrow strip of land
that used to be a driveway.

having fun kiddies?

watching valley of the dolls
and plucking my eyebrows.
whoo!! saturday night!!

is that all there is?

my is that all there is? station over at pandora
turned me on to clare fader's johnny,
a smutty little song in all the right ways,
so i gave it the quick thumbs-up,
but the new station it spawned
is all just sinantra hits. pandora, you're such a tease.

what is your well-being total?

life coaching is simultaneously
vaguely appealing
and extremely creepy,
right up there with cults
and pyramid schemes.
this clean sweep assessment
hits the helpful/ominous
chord just perfectly.
I have just the right amount of sleep.
I use well-made sunglasses.
I do not suffer.

that's my girl!

Preparing children to become citizens of a democracy requires recognition of the different ways in which children learn about politics. Kids in the United States currently spend most of their lives in controlled situations such as schools where the dependency they experience in their homes is reinforced. Besides teachers -- books, films, television, and video games influence how children think about democracy. Interviews and surveys of children during three Presidential elections and two non-Presidential years show how some sixth-graders in a Vermont town react to the political issues raised in those elections. Besides presenting the children's voices, Sugarman also examines some aspects of the media and of the school situation to see how they effect the children's thinking. Changes that might improve the children's understanding and knowledge of democracy are also suggested. This book should be of interest to parents, teachers, those involved in media literacy, popular culture, or child development, and the imaginary readers of self-invasion/perpetual huddle.

"if kids could vote; children, democracy, and the media"
now on sale at lexington books!

i am no longer bored

i forgot how thoroughly harpers
trumps the new yorker,
especially in the small bits.
i will subscribe as soon as i can.
this diary entry from a teeny-bopper
ginsberg is fantastically bombastic.

does this mean comics are homo prose?

graphic novel tease
one day in one of my writing workshops
a student known for his spoken-word
showed us a piece he'd actually
taken the time to type up.
when asked to read it aloud
he said "i don't usually do
readings of my page poetry."
my teacher asked "so, page poetry...
can i add that to the list with
acoustic guitar and snail mail?"
although i now know that page poetry
doesn't strictly qualify as a retronym,
the literary example i ripped out
of the the guardian this morning
blows it out of the water anyway.
the ad that seems to be
clearly for a really bad
(in my adventures, by now
i should have lost a leg, an eye,
and my sense of fun.)
graphic novel,
but, look carefully,
in the small type
at the very bottom
there's a disclaimer:

STRAIGHT PROSE --
but you'll picture every page for yourself.

once you pop you can't stop

in the entire tube of pringles prints music trivia
the only chips that i answered correctly were,
(without ever having heard of the singer in question):

Q: Does Kaci Brown prefer Lipstick or Lip Gloss?
A: Lip Gloss

Q: What is singer Kaci Brown's favorite color?
A: Purple

Q: What is Kaci Brown's favorite style of jeans?
A: Low-rise

and finally
Q: What is Kaci Brown's website called?
A: www.kacibrown.com

i visited, and she makes
the mandatory popstar slide
from total christian to total slut,
in record time, as you can see.
somebody should tell her
that the pros take it slow.
getting there is half the fun.

creature comforts

turn the volume up
to help with the accent.
as he talks about being a dad
this little clay mouse
will make you cry.

dad is funny

in lieu of leaving comments
my dad modifies the images
from my blog in photoshop
and emails them to me.
the mods are meticulous,
goofy, and perfect.
see them all here.

sasha my love & a pair of schlubs coming to blows

he knows what a girl needs.
please give me a tv, a remote,
a red dress, and your heart. thank you.

my best friend and i invested $22
to see borat: cultural learnings of america
for make benefit glorious nation of kazakhstan
with the saturday night masses at the multiplex.
watching the scene (below) with the humor coach
in a theater full of stangers, all laughing
until they couldn't breath anymore,
all laughing for different reasons,
or the same ones i don't really know,
was the most uncanny and postmodern experience
i've had since i watched my sim play the sims.

afterwards we headed to chevys
for a little fresh-mex
and some prickly pear margaritas,
where we happened to have the pleasure
of witnessing two very drunk and very middle aged men
get in something vaguely resembling a fistfight,
spitefully ripping off each other's caps,
clawing the air, and high kicking
to shame the very rockettes themselves.

i'm taking a break before "a prayer for owen meany"

the world according to garp
was a good introduction to john irving.
i ended up liking the messiness of the book,
the unfinished, sprawling quality of the writing,
e.g. the weird short story (the pension grillparzer)
plopped wholesale in the middle of the novel.
many scenes seem longer than they need to be,
as far as i can tell, just because the author
gets carried away with the fun of the details.
for example, read these three paragraphs,
an endearingly superabundant description
of squalor, especially great-- the cat and the pantyhose.
i have to admit though, by the time i finished the hotel new hampshire,
i was tired of all the half-trained bears loping around
and ready for something a little more disciplined.

blog this!

I'm Always Up For Some Commitment

Every time I see an attractive, single woman walk down the street, I've got just one thing on my mind: cultivating a loving, fulfilling,...

when i went to the onion site
to cut and paste the url of this article
(not the strongest headline
but classic and worth
reading all the way through)
i didn't have to, because
there was a handy little
link to embed a photo and blurb
into your blogger template.
they sure know their audience!

i miss them

bones We have not slept
for three days
and the few of us left
are lighting huge bonfires
to keep the elephants at bay,
without success.

--reuters via to be sorted

wacky hometown crap i can't afford

the cubes copy center
the new archie mcphee
catalogue made me nostalgic,
but not for its hometown
and mine, seattle, washington.
no, i got all misty-eyed
at the memory of cold hard cash.
you see, when i was slaving over
that million-dollar print account
at officemax i wanted to buy "the cubes"
copy center extension set, as a funny gift
for each of the employees i managed.
we were all busting our asses
for a soulless corporation,
why not treat them to a laugh?
but i was "too broke," so i was "saving up."
since i lost that job, rather unceremoniously,
i've learned that "broke" isn't
having your overtime capped
before it becomes double-time,
or thinking about diverting
a few bucks of the eating-out budget
into a crap-for-co-workers fund.
broke is commuting an hour
each way in opposite directions
on public transportation
to your two part-time jobs.
it's paying over twice the taxes,
because you're technically "self-employed,"
while "saving up" for next month's bus pass
and the fee you'll need to pay
for a california state i.d.
then again, i don't work for officemax anymore!

pfizer is creepy

do i owe you money?

do you owe me money?
this pretty little site
will never let you forget it:
billmonk.com

thank you for your patience

i quit smoking last monday,
but ending that habit seems
to be interfering with
this habit i've just started.
the cravings have been very
manageable during the day.
new thing to do while
waiting for the bus:
fiddle with the safety switch
on my pepper spray.
new thing to do while
walking: worry at
my gums with a toothpick.
new thing to do when
hungry: chew dentyne ice.
new thing to do when
i want to take a short
break from my writing,
to pause, reflect,
and reenergize myself:
fall asleep instead
i hope and pray i'll figure
out how to write without
my late night cigs
in the next couple days
so i can polish up the nine
or so drafts waiting here.
what i mean to say is--
thank you for your patience
and please stand by.

gorgeous

laura's dress
project runway

spice girls --> baby jesus

dawn french--vicar Frank Pickle: Very good sermon, Vicar!
Jim: No, no, no, no, yes! I like the way you move from the superficial and facile messages of popular culture to the subtle and more complex revelations of the nativity.
--the vicar of dibley

inbox -- not spam, but not quite a letter

a former acquaintance of mine
sent me a mass email asking me to plug
her blog's new book worldchanging in my blog.
i met one of my all-time favorite boys
at one of her parties, so i guess i owe her,
but he's out of the picture now,
and besides, she asked me to read her
the great gatsby out loud,
then stood me up,
which is pretty bitchy.
so this is a kinda' plug:
check it out if you feel you must.
oh, it's about green design
with a foreword by al gore.

sight / vision

anders nilsen's story "the gift"
in the best american comics 2006
is stark and ambitious
without being tidy or pretentious.
i can't seem to avoid
reading and rereading it
smoothing and resmoothing
the thick white pages
with the palms of my hands,
a sort of reverent gesture.

smell / olfaction

scent my second job is now
with a custom perfumer.
today i labeled and dipped
132 thin strips of paper
in cucumber, teak, and fennel.

hearing / audition

atlas shouldering the world I found that where the world was closest to my ears, I could hear everything. I could hear conversation, parrots squawking, donkey's braying. I heard the rushing of underground rivers and the crackle of fires lighted. Each sound became a meaning, and soon I began to de-code the world.

Listen, here is a village with a hundred people in it, and at dawn they take their cattle to the pastures and at evening they herd them home. A girl with a limp takes the pails over her shoulders. I know she limps by the irregular clank of the buckets. There's a boy shooting arrows -- thwack! thwack! into the padded hide of the target. His father pulls the stopper out of a wine jar.

Listen, there's an elephant chased by a band of men. Over there, a nymph is becoming a tree. Her sighs turn into sap.

Someone is scrambling up a scree slope. His boots loosen the ground under him. His nails are torn. He falls exhausted on some goat grass. He breathes heavily and goes to sleep.

-- jeanette winterson, weight

alliteration & self-righteous indignation

my best friend's brother let me borrow
a copy of broke-ass stuart's v.2,
a hilarious, helpful, and homemade
alterna-guidebook zine.
i wasn't surprised to find
it doesn't include
bayview/hunter's point,
the broke ass-est
neighborhood in sf.

the night max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another

mischief of one kind
the boy i work with was sick today, and tired.
i plopped him down on a cot, shared a snack,
and read where the wild things are with him.
he loves it, because it shows max being bad
and standing on books. also, he gets to yell
"BE STILL" and "let the wild rumpus start!"
i love it because it is, bar none, the best
children's picture book ever written.
also, i get to yell "BE STILL" and
"let the wild rumpus start!"

what a priviledge it is
to have a drowsy kid
snuggled into my shoulder,
to be given the chance to
create anew with him
the timeless and cozy ritual
of a book before bed.

wednesday whoo!

instead of doing laundry
and going to the library
i ate a fried banana
at chilli cha cha
and went and to see
a show at the hemlock.
i am no music connoisseur,
but i love going to shows.
i blame my clueless
attraction to live music
on my first love who dragged
me to every decent all-ages show on the eastside,
and sometimes, if i could get a curfew waiver, in downtown seattle.
i'm not picky, but i'm especially a sucker for
any band with a hot drummer and some fiddle playin'.
sometimes, i like to raise a ruckus, drink champagne,
and swing from chandeliers. i'm not flattering myself
when i say i know i am personally responsible
for this phrase in skeletonbreath's bio:
The crowds were rowdier, noisier. We liked it.
despite the fact that the degenerate art ensemble
is designed to induce an instantaneous psychotic break
and did happen to include some violin, i was bored.
it isn't their fault. on nights like this, when i try to prove
to myself that i'm super-spontaneous
and go out right after work,
i find that the combination of a sensible sweater,
an invisible yet potent layer of cheez-its and drool,
and an unwieldy backpack full of unreturned library books,
all conspire to remind me
that i'm the least rock and roll chick
i've ever met.

suggestion box

i am headed to the library tonight
looking for interesting non-fiction.
any suggestions, dear readers?

a.k.a. "the texian campaigne"

antiques roadshow trunk logo
my best friend found the antiques roadshow on itunes.
watching it, i decided trunks, or "blanket boxes"
should categorically be banned from the show.
there's just too many of the damn things
and in the end they're all just
boxes for blankets.
why did people in the olden days
have so many blankets?
and why did they keep them
in so many boxes?
watching them get appraised is worse
than watching anything else
in the universe get appraised
"well, maryanne, this piece does appear
to be box-shaped and made of wood;
it definitely was suitable
for storing blankets in,
in fact, the people who originally
owned it propbably did just that."
after a segment on a "blanket box"
even ugly-expensive plates
that commemorate the mexican-american war
seem positively scintillating.

aerie tuesday

girls like me for the second time in a week,
as i was watching veronica mars
in my p.j. pants and hoodie,
and chatting about it with my girlfriends,
i had to watch a commercial
consisting of chicks watching veronica mars,
in their p.j. pants and hoodies,
and chatting about it with their girlfriends.

american eagle, first, thanks for inventing
a whole line of clothing designed
for wearing while watching televison,
then airing your commercials on televison.
now i know that i am not alone.

second, thanks for starting a blog
[excerpted below, for those who balk
at following a link that surely leads
down the path to eternal damnnation.]
just like me and all my cool friends have,
so we can write about television.

but most of all, american eagle,
thanks for opeing up a whole new
world of cringe-tabulous self-loathing.
i'm going to relax, recline, get comfy, and stay awhile.

Welcome to aerie, a comfy meeting place where we’ll happily stay busy providing the soundtrack and the look of your life. So, recline. Relax. Be comfortable…in your own skin. It’s all about comfy cozy dorm wear, irresistible intimates, and great company. Like to keep a pulse on what’s new in entertainment? Visit us for updates about the latest news about your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. Also, find out about the cool aerie promotions going on at your local AE store. We’ll let you know about amazing sweepstakes, inside information about your favorite singers, actors and writers, plus exclusive music and videos. It never stops here at aerie. So, get comfy and stay awhile. There’s a lot in store… just for you.

the soup

photobooth
the boy i work with and i
celebrated columbus day
by going to the zoo,
which he insisted on calling
"the soup." his favorite animals
were the gorillas, the ice cream,
and the photo booth.

strong on dragons

i'd give my right arm for one of these original etchings Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon's lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.

my best friend is revisiting
the chronicles of narnia
and i had the great pleasure
of reading her two chapters
from the voyage of the dawn treader.
i tried to channel my dad
(who does reepicheep's voice
better than anyone else
in the entire world)
and refused to make it
"a triple chapter night."
it was past her bedtime.

george & martha

One Saturday morning, George wanted to sleep late.
"I love sleeping late," said George.
But Martha had other ideas.
She wanted to go on a picnic.
"Here she comes!" said George to himself.

my best friend just gave me the hefty yellow hardcover
george and martha; the complete stories of two best friends.
maurice sendak's stunning forward, james marshall, wicked angel,
is a quick overview of picture books as an art form
and an ode to his dear friend. read it online here.

who wants to go see ramblin' jack elliott with me tomorrow? anyone? please?

battling past the port-a-potties
at hardly strictly bluegrass,
i chided myself for forgetting
how easy it is for a girl alone
to feel invisible in crowd.
every time i go out by myself,
which is often, the cliche
smacks me in the face,
but never more blatantly than it did today.
everybody had beer, blankets, chairs, and children.
they were all stopping with no warning
to wave "hi" to their distant buddies,
or elbowing their way in half-dancing
clumps towards the stage.

but after i staked my claim
at one of the less popular stages,
sprawled out on the grass,
and closed my eyes,
it was all about
the saturday sunshine,
and the banjos.
with them came
unemcumbered joy.
even the blue angels buzzing
by were just conspiring
to prove that i was alive
and here and happy,
buddies and blankets be damned.

i even overheard a guy on a cell phone
say loudly i have a love/hate
relationship with solitude
and eyes still closed, grinned wider...
right before he tripped over my head,
catching me, hard, in the cheek with his boot
and walking on without even checking
what had caused him to stumble.
me too,
my friend,
me too.

book reports

my favorite sister says
everyone skips
long essay-posts
on books, and i think
she's right.

chelsea handler's my horizontal life:
chelsea's a smart girl, and very funny on tv,
but on paper she just comes across as an alcoholic slut,
totally oblivious to how boring and mean she comes across.

When I told Ivory the next morning about how small his penis was, she said, "Gosh Chels, you didn't need to leave him there, he could have been good at other things."
"Like what?" I asked her. "Math?"

jeanette winterson's lighthousekeeping:

heavy-handed and beautiful,
all about stories and storytelling,
it secretly makes me believe in magic
and poetry again. especially, babel,
the dark priest who tortures his dull wife,
but is capable of love two months out of the year,
who discovers a fossilized seahorse cave,
and keeps two diaries.

Tell me a story, Pew.
What story, child?
One that begins again.
That's the story of life.
But is it the story of my life?
Only if you tell it.

i (heart) explorers

redwood richard preston's article "tall for its age"
in the current new yorker, about
surveying a record-setting redwood
is refreshingly vivid,
without those listy bits
you have to skip
in most new yorker articles.
it makes science and trees
and climbing trees for science
sound so boyishly charming
and matter of fact
at the same time,
sort of like
shakleton.

truth & beauty, finally

i've been trying to write a post on
anne patchett's book, truth & beauty
about her friendship with lucy grealy
for weeks now.
here are the basics.

lucy grealy was my poetry teacher, briefly
until she dissapeared, leaving vague instructions
with her favorite student, like
"meet before breakfast, drink champagne,
and finish the john ashbery."

she wrote our evaluations,
i read her book, autobiography of a face,
then when i returned to school,
she was dead, just like that.
later, other people i knew briefly,
were dead, just like that,
one after another.

reading about lucy the first time was invasive.
i didn't know how i would look her in the eye.
me, a stupid freshman, party to her childhood memories,
her sex life, her ruthless self-examination.
it didn't seem fair.

reading about her the second time
was exponentially more invasive.
i didn't read truth & beauty, because i wanted
to read what everyone had described as an excellent book.
i wanted to know everything i could about lucy.
i wanted all the details, her intimate moments
set down on paper by her best friend.

because when the other people
i kind of knew died, i was lost
in the heirarchy of grief.
you can't "get to know"
somebody after they're dead.
even though that's all i wanted,
suddenly, to get to know these people.
because of one fact, death,
i knew it was no longer my right.

reading this book i learned a lot about lucy,
just has i had expected,
and i felt really creepy, nosing around,
just as i had expected,
but at least it gave some closure to,
the strange guilt and tension leftover
from mourning for people i'd hardly known.

as a consequence, i felt extra super creepy
when anne patchett wrote about her disgust
for readers who use lucy's writing
and her life, as a sort of cathartic
one-size-fits-all narrative
of their own suffering,
as self-help.
whoops.

despite the cringeiness of the whole thing,
the book also made me want to be
anne patchett when i grow up.
first, because of her writing.
it isn't effortlessly lyrical.
it is the work of a skilled
and practiced writer
struggling to say something
both honest and tender
about somebody she loved.

more importantly, i want to be her
because of the kind of friend she is.
i think i'm drawn to her so much because
i'm in a very 'esther' mood lately.
she's a fierce and practical sidekick,
ready to defend your artful memior
against the bourgeoisie self-pity
that would make it into a
protracted tabloid feature,
ready to organize your closets, your unopened mail,
to chaperone the crowds at your hospital bed.

"I'm going to write a book about my friends," Lucy said to me one afternoon after dispatching Sophie and Ben for fresh magazines and a milkshake. "I have the most extraordinary friends. I've never really understood why everyone has been so good to me, and now I can interview them, talk to them and see." Then she added as a gift, "I'll write a whole chapter about you."

"I could write a whole book about you," I said, and laughed.

gross

braff cake the only problem with scrubs
is zach braff, but he is a big problem.
he's annoying and glib and whiney,
sickly sweet, like generic frosting.
so, i'm ashamed to admit
i stayed home sick all day,
bought two whole cakes at safeway,
both covered in gobs
of unsatisfying fluff,
and watched hour after
hour after hour of scrubs.

limbo

my epiphany throne it was as though i had begun
taking a new medication
and one of the side effects was inertia.
-augusten burroughs, possible side effects

the full post,
including more quotes,
wacky chit-chat,
an epiphany,
francis scott key,
and much much more!

mr. meaty

one minute you're watching
a little lighthearted tween fare,
and the next minute you're clutching
your best friend's shoulder
with all your might,
mouth agape,
unable to rip your gaze
from the most grotesque
terrifying and nonsensical spectacle
ever made in the name of nick tv.
excuse me, i have to go scoop
my own eyeballs
out with a rusty spoon.

avatars

virtual sally & virtual me
i once honored my hero, sally sugarman,
by including her digital doppelganger
in my geektastic lecture on the sims II.
it tickles me pink me that
joe has done the same for me.
i'm now officially a kick-ass
world of warcraft babe!!!!!!1!111!1111!

hoodrats & guttersnipes with a hint of burlesque

i pulled on my scarface t-shirt,
employed my "least charming
hygiene shortcut,"
(according to my best friend
putting baby powder in your hair
to make it look less greasy
doesn't count as "grooming.")
shoved on my $2 chinatown slippers,
(baby-doll pink, the toe bejeweled
by sequined flowers)
and forced myself, for once,
out of the house on a saturday night.
inspired by rollergirls,
my best friend my roommate and i had bought tickets
to the sf roller derby final smackdown,
as a surprise for a friend's birthday.
you have to understand that i grew up
homeschooled, christian, and overseas...
without a television. the whole "fitting in"
thing has always been a little beyond me.
i still have to study social interaction
with a tediously anthropological eye,
like an eight year old with aspergers.
in any crowd i'm wide-eyed, looking for clues.
roller derby is a sport, and a celebration
of sexy and powerful chicks,
but it is also an impressive exercise
in a certain fine-tuned aesthetic.
the players wore fishnets, fake blood,
and clever jerseys, e.g. "the mathmortician."
the crowd tended toward the dirty
end of the hipster spectrum,
less stella-mccartney-does-macys
and more midnight-breakfast-at-bennington.
the cheerleaders, mostly men with soul patches.
the program, basically a zine.
the beer, pabst.
stir in some aging butch couples
in collapsible forest-green camping chairs,
and some half-time capoeira
and you have the makings of a very
san francisco style.
i wish i could say
i felt right at home.
i didn't.
but i was surpised to find,
i looked the part.

touched by an angel

i am an angel
trying to nail down the perfect sides
to go with my 12-piece bucket coupon,
"feed the team," at kfc.com,
i came face to face with this image,
fresh, innocent, and all-american,
but still sumptuous...
like roma downey before
she mutilated her face
and started dressing like a two-bit whore.

NPR

i listen to KUOW every night.
a steady stream of commentary
not generated by my own OCD prone brain
seems to distract me enough to sleep.
especially diane rehm.
she's my favorite lullaby.
since i leave it on all night,
i often awake in the morning
to descriptions of famine and torture.
luckily, this morning i awoke to
this american life, a longtime favorite of mine.
i once made an audible playlist,
a nice well-rounded selection
of what the show has to offer, for a boy,
a kind of mix tape from an NPR junkie.
i'm glad that i can no longer remember
if it was the boy who broke up with me
for "thinking too much."
you, dear reader, can't break up with me,
so please have a listen to any of these beauties.

privacy

my favorite sister called me, pissed,
because for her upcoming trip across india
she had to get a new passport
and it has an RFID tag in it.
now, not only can she not
wear her gel-bra on the airplane,
but bad guys can tell she's a u.s. citizen,
not just by her blue eyes, blond hair, and accent,
but also by the radio signals her passport is emitting.

a failure to communicate

the episode begins with the famous first words of john
and ends with a very "classic oz" apocalyptic monologue.
r.i.p. also classic oz is the narrative frame linking them,
a basic and murky media history lesson,
laced with doom and muddled symbolism,
taking stabs at all sorts of ideas
over shots of prisoners
talking, screwing, or shiving each other.
don't get me wrong, i love it,
because every once in awhile
the mish-mashing and vernacularizing and philosophizing
come together perfectly, and say something true,
in a particular way, that just pierces you.

for example, mid-way through this episode
the show comments on television
itself, which is always eerie.
the narrator, a character
resurrected only for the viewers,
moves through a crowd of oblivious
prisoners watching television,
and looks out through the screen:

Mid-way through the 20th century, man wants communication without communication! He wants to sit in his living room and watch people in a box...fall in love, work, sing, golf, cry, fuck and fuck up. Television! A one way conversation between you and the world, where the world does the talking! Like God, man can finally create man in his own image and then kick back and watch all sorts of shit hit the fan.

-oz, season 6, episode 4

risk

a few weeks ago
without hesitation
i stepped off a cliff
and the wind caught me.
thanks to a friend
of the kind pilot
who took me up
i now have proof.
digital cameras!
flying!
media and my life!
whee!

tis the season

election advent right after i left
my favorite sister
at the oakland airport,
i arrived home to find
that the present she ordered
from gerrymander.com
(via boingboing)
had just arrived.
it is an advent calendar,
but for election day.
i'm glad it will nag me
into figuring out where,
after all my wandering,
i am allowed to
or supposed to
vote.

big fish in a small pond

i'm a huge fan of pro-dominatrix mistress matisse.
though she is something of a celebrity
in the kinky blogger community,
it isn't really worth mentioning
in mixed company
that i bumped into her
at the folsom street fair,
but it made my weekend.

...sorry?...

diego and eva
matador. not a movie i recommend
watching with your siblings.
unfortunately, my best friend and i
did just that. she brought her brother.
i brought my sister. my sister who is afraid
of blades, to a movie about bullfighting
and orgasmic fatal stabbings, to a movie
that opens with a painfully long shot
of antonio banderas jerking off.
he's doing it with a television propped
between his ankles, to a montage of what you assume
are extremely twisted and bloody clips
from a number of different horror movies.
later, you discover, they are in fact clips
from matador itself. i could talk to
my old media studies advisor, sally sugarman,
for hours about all the implications of this movie,
but i couldn't think of a single word
to say to my sister afterward.

or lucky squared?

my favorite sister is in town
and that means we're two times lucky!

why are these damn things so addictive?
it must be the awesome vending machines
with the huge colorful buttons.

wandering barefoot in the port-a-potty

although "wandering barefoot along the shore"
is the ultimate big-budget feel-good summer hit,
(you can't go wrong with walking in the sand,
relaxing under the palms, wading along the shore,
splashing in the waves, and sailing in the bay.)
"shades of vanilla"
has the makings of a modern masterpiece.
its fresh, yet timeless, sense of nuance
comforts without lulling.
unfortunately, after the early, slightly crunchy
brilliance of "vanilla nut cake"
the denouement just feels cheap.
[spoiler warning: plot and/or ending details follow.]
creamy vanilla, vanilla nut cake, french vanilla, vanilla nectar, vanilla taffy

deal

i have left my favorite sister
and my best friend in the other room
to watch deal or no deal.
it is reassuring to hear them both
screaming HIT THE BUTTON HIT THE BUTTON!!
as i write. we all watched the beginning
of the new season of the american office together.
the american office is funny,
the "conflict resolution" episode hooked me,
but when i hear the theme song
i miss the british office so badly.
it is like i'm in some victorian romance
and through several convoluted
drawing room misunderstandings
somehow got engaged to the kinder,
but slightly less attractive,
younger brother of my true love.

halloween 2006

hott british mod schoolgirl in a spate of boredom
several months ago
i clicked almost every
"order this free" link
at catalogs.com.
these people
really understand
niche markets!
don't get me wrong
i loved perusing
my pool filter options,
and learning all about
archival boxes,
but i was glad to see
my forplay halloween 2006
sexy costume catalogue
had arrived. i'll save
"santa's punk rock girl"
for christmas 2006, and be a
"british mod school girl"
for halloween 2006.
not only do you
get a union jack tie
but it is the obvious
budget schoolgirl option.

but its prettier and less long-winded

my favorite sister recommends
the online photo-comic a softer world,
because it has "lots of lowercase, like you."

life & style

i can always count on you
for a little "decolletage" & "canoodling."

a pill saved is a pill earned

h_adach_? excedrin (e)(e)2 go! the pain stops. you don't.
this was wrapped around
my morning cup of coffee,
to keep it from burning my hands.
if you look closely you will see
there are two coated capsuls
of aspirin & caffeine attached.
i am saving them
for the withdrawal headaches
i get when i can't afford
my morning cup of coffee.

golden oldies

golden girls
life is cozy again.
each roommate dressed up
as the golden girl
she most resembles.
we ate cheesecake
and watched the show.
i was given the honor
of being sofia for the night,
but our blanche was dressed
to the nines, our rose
was ready with her stories,
and our dorothy had her
stern face down pat.
which golden girl are you?

half life

Second Life Time: 11:00:00 PM
Total Residents: 729,294
Logged In Last 60 Days: 313,981
Online Now: 3,564
US$ Spent Last 24 Hrs: 391,259

i just spent the evening with a scientist.
halo and second life are both games.
i call the sims 2 my fake life.
for whatever reason,
i asked my best friend
how her "half life" was going.
then, i got out a green camping chair,
set it up beside the computer,
and i did what i do best,
watch my best friend play video games
and talk with her about what they mean.
i was fascinated with the in-game escorts.
you pay them with linden dollars,
which you buy using real dollars.
the escorts can be anything,
a naughty schoolgirl or a whip-wielding mistress,
because they can just change skins.
the cheap ones sell what you would expect,
and the expensive ones sell the GFE
[that's the "girlfriend experience"
for those of you not fluent in hooker.]
you can float in the game, though,
like in grand theft auto
with the jet pack cheat,
like in my favorite dreams.

say "lunchables 'mess with your mouth' mini-burgers with free sour tongue-teasing fizz" three times fast

lunchables 'mess with your mouth' mini-burgers with free sour tongue-teasing fizz
why write my own post
about the experience of eating
lunchables "mess with your mouth"
mini-burgers
with free sour tongue-teasing fizz,
when demonbaby's post, complete with photo essay,
about the expience of eating
lunchables "mess with your mouth"
turkey and american stackers
with free sour tongue-teasing fizz,
says it all?

tongue twister database

viva pedro!

i don't normally sleep with guys
tonight was a perfect indian summer evening,
warm, but with the crisp smell of fall.
my best friend and i dogded the meth addicts on the L-taraval
and went to see the law of desire at the castro theater.
how almodovar manages to make such over-the-top
characters seem so human is beyond me.
i laughed and gasped at each shocking plot twist,
glad that all the saturday-night gays
were out to laugh and gasp with me.
i'll never see antonio banderas
in quite the same way ever again.

green apple

i buy graphic novels
like summer blonde
because they make me feel o.k.
with being alone & kind of creepy.
used, of course.

lake wobegon, my hometown

when i was a kid we didn't have a t.v.
so we'd all gather around the radio
on sunday nights to listen to prarie home companion
and eat fresh popcorn and slices of apple and cheese.

clinton vs. carter

u.s.a. because i was young, with parents who still
voted for jimmy carter (write-in) each election,
i wasn't paying attention during the clinton presidency,
until the scandal hit, and then i was disgusted,
because my parents were disgusted. also, i didn't get
why everyone kept saying that clinton
was so handsome and charismatic.
he just looked middle-aged and yucky to me.
after several years of bush, i caught clinton
on the daily show and instantly got it.
he was so relaxed, so smart, so well-spoken,
so funny, so tall, so presidential...
i wanted him back!
david remnick's profile of clinton,
the wanderer, starts out much the same way,
nostalgic and gushing, but by the end
of it clinton sounds like
everybody's embarrassing dad,
unable to turn off the hammy
monologues even if he wanted too,
oblivious to others' discomfort,
reveling in the spotlight, real or imagined.
also, his post-presidency so far
has been ambitious, but annoying
in comparison to jimmy carter's
quiet, but relentless, work
toward peace and human rights.

dear abby

everybody, including my relatives, roommates, and my boss,
seems to think i should get a cell phone
for the exact same reasons that i don't want one,
namely, the ability to get in touch with me at all times.
i've had a cell phone, and it seemed to create more hassles
than it solved. also, i got addicted to text messaging
and it ate up all my favorite eavesdropping and reading time
on the bus. what should i do? is a pager too passe?
i wouldn't mind people assuming i'm a drug dealer.
sincerely,
not an early adopter

i wish he was my cousin

my future husband after a long hard day
i wasn't up for any of veronica mars'
shiny self-confident sleuthing,
but then my best friend told me
the boy i'm in love with from
arrested development
was in the episode she was starting,
charmingly titled "the rapes of graff."
let me tell you,
he didn't disappoint...
of course i'll always have a special place
in my heart for my first love, bill.

retardation celebration

jerri i came home today exhausted.
the kid i work with,
who has down syndrome,
beat the crap out of me all day.
as soon as i told my best friend
she launched into a frighteningly well-rehearsed speech:

first off, the retarded don’t rule the night. they don’t rule it – nobody does. and they don’t run in packs. and while they may not be as strong as apes, don’t lock eyes with ‘em, don’t do it. puts ‘em on edge. they might go into berserker mode, come at you like a whirling dervish, all fists and elbows. you might be screaming, ‘no, no, no!’ – all they hear is, ‘who wants cake?’ Let me tell you something: they all do. they all want cake.
kudos to her for memorizing long passages from strangers with candy
with the hope that someday, just someday, they would come in handy.

d’accord

david sedaris It’s funny the things that run through your mind when you’re sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers. Suicide comes up, but, just as you embrace it as a viable option, you remember that you don’t have the proper tools: no belt to wrap around your neck, no pen to drive through your nose or ear and up into your brain. I thought briefly of swallowing my watch, but there was no guarantee I’d choke on it.
-david sedaris, new yorker article in the waiting room

two songs

weird al & busta
morning, babysitting:
kids sing along
to weird al yankovic & raffi.
afternoon, at work:
kids dance along
to busta rhymes & chris brown.
now i've got an unwelcome and ungainly
baby beluga/run it mashup
stuck in my head.
it goes a little somethin' like this:

baby beluga in the deep blue sea,
swim so wild and you swim so free.
baby beluga in the deep blue sea,
swim so wild and you swim so free.
is the water warm? is your mama home?
is ya man on the flo? if he ain't...let me know
let me see if you can run it, run it
girl indeed i can run it, run it
let me see if you can run it, run it
girl indeed i can run it, run it

here i was at last...

my best friend has an ankle tattoo
based on an ed ruscha piece.
i finally saw his work in her book
they called her styrene, etc.
the main feeling i had was a sense
that i had seen these before,
in important museums
and that now if i went
to an important museum
and saw one, i could probably
identify it at a distance
to whoever i am with.
"oh, ed ruscha!"
it reminded of when i was maybe seven
at my uncle's house, looking at his
coffee table book on impressionism.
he showed me a page full of ballerinas stretching.
"want to know a secret?" he asked.
"if you want to be cool,
when you see tutus in a picture,
say 'oh, degas!'
like you just met your best friend
after a long vacation."

see also this american life's a little bit of knowledge; modern jackass (4 1/2 minutes)

perpetual huddle

Sunday, January 25, 2009

goodreads widget

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

retcon

Sunday, August 12, 2007

sunday afternoon

Friday, August 10, 2007

aug. 13 new yorker pg. 26

The Kingfisher

no duh

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

lesson plan

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

r.i.p. gracie

Saturday, June 23, 2007

A-

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

block quote: totally forgetting

Saturday, June 16, 2007

the year of the bellydance

who's prissy now?

Thursday, June 14, 2007

non-alcoholic... i can feed it to my kids

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

block quote: i could do that much

Friday, June 08, 2007

today on aol

Thursday, May 31, 2007

buy a dead squirrel on ebay

Monday, May 28, 2007

on the same page

Sunday, May 27, 2007

i love smoking

Saturday, May 26, 2007

skip the speech-bubbles

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

they do?

Sunday, May 20, 2007

hankie parachute

amazon.com

Sunday, May 13, 2007

walkman time capsule

Friday, May 11, 2007

mother's day

Thursday, May 10, 2007

homesick

Friday, May 04, 2007

loyal porter

Friday, April 27, 2007

bad poetry and good

Thursday, April 26, 2007

april

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

my first baby box

Sunday, April 22, 2007

dad's night

Friday, April 20, 2007

punch, roll, & crimp

Monday, April 16, 2007

taste / gustation

happy anniversary

Saturday, April 14, 2007

psychic dojo

inbox: upcoming

star trek: the next generation

Thursday, April 12, 2007

terrible twos

Monday, April 09, 2007

aunt flo's nut cake

Saturday, April 07, 2007

you are the chosen one

Thursday, April 05, 2007

hindsight

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

boring zine wins me over

Sunday, April 01, 2007

classic rock

block quote: we cannot skip

Saturday, March 17, 2007