Hee hee, Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters. Just announced. I did a full write-up with press-release excerpts and a link to the book trailer (man, I hate book trailers, but this one's kinda fun) for the AVC site, so I won't reproduce it all here. And I still haven't even read Pride And Prejudice And Zombies. But I'm already wondering what the next one will be. Emma And Mummies?

I'm-a feelin': pleased

I do not know where my head is at these days. I also don't know where the game is. But wherever the game is, my head is not in it. I had about six months straight of weird energy out of nowhere: I ate healthily and minimally, joined a club and worked out almost every day, walked two miles home for fun on a regular basis, went new places and tried new things, made wacky plans, started reading voluminously again after a couple of years of lacking the energy or focus, started a new hobby, reorganized my house and my life, bought new clothes, and generally got things in order.

Now that energy has deserted me, and I feel like I'm flailing through soup most days. If it's depression, it's a very mild version. I don't hate myself and feel like everything is worthless and awful, I'm just tramping through routines without any taste for them, or any will to change. I crave sugar half the time, and want to sleep the other half. I'm staying home nights, and not getting anything done when I do.

And I'm not finishing things. I've started half a dozen minor posts here and not actually completed any of them, even though some of them only needed to be a couple of lines long. Others were stories at the time, but now could be reduced to only a couple lines long, because they don't matter any more. Here are some of them:

• On July 3, Cass and I went downtown with chairs and sat on the Adler promontory and watched the fireworks about two feet from the steep drop-off into the harbor in back of the Shedd Aquarium. The fireworks were awesome, but I think better yet was that it was a perfect night, and we just sat and talked for hours, something we don't generally do enough. Around 10:30 a weird bird I'd never seen before started circling the area, coming to hang out within a few feet of us, then flying up and down the harbor, occasionally fishing. It looked like a penguin-seagull hybrid. According to my bird books, it really seems like it was a thick-billed murre, which I'd never heard of before. But if so, it was a zoo escapee or it was really lost, because those are Newfie birds that just don't get to Chicago. Still, everything I've read about murres emphasize their penguin heads and diving style, and everything else that looks remotely similar in the books has a bright orange or yellow beak. The books say there wouldn't be a murre in our area, but as my mom's fond of saying, animals don't always bother to read the guidebooks about them.
  
  
• I spent an enjoyable evening recently playing this ridiculously adorable little online shooter, which takes the currently hot idea of achievements and upgrades to its logical extent — you have to earn points to upgrade everything about the game, including the title screen, the save system, the achievements system, the sound, the graphics, and even the copyright info. The actual game, once upgraded, turns out to be no big whoop, but the actual purchasing of the game components with game points is surprisingly fun.
  
  
• I hate one of our local librarians, a cranky, nosy, obstructionist lady who goes out of her way to put bureaucratic barriers in people's way, and only shows signs of cheer when she's telling a kid she can't check out books because she doesn't have documented proof that the uncle who signed off on her library card is her legal guardian, or telling someone with a question that she couldn't possibly take time to answer him because she's far too busy with other people. She seems to hate people, her job, and the world, she's about as nasty to everyone as she can get away with, and she's criminally slow. Here's the bizarro thing: I've discovered that the ruder I am to her, the nicer she is to me. When I got pissed at her over the denying-a-child-a-card thing and spent our whole transaction glaring at her, she wanted to chat about my books. If I approach her civilly and try to talk to her while checking things out, she glares or sniffs or pretends I'm not talking, but if I glare through her and answer her questions with irritated grunts and never make eye contact, she always chats me up. It's the weirdest thing.
  
  
• Most days, I take the last express train south. And most days, I wish I hadn't, because there's always the same driver, a heavily accented woman who insists on supplementing all the pre-recorded announcements with her own, which are repetitive and piercingly, painfully loud. I cringe every time she speaks. I don't know if she just makes a point of cranking the PA all the way up, or the speakers are just really powerful on this train, but every time she talks, it hurts, and I want to find her and hit her until the hurting stops. LADY WE CAN SEE IT'S A PURPLE LINE TRAIN YOU DO NOT NEED TO ANNOUNCE IT TWICE AT EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN STOP.

So yeah, nothing too exciting going through my not-in-the-game head. I keep wondering if I should try something dramatic and different to get myself out of my rut, but I've been on a lot of vacations lately and have had a lot of fun and shouldn't be rutty at all, so maybe I just need a really long nap to refill my energy reserves. Say, three or four days in bed.

I'm-a feelin': drained

I just this moment remembered something the anal, correcty boy-cousin I talked about in my last post said to me while I was in Alabama:

"I have CDO. That's like OCD, except it's in proper alphabetical order, the way it should be."

I'm-a feelin': and also moan

So this happened the other day:

Me, to two teenage boy-cousins who are playing a videogame: We're leaving for the swimming pool at 2. Are you guys coming?

Older boy-cousin: Are we getting ready at 2, or leaving at 2?

Me: We're out the door at 2. So at this point you have — [Looks at digital clock right behind them.] — 13 minutes to get ready.

OBC: Fourteen.

Me: That clock right behind you says — 

OBC: [Points at presumed clock in a corner of the room I can't even see.] THAT one's atomic.

Me: [Rolls eyes.] Well, we're leaving at 2.

[FIN.]

---

Now, this entire exchange could be read a few different ways. There is a profound anal streak running through some members of our extended family, an itchy this-must-be-precise-or-it-isn't-RIGHT type of OCD that is probably the reason I became a proofreader and an editor. I had it when I was a wee child — there are cassette tapes of me and thefirethorn singing a Sesame Street song, and me earnestly insisting that the song wasn't done until we'd done it as I'd seen it done on the show — meaning with the before-and-after verbal exchanges between the characters. (I did both parts.) ’Thorn's 5-year-old son has the same disease, and will pointedly correct her about tiny changes in song lyrics when they sing together. Or he'll ask her a question, and then correct her answer, with "Actually, it's…" So it's possible that OBC was just lining up all his ducks in a properly orderly row.

At the same time, OBC apparently asked ’Thorn at another point during our trip whether other nuclear families were as obsessed with punctuality as his. Well, I know mine isn't, but we don't have three adults and 11 kids to wrangle, and no matter who else is ready, we aren't leaving until Dad feels like it, so being at the door at precisely 2:00:00 isn't nearly as much of a "making 13 other people wait" issue. So maybe he was just bargaining for 60 more perfectly legitimate, sanctioned-by-atomic-clock seconds of his videogame. Or even responding to my poking his punctuality buttons by out-punctualitying me.

But in the end, I kind of suspect it was just a knee-jerk, utterly automatic "I'm smarter than you and I know more" kind of correction. Because that also runs in the family. Some of us are more conscious of it than others, and some of us are more theatrical about it than others, and some of us are more teacherly about it than others, ahem Thorn, but the truth is that we're kind of a bunch of smart, smart-ass geeks with an embarrassing Martin Prince streak, and the urge to wave our hands in the air and cry "Call on me, teacher, I'm ever so smart!" is painfully compulsive. And in a house full of smart people, the drive to be the smartest — even if only for a second, in the form of "I know this one thing better than you" — is pretty strong too.

So I saw a lot of this kind of one-upsmanship while I was in Alabama. And while it occasionally made me want to whap someone upside the back of the head, it also made me wonder how often I do this, and how often it's this obnoxious. Just something I should be watching out for.

But now I suddenly wish I'd asked Mr. Smarty-pants why, if the atomic clock is the final arbiter of everything, he bothers having a clearly imprecise, constantly wrong clock in his room.

I'm-a feelin': thoughtful

I've been trying for the past couple days to get enough of a breather to post about what I'm up to, but while it's been easy enough to get time free, it's been harder to collect enough mental capacity to be coherent. I'm still basically an introvert; being around a lot of people and being "on" wears me out fast.

Though this hasn't been nearly as hard as I thought it would be, for various reasons.

I'm currently in Huntsville, Alabama. On Thursday, I flew from Chicago to Nashville, while my cousins modernorpheus and thefirethorn, and Thorn's two boys (age 5 and 2) all flew from Oklahoma City to Nashville. We rendezvoused, rented a car, and drove down here. So that's five people in our party alone. We came to visit my grandma, her youngest son, his wife, and their massive herd o'children: three bio-kids, plus eight adoptees. (Five from Russia, one each from Vietnam, China, and Kazakhstan. The last three are from "disrupted" adoptions, where a family adopted them, then later wanted to give them up again.) Of the 11 adoptees, one got married and moved to Michigan, and another is living on his own in the area. That's still a total of three adults and eight teenagers living in one house even before our five showed up. I was expecting chaos, constant noise, no privacy, and just way too many teenagers.

Instead, I've been impressed and a little shocked by how quiet it gets around here. It isn't that the teenagers are all silent intellectuals, though some of them definitely have the family smarts, and the social awkwardness and know-it-all-itude that comes with it. (Seriously, ours is a family of Army codebreakers and NASA contractors. We ain't dummies.) Instead, there's just a tendency to deal with the crowding by letting everyone make their own walls — periodically everyone retreats into their rooms and a hush falls over the house. With five teenage girls in three rooms, the place reminds me more than a little of my dorm days in college, but in a good way.

What I hadn't really anticipated, and what's been neatest about this whole process, is that the family is fragmented enough that I've been able to get almost everyone on their own for some quality time, and I'm getting to know a group of people we just called The Clan as individuals with personalities and personal tastes and goals. I've been bonding with one of the girl-cousins over beading and jewelry-making, and one over Chinese movies and martial-arts epics, and one over fantasy novels, and with one of the boys over card games, and so forth. We aren't going to be best buds anytime soon, but I actually feel like I'm among family at this point, which I'd worried wasn't going to happen with so many people to deal with, and my tendency to pull away from crowds, especially crowds of people that already know each other.

Though it does kind of help that we're a novelty, the flavor of the month in a group that's spent a lot of time together and has the sibling familiarity-breeds-contempt thing going on. They're all home-schooled, so they see a lot of each other. We're new blood.

At any rate, thefirethorn has said that the little kids can handle about one "adventure" per day, so we've been sticking close to home; our first full day here, the day's adventure consisted of going to Wal-Mart. Today we're going for Chinese food with the adults, then swimming with the teens. The only lasting problem I've had while here is the herding-cats issue; every trip anywhere is a massive production of rounding everyone up over and over and over and over. Which is another reason to stick close to home.

And yet another reason is that it's consistently been 100 degrees outside during the day while we've been here, which gives us all an extra incentive to stay inside by the air conditioning and entertain ourselves, largely by talking to each other. Which I find pretty neat — the idea that in this day and age, there's an entire family that considers talking a form of entertainment. Though day after day of talking is leaving me without much brainpower to spare on posting.

I'm-a feelin': tired

Every year at about this time, I have to go rescue my garden from being eaten by vines. As of two weeks ago, everything had come up (or in the case of some annuals, been put in place) except the morning glory, which was sending up tentative little shoots to wither under the Junuary chill. Then we had one single hot, bright, rainless day on Saturday. Sunday, I came home from Father’s Day obligatories and a stroll through the Custer Street art festival to find the whole front garden being strangled by two-to-four-foot morning-glory vines. I had to unwind half of them and wrap them around the post that’s there for them to climb, and tear out the other half of them, since shoots were coming up a foot away in each direction, in the middle of the lilies and the Solomon’s Seal and other things I don’t want to disappear under a pile of vines. Ripping up fresh green growth goes completely against my nature — I’m no good at cutting plants back normally, because I hate hacking off the newest, tenderest part of a plant — but it is more than a little creepy, the way the vines appear out of nowhere over the course of a day or two, wrap themselves 20 or 30 times around another plant, and then squeeze. It’s like growing a garden of boa constrictors.

In retrospect, I should have taken my one white Threadless T-shirt off BEFORE spending an hour and a half weeding the muddy, buggy, sweaty front and back gardens. Also, bug spray would have been a good idea. But whatevs, I got the weeding done, and it's been needing it for a month. And the morning glories are at bay for the moment.

The Custer Street fair yesterday was amazing. I probably wouldn’t have made it up there if we hadn’t been meeting Cass’ parents to see a movie and get some dinner for Father’s Day — I noticed the fair on Saturday when I was out running errands, but it was blazingly hot and I wasn’t in the mood for walking around in the sun. Saturday night we walked up to Main Street for dinner with Monkey and Mer and asparas and kneelbeforezod, and we walked right through the middle of the closed-down festival, and were surprised at how extensive it was — maybe three square blocks of booths lining both sides of every street—on a couple of the wider streets, there were four rows of booths, forming two alleys between—plus a couple of stages for performances. There were jugglers and magicians wandering around, and giveaway booths for new products, and several face-painting booths, and a lot of people selling junky jewelry and airbrushed T-shirts. And somewhere, someone was making balloon-animal weirdness, because I kept seeing little girls with balloon fairy-wings on their backs, and little boys waving balloon fishing rods attached to balloon fish.

But mostly, there were streets and streets of art. I bought nothing except a white feather carved out of a piece of bone, but I sure enjoyed wandering the streets looking at all the different ways people have of being creative with glass and textiles and paint and pottery and found objects and metal and silk and wood. I less enjoyed the booth selling tacky T-shirts covered with tacky slogans spelled out in tacky rhinestones: The worst was "If you think I'm a bitch, you should meet my daughter." Bleah.

But all in all, I wish we'd had another hour or so there. Something to keep in mind for next year. Also, I wonder how the musical performers for the stages get selected? The ladies singing on the small stage when I was there were pretty talented, but I couldn't help thinking that s00j would have made a better show of it, and sounded better to boot.

I'm-a feelin': pleased

Cass recently expressed an interest in seeing Twilight, just to know what all the world is going on about. I talked to my sister on the phone this morning, and she said she, too, wants to see the movie, largely to see if the filmmakers cut down on the creepiness of the story. Everything she's heard about the series (which she hasn't read any of) makes her not merely hate it with a passion, but despair for our young women, who are clearly being corrupted by fictions that tell them to be desperately grateful for the romantic attentions of abusive, domineering monsters:

Tara: He keeps going on and on and on about how he just wants to eat her, how she's just food to him, and yet she's all "But you don't act on those urges, which means you truly love me." It's ridiculous. It's like you falling in love with a Big Mac.

Me: Yes, but while I might crave Big Macs because they're full of salt and grease, I don't ever actually eat them. Which just proves how deeply and profoundly I must love them. Now I will go and lie about in the sunlight with my skin sparkling like diamonds.

Tara Of course, it is more complicated than that. In this situation, there's also a fish sandwich that's in love with the Big Mac, and trying to lure it away from you. That's even MORE romantic. Sigh!

I'm-a feelin': amused

Every week at the A.V. Club we do a Taste Test of some new or weird product that's caught our eye. Recently, one of our city editors got email from a publicist that wants us to taste test their new line of caffeinated cookies* and brownies, which they're marketing to gamers. Which made me think of another product I recently saw in a comics store: "Mana Energy Potions," a line of energy drinks "made by gamers for gamers." (One of the geekier things I've ever seen; the company website even promises these drinks "will bump your mana or your HP up +160 (real world humans have about 100 mana, by the way).") I suggested we should do a paired taste test.

Josh pointed out that there was another product we could add to the list: Gamer Grub, a "performance snack" that's basically a little foil pouch of trail mix. The big selling point is that you can eat it one-handed by dumping trail mix out of the bag directly into your mouth, without getting grease or crumbs on your keyboard or controller.

And then there's the upcoming World Of Warcraft-themed "game fuel" flavors of Mountain Dew, in Horde Red and Alliance Blue. Put all this ridiculous shit together, and you got yerself a gaming party. I mentioned all this to Chris the other day, and he pointed out that it wasn't as new of a phenomenon as I was thinking; Penny Arcade ranted about it in October of last year.

I'm trying to figure out how I feel about being part of this particular demographic. I'd like to deny that gamers are all about sugary, neon-colored caffeinated beverages and nutrition-free junk food, but I'd be fooling myself. Mostly I just find it a little weird that there are enough of us to be worth marketing specialized foods to. It's like seeing brands of coffee marketed specifically and exclusively to people who play chess, or sunscreen meant for people who fly kites. Granted, I'm saying "us" when I'm really not what any of these marketeers mean when they say "gamers" — they presumably mean people playing WOW for days on end. But that still feels like a narrow segment of the population to me.

I guess I'm mostly just a little sad that they aren't marketing, you know, better stuff to gamers. I guess stuff you're meant to cram into your face one-handed while doing something else that's taking up most of your attention isn't going to be particularly high-end. But man, where's the company marketing fine wine and gourmet chocolate to gamers?

Oh wait, right.

---

* Is it even possible to caffeinate cookies? I thought caffeine broke down at baking temperatures.

I'm-a feelin': amused/disgusted

Sorry about Saturday. I'm really not a fan of the cryptic, emotional LJ post, and I know I startled and worried at least two people, who had perfectly good cause to think I was talking about someone else. I just happened to be doing something on LiveJournal at the time, and I guess I dumped that first reaction in the first place that came to hand. It was inconsiderate.

Finding out that someone you've known for a long time had serious depression issues is remarkably like finding out that he spent years fighting off cancer and you didn't know. Finding out that the fight wound up fatal… the only possible questions are "Where was I when all this was going on, and why didn't I help?" Death always leaves a lot of holes in a lot of lives, but in my experience, suicide leaves a much rawer, more ragged hole that never really heals right. It's just different when they do it on purpose, and — again solely in my experience — it always seems to be marked by a blend of belligerence and defeatism that begs for an answer that it's too late to give. I thought I'd finally gotten over the last one, but that clearly wasn't the case, and I didn't know until I got the news and it made me stupid.

Yes, I'm fine. But I'm done talking about this here. It wasn't all that appropriate in the first place, and it feels less so now. Sorry again for being a bit of an ass.

Aw, FUCK, Rob. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck.

I'm-a feelin': nauseated

• Oh, fandom. You know I love you, but must you dress that way? Really? Ladies, aren't corsets supposed to lift and tighten your boobs rather than present them, collapsed and wobbling, on a flat plate just under your chin? Guys, aren't T-shirts supposed to cover ALL of your dangly stomach bits, and not just the top two-thirds? I know you've loved that T-shirt since you got it at your first Duckon 17 years ago, but both you and that shirt are 17 years older now, and it's time to let it go.
  
  
• I often wind up a little horrified at the degree to which everyone at conventions seems to be kind of a spastic, unsocialized dork. Then I realize that cons turn me into a spastic, unsocialized dork — there's just too much going on, and I flit around saying embarrassing things that I instantly regret and making dumb jokes because everyone else is and not being able to settle on any one place or conversation for long. It's way too much like being a kid full of Pixy Stix.
  
  
• Book stalls at cons used to be exciting, as I learned which of my favorite authors had books out that I didn't know about. Now they're just kind of depressing, letting me know exactly how far I've drifted away from the field. I've never heard of half the authors, and the other half have finished trilogies I didn't even know they'd started. I've been reading a book roughly every three days lately, and I still feel intimidated by the sheer bulk of material out there.
  
  
• Art shows, on the other hand, never change. Dragons, cats with wings, scantily clad fantasy maidens, furries. But this lady's sculptures are marvelous. And there's a lot of interesting chainmaille jewelry.
  
  
• Why is no one selling comics? Do geeks not read comics anymore? Did I miss a bulletin?
  
  
• Seriously, singing Tesla coils. I can't wait for tonight's show.
  
  
• The "build a blinkie" track, which used to consist of folding paper around a little blinking diode thing to make a little origami ship, has this year graduated to soldering and building wearable flashing diode arrays that are way past my engineering understanding. Many people are wearing them, and they're ridiculously neat. I may have to make time to make one today, even if it means cutting into concert time.
  
  
• The themed/open filking was terrific, basically a series of teases and previews for Saturday's (gulp) six-and-a-half-hour lineup of concerts. I'm psyched to get back to that, though my butt is already protesting the thought. Could have done without the guy sitting right behind me who wanted to sing along with everything, though he generally didn't know the tune or the words, and often just dropped in at the end of a line when he figured out what the rhyme was going to be. It was sort of disconcerting (a-heh. So to speak) to have someone sitting behind me quietly contributing a series of off-tempo, off-key words to each song. I would have moved, but I'd already moved once to get away from the door, and the inevitable noise leakage there. Oh, fen.
  
  
• The one actual formal concert I went to last night was by a group called Toyboat, consisting of three electric guitarists and a drummer. One of the guitarists was a really talented guy who also happened to be really cute, with a mop of curly red hair and a face that seemed familiar. I finally realized he reminded me of Rob, an old friend from our Iowa years, someone I haven't seen in nearly a year, and haven't really thought about since then, either. And then we came home at 2 a.m. to a terse email saying that Rob died yesterday, at age 39. What the holy hell? I have no more details than that, and it's really bothering me, but I've been waiting until a decent hour to call people and find out what's going on.

I'm-a feelin': confused

Just now back from day one of Duckon, an interesting little Chicago-area mini-con that Cass and I used to go to every year before we fell out of the habit. This year, I'm back because vixyish and tfabris and s00j and filkertom are all in attendance, and it's going to be one damn singy convention.

But I wasn't expecting that the best concert I heard tonight would be given by a couple of giant Tesla coils.

I always forget that Duckon has an unusually robust mad-science track, often involving the seven-foot-tall Tesla coils. This year (and apparently previous years, though I wasn't there for it) the Tesla coils are singing. The people who built them have apparently figured out how to modulate their output so the sparks they produce sound discrete musical notes — so discrete that they were able to clearly play things like the Empire theme from the Star Wars movies, and the Ghostbusters theme, and Toccata And Fugue In D Minor.



(If you follow that link to YouTube, the guy who put it up — Jeff Larson, one of the coil designers — has a bunch more videos with different music being played. The only thing wrong with the video is that it doesn't really give a sense of scale — these things are about 18 feet apart, and are producing 12-foot bolts of lightning at times. The bolts are also much brighter in real life.)

It's hard to even begin to explain how cool it is to hear music being generated by crackling lightning. Not to mention the actual light show itself. To top it all off, one of the creators repeatedly walked between the coils in a metal suit which conducted the electricity safely into the ground — though at one point he held a 2-by-4 in his hand, and it burst into flame.

These guys (they have a website, though there's nothing much there except a couple of great pictures of the coils in action) are beautiful sciencey lunatics. And they're doing another "concert" Saturday night at 9 p.m. If you're in the Chicago area, I seriously urge you to drop by. They're doing it in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Select in Naperville, just off 88, so you don't have to register for the rest of the con to see them. Tonight's concert was a good 75 minutes long, so I'd say it's worth the drive. Besides, when else are you going to see something like this?

I'm-a feelin': ecstatic

Poop! I knew I forgot something in the roundup of where I've been for the last few days. I completely left off Misericordia, this complex on Ridge that I've driven past approximately a hundred bazillion times, and finally decided to look into. It's apparently a Catholic-run charity that trains and houses developmentally disabled adults, and teaches them life skills. And among other things, they have a bakery, a greenhouse nursery, a gift shop that sells handmade items, and a restaurant, all staffed by their trainees. We went for Sunday brunch, and it was marvelous. The usual sort of breakfast buffet, with a wide variety of choices, including ham and roast beef on the carve, but also an assortment of seriously delicious fresh-baked pastries, and fresh fruit salad, and some fairly random but delicious things, like chilled asparagus vinaigrette. It was one of those meals where we all spent the whole time exclaiming over how good everything was. I want to go back, but there should probably be a restraining order keeping me away from the cinnamon pecan rolls, which were the best I've ever had in a walk.

Afterward, we spent nearly an hour just strolling around the place, which is an immense, beautifully maintained sort of gated community full of fancy little group homes and on-site residencies and community centers and gardens and school buildings. There's a gorgeous little chapel and adjoining garden where they apparently grow commemorative plaques. It's such a gorgeous self-contained community that it's hard to believe something so big, clean, and polished exists in the city, let alone in that area. It's like its own little bubble of magical world. With unlimited helpings of bacon. It doesn't get much better than that.

I'm-a feelin': pleased

So my parents flew into town a week ago today and promptly went on walkabout, traveling around Wisconsin to visit various places and generally not involving me at all, which was fine. Then they came back down to Chicago on Friday and I've spent the past four days with them, largely being stressed and overwrought for a combination of reasons that included miserable allergies and general hormonal wonk. I suspect I wasn't terribly pleasant to be around much of the time. Nonetheless, we did many things together, including the following, in order of most fun to least fun:

• The "tour" of the Eli's Cheesecake Factory. This was ridonkulous. First off, it wasn't really a tour. First we wandered around their café, which had many amazing-looking sandwiches, soups, and desserts, plus sample cups of cheesecake. So we tried four different kinds of cheesecake. Then we watched a slideshow of Eli's history and trivia, presented by a nervous but sweet girl who was probably 16, and who periodically asked trivia questions that amounted to "What did I just now say?" Every time we answered a question right, we got a free pre-packaged piece of Eli's cheesecake. (We ended up with three of them.) Then we were allowed to step out into a walled-off area of the decoration room floor and crane our necks around — we saw ladies speed-dipping slices of cheesecake in chocolate, and another bored-looking lady smacking paddle-loads of cream onto fresh cakes — but since someone on a tour had recently slipped in the production area, we didn't get to see that at all. Then the tour-girl brought out a giant cheesecake and we watched someone cover it with toppings, and the tour-girl asked another "What did I just say?" trivia question, and my mom answered it first and we won the cheesecake. Then they took us back out to the café and… surprise surprise… let us each pick and eat a slice of their fancy gourmet cheesecakes. (We tried Key Lime, Oreo, and Bailey's, which were all, naturally, marvelous.) For $3 apiece, we didn't actually learn much about cheesecakes, except that they're apparently free. I feel honor-bound to mention this adventure to cheesecake fans, given that we paid a total of $9 for a slideshow and about $50 worth of cheesecake. (Also, they apparently have a free cheesecake "tasting buffet" from 11 a.m. - 4 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. Double ridonkulous.)
  
  
• The Threadless warehouse. I've been meaning to do this for a long time now, and Mom gave me the excuse by deciding it would be hugely cool and she wanted to go too. They're having one of their $5 T-shirt sales up through tomorrow, so we went in, waited for a free terminal, and then went through their online catalog and ordered freakin' seven $5 shirts. Then someone went into the back and came out five minutes later with our shirts and a complementary Threadless tote to put them in. I'd thought their warehouse would be, well, warehousey, but it's this huge crazy open space full of pantsless mannequins (at least one of which had a smiley painted on his balls), and weird art, and couches made to look like the back end of vintage cars, and an old Airstream camper for some reason, and a giant TV with conjoined La-Z-Boys and Rock Band instruments scattered around, and it generally looked like the hippest coffeehouse/dive bar in town, but with all the lights turned up. I was so concerned with walking Mom through the selection and ordering process that I didn't even look at their new shirts, which is probably lucky, because now I'm coveting at least three of them. They're producing some beautiful stuff these days. I still want to drop by their actual store.
  
  
• The Lincoln Park Zoo. Nothing new or exciting to report about this — it's free and easily accessible, so we almost always drop by for an hour or two at least when they're in town. I was stressed and overwrought most of the time they were here, and just walking through the zoo with Mom while Dad did his own thing was about as relaxing as it got. Also, it's baby-bunny season. We saw seven of them altogether, placidly cropping grass in or between the actual exhibits. Wee little wiggly noses and tiny round ears!
  
  
• Gethsemane Garden Center. I've been to just about every major greenhouse, garden center, home-improvement store, and nursery in Chicagoland at this point, and I'm convinced this one is the best in terms of selection, health of plants, friendliness, and knowledgeable staff. And very often, in terms of pricing as well. We went multiple times, to get things for me and Cass' mom and eventually for Mom to take home. When Mom visits, she and I always end up puttering in my garden at some point. (Weirdly, in this case, we wound up messing about on Chris' front lawn and in asparas' garden as well.)
  
  
• Home Depot. Not most people's idea of fun, but in this case it meant my father noticing various tiny things wrong with the house and fixing them — a loose towel rack, a hanging set of pots that needed to be mounted in the kitchen, leaky exterior garden hoses, a wiggly bathtub fixture — and hauling us off to Home Depot for screws and washers and whatnot, and then repairing everything in sight. Everyone should have a HandyDad on staff. He keeps easily fixing things I either thought would be a huge pain to fix, or didn't even know could be fixed.
  
  
• Gillson Park and Wallace Bowl. A little ways north of our home is this gorgeous, gigantic park with an outdoor amphitheater. I wanted to go for a walk there and see if we could get a schedule of park events. (Sure enough, there are a ton of free outdoor plays and concerts there throughout the summer, and I'm planning on hitting some of them this year.) It seemed like it'd be a neat place to stroll around — it's right by the beach, too, and within sight of the Baha'i Temple — but as soon as we got there, it started raining, and even though it was temperate and we all had giant umbrellas and it was still a pleasant stroll as far as I was concerned, the parents — who had airily dismissed me when I suggested bringing jackets — both complained that it was freezing and miserable out. So I gave up and we went and ate dinner at 4 p.m.
  
  
• Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park home and studio. My folks are hugely into Frank Lloyd Wright at the moment — one of the things they did without me on this trip was visit Taliesin West — so they were eager to go down to Oak Park, which is full of buildings designed or inspired by him. It's a beautiful area, and looking around at the houses, which are almost all gigantic, majestic, and idiosyncratic — no cookie-cutter neighborhoods there – was enjoyable enough. But I don't really share their interest in him, I was worn-down and overstimulated, and the massive flow of information I didn't really care about was exhausting. After an hour of my mother eagerly telling me depressing Frank Lloyd Wright stories — about the families he formed and abandoned to poverty, the talented people he insulted and dismissed, the abuse he heaped on people who put up curtains or shades or "inappropriate" furniture in his houses, his various irrational prejudices against, say, downspouts to keep his roof from leaking — I was generally of the opinion that he was an overrated, obnoxious brat, and I was tired of oohing and aahing over his work. (Frankly, I find Prairie-style homes profoundly ugly.) And then we went on the tour, and it was 70 minutes of a very excited guide gushing rhapsodically about things I didn't much care about while half the tour-ees (Mom included) put their oars in about things they knew that he wasn't mentioning, and it felt like the world's biggest game of "Call on me, teacher, I'm ever so smart," and I really, really wanted to be elsewhere.

Which is how I unfortunately felt much of the weekend, and I'm only now refinding my feet and kind of wanting a do-over of the parts of the weekend where I was either not mentally present or not emotionally suited for what was going on. But oh well. As we said about 40 times this weekend, "Well, there's always next time."

I'm-a feelin': weary

My parents are visiting, therefore I'm exhausted and cranky.

At least they're reasonably entertaining. Once again they summed up their relationship for me tonight over the course of two minutes:

Mom: …so there was a downy woodpecker that flew in out of nowhere, and I told Sue "There's the woodpecker you asked for," but we stayed a while to see if we saw anything else interesting, and there were cardinals and this one duck with a tuft of feathers on its head, I was going to look it up online and see what it was, but I forgot, and I'm going to go do that in a minute, but anyway, there was this bird and we couldn't figure out what it was, it had a little black mask and a speckled belly, and we checked through all our books and there was nothing like it in there, and we watched it and watched it and couldn't figure it out, until suddenly your father said… [Nudges Dad.]

Dad: "What the hell does it matter? Let's go home."

Mom: That isn't what happened at all.

Dad: Oh. Then maybe you better tell this story.

I'm-a feelin': sleepy

Three short things:

1. At some point over the weekend, a bunch of us were sitting around talking, and attackmonkey was talking about people washing out of the Navy pilot program because they didn't meet the strict size parameters for the cockpits, and if their knees stuck out just a little too much, they could get their legs sheared off under certain conditions. Cass made some comment about "the new FA-Procrustean jet series," and everyone in the room instantly laughed. At that moment, I was profoundly proud of all my friends for getting that joke. Weirdly, while it was funny, I was prouder of them for getting it than of Cass for making it. I gotz smart frenz.
   
   
2. After that initial skunk sighting back in March — my first in three years of living in this house — they've suddenly become common for me. I've never seen that giant adult again, but there's a much younger one who frequently turns up in our front garden. At this point, I consider it just a matter of time before I accidentally step on the poor thing on my way home, and pay the skunky price. It's still a thrill whenever I spot him, though. Tonight, I was coming back from the library and I heard the faintest rustle in the daylillies and I knew exactly what it was, and I held still until the skunk bobbled out of the greenery and wandered away. Maybe, just maybe, I'll manage not to get myself sprayed.
   
   
3. If you haven't seen this fan-made faux Green Lantern trailer yet, you really oughta. It's ridiculously ambitious. I'm putting together an AVC blog post about these kinds of fan trailer projects, like the early fake Phantom Menace and the Thundercats trailer featuring Brad Pitt as Lion-O and Vin Diesel as Panthro. If you've got any more terrific examples of the phenomenon — ones that are good enough to stand out — lemme know, eh?
   
   
   

I'm-a feelin': cheerful

Happy birthday, cassielsander. Thank you for another year of being my anchor, my stability, my common sense, and my love. Here's hoping that the year to come is as much of a gift as the last one was.

I'm-a feelin': lovey

Much as with last year, this year's arrival of the All Candy Expo at our local big-ass convention center was like a group holiday. We went in teams, swapping badges. (I was Genevieve for a day.) But I'm not entirely sure why I went. I've been avoiding anything with refined sugar in it since around October, and I've reached the point where for the most part, sweets and candy don't look or taste particularly good to me; they're tempting only if everyone else is eating them and I feel left out. Which is sort of funny, because I bake stuff for our social gatherings all the time, or buy desserts which I then don't try. So I'm not sure why I wanted a big-ass bag of candy. Maybe just because it was free. Maybe because going over to Candy Expo for two brief hours was a mini-holiday from work. Certainly because I think it's neat to do the tour of the major companies and see all their new products.

Our write-up with those new products went online Friday, and that was a blast to write, even if it was fairly exhausting trying to co-write and edit it while sitting in a book proofing meeting and while on deadline for the rest of the print edition. The big things for the year as far as we're concerned: Mars is coming out with limited-edition Coconut M&Ms and peanut-butter and strawberry jelly M&Ms, while Hershey's is spinning off Reese's Pieces into York Pieces, Special Dark Pieces, and Almond Joy Pieces. And Lindt has a wacky new Sea Salt Dark Chocolate Bar which is exceedingly odd. I tried a few more interesting things — notably including dark chocolate bars filled with champagne, port, and cabernet gels, and Harry and David's Moose Munch bar, which may be the single best candy bar I've ever had — but for the most part, I couldn't get excited about all the taste samples, and I concentrated on stuff I could bring back to friends. I think I'm sublimating my own sugar desires and becoming a sugar pusher.

I do actually enjoy going to trade shows and talking to reps about their lines and their new products and actually engaging them, and I came back to the office with a ton of full-sized candy bars and other freebies that boggled my co-workers; Josh was shocked I actually talk to the exhibitors, and said he mostly just sneaks up sheepishly and takes one of whatever tiny mini-thing they have out in the giveaway bowls. I think the thing is, I like interviewing people. It's one of the few things I'm not self-conscious or self-questioning about; I just enjoy it, and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I kind of want to be Studs Terkel when I grow up.

That said, I also wouldn't mind going to candy conventions for a living. I made out like a bandit when all the exhibitors started packing up an hour early and many of them just let the hordes descend and carry off their entire exhibit. (I talked about this in greater detail at the end of the Onion piece.) I wound up with a huge supply of Harry London truffles in four varieties, and I could have had twice as many flavors if I'd been ruthlessly grabby instead of mildly curious. I did try the Hot Fudge truffles, though, and they're terrific. The Peanut Butter Joys went over really well at Thursday movie night, too.

All of this is by way of saying, if you're planning on seeing me at a social event this weekend — of which there are many — expect me to be laden down with candy or other sample products, and pushing it on people. I may need to bring my trenchcoat. Hey buddy, you wanna buy a truffle?

I'm-a feelin': curious

So I've been seeing this lady every other week about a minor chronic skin condition. She's a nurse, but she also does cosmetic stuff, like permanent makeup and skin dermabrasions and "facial wrinkle fillers" and such. And it seems like every time I go in to see her, she has some new thing she's learned about, and had done to herself, and wants to pitch me on.

I mean, never mind that I pretty much don't wear eyeliner and definitely don't want it tattooed on. (Even if I did like eyeliner, makeup fashions change, and tattooed eyes don't.) Or that I don't really care about Botox or waxing. Like so many people in the beauty industry, she just seems really, authentically excited about each new development, and wants to share it with everybody.

Last night that got kind of uncomfortable. First off, she'd just had some procedure done — I didn't catch what, she was talking about it on her cell to a friend while I was waiting, and I was trying not to listen — and it had left her face seriously bruised under a thick layer of pancake makeup, which didn't leave me feeling too positive about any new process she wanted me to try. Second, she'd just gotten into roll-on self-tanner, which I think is pretty hideous stuff. Particularly this, which came in a big applicator tube with a sponge on one end, like a jumped-up version of one of those dishwashing wands with a sponge on one end and detergent inside. She wanted to tell me about what great stuff it was, and then she crowed "Just look at my legs!" and pulled up her skirt to show them off. They were blotchy and hairy and covered with spider veins and what looked like more bruising, and, well, they weren't tan. Not even fake tanner-colored tan. And I had really no idea what to say. "Um. Oh?"

Whereupon she grabbed the applicator and said "Look how easy it goes on!" and started rolling sticky goop onto my arm, matting down my arm hair. I guess she'd been aiming at the top of my arm, but when she came at me with the thing, I put my arms up instinctively to ward her off, and she rolled it onto the side of the arm instead. (I kept thinking "If I drop dead, the cops will look at the tanner stripes on my arm and say 'Well, she tried to fight back. She has defensive tan lines.'") The stuff didn't come out tan; it just disappeared into my skin, leaving it wet and kind of tacky. After a minute, I tried to brush the hair back up so it wouldn't just stick to my skin, and she said "See how fast it's drying? Almost? Starting to dry?" Later, before I left, she showed me her legs again, in obvious excitement. They looked about the same. I felt like I was really missing something. Maybe "before" pictures.

It's been a long time since I was ambushed by an unwanted perfume-sprayer in the cosmetics aisle. I wasn't really expecting it to happen in a nurse's office. The weird (and probably good) thing is, I can't even tell where she smeared the stuff; it never darkened and it never looked tan. I don't have a big tan stripe on my arm. Maybe the motto of this particular brand is "No one will be able to tell you're wearing it!" Which is probably a bad thing for a tanner, but a good thing for me. Except for the part where I vaguely felt like I was being asked to praise the emperor's lovely new clothes.

I'm-a feelin': creeped out

(After watching Wolverine and Taken at the Cascade Drive-In out in the boonies. Taken, for the 12 people left in the country who haven't seen it, stars Liam Neeson as an ex-government agent whose daughter gets kidnapped by white slavers, and then he monomaniacally spends 90 minutes killing his way through France to find her.)

Me: Taken was an okay film, but I don't know, some part of me just doesn't like movies where the protagonist's motivations are so vague and ill-described. I mean, what did Liam Neeson really want in that movie? What was he trying to accomplish?

Tara: Weren't you paying attention during that one scene with his old government buddies? He liked Paris and was thinking about buying a house there and settling down.

Me: If he likes France so much, why did he wreck so much of it?

Tara: Because he was trying to find a nice house, but the realtors never showed him one. Most people, if they don't like a house, they just don't buy it. But he would kill everyone in it and then blow it up or burn it down.

Me: Why? He just resented them wasting his time?

Tara: Basically, yeah. "ARRRGGHH! WHY DID YOU EVEN BOTHER SHOWING ME THIS PLACE? YOU PROMISED THIS ONE WOULD HAVE WALK-IN CLOSETS!"

I'm-a feelin': amused

(Walking by the lakefront.)

Me: Did I tell you there's a fee for using Evanston beaches in the summer?

Tara: That's the stupidest thing ever.

Me: Well, I think they're just trying—

Tara: To make lots of money? You don't need to explain, I could have figured that out all by myself.

Me: I was thinking more to—

Tara: Actually, are you sure you aren't just being mugged? "Hey you, lady. You wanna go on the beach? Gimme youse money."

---

Yesterday was Tara's birthday, and it was unfortunately cold and gray and rainy and clammy all day, which kept us from walking anywhere too fun; we ambled down to Argo Tea in downtown Evanston and tried strawberry creme green tea and frozen blueberry green tea, and then shopped a little at various places, working our way south. Eventually we picked up Cass and went to Medieval Times, which was Tara's big birthday wish. None of us had ever been, but from the ads and various friends' reports, we had a pretty good idea what to expect: A lot of ancillary opportunities to spend money (especially on cheap crap like light-up wands and plastic swords), a whole bunch of meat on a metal plate, and a razzle-dazzle dinner show featuring jousting. Also, we all had to wear paper crowns in our knight's colors. The whole thing ranged from enjoyably cheesy to honestly entertaining, though it didn't help that there was an actual story behind the show, with a lot of narration, at least half of which was lost to me because the booming PA system produced kinda muddy sound, and most of the time, people were talking over it — including our server. It also seemed like everytime something exciting was happening on the field, a vendor was walking in front of us with "cheering banners" or glowsticks or LED roses or something else that lit up.

Still. We had half-price tickets thanks to an online coupon Cass found, and for that price, I couldn't argue with dinner and pageantry and a bunch of people with swords pretending to try to kill each other. (I'm a little jaded to faux-medieval combat, having seen a bunch of it, but this show did feature one of the more amazing stunts I've seen — the "evil" knight, still on horseback, running down an unhorsed opponent from behind with a lance, which practically exploded on impact.) Also, there was a brief falcon display, with the bird actually trained to fly fast, low figure eights just barely above the heads of the audience; that was pretty amazing to watch. I'd say we got our money's worth.

And today, Tara and I are off to St. Louis. And we should leave now. Byeeee!

I'm-a feelin': happy

Adventures with my sister:

(Driving to the grocery store.)

Me: Hey, we should go for a walk in this cemetery. We've lived a block away from it for two and a half years and I've never been in it. Remind me after the library.

Tara: You want ME to remind YOU of something? Don't even bother. I have the memory of a flea.

Me: What were we talking about just now?

Tara: Mmm, I sure do love jumping really far and sucking people's blood and making them itch!

---

(On the Northwestern campus, feeding the giant carp.)

Me: …so we were out in the canoe and we kept hearing that sucking, slurping sound, insanely loud, but it stopped whenever we put our paddles in the water. So we just let the canoe drift up to the shore, and there was a whole row of fish there up against the bank, sucking in water from the surface. Probably trying to draw in mosquito larva or waterbugs or something.

Tara: ICK. You nearly died. They were probably actually crocodiles.

Me: Well, the water was murky, but we could see their mouths. They looked just like the carp mouths sucking the bread off the surface down there.

Tara: That's just what the crocodiles WANT you to think.

Me: I do hear that the North American crocodilefish can be pretty deadly.

Tara: You laugh now, but when the crocodilefish get you, you won't think it's so funny.

---

(After Tara got her pants caught on some edge on the car and ripped a huge hole in them.)

Tara: I feel like everyone's staring at me.

Me: Your sweater covers it. No one's paying any attention.

Tara: Are you sure? Those people over there look like they're laughing. "Hey, look at that girl and her giant butt-hole!"

Me: …

Tara: What?

Me: I can honestly say, of all the things I have thought about in my life, your giant butthole was never one of them until now.

I'm-a feelin': amused

I haz a sister. Specifically, I haz acquired her from the airport, and she's here for a week. She makes me laugh frequently. Case in point…

Me: And the place up the street, Flat Top is a Mongolian grill. Have you ever been to one of those? There's a bar where you put all the vegetables and sauces you want into a bowl, and then you add meat in a separate bowl, and you give it to them and they cook it all for you.

Tara: That sounds like fun, except the part where you have to handle raw meat. That part sounds disgusting.

Me: Well, you don't just grab raw meat with your bare hands. They have various scoops.

Tara: "Meat scoops" sounds even more disgusting.

Me: Wait, you cook all the time. Don't you ever work with raw meat?

Tara: Eww, no.

Me: How do you ever get meat in your diet?

Tara: I come home and I say "Hey, Dad, what's for dinner tonight?" and he says "Delicious cooked meat!" and I say "Hooray!"

I'm-a feelin': cheerful

Chris and Bob and I have lately been watching the out-on-DVD seasons of Dexter, the much-acclaimed TV series about a serial killer who kills serial killers. I enjoy it largely because it's twisty enough to actually surprise me, in spite of my overexposure to TV and film, which has left me pretty jaded and easily irritable about clichés. Case in point, we were watching an episode today that begins in the studio of an attractive, somewhat crazy artist. She's talking in voiceover, in a breathy, sexual, suggestive purr: "Start from the top. Work your way down. Light, feathery strokes. Perfect. Stunning. Try longer strokes now… Perfect." I grumble, because it's clear that we're meant to think that she's having sex, whereas she and a partner are obviously painting something together. Meanwhile, the camera is panning through sculptures and blowtorches and whatnot until it reaches the characters…

Who are, entirely to my surprise, actually fucking.

I can't help but be pleased with a show that sees a cliché, exploits it, and then goes in the other direction on purpose.

Admittedly, at this point I'm getting more than a little sick of the emerging pattern whereby all the female characters are crazy, manipulative, wildly selfish bitches. (The men are all damaged and irrational too, but largely in ways that strike me as less hateful and, well, cheap.) But still, I'm enjoying this show a lot. We've heard from a lot of people that only the first season is worth watching, but so far I'm enjoying the second season too — enough that out of curiosity I'm reading the books that inspired the series. Granted, they read like bad fanfic for the TV show, but they've proved popcorny enough to hold my attention while I'm on the elliptical trainer in the morning, which is about all I ask out of a book these days.

I'm-a feelin': amused

Huh. Just got a pretty bad phishing attempt sent to one of The Onion's email aliases, purportedly from Blizzard, claiming that they've been informed that we've attempted to sell our World Of Warcraft account, which is against the user terms of agreement and could result in permanent shutdown of our (nonexistent, obviously) account, not to mention undefined "legal action."

The only remedy, natch, is to prove that we own our nonexistent account by sending in all sorts of info, including:

• Account e-mail
  
• CD-key, alternatively a photograph of your CD-key that is located on your manual for World of Warcraft
  
• Account name
  
• Account password
  
• Secret Question and Answer

While anyone who falls for this kinda deserves it — I really can't help but wonder how often it works — phishing for WOW account info is new by me. Has this been going on for a while now and I just didn't know? For what it's worth, while it isn't one of the more intelligent phish attempts I've seen, it's one of the most polished—no misspelled words or broken English at all.

Oh, and I really liked this coda on the email: "We ask that during the time of the investigation you give approximately twenty-four hours of inactivity after sending a response email. This should provide enough time for Blizzard to confirm your identity and that the terms of agreement are being followed as is necessary."

In other words, give us all your money and a one-day head start. We'll be, uh, over here right around the corner validating your currency codes.

I'm-a feelin': sleepy

Things are rushed this week because kp3000 has been on vacation all weekend, and there's a lot to do in his absence. But things are always rushed, so the fact that I don't much have time for posts beyond a smattering of bullet-pointed thoughts accumulated over the past two days is nothing new.

1. The Chicago Tribune still owes me a small amount of money for freelance reviews done before the bankruptcy, but not billed until after the bankruptcy. Yesterday I received several copies of some insanely complicated court forms I could fill out, presumably to put my claim in for their assets as the bankruptcy is resolved. I'm vacillating. Do I want the money enough to figure out all the legalese? No. Do I want to be involved in the bankruptcy as it proceeds and possibly get more notifications of exactly what's going on? Yeah, I kinda do. Is THAT worth the headache? I don't know.
   
   
2. Per Josh at work: 30 Awesomely Bad Unicorn Tattoos. Who knew zombie unicorns and unicorns pissing rainbows were even remotely common tattoo themes?
   
   
3. Cass pointed me at the webcomic Truck Bearing Kibble because of a recent entry that merged Twin Peaks and Michael Jackson. Flipping back through past strips, I now realize this comic is the next best thing to Perry Bible Fellowship, which is terrific, because there isn't enough Perry Bible Fellowship in the world. One of these days I'll find time to read through the archives.
   
   
4. I've been walking a lot lately (as I keep saying) so I've been getting a little sick of my music, so I got a bunch of audiobooks from the library — mostly stuff that's fluffy enough to still make sense even if I'm only listening to it with 60% or so of my brain. Unfortunately I picked up Dan Brown's Angels & Demons, which I wouldn't waste real book-reading time on, and I got stuck only a few moments in, as symbologist Robert Langdon is picked up by a mysterious man and placed on a plane which, the pilot offhandedly mentions, will transport him from the East Coast to Geneva Switzerland in an hour because it goes Mach 15 at 300,000 feet elevation. Um, what now? That's around 11,000 miles per hour. In a comfortable passenger plane. Reading up on it, I find that it's theoretically possible to make a fighter plane that might do Mach 15, but hearing it the first time, it sounded about like "We'll be in Geneva in five minutes because we're going to ride Gumdrop The Rainbow-Pissing Unicorn." I'm not sure I can go on with this book even in backdrop-while-getting-real-things-done form.
   
   
5. I miss the days when I had time to be clever. These days I am more often addled and bored. I was planning on going back to Six Flags tomorrow just to have something fun to do, but now the weather reports have changed from "80 and awesome" to "thunderstormy and severe." I am already picturing myself as the kids from The Cat In The Hat, pressed up against the glass and pouting as the rain comes down.
   
   
6. This fanart image makes me insanely, giddily happy:
   
   

I'm-a feelin': busy

People periodically mass-email us demanding that we get them jobs in film, and more rarely, in porn. The, um, job application I just got from someone allegedly in Norway had the following text block pasted in verbatim three times in a row:

oliver will have big older fatty woman in the porno film help oliver to sex job in the porno film oliver like older fatty woman have big pussy oliver will work sex job oliver will have big fatty woman in the porno film older woman from the 30 to 75 years age from 70kg to 200kg oliver will travel to sex job in the adult film contact oliver oliver like big fatty black woman will you help oliver to play porno film like big fatty woman wll you send the photo from the big fatty woman to oliver have big pussy have you the Videos from the big fatty woman oliver will travel to sex job in the porno film sex photo from the big fatty woman and the address oliver like big fatty black woman oliver will have penes in the big pussy cum sperma [phone number, address, and email all deleted.] oliver will have big older fatty woman in the porno film help oliver to sex job in the porno film oliver like older fatty woman have big pussy oliver will work !

Something about that excited, emphatic ending really makes me laugh. I emailed Oliver and asked him to send me a picture right away, but alas, he never responded. Gotta say, though, at least the man knows what he wants. Also, he writes like a turned-on James Joyce. That's what the porn-film industry needs, right?

I'm-a feelin': amused

Two images that have made me laugh today:



and also…



The latter comes from FailBlog.org, but I have to disagree with whoever submitted it. That sign is composed of win, not fail.

I'm-a feelin': chipper

1. Back in February, I had some old silver fillings replaced with new porcelain ones because my dentist said the old ones were degenerating over time. Pretty much from the start, the new ones were a problem — first they didn't fit together and I had to go back and get them filed down just so I could close my mouth. Then they were extremely temperature-sensitive, and drinking or eating anything that wasn't room-temperature was painful. Then they started throbbing, and then they just outright hurt all the time, sometimes severely, all the way down to my neck and all the way up to my eyes. I kept calling my dentist, in pain and in frustration, to tell them I was having problems and I needed to know what to do about it. They never, ever had anyone answering the phone, and they returned exactly one of my calls — while I was in a screening. They didn't leave a message, and when I tried to call back, they weren't answering the phone. The pain went away and I moved on, irritated by the whole thing but ready to get back to my life. Now suddenly they're calling me to say something went wrong with my insurance and they didn't pay up and could I please call them RIGHT AWAY PLEASE NOW. Guess how motivated I am to return their calls?
   
   
2. I keep seeing posters for The Overnight in CTA stations, and I was seriously considering doing it — a long overnight walk in support of suicide prevention. It's a good cause, I have some personal experience with the pain a suicide leaves behind, I'm still enjoying taking long walks, and I've long been curious about these local marathons-for-a-cause. Looking into their site, though, I'm finding that there's a $1,000 minimum fundraising commitment. You have to have that money in your "fundraising account" before you can participate — though if you fall short, you are permitted to pay the rest yourself. Otherwise they won't let you walk. Geesh. Is this kind of thing normal for support marathons? I can understand that they need the money to offset the cost of shirts and transport and snacks and water for the walkers, not to mention all the org and whatnot, but the idea that I can't support suicide prevention without earning them a cool grand really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. ETA: Apparently the local Walk For The Cure (for breast cancer) event requires a $2,200 per-person fundraising commitment. I feel like I must live in a completely different world from those zillions of women in pink in all the pictures; I cannot even begin to imagine begging friends or strangers for that kind of money, even for a good cause.
   
   
3. Work is making me grumpy today for reasons I 100 percent can't get into on the Internet. Yay!
   
   
4. Oh hey, on Tuesday I spent 45 minutes talking to Pete Docter, director of Monsters Inc. and the new Pixar movie, Up. He was — like everyone else from Pixar I've interviewed — a really neat dude, very expressive and thoughtful and quick-minded, and very clear and concise in his opinions. I'm looking forward to that interview going up, though I'm glad I'm not the one who's gonna have to transcribe 45 minutes of very fast, enthusiastic chatter.

I'm-a feelin': grumpy

1. I have a phone again! Six Flags did in fact find it and mail it to me. I am deeply pleased, largely at not having to re-collect all those phone numbers.
   
   
2. After a week of Devil's Panties webstrips about the myriad joys of the St. Louis City Museum, I want to go. I'm planning on a road trip with my sister when she visits — probably staying in town overnight and hitting the Arch while we're there, since I did that with my cousin many years ago and we enjoyed it. Anything else y'all would consider must-dos in St. Louis? More to the point, anyone know anything miraculous we should stop and do on the road between Chicago and St. Louis? Cause I can already tell that li'l sis isn't going to be excited about five hours in the car.
   
   
3. The 2009 schedule for the Chicago Outdoor Film Festival has been posted. As usual, it's kind of a disappointment to me — only a couple of films I haven't seen, and neither of those blows me away. I mean, there are some great classics on this list, but nothing I'm burning to see again. I'll probably try to make it to Born Yesterday at least. But Tootsie? Seriously? For reals?
   
   
4. Per welcomerain, recipe and instructions for Totoro-shaped cream puffs. Nonstop squeedorable. Not that I will ever go to this much trouble to make pastries, but I'm impressed that someone else did.
   
   
5. Anyone out there still doubt that American Apparel is a sleazemo company run by assholes? Try following the story on Woody Allen's lawsuit against them. It's AMAZING. Short version: They used his picture in a billboard ad without his permission. He's suing for $10 million, pointing out that they're, well, a sleazemo company mostly known for porny ads featuring mostly-naked, underage-looking girls, and claiming they've tarnished him. Their defenses so far? Essentially "We can't tarnish his image, everybody knows he's a pedophile" and "He isn't nearly as valuable as he thinks he is." And American Apparel's lawyers are demanding Allen's people cough up court documents about his custody battle and all Soon-Yi Previn-related sex scandals, supposedly so they can prove he has no reputation to tarnish. The quotes from the lawyers are just astonishingly slimy; the whole thing seems to amount to a childish "Yes, I kicked my sister for no reason, but it's okay because she's a stupid uglyhead" defense. I'm hoping the courts nail American Apparel in the seat on this one; they're doing their absolute evil best to deserve it. Oh, pictures of the actual billboard are here; despite the lack of near-nude girls, it's a typically baffling, pointless AA ad.
   
   
6. My grandmother was hospitalized Tuesday night because she was having trouble breathing. Her doctor put in a heart catheter and found a blockage in a blood vessel. Apparently bypass surgery was suggested, but she has no interest in that; she's been telling us for 10 years now that she could go at any time and we have to be ready for it, and she doesn't seem particularly interested in anything invasive or expensive to prolong her life. I called this morning as she was being released from the hospital and chatted with her about it; she warned me again that she's due to go any time now, so I'd best brace myself for it. (I have no idea whatsoever to do with these statements, this time I just said "You've been telling me that for 10 years now, so pardon me if I'm not on the edge of my chair here.") But she won the brutal frankness award by telling me "I love you and I'm glad you called. Now next time, don't wait until you think I'm dying!"

I'm-a feelin': cheerful

Oh, one more thing about Six Flags… my phone managed to escape my pocket on round 3 of the Superman coaster (which dangles riders from a harness so they're in Superman-flying position, then spins them around a bunch) so I am currently phoneless. I have some hope of getting it back — the Lost And Found woman said the park employees pretty much know the "dump points" where keys and phones and glasses land when they escape people's pockets on the major coasters, and they check them nightly — and if they find it, they'll mail it back to me free.

And if that doesn't work, I have an identical phone that Cass bought me when I left the charger for the old one in Oklahoma, so I can eventually get that activated with my old number. But for the next couple of days at least, I won't be getting texts or phone calls, so don't expect callbacks or text responses. Or if you call me and you get one, don't be surprised if I sound squeaky and male, like a cranky teenage Six Flags employee.

I'm-a feelin': resigned

I've been doing a lot of walking lately, and I wanted somewhere more interesting to do it. Possibly someplace where the walking would be punctuated by roller-coaster rides. So I suggested to a whole lot of people that this would be a good time to go to Six Flags, which I haven't been to in many years, and which just opened for the season. Sam, Kevin, Dan, Chris, Wil, Erin and I went today. Approximately eight hours of walking-punctuated-by-rides later, my legs are pleasantly achy and my stomach is only starting to settle. I bought a season pass with the idea that I'd like to do this several more times this year, but I'm not entirely sure I'm physically up to it. On the other hand, while I may have been the most nauseated on the ride home, I managed to last as long as my much younger companions while putting in two more hours of coasters than they did, so I don't feel too bad about my eventual exhausted collapse in the car.

It was a really excellent day for the park. It was a little on the cool side, but nice in the sun. Virtually no one was there; there were no lines for anything except the front seats on any given coaster. On the Superman and Batman coasters, we stood in line for five to 10 minutes for the front car on a ride, took the ride, and then debarked… and just moved back two seats to an unoccupied row with no one waiting to get on, and rode it again. I hit every single coaster in the park, and the fun ones two or three times each, and a bunch of the littler rides. By the end of the day, my stomach was protesting mightily, but it was worth it. Though by basic necessity, I didn't eat anything after lunchtime — just the nonstop ads for the park's bargain buckets of various types were making me kind of queasy.

I don't remember anything like this from my Six Flags days. These days, it seems like one of the big merchandising efforts is to get parkgoers to buy a $13 souvenir cup (comes with infinite soda refills) or a $7 souvenir bucket (comes with infinite cotton candy or popcorn refills) or an $8 Dippin Dots souvenir cup (comes with slightly cheaper Dippin Dots refills). Given how wonky my stomach was after just six hours of spinning and slamming and looping about, the idea of infinite cotton-candy refills had me wondering how it's possible that the entire park (especially the rides) isn't spangled with fluffy pastel-pink-and-blue barf.

On the way back, we started talking about the park's Flash Passes, which cost an extra $30 or so and let parkgoers bypass most of the lines when the park is busy. Six Flags Great America is kind of heavily DC Comics branded right now, so Flash Passes have a picture of the DC Superhero the Flash on them. Which led Kevin to comment that the park would actually make a lot more money if they issued Villain Passes, which would be like Flash Passes, but would let you walk to the head of the line and then shove aside anyone who's in your way. The general conclusion was that everyone would want one, regardless of the price; Dan suggested that he'd probably come to the park when he was in a cranky mood and just shove people, and skip the damn rides altogether.

This rapidly led to me brainstorming Hero Passes, which would not let you bypass any lines, but would let you hang out at the head of the line and punch anyone obviously using a Villain Pass. That would keep the number of Villains down to a semi-reasonable level, or at least distract them enough that occasionally normal ticket-holders could make it onto a ride without getting shoved. Of course, as we all know from postmodern talky hero comics, the very existence of superheroes begets supervillains, so then we need Nemesis Passes, for people who don't want to shove people or skip lines — people basically unconcerned with civilians — but who want the right to just punch people with Superhero Passes.

And by this point, Six Flags has effectively become Fight Club, and no one's actually coming to ride the rides anymore, which lets the park do less maintenance, run fewer rides, hire fewer bored teenagers, and become infinitely more cost-effective. At which point, for an extra fee, we can afford to let people upgrade to full on Superhero Passes and Supervillain Passes respectively, which are like Hero and Nemesis passes except that they come with First Aid bargain buckets: All the basic first aid you can use onsite, plus a free one-way ride to a nearby hospital if necessary.

Eventually, because DC is involved, there will be Love Interest Passes (may be downgraded to Love Interest In Refrigerator Passes without notice at any time) and Alternate-Universe Hero and Villain Passes (possibly allowing people to slap or kick opponents instead of punching them) and ultimately some sort of massive Mandatory Retcon Passes where the park takes away everyone's passes and scrambles them randomly and leaves everyone even more confused than they were when they started.

It is probably indicative of how thoroughly scrambled eight hours of roller coasters and walking left my brain that I think this is all a really good idea. Mildly difficult to market and get by Six Flags' legal crew, sure, but last I heard, the whole company was on the verge of bankruptcy, so shouldn't they be willing to implement any dangerous, ill-considered, violent plan they happen to spot on LJ? I don't see why not.

I'm-a feelin': drained

Over the weekend, Chris came over and watched City Of Ember with us, and somehow managed to spill water all over himself while drinking. Channeling the running gag from Airplane!, he confessed that he had a drinking problem. So today when I managed to fail at drinking water enough to send rivulets running down my face and into my shirt, I IMed him:

Me: Ugh. I have a drinking problem too. Perhaps it's rehab time.

Chris: I don't know how they'd do that sort of rehab. Maybe teach you not to multitask, or give you shocks whenever you spill water or something.

Me: Really, a mild corrective shock wouldn't be any less pleasant than cold water rolling down my throat and into my shirt.

Chris: It sounds like they just need to send you the bill, then.

I'm-a feelin': amused

Yesterday I edited ludickid's interview with Isabella Rossellini, which is supposed to go up at theavclub today. (ETA: And here it is.) It was largely focused on her Sundance shorts series Green Porno, which I hadn't heard of. Partway into the interview, I was having a hard time visualizing what this show could possibly be like, so I went and watched some of it on YouTube. The pieces are only about 90 seconds long. (The YouTube clips below LOOK longer, but that's all credits, which you can skip. The actual content is much shorter.) They are generally pretty damn unsafe for work. Case in point:



They're all pretty much like this. Rossellini dresses up in bizarre and gorgeous handmade animal costumes, and starts each video with "If I were an earthworm…" or "If I were a mantis…" and then talks about what her genitals and her mating habits and turn-ons would be like. Frequently she winds up humping a prop partner, a giant cloth-and-paper housefly or whale or whatever. These shorts are MIND-BREAKING. They're somewhere between surrealistic art cinema and grade-school stage plays and David Lynch nightmares and children's educational programming and a Nature Channel doc. And they all feature Rossellini talking in her sweet, thoughtful, heavily accented and cultured voice, usually about barbed penises and living with her anus folded over her face. The whole series is just insane.



So naturally I had to watch them all. And I recommend you do the same. At least if you always wanted to see Isabella Rossellini peeing from all her worm-segments, or walking around with a four-foot pink erection. Or if you don't much value your sanity. Or if you want to be emotionally prepared for the interview, which is matter-of-fact and informative and chipper about the whole series. (Season one is eight shorts about invertebrates; season two is sea creatures; season three will be food animals.) Apparently they air as bumpers on the Sundance Channel (which commissioned them) and they've played theatrically before films, but the Sundance Channel also has them all online, including the ones that have been made but haven't aired yet.

Ow, my brain. But at least now I know a lot more about snail sadomasochism than I used to.

I'm-a feelin': gluh

Mmmm, tastes like the holiday.

Bacon Paste! Comes in a convenient condiment tube for squeezing directly onto food. Conveniently spreadable as well. They even suggest you can "eat it right out of the tube like we do!" And I thought Baconnaise was decadent. When do we get eggs-in-a-tube and maybe mushy-milky-cereal-in-a-tube? Then breakfast can be entirely liquid, and we'll just be one step closer to living in the Matrix.

I'm-a feelin': amused

Short takes:

• Threadless is having a $5 T-shirt spring-cleaning sale through Monday, so I just bought four shirts for $20 and I'm pretty pleased with myself, especially since one of the designs was one I liked so much that I almost bought it for $25 earlier this year before backing out. Only problem is, I didn't look at the main page until after I'd checked out, so I didn't realize I could have gotten free shipping if I'd ordered more, and now I'm a little bummed. One of these days, though, I really am going to visit the Threadless store in Chicago. Maybe I'll wait until vixy hits town in June, though, since she wanted to go too.
  
  
• Maybe the nasty-taste spray did work, because after the rabbits ate the last crocus bloom, they started leaving my garden alone, and now I've got a whole lot of crocus stems. Or maybe they aren't interested in anything but the flowers themselves, which I still have none of. *fist-shake*
  
  
• I was really fascinated with this local article about organized attempts to vandalize Chicago parking meters in the wake of Mayor Daley selling them off to a private, for-profit firm that jacked all the prices up. Apparently there are a LOT of ways to render a parking meter inoperable, including filling it with pennies. I wonder how many it takes?
  
  
• I've also been really fascinated lately with sooj's "We Are Shangri-La," the first song off a work-in-progress album based on yuki_onna's latest book. It's a more ambient, produced song than her usual neo-folk, and it reminds me hugely of Eurythmics. And i can't stop listening to it.
  
  
• inediblebuddha is back in town, due to a broken foot, a broken collarbone, an operation, and some medical leave from the Army. I'm completely psyched about seeing him tonight, assuming his travel plans work out.
  
  
• About the routine-vs.-trying-new-things poll, I knew I shouldn't have put in the detail about the Gypsy curse turning you into goo, because people were guaranteed to focus on that; I just wanted to give it some urgency. Mostly I've just been thinking lately about how I've gotten into a serious rut lately, but I'm enjoying it, because it involves working out every morning, and that's become a part of my groove to such a degree that when I miss a day at the gym, I'm out of sorts and distracted all day. But it disturbs me a little to see how comfortable and happy I am with routine, and I keep thinking about taking some kind of try-new-things-every-day pledge, except I suspect HAVING to do new things would make me more grumpy than challenged and excited. As with so many other things in my life, it's not that I'm unhappy with routine, it's that I'm unhappy being the kind of person that's happy with routine.

I'm-a feelin': busy

Poll #1371161
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

I find a regular, mostly unvarying routine

If an ancient Egyptian curse forced me to try something new every day for the rest of my life or melt into a puddle of goo, I would be more

I'm-a feelin': sore

There's a family of rabbits living under my neighbor's front lawn. Normally, I just consider this a Free Wildlife Bonus for living where we live; it means I spot baby bunnies hanging out on our lawn, cropping grass, all throughout the summer, which is just fine by me. And most of the year they don't bug my garden, either because I plant yucky things or because there's so much other food to be had.

But every spring, they eat my crocuses as they come up. Last year, I had crocus greens but no blooms, because they ate the flower out of the center of every plant. This year, they've just cropped the crocuses down to dirt level. Daffodils and hyacinths and daylillies and tigerlillies and irises are all starting to come up, and the rabbits have completely ignored those, but the crocuses have gotten razed.

This bums me out, because I love crocuses, the most delicate and ephemeral signs of spring. But I haven't had much luck finding rabbit repellent locally. Our gardening-fanatic neighbor tells me garlic oil works wonders, but online places sell garlic-oil spikes in batches of 50 to 250, which is a bit much for my 1.5-foot-by-8-foot plot, and by the time the crocuses started coming up, I realized it was already too late to mail-order anything anyway.

Someone told me that a good solution was cayenne pepper: It doesn't hurt the plants, but it makes them too spicy for mammals to eat. The rabbits had missed exactly three crocuses, so I peppered 'em up good.

The next morning there was only one flower left. Apparently our rabbits like spicy food.

So I dug out this bitter spray that I bought to keep the cats off our houseplants. It's been incredibly successful, and it's pretty clear why — when I first sprayed it on the plants I was transferring indoors in the fall, some of it ended up aerosoled into the air, and my dad and I both got a little of it on our faces. Everything, including the air, tasted like bitter ash for the next day. I sprayed a bunch of the stuff on the last crocus and the rest of the garden.

Apparently our rabbits like bitter ash, too.

So they've won, and I have no crocuses again this year. It's still worth it for baby bunny sightings, but clearly I need to step up the game and start planning earlier for next year, if I ever want to see a crocus again.

I'm-a feelin': irate

Ack! I have not been paying proper attention to my email or the date, and I came embarrassingly close to missing this altogether, because for some reason I thought it was tomorrow rather than tonight.

vixyish and sooj and yuki_onna are in town, launching their five-day road-show trip down to New Orleans. They're performing a concert/reading tonight at the Life Force Arts Center, at 3148 N. Lincoln. From the press release…

[The event] will feature readings from the upcoming urban fantasy Palimpsest by author Catherynne M. Valente and several local and regional "personalities" and a palimpsest-inspired musical performance by SJ Tucker and supporting musicians Betsy Tinney (cello) and Michelle "Vixy" Dockrey (harmony vocals). Additional entertainment will be provided by exotic bondage performance artist Lee Harrington, the dance troupe Fire & Strings, and a variety of local and regional "Personalities."

In other words, it's a variety pack of awesome, featuring a whole bunch of really talented people whose work I really love — and who absolutely never get around to this part of the country. (You can sample a ton of sooj's music at her site, along with spoken-word excerpts from yuki_onna's books, and vixy's latest album is here.)

Argh. I didn't think to bring a camera, let alone to start stumping earlier. Put it this way: I'm ditching my evening plans and going. And you should too, ’cause it ain't too likely that this show is coming around again.

I'm-a feelin': excited

So I got this email saying my journal's been shortlisted for inclusion in a best-of-LJ book. How nice! Except they want me to submit links to five entries I'd like to have considered for the book. And, hell, I dunno. I've been keeping this journal for seven years now. That's a lot of entries, none of which instantly leap out for me as book-worthy. Do any of y'all actually remember any specific entry that you liked?

This is the only one that immediately stood out for me as something I remember doing and being proud of, but I can't decide if it's something anyone else would enjoy, or I'm just entirely too full of my own clevarness.

In other news, O HAI. I went to Florida. I swam in the cold, cold sea. Mere hours later, I had a headache and a sore throat and a fever. I slept for 16 hours and woke up with a cold and no energy, and I've been trying to come back from that ever since. If I had to have a cold, it was nice to do some of it in a warm place where I could lie in the sun, but at the same time, being on vacation and just wanting to lie down in the dark most of the time wasn't exactly joyous. At least I got some cool wildlife pictures. And I'm clearly rallying now, because this morning I woke up and a) I could breathe through my nose, and b) I looked around at the mess of apathy-spawned detritus in the house and thought "Yuck," and started cleaning. Hoping to be back to normal soon.

I'm-a feelin': tired

Well holy crap! I just got home, and as I was trundling up the central sidewalk between our townhomes, I had to stop short because there was a huge skunk standing in front of me, staring at me. I've never seen a skunk in the wild, and the zoo skunks I've seen were considerably smaller than this guy; he was the size of a full-grown raccoon, with a gigantic puffed-out tail to boot. I froze up, really not wanting to get sprayed, and after a moment he wandered up into the neighbor's garden, then across our shared porch and into our garden, where he checked things out for a few moments before wandering down onto our lawn. The whole time, I stood still and waited. And then he just walked off peacefully. I've seen rabbits on our lawns frequently — a family of them lives under one neighbor's lawn — and raccoons occasionally in front and back, and I startled a baby possum in our back yard once. But never a skunk. I'm utterly thrilled. Granted, I will be considerably less thrilled if I come home one of these days without paying as much attention to my surroundings, and I trip over a skunk and get a face full of skunky punishment.

I'm-a feelin': excited

Flew into Florida last night and I'm hanging out with my parents and my dad's sister at the house they rented for March. Lest anyone doubt where I got my absurdist, facetious sense of humor…

Mom: OH MY GOSH. YOU ARE NOT DOING WHAT I THINK YOU'RE DOING.

Me: What?

Mom: You are eating a WHOLE BANANA. Hey, everyone, Tasha is eating a WHOLE BANANA. No one eats a WHOLE BANANA!

Me: Why not? Are they in short supply? Are they really expensive right now?

Mom: No. But no one eats a WHOLE BANANA.

Me: [Sigh.] Do you want half a banana, mom?

Mom: Oh no. I've already had my half a banana for the day.

Me: [Laugh.]

Mom: What? Is something funny on your computer?

Me: No, I'm flat-out laughing at you. Okay, who had the other half of your banana?

Mom: Aunt Ardatha.

Me: Okay. Dad, do you want half a banana?

Dad: No thanks, I'm not hungry.

Me: Okay, screw all y'all, I'm eating this banana.

Mom: Okay, fine. But we are WRITING THIS DOWN, missy!

I'm-a feelin': amused

For the past two days, I've been reading Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, an undercover-journalism stunt book about a year the author spent pretending to be a man, infiltrating a monastery and a men's retreat, and going on dates, and getting a high-testosterone sales job, and so forth. (I heard about it when one of our writers covered her latest book, where she has herself committed to a series of institutions and writes about that, apparently in a fairly condescending way.) I keep wanting to talk about it here, but the more I read, the more I have to say about the whole thing, and now I'm thinking of doing a full A.V. Club write-up on it, especially since I'm supposed to be producing more blog posts for the site these days.

I was thinking about doing a month or so of undercover-journalism books, since I've got a few of them on my immediate to-read list: Newjack, about a guy who went to work as a prison guard at Sing-Sing for a year and wrote about it, and Black Like Me, about a white man in the ’60s who dyed himself black and toured the South. Digging a little, I came up with another interesting one — Ten Days In A Mad-House by Nellie Bly, who feigned insanity in 1880 in order to experience life inside an asylum, and expose the terrible conditions in them. The author of Newjack has a couple more books under his belt, one about pretending to be a Mexican immigrant so he could see what crossing the border was like, and one about pretending to be a hobo and riding the rails.

Those aside, I'm looking for more recommendations in the "journalist who posed as a ____________ for X period" subgenre. I've already read the current monster of the genre, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed, and I'm musing over whether to get into Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days, though I'm looking more for books than anything else. I remember reading a couple books in this vein when I was younger, both of them feminist dissertations, one from a woman who tried being stripper for a while, and one from an American woman who became a Japanese club hostess to see what it was like. I'm trying to track those down.

In the meantime, what else should be on my list?

ETA: Okay, I'm pretty sure the book about being a club hostess in Japan was Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, And Corporate Masculinity In A Tokyo Hostess Club by Anne Allison. Still looking for the stripper book.

I'm-a feelin': interested

Hey, LJ Brain Trust, help me out here, will you? I woke up this morning from a dream about rapacious, stealing teddy bears, which stirred a weird old memory of a book or story or series of children's novels about fairy-like people who take things from big folk on a regular basis, leaving behind worthless things of approximately equal shape and size — a bottlecap for a coin, say, or an old used sponge for a sandwich. They repeatedly claim "A fair trade is no crime," or some such line.

It might have been a bunch of little people along the lines of the Borrowers or the Littles, except that I remember both those groups as being more socially adept and considerate, whereas the group I'm thinking of had to be taught that yes, taking a diamond necklace and leaving behind a strand of spaghetti was theft. Also, I just looked up both series on Wikipedia, and I'm convinced I never actually read a Borrowers book, and I only knew the Littles from TV. So this is something entirely different. Also, eventually the people in this story might have been taught to leave valuables behind instead of junk, because they didn't actually value money, or they had a lot of gems lying around or some such. Anyone know what I"m thinking of here?

I'm-a feelin': bothered

It's been nonstop frantic lately, though not in a bad way — I've been going to the health club four or five times a week, and rediscovering how much I missed regular swimming, and how much energy it gives me, which is both a good and a bad thing — I need less food and less sleep, but I also get restless sitting still for long periods at work, and I want to just get up and walk somewhere. I've simultaneously been venturing back into more diverse social activity, instead of relying on the Thursday-evening Wire-watching crowd to keep me socialized. But that's meant a lot more rushing around, trying to find time for everything; I can fit exercise and commuting and work and going home and making dinner for eight and eating with company and watching The Wire and cleaning up afterward and getting to bed at a reasonable hour all into one day, but only if I allow for no downtime whatsoever, and I'm constantly watching the clock. (And if people don't mind dinner being a little late.)

But this was our first unscheduled weekend in approximately forever. So I wound up spending eight straight hours today cleaning and sorting and finally putting things away, which was weirdly pleasureable. Even more pleasurable — being able to do it at my own pace. Taking breaks, reading a little, talking to Cass, lying down, and generally not rushing.

And also, especially when I got tired after too many trips up and down the stairs carrying crap, I'd waste some time on this way-nifty little balance game. It's a waste of precious weekend, messing with this thing, but I get such a kick out of the way unstable pieces gape and look wildly around them in terror, while stable pieces relax and smile at you.

Granted, eight hours of mild but relatively uninterrupted physical labor left me exhausted and a little dizzy, especially since I kind of skipped the whole food thing until around 4 p.m., when I'd mostly finished cleaning the fridge out, and decided to cook some of the vegetables I'd bought strictly as an experiment, based on some recipes I ran across months ago. Roasted Brussels sprouts turn out to be really tasty. The roasted fennel, on the other hand… actually, it was tasty too, but the recipe left it shriveled and carmelized and entirely unattractive, such that I could never cook it for anyone else. I'm thinking 45 minutes on 425˚ is pretty ridiculous for cooking vegetables.

But now the kitchen is clean, and there's nothing expired or creepy left in the fridge, and my office is finally sorted out, and all my laundry is done and hung up, and all the jeans I bought at the $4 sale in January are finally sorted and put away, and blah blah blah, and I'm feeling pretty good about life. Now I'm all orderly and ahead of the game, and set up for another frantic, breathless week.

I'm-a feelin': tired

Cass got me flowers for Valentine's Day, as he often does. His usual method is to buy an assortment of little bouquets — carnations, daisies, rosebuds, freesias — and arrange them himself. He sneaked out this morning to buy them, planning to just walk to get them, but deciding to take the el instead, because, as he just told me, it's worth it for the comments alone. Which have included:

"Someone's getting some lovin' tonight!"*

and "Whoo, looks like somebody's in trouble!"

and — due to the multiple bouquets — "Uh… you makin' a bunch of stops, sport?"

This actually tickles me even more than the flowers do. He says "All the world loves a lover," but I think all the world just loves something they don't see every single day on the boring ol' el.

---

Also, since I haven't posted one of our random bits of banter lately, this just happened…

Me: Hon, if I were you, I'd figure out whether you're really doing an Oscar-movie catch-up party, and send invites out today, so people have a chance to work it into their schedules.

Him: Oh yeah. Mmmmm, Oscar ketchup.

Me: Yeah, for putting on your Oscar hot dogs.

Him: WHAT KIND OF MAN EATS OSCAR HOT DOGS?

---

* Cass thinks this guy meant me as flower-recipient rather than Cass as flower-granting recipient of gratitude, but who knows.

I'm-a feelin': pleased

Have I just not been paying attention? How did I not know about this book?

I'm-a feelin': shocked