Date Archives January 2010

Crib Notes

January 29, 2010 63 Comments read Uncategorized

weaselmom recently posted a link to Design Sponge as she was pondering her personal aesthetic and how it relates to her new home, which she can decorate however she desires.

I have a total boner for spaces that are not only open and welcoming but that also reflect a person’s tastes and style. Where everything is just so, where individual pieces stand on their own but are part of a flowing whole where everything fits.

I know some people whose homes, to me, are perfect examples of this. Everything about them feels exactly right. Cole mentioned the other day about all the work he did angle-grinding Shannon’s bathtub to give it the appearance of fish scales, and something in my brain shivered happily, because the idea of that, for Shannon, feels perfect. This extends to personal style as well–adorning oneself via clothing or accessories; there are a few people I know who have very clear tastes which gives them an impeccable sense of style–Tara is one of those people. Everything she picks out, everything she makes, everything she surrounds herself with, seems to fit just so, to mesh immutably with her style. When she posts a piece that she’s done, everything about it says “TARA!”. Put her work in a lineup with other artists and I’d be able to recognize hers immediately.

There aren’t enough descriptive words in this expressive language to explain my utter jealousy of people with bold, distinctive style, because I want it for myself so very badly. I want to walk into my apartment and have everything just so. I want the way I dress to reflect who I am. Everything I do and wear feels so generic and lacking. Part of this stuff purge is to get rid of all of the things in my life that I don’t need, to be sure, and that part is going like gangbusters, but I also want to get rid of all of the things that are not me.

The problem is, I don’t quite know who I am. It would be all too easy to blame my mom for this–to a large extent, she dressed me until I was sixteen and couldn’t take it anymore/was earning an income and could pick out my own things, and then I just mainly picked out things that I knew would piss her off. My room was baby blue and light pink and pastel purple, bordered in stenciled butterflies with a ruffled bedspread and curtains, because that’s the way she wanted it. While other kids my age had hand-me-down cheap furniture that they were allowed to sticker up or paint or otherwise make fit them, I was polishing a cherry wood dresser and nightstand. The furniture I had as a little kid was more adult than the stuff I have now!

So, I’m at a loss. I’m finally getting to a point in my life where I can afford to pick out things that fit me…but I don’t know what those things are. My tastes are mishmash and I can’t begin to imagine a scenario where tin robots fit in with asian-influence furniture and a taxidermied bear that’s wearing an outfit (Ok, I don’t actually HAVE a bear…yet.) and a great big print of The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. Clothes pose another distinct challenge–there just aren’t many cool, unique things for girls shaped like me. Even if there were stylish clothes that actually fit me, I spend half my work week climbing filthy warehouse shelves like a monkey which doesn’t lend itself to dressing well. How do I go about refining the things I have into the things that are right for me, the things that ARE me? If I don’t know who I am, will everything I do now just seem like a watered-down version of someone else’s distinctive style?

What’s YOUR design aesthetic? How have you decided what’s ‘you’ and what’s not?

Put away that thing, cause my baby don’t need no vibrator!

January 26, 2010 63 Comments read Masticating With Mellzah

Saturday, I painted the town red with leighhyphenanne, or at least our version of it.

Things got off to a strange start when a parade of men started hitting on me at the bus stop. Not one. Not two. Not three. FOUR different men approached me and were shameless, asking for my phone number, dropping ridiculous compliments, asking if they could go wherever I was going–at one point, I looked up to see if there was a full moon, and around me to see if maybe Ashton Kutcher was hiding in the bushes nearby, because I figure the only two potential explanations were either crazy astral influence or I was being punk’d.

When I got to the Comet, I recognized entropic_system just from the pictures he’s posted to the intertubes, and we waited together for Lanny.

Our first stop on the tour was Po Dogs, a place to coat our guts in the requisite grease to kickstart an epic evening. The week’s special was a Mac&Cheese Dog, and while that sounded disgustingly delicious, it didn’t sound disgustingly delicious enough. I steeled myself for mockery, approached the counter and asked “Do I live in a world where I can order a Deep Fried Danger Dog (a hot dog wrapped in pepper bacon which is then deep fried and smothered in onions and chili) with mac & cheese instead of chili?”

Yes. Yes I do live in that world.

It is a delicious world, ladies and gentlemen, though I have a feeling that dog is STILL sitting on my heart, hence the danger.

After dinner, we walked to Lanny’s place to pick up her wallet before we found a place to go drinking, because some places are weird about accepting passports as IDs for whatever reason. I can’t exactly remember when the idea of going to a strip club was first broached, but it definitely solidified when I spotted a Guy Fawkes mask on Lanzo’s table and insisted that it was important that he get a lap dance.

We played ding-dong-ditch on her new pothead neighbors, ran screeching down the fire exit stairs, silly-walked our way back up the hill…and then we saw it. Some utter douche had decided that since he couldn’t find an actual parking spot close to the grocery store, he would just park around the corner, in the intersection, sitting across the crosswalk. My thoughts came out in a rush, “Should I go over the hood? I want to go over the hood. Ok guys, I’m going over the hood,” and then I rolled over it, action-hero style. Next, Lanny used the tire as a step and crossed the hood on foot. As I looked back to watch her, I saw a guy angrily emerge from the QFC and shout “HEY!” Ever an avoider of confrontation, I hurried across the street, my logic being that if he was too lazy to park farther away, he certainly wouldn’t follow us all the way across the street. After we hit the next sidewalk, I glanced back and realized I was wrong. “HEY!” he yelled again, as he grabbed Lanny’s arm. “That was my car you just walked across!” “Uh…sorry?” “OH, you’re SORRY?” I interjected with “Sorry you don’t know how to park!” “YOU BITCH.” “OH NO, NOT THE ‘B’ WORD! MY FRAGILE EARS! NOW I’M *REALLY* SORRY!”

…At some point, I graduated from Internet Douchebag to Real Life Douchebag.

Thrilled at this non-confrontation, we ended up at Moe Bar, drinking PBR tallboys with straws. Lanny brought her own cozy, because frankly that is how we roll. Mike just watched, because that is how HE rolls.

After our beer, Mike was being summoned to Noc Noc for vurumai‘s welcome wagon party (ONE NIGHT ONLY: ONE LJer ENTERS SEATTLE! ONE LEAVES!), so he offered to drive us downtown since we were going to the strip club anyway. We mingled outside Noc Noc with the great big Seattle LJ crew, met the super-awesome-wonderful Tobie, and then Lanny and I walked to Deja Vu.

Once inside, we both agreed that we preferrred ladies stacked on the top and the bottom, which meant, of course, that we were doomed to be approached only by the skinniest girls in the joint. One of them was so thin, her butt was pointed. I hadn’t known that was possible. No matter how much she professed to love dancing for girls, I did her a favor by declining her lap dance offer out of concern that if she rubbed her twiglike legs together too much, she might explode into flames like dry tinder in the wilderness. Another rail-thin girl approached us, but instead of trying to sell us on a dance, plopped into the chair in front of us, almost tipping it over, and started chatting with us while we watched the super-acrobatic girl onstage. Eventually she got up to leave and tripped over her own stripper shoes. My first instinct was to reach out to keep her from falling, and after I grabbed her, I realized what I’d done. “Oh no, I’m sorry, I know I’m not supposed to touch you but I didn’t want you to fall over”–fully expecting to be booted out of the club at this point. She laughed and said it was fine to touch her to keep her from falling, and then I think she made an attempt to caress my face but ended up stabbing me in the cheek with one of her nails. I have a feeling this girl might not be cut out for the stripper lifestyle.

After that, we were pretty well left alone by everyone, free to mock at will. We saw the most coked-out girl in the universe. We saw a rotten weave. We saw another girl who maybe wasn’t cut out to be a stripper, dressed in a leopard print apron, carrying an oven mitt, get rejected by nearly everyone in the club, which we really couldn’t figure out and then she reached out and tweaked some girl’s boob in the front row and we smelled it. Homegirl REEKED of cat pee, which is not the traditional stripper smell. At one point, we crumpled dollar bills into little balls and flung them onstage. We made fun of other patrons. A walker-using midget came and went. Clandestine pictures were taken. Some guy shouted “HEY HONEY, I GOT DOLLARS OVER HERE FOR YOU” and the stripper went over, bent over in front of him, stuck her head through her legs, and took the bills with her mouth. Encouraged by his successes, he continued to shout “I WANT A HOT GIRL WITH NO MORALS ONSTAGE” and the next stripper shushed him. After closing, he shouted that he wanted someone to hook up with him. Yes. I DID die laughing. After the club closed, we hit the lone women’s bathroom. I went in first, and was in there for maybe a minute when someone angrily rattled the door handle. “Whoa! Whoa! I’m coming out!” Apparently one of the strippers had sat in gum and wanted to check herself out in the mirror, so she forced her way in with Lanny, who got to pee in front of a stripper. So. That happened.

Of course, after any successful (not THAT successful, Guy Fawkes never got his lapdance) strip club outing, it’s important to visit the adjacent porn store, which was swarming with tanked guys. “Hey girls! What do you use THIS thing for? If you use this THERE, then where’s the room for me? Do girls really want something THIS big?” and so on and so forth. It was all fun and games until some guy stood reallllly close to us, and whisper-quiet asked our names, asked our ages, then said “You don’t need any of this stuff…I’ve uh, got a PHD, and uh…” When we looked at him quizzically, he said really quietly and quickly “Oh, I hate myself.” I told him he didn’t need to hate himself but that hitting on girls in a porn store maybe wasn’t the best way to meet someone (and maybe don’t come off as a skeezebag, but that’s a lesson for another day). He didn’t really learn his lesson, and when I picked a great big red-glitter dong off of the wall, he asked if he could buy it for me. No, dude. No. Go away.

Then Lanny and I spied the great big fisting arms on the wall, grabbed two, and had a fistfight in the middle of the store. Eventually, she picked out something, I picked out something, and we went home. Let me tell you–as much as it felt normal to pick out a vibrator at three in the morning, it did not feel as normal going home on the bus at 8am with one shoved in my coat pocket.

How was YOUR weekend?

How celebrity crushes have killed it for me (mostly by opening their mouths)

January 22, 2010 73 Comments read Everything is Terrible

Welcome, friends, to my journey of bitter disappointment in discovering that the celebrities I crushed on were just people, too.

Bad people.

Jim Carrey

When I was twelve years old, I developed a great big owl-glasses drooling brace-faced crush on Jim Carrey. He was funny AND handsome! I was especially impressed with the way he would make it appear he was talking out of his butt. He would understand my pain. I wasn’t quiet about it, either. Ooooh no. I wrote him letter after letter after letter. Not stalking, just sharing. After all, he was surely interested in my prepubescent trials and tribulations, why wouldn’t he be interested in the day-to-day activities of his future wife? Like when her little brother knocked her off her bike and she ripped up her forearm on a jagged rock and her doctor stitched her up RIGHT THERE at the kitchen table and said she was SO brave and then it oozed weepy matter for a month because one time she accidentally hit it against the door as she was getting off the school bus and ripped it open again and spent the afternoon in pre-algebra class alternately pressing those rough brown paper towels against it and picking at the remaining scabby edges? What future husband wouldn’t want to know that? I was incredibly thrilled when I received a genuinely autographed photograph from him in the mail in return. Encouraged by my successes, and armed with the knowledge that my family would be visiting my grandparents in California for Easter break that year, I made the first move and cordially invited him to meet me for lunch. I was sure he would be suitably impressed by the massive scrapbook I had assembled with photographs and articles about him, things that I had collected and friends had given to me, because it demonstrated my complete knowledge about all things Jim Carrey. He never responded (who would?! It’s a basic law of self-preservation to avoid encounters that might end with you getting stabbed by someone who is sobbing while screeching “I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU!” or “IF I CAN’T HAVE YOU, NO ONE CAN!” or “SPANK YOU VERY MUCH!”), but while I was visiting my grandparents, my aunt called the house and pretended to be his secretary while my grandfather called me to the phone with “Oh my goodness, Melissa, it’s Jimmy Carrey!!” because you aren’t a member of my family if you don’t believe in cruel pranks.

Little was I to know that one day he actually WOULD start talking out of his ass. You see, his girlfriend, Jenny McCarthy, is a scientist.

See? Totally a scientist.

OH WAIT, NO SHE ISN’T. She’s a pseudo-celebrity who was once famous for showing off her rack in Playboy and on MTV, she popped out a kid, and is now the self-appointed leader of the anti-vaccination movement with the spurious reasoning that vaccinations cause autism, when it’s more likely a coincidence; children start exhibiting signs of autism around the same age that they receive the MMR vaccine. She is basing all of her ‘science’ knowledge off a sample group of one–her child, and for some reason, that’s given her credibility among talk-show circles though NO respectable science is done with a sample group that small. Not only does she claim to have cured her son’s autism through diet, but she is reccommending that other, talk-show-watching, impressionable parents who want the best for their children NOT vaccinate these children, leaving a group of our population (up to 10% of our schools!) vulnerable against third world diseases that we had essentially wiped out in the developed world. This movement now has a body count attached to it. Children, who are supposed to be protected by their parents to the best of their ability because they cannot fend for themselves, are becoming ill and dying because Tits McGee fancies herself a scientist.

Jim Carrey has also attached himself to this movement. It’s amazing how he became interested in it and SO very educated about it right around the time he started boning down with Jenny McCarthy, isn’t it? He rails against the profitability of vaccines, claiming that doctors, uninfluenced by their hippopotamushippocratic oath, have a motto: “Grab ’em and stab ’em.” Yes, that sounds vaguely doctor-ish. It’s too bad that vaccines aren’t really the profit-generators in the industry–pharmaceuticals to grow hair, lose weight, and give you boners are. It’s why we don’t get spam trying to sell us /\/|M® vaccines for 60% off–they aren’t the moneymakers! Anything you only need once, twice, three times in a lifetime isn’t going to generate the profit of something that’s used EVERY DAY. I would expect someone educated about the industry to know this, but oh wait, you just went to VAGINA UNIVERSITY, Jim Carrey. And now your (girlfriend’s) opinions about vaccines are given more airtime and credence than they deserve, simply because of your celebrity, creating a debate where there should be none. Do you not recognize how utterly sick and disgusting it is that your high school dropout opinion should be given the same or greater weight than that of noncelebrity scientists and doctors who actually know what they’re talking about?

SHUT UP, YOU ARE RUINING IT FOR ME.

Johnny Depp

This guy oozes cheekbones and charm and class, save for his ‘Wino forever’ tattoo, meeting and greeting and signing autographs for fans who wait outside his sets for hours, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. By all accounts, he is supposed to be a decent guy, both to work with and in general, not a prima donna or an asshole like Val Kilmer or Russell Crowe. An excellent, swoon-worthy candidate for crushitude.

This is why I was particularly disappointed to see this; that he defended Roman Polanski’s rape of a child.

EXCUSE ME? Why now? If he killed a child and fled justice for thirty years instead of raped a child and fled justice for thirty years, would you be asking why now? Here is a hint, Johnny Depp: Roman Polanski raped a child. He was CONVICTED of raping a child. There is NO question that he actually did rape her, both vaginally and anally, after drugging her. If he had manned up and accepted his punishment at the time, we wouldn’t need to ask ‘why now?’. He certainly manned up enough to stick his cock in a few of her holes. But he ran away, Johnny Depp, to live in ‘exile’, a life filled with extravagant homes in multiple countries, continuing high-profile work, almost flaunting the fact that he escaped justice. What makes him better, less deserving of justice, than other child rapists? Is it money? You indicate that it must be about money somehow…because in your world, problems like this can always be solved with money. It must be nice to have enough money to be able to buy freedom from justice. It’s too bad that money couldn’t shut the girl up to avoid the conviction in the first place, eh?

FURTHERMORE, I wasn’t aware that once someone has beautiful children and a wife that it erases the bad shit they’ve done and eliminates them as a potential predator. I suppose no child has ever been touched inappropriately by a parent or guardian, that sort of thing never goes on in the home, right? And even if he ISN’T touching his kids or out in the street doing ‘horrible, horrible things’, he DID a horrible, horrible thing, and this is about punishment for THAT act. HE PLED GUILTY. IT IS NOT IN QUESTION!

SHUT UP, YOU ARE RUINING IT FOR ME.

Billy Corgan

When I was a teenager, he totally spoke to my pain, even though NOBODY understood me, could possibly get the depths of my pain as an upper lower middle class suburban white kid, he did. We were totally going to get married when I grew up. I did the math. It didn’t creep me out as a teenager.

It creeps me out now that I AM an adult and he’s dating girls my age. Also, Tila Tequila? JESSICA SIMPSON!? Really dude? Are you trying to make up for high school, when girls like them wouldn’t even look at you? Or are you trying to make some sort of ridiculous comeback on the shoulders of girls who are even bigger famewhores than you could even hope to be?

…What, I can’t be petty? There was also all that shit he said about the music being ‘sacred’ and that he could never license it for commercial use because it’s ‘saved people’s lives’ and he has more respect for its power than that…and then licensed ‘Today’ for a Visa commercial. And then wrote an exclusive track for a Hyundai commercial. And then released the same album, like, six times to rip off the people who supported him when his music was actually good. I’m mad about the hypocrisy in those things, too. But it’s dating the mid-twenties girls that skeeves me.