Clinique Bukkake

The other night it was foggy and cool here at San Francisco's outermost edge; I was just starting a week off work; my boyfriend was producing dinner; I was happily just beginning to browse through the newest issue of Allure magazine (September 2006, with a platinum blonde, 1940's-styled Christina Aguilera on the cover). A few pages into the magazine, I came across this ad; a model's face, huge and close, with creamy, pale yellow, viscous stuff dripping off her cheek and nose and down her lips.

Huh.

Two jobs ago, I worked as a sex educator/sex toy salesperson/quality control person at an internet sex toy store with a supposedly feminist bent. In actuality, it was about as feminist as ads for discreetly packaged tampons or floral-scented douches or clothing detergent for the tough guys in your family (your Dear Husband and Dear Sons) are feminist. But I digress.
The longer I worked there, the more I learned about sex, vibrators, sex books, and porno movies. As with working in any industry, working in the sex products industy, a person learns not just basics but detailed info like the month and day that the newest highly-anticipated and much-critically-acclaimed bukkake video is being released. Being Released. Yes, indeedy.

Bukkake, you innocents, is a Japanese word, but like "sushi" and "futon", everyone who does not speak any Japanese knows it.
Everyone into porn, that is...baldly put, it's when people splooge (ejaculate) all over someone's face. It's a whole porn genre unto itself. When I started working at the sex store, I didn't know that word. I had just started working there when I talked to a customer on the phone who said something something about "bukkake" videos.
"Um, hold on, please," I told him, pressing my finger over the voice tube of my headset and standing up to yell to my co-workers, "WHAT'S BUKKAKE?"

"Ejaculating on the face," Maude, my co-worker and pal replied. (Not really her name, but that was her work name there, and mine was Dot. We tried to pick names that we thought were hilariously unsexy, kind of the opposite of Honey or Cherry or Ashley or whatever other names sound like they belong to a Hot and Sexxy gal.)

"Here, I'm emailing you a link," Maude said.


Call me Pollyanna: it still amazes me how much porn imagery shows up in mainstream advertising. In fact, sometimes it seems mainstream advertising is nothing BUT porn imagery.

The first photo is the Clinique cosmetics ad for their Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion. You can see the ad in all the major fashion magazines this month.

The second photo is a still I found at a "free bukkake pics" website. You'll appreciate the fact that I cropped some stuff out, methinks.

Francesca Lia Block

My guy ordered these books for me today; Francesca Lia Block's two newest. I can't wait to read them!

The little novel Weetzie Bat was the first book of hers that I read, so I always recommend and often give this book to people who want to know what's so special about Francesca Lia Block's writings. You can read it in less than an hour, and in that time it will either pull you in and you will want to read all her other novels, or you just won't get it at all. I hope it's the former.
It's a magical little novel full of oddball characters, beauty, sadness, love, fun, and Los Angeles.


About Francesca Lia Block...

More Revelatory, Less Ranting

This is my tattoo. It is my only tattoo, and obviously it is somewhat large. Compared to comedian
Margaret Cho's tattoo, it is not at all large, but it's large compared to the tiny butterflies or mini hearts that demurely adorn so many women's ankles and pelvises.

It was done for me by a woman artist in Los Angeles; her name is April Love. For planning the piece, I brought her several stems of the orchids on our first meeting and we talked; next, she did a colored pencil drawing from there, on some kind of very thin, translucent paper, almost like vellum, but less crisp and more like fabric. That took a few weeks. I then visited the studio again, and that time she cut around the drawing and placed it on my body, moved it around, looked, moved it around some more, decided to take one leaf off the original drawing, and then finally on my third visit she did the tattoo. It's very uncommon to see a soft gray outline instead of black. We wanted the tattoo to be feminine and soft and to look like the original drawing, as if it were done with colored pencil, pastel, or watercolor rather than a more traditional type of tattoo with a distinct outline. She tells me it's one of her favorite pieces she's done. I love it and feel like it's really become a part of me over time.

The Extinction of my Eyeliner

As everyone who loves makeup knows: products come and products go. Your favorite color/formula/fragrance is likely to be discontinued at any given time, for no apparent reason. Surely it MUST be a bestseller, no?! If I love it, mustn't hundreds of thousands of others love it, too?! Usually I take the extinction with a grain of salt; I shrug it off and find a replacement.
(Not so my friend Emerald, who immediately stockpiled a case of her favorite color nailpolish when she found out that it was being discontinued. I once looked in her refrigerator, and where eggs should be, there were about thirty identical bottles of the purple stuff. "Those idiots," she sighed. "They're not making my color any more.")

Till now, the extinct cosmetic item I missed most was Prescriptives' Simply Moisture, a lightweight, easily-absorbed and mild-smelling mositurizer - one of their first, if not their very first item in their skincare line. It was perfect. Really, truly perfect! It came in an open-necked bottle and was liquid enough to pour out... I hate the gooey, messy pumps most lotions are delivered in today. SImply Moisture was simply friggin' awesome! I didn't even know it was being discontinued till it was gone. They replaced it with something called "All You Need." When I tried to express my distress to the Prescriptives counter person, she just looked bored and then pointed to "All You Need."
"This is All You Need," she said, expressionlessly. I almost cried.

Now the liquid eyeliner I love is gone. It's by Anna Sui, it's black, it never gets dried out, it's the perfect consistency and it COMES WITH THE PERFECT BRUSH, which is firm and kind of thick, which is unheard of in the realms of liquid eyeliner. Always, the brush that comes with all other liquid eyeliner is a cheap, flimsy piece of crap. And I despise the felt-tipped ones. Insane!!! Shall we just take a Sharpie to our eyelids?! Because that's what the felt-tipped eyeliners are like. The Anna Sui is not too wet, not too dry, really, really black, and very long-lasting. I've used this Anna Sui liquid eyeliner for years. I wear it pretty much every day... probably 358 days a year, minus two days a year for when I have the flu or something equally horrifying. At times I've ventured into other brands of liquid liner just for fun and have always found them inferior.

Anyhow, it's GONE GONE GONE.

Figs and Leaves

My pal Denise came at me with a little strawberry basket of soft green balls yesterday at work. "Try it!" she said, holding one of the balls out to me. (This sort of thing happens often where I work; it's an organic produce distributor.) I bit into the plump, slippery sweetness of the most delicious fig I've ever tasted. It felt sort of soft-hairy inside, with a thin outside skin as soft as a baby's. She told me it's an Adriatic fig.

"Hmm," I said, thinking, "It's sorta... sexual."

"TOTALLY!" Denise concurred, smirking. "Heh heh. Do you like FIGS?" She said in a low, sexy hiss, wriggling her eyebrows. Oftentimes, Denise has the lowbrow humor of a 7th grade boy. It's really funny.

Here's the inside of an Adriatic fig.

Do *you* like figs?

What the F*&%$ IS THIS?!

There are a lot of tourists in San Francisco. The ones who are sporty rent bikes and ride them along the waterfront. The ones who are not sporty ride the cable cars. The ones who are paired into nice heterosexual sporty couples can sometimes be seen on TANDEM bikes. (Not only is this woman on the back of a tandem bike... she's also wearing a stuffed animal backpack. That's the real reason I took their photo. But then I got annoyed thinking about the tandem bikes.
"Why is the man always on the FRONT?" I shouted at my beloved, while shoving my spy camera in front of him.)

I actually have been on a tandem bike once before, when I was around twelve, and on a Santa Barbara or San Diego trip with my then-single mother. The only reason we rented it was because the bike rental shack was out of regular bikes. We almost killed each other arguing over who was pedaling harder, who was not synchronized, who weighed more and who was actually stronger. I was already her height, and NOW I admit she was and still is stronger than I am, but at the time, damned if I was going to be on the back. (In case you don't know anything about tandem bikes... the stronger, heavier person should ride in front, because the bike is really hard to control if the bigger person is in the back. This is why the man is always on the front of the stupid bike. Sure, chances are he's also a sexist asshole, but technically, it's just that the bigger person goes in front. ) After that ride, my mom and I both vowed "never again", and certainly, definitely, I will NEVER get on a tandem bike behind a MAN. It's just so dumb. Why not just put on a frilly-ass dress and hop up sideways on a horse?!

This is what Tandem Cycle Works says about tandem bikes:

"Tandem Bicycles create a mutual experience – a team effort in achieving the satisfaction that comes from a spectacular ride."

Who are they kidding?! A mutal team effort and satisfying spectacular ride?! Just have sex with each other and then ride separate bikes, jeez! Separate bikes, and separate bank accounts, seriously. One day soon I shall write my manifesto about separate bank accounts. I'm just warming up with the stupid tandem bikes!

Beauties and Beasts

What in the Hell happened?! Am I crazy?

I understand that cultural norms around beauty change with time, but I just feel like some really weird media brainwashing thing is happening to Americans in the year 2006... the women being held up to us as "beauties" are all horrifyingly similar and just plain horrifying in general. I honestly think that each of these celebrated beauties from the past is stunningly, heartbreakingly, inarguably gorgeous, while the so-called "beauties" of today are actually beasts!
(Of course I'm only talking about a very narrow and white standard of beauty here anyhow.)

(The women in the top four photos are Faye Dunaway, Twiggy, Brigitte Bardot and Bebe Buell.)

The Dahlias

The famous
Dahlia Dell at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park is doing its thing again!

Each year the dahlias in this amazing garden burst into bloom. The first time I saw them I was shocked and awed by their size (some of the blooms are as large as a person's head), the intensity of their colors, and the dizzying mathematical patterns of their petals. Some are hot pink, some are brilliant orange, some are electric purple, some are even white with red tips; they remind me of Betty Boop. On an overcast early morning, the colors really pop, and the experience is almost surreal. You may feel as if you're falling headlong into the pages of a Dr. Seuss book.

Have you read The Lorax? I think Theodore Seuss Geisel was influnced by dahlias when he designed the truffula trees...

Skeepants with His Cherry Tomatoes

Yoshitomo Nara

When you first look at Yoshitomo Nara's work, it's deceptively simple. But the longer you look, especially if you look at several of his cartoon children over and over again, the more you begin to see the complex expressiveness of their seemingly flat faces. They're impish, devious, sad, sweet, joyful, and sometimes demonic.

See some of Nara's work here.

The Birds and The Bees

The best way to remove the anthers from a lily is with dulled slant-tip tweezers. In case you were truant or under the influence of anything during high school Biology class, the anthers are the pollen-making parts at the top of the stamens. When the lily first begins to open, the anthers are silky and smooth and are not yet a powdery mess of throbbing plant desire; this is the time to remove them! I've learned the hard way - orange lily pollen stains skin (leaving you orangey-yellow, as if you'd been cooking with tumeric or playing with certain self-tanners), stains placemats and dinner napkins. So use tweezers - spare your skin, clothes and table linens.

The anthers come off with a satisfying little *snap*, leaving you with the naked male stamens, and the big stigma (the female part of the flower, in the center) intact. Remember: a stigma needs an anther like a fish needs a bicycle. Heh heh.

The College Years Live On

As we all know, some little kids get attached to a particular blanket or stuffed animal and will drag it around for years till it's filthy and ragged. My cousin Kristen (now eighteen years old) had a cheap baby blanket with a polyester-satin edge on it that she loved to twist, suck and rub. First the blanket was blue, then over the years it became dingy gray. One holiday when we all gathered at my grandparents' house, I noticed she had a new blanket! When I looked closer, I saw that her parents had hand-sewn part of the old blanket (about an 8 inch square, including part of the silky edge) onto the new blanket. (And clearly neither of them knew how to sew, but that's irrelevant.) Kristen was happy and yippee! she had a fresh new blanket.

Similarly, some adults become attached to memorabilia from their younger days - college dorm days, etcetera. They will move from roommate to roommate, lover to lover, apartment to apartment and sometimes even city to city carrying around boxes and folders of their old crap.

I'm horribly unsentimental, but I've always collected souvenir programs from musicals my mom has taken me to. Hairspray, Rent, Chicago, Flower Drum Song and any number of lesser-known ones - I have all the shiny, glossy programs. My partner, who was a theater major in college, had a lot of posters from shows he saw, worked on and performed in. He also moved in with some vintage posters and comic books. Plus, he also has a particular fondness for Madonna, and me for Mariah Carey.
Posters and magazine covers abound!

These things could not just be thumbtacked to the walls in our shared apartment like so many Budweiser posters.
We decided to display them in our hallway in these inexpensive "frameless" clip frames. (Yes, yes, they're from the dreaded IKEA!) The frames literally clip together with four springy metal clips each, so they are easily opened. We can always take one down, change the artwork/crap inside and hang it back up. This way we get to hang on to a corner of our security blankets and yet our place still looks clean and grown up, the way we want it to.

Paper, Tape, Ribbons and A Little Math...

As a child I was taught to gift wrap by my mother and my auntie Maria, who are both big advocates of crisp folds, matched-up edges, and ultra-tight bows made with florists' ribbon. Really, it was almost ritualistic - this whole Christmas gift wrapping flurry we would fly into shortly after Thanksgiving. They seemed to derive pleasure from the neatly arranged assemblage of gifts, all in matching wrap (my mother preferred plain shiny red or green) with matching white bows. Learning how to wrap, I was dispatched to do all my grandma's packages for her - she wasn't so picky about how well it was done.

Eventually I developed my own gift wrap style - I changed to double-stick tape, for one thing, which means I can wrap a package in paper and have no visible tape anywhere - pretty cool. I also like to try all different sorts of papers and ribbons. If I want the gift to be really fancy, I wrap the box in colored tissue and then wrap it again in paper. I love paper. I love heavy, rich paper that feels good in the hands. I love a beautifully wrapped gift!
I also love really sharp scissors!

Ping

My beautiful orange goldfish in a bowl with orange rocks is a lovely "home accessory", and he's also a living creature who breathes, eats, poops and grows!
So, Ping is soon moving into a new apartment: a BabyBiorb 4 gallon aquarium.


Goldfish are one of the few fishes that can live in a bowl without filtration and an air pump. The others are Bettas (or "Siamese fighting fish") and paradise fish. Even so, their water needs to be changed very frequently, and eventually they will outgrow the bowl. (And please do not email to yell at me and tell me I am a fish abuser... I got this information from The Animal Connection on Judah St in San Francisco - blame them!) I started with this bowl, which is actually a vase, some orange glass pebbles without sharp edges (from Crate and Barrel), a bottle of tap water conditioner, fish food, water plants, two tiny snails, and finally added Ping. Goldfish will nudge and nibble on their water plants, so I often buy new ones. (It's good to think of the plants as more a salad for the fish than a fish houseplant... that way I don't get mad when the plants fail to thrive and eventually get torn apart!) The snails go round and round and eat leftover fish food, the plants recycle some carbon dioxide and emit oxygen, and the pebbles... well, he likes to poke at them looking for fallen flakes of fish food.

Friends and acquaintances have asked me if I like dogs and cats...why not a dog or cat? Because hamster poop and fish poop is about all the poop I want to deal with, thank you very much! I do like dogs and cats, as long as their poop belongs to someone else...If I wanted to deal with big, hot steaming poop I would have a baby.

Watching a fish swim around is so much more relaxing than watching TV. I have a fish as one alternative to TV (books are another), not as an alternative to a dog!

If My Apartment Were Burning...

What the heck is this?! you may be thinking.

Well, if my apartment were burning down and I could only carry one thing out, I think it would be this sculpture. (But it's so damned heavy I'd have to strap it to a rollerskate and roll it along.)

Once upon a time, it hung above my grandparents' fireplace in their ultra-mod house. Then it was wrapped in packing material and living in my mother's laundry room - for shame! She eventually decided she had no place to hang this modern monstrosity in her sort of traditional, sort of contemporary home and gave it to me. I seem to get all the rejected family art, which is just fine by me!

After much weighing, measuring, stud-finding, drilling, shrieking and screwing, my partner and I successfully hung the piece in our bedroom. I feel so fortunate to own this piece of art by sculptor Julie MacDonald.

Hello Kitty with Alligators Tee

I received this yellow cap-sleeved tee shirt as a reward for a perfect dental check up! It has a vee neck and green alligators all over it, making it look kind of like children's pajamas. There is one Hello Kitty riding an alligator on the chest. The tee shirt is a bit long, which is good if you wear low-rise jeans.

Get yourself one...

Kamio Happiness Animals

I picked up this little notepad with different animal face sheets of paper inside at
Kawaii Corner, a tiny, jam-packed little shop in San Francisco's Outer Richmond area. At first I thought, all this stuff is so cute, but how can anyone afford the rent on this shop and make a living selling nothing but items at less that $5 each?! Then I saw that the young woman who owns/runs the shop had a huge pile of packages she was getting ready to mail out. Probably most of her business is through the website. God, I want to have a store where I get to pick out and write descriptions for all the cute stuff!!! I need to have rich parents like Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - that wicked brat who said, "DADDY, I WANT A TRAINED SQUIRREL!" and ended up going down the garbage chute in the chocolate factory...

I think my mom would be a better bet than my dad, actually. She's much more the spoiling type; my pops is kind of cheap.

Maybe I'll try that on her. "MOMMY, I WANT A HELLO KITTY STORE!"

Something tells me that will not fly.

Hello Kitty Barrettes

These are both cute and sturdy! (I have another, older pair that have lasted three years now.) I don't see them at the Sanrio website, but I found them at the Sanrio "flagship" store in downtown San Francisco. The downtown San Francisco store is not as impressive as the Los Angeles (Beverly Center) store. But it's still really fun.

PS Everthing got dusted and my mom declared my apartment "nice and clean"... whew...

FREAKING OUT!!!

My mother is coming to visit this weekend.

My house is always pretty clean. My mom's house is always IMMACULATE. You could do surgery on yourself on her floors with her knives and sop up your blood with one of her kitchen towels and then sew yourself up with some thread from her sewing kit and there is no way you would get an infection. IT'S THAT CLEAN! The smell of my childhood is not Nestle Tollhouse cookies baking - it's Windex, Listerine and a slight whiff of bleach! She seriously would inspect my bedroom each week (when I was a kid) after our Saturday morning house cleaning, and she would run her fingertip along the surface of my dresser. I know this sounds very Mommy Dearest but she's a really cool mom. She's just... extremely clean.

Behold the weird, outdated and useless heater unit in our wall! I think it's from the 60's. It has all these LITTLE SPACES which catch dust. In order to clean them, I must wrap a cloth around my fingers and run my finger along each little slat. It's a little like flossing, only instead of 32 teeth, there are hundreds. And it's double sided! One side faces the living room and the other side goes right through to the hallway. It's a nightmare!!! Cleaning house before my mom gets here IS A NIGHTMARE! Look at my lamp... it's made of dust-catching STAIRS for Pete's sake...
everywhere I look there are DUST HOLDERS... mini blinds... everywhere... I'M FREAKING OUT!!! I'm in a horror movie, and the villain is covered with little dusty slats and steps...

Mamegoma

Mamegoma is a little seal-like creature character. I'm in love! This cute, tiny memo pad came from shopkawaii.com, currently my favorite source of made-in-Japan paper cuteness.

My Old L.A.M.B. Baby Barrel Bag

When Gwen Stefani did these L.A.M.B. bags in partnership with LeSportsac a few years ago, I went to the LeSportsac store at the Beverly Center in Los Angeles and they were sold out. (This was in Aug/Sept of 2003.) When I returned to San Francisco I wandered morosely into Macy's one day during a lunch break and their handbag section was fully stocked! I bought this one, called the "Baby Barrel" style. At the time I liked the black and white print (and I love blackletter calligraphy and "type") but I thought the bag was trendy and that I would only use it for a few months. It turned out to be one of my favorites for the next few years! It's such a tiny bag, and I now wish I'd gotten a larger one as well as this one. I wish I'd known then how quickly they would sell out everywhere, that L.A.M.B. was only partnering with LeSportsac for a limited time, and how much I'd love the bag...

especially the "limited time" part... I would have purchased several and jacked up the price and hawked them on horrible Ebay like everyone who is selling them there...
I'm always missing out on money-making schemes...

Pizza Orgasmica

We sometimes order pizza from Pizza Orgasmica.

I was mad at them for a while because we once ordered a pizza, and it still hadn't arrived an hour and a half later, so I called to see if our driver got into a car accident or what. "YOU GOT YOUR PIZZA," a guy with a New Zealand accent screamed at me. "WE DELIVERED IT!" Turns out they delivered my pizza to apartment "C". We live in APARTMENT "D".

How freakish are the people in Unit C, that they accepted, paid for and ate a pizza they didn't even order?!


Apartment D, dammit. D as in DOGGIE STYLE, which is the actual name of one of their pizzas. I've never had the Doggie Style, since I eat meat rarely, and it's covered with five different meats.

Well, I got over the mis-delivery, and we can order from them again. They do have some clever names and you can get the pizza with this delicious, thin, crisp cornmeal crust. I like to think up really vulgar names I would use if I owned Pizza Orgasmica...like "The Big Throbbing Sausage"...that would be my first one.

Pink Head by Tarina Tarantino

This necklace was quite a shopping "score" - if you will. (Oh, how I hate sports metaphors, and yet I find myself using them. I blame it on my mother - super jock and former PE teacher. And she's coming to visit this weekend. AAAGH!)

Well, Tarina Tarantino is a designer who put pink hair on Hello Kitty, added some Swarovski crystals and a high price tag, got skinny-weird Paris Hilton to wear her designs, and basically reeled me in like a fish hopelessly hooked in the gullet.
I love it.

I love TT's Hello Kitty jewelry because it's whimsical, it's adorable, It's well-made, or at least much better quality than any cheap necklace sold at Sanrio prior to TT's arrival. (And I have several cheapies.) I do think it's overpriced.

The reason I consider this necklace a score is that it's from the Tarina Tarantino "Bambino" line. It was designed for a child, so the items in the Bambino line were the same as the ones for adults, but with shorter chains, and were priced much lower. This necklace was less than $50, whereas many of her pieces are around $170 - $200. The drawback is that the chain doesn't fit everyone, but if you're small-ish, it will fit like a choker, the way you see it on me here. Maybe TT's people realized the Bambino line was too good of a deal, because it's no longer available. It may still be available on Ebay.

(But you know how I feel about Ebay, right?)

IKEA Madness

What did I say? IKEA is a nightmare! Yes! I did find the mirror tiles I wanted, and a nice-looking houseplant, described by my pal Meagan as "green and firm". Hmm.
Here is Meagan holding the firm, green plant in the backseat of my car, and non verbally telling us what she really thinks of wandering around IKEA.

Seriously, the thing with stuff from IKEA is that everyone (of a certain age and income bracket) has it, and everyone recognizes it. "Oh, you got that at IKEA! I have the same one!" is the twenty-something/early thirty-something refrain. HORRORS!
Okay, now my house is fully furnished and I'm never going to IKEA again.

(Anyhow, our place looks more like Crate and Barrel threw up in it than IKEA did.)

IKEA

I'm dragging two pals across the Bay to IKEA tonight. It's only noon and I'm already cackling with evil laughter.

Yes, IKEA is huge, confusing, and migraine-inducing. A college girlfriend and I literally broke up over the assembly of a cheap IKEA dresser that had the holes drilled into the wrong side of the plywood. (I called her F*ing incompetent and she called me a bitch. If I remember correctly, she was foaming at the mouth. Ah, those were the days.) And yet...they have really good houseplants sometimes. And a few months ago I bought sixteen mirror tiles there and affixed them to the wall in my bedroom and they look AWESOME, and I've decided that I need eight more to make this mirrored area larger. I hope they still have the mirrors. I think my friend Esther is just coming with me for the IKEA meatballs. And Meagan wants a shower curtain. I hope our friendship survives the maze that is IKEA!

My Jade Ring

This is my jade ring, which used to be my grandmother's, and her mother gave it to her. It was bequeathed to me because I'm the only person in my family who likes jade, and I'm definitely the only person who likes cabochons.
("Eeewww. Old-ladyish!" says my mother and my aunts.)
When my aunt Maria gave me the ring it was so dirty I didn't even know there were diamonds on the sides. I scrubbed it with a soft baby toothbrush and there it was, all beautiful and green and gold and sparkly. I wear it on my middle finger because it's too big for my ring finger, and since it belonged to my grandma, I don't want to get it sized. I call it The Incredible Hulk. It's not very comfortable, so I only wear it for dress-up. It makes me feel like I'm a different person, in a different time.

Goodbye, Downstairs Neighbors!

I was sitting at my desk with the living room windows open yesterday, when I heard a masculine voice outside saying, "Yeah, well Carol got a U Haul... yeah... there are three really heavy things; there's a king sized bed..." I practically snapped my neck I turned so fast to look out the window! Carol is my downstairs neighbor.
I looked and saw Carol hugging a gigantic cardboard MOVING BOX. Yes indeedy - my downstairs neighbors are moving out!

I've always said I wish they would - they annoy me. They have two televisions (at least) on which they seem to only play war movies, and both TVs are on all the time. I always hear gunshots coming from my floor. I WANT to hear the waves crashing outside... that's why I moved to the damned beach. They never go outside and exercise, so they have all this pent up energy and they wrestle, run and stomp like a herd of elephants late at night, which wouldn't be so bad, except that they rumble our apartment, too. (Plus I go to bed super early because I have to be at work super early.) They drive a huge-ass Chevrolet SUV and they scraped my car door with it and neglected to tell me, so I had to confront them about it and tell them they were sneaky and dishonest. Oh, and they leave their little dog alone and it barks and barks out of loneliness, which I think is just cruel.

On the other hand... there's always a worse neighbor***, and at least I'm on speaking terms with these two. I gave them ornamental pumpkins for Halloween (unacknowledged) and a big plant at the new year. To our shock, they reciprocated with a bottle of wine. When I got mad at them about the car, Carol said she wanted to fix the situation and offered to pay for the damage, and she made her friend (who apparently was the one who hit my car and didn't tell anyone)march upstairs and apologize to me. And when we once had to tell them to please shut up they apologized and said they were trying to clean house (it was 1 am!). So, at least we're on decent terms.

Well, the unit will be vacant for months! That's MONTHS of utter peace, and months that I will get to hog two parking spots and not have to park my car one inch from the wall to give them their much-needed SUV space!

*** Worse neighbors - like the lady with dementia who lived next door to us when we lived in Oakland, who would scream "Goddamned F*ing Shit!" over and over again through the adjoining walls... and the guy who lived above me who would watch the same porn movie over and over again and creak his insanely creaky bed while he jacked off to the movie... even on Thanksgiving morning at 5:30am...oh yeah, and we can't forget my old roomie in LA who had months worth of fast food trash on his bedroom floor and who spent my half of the rent at Gucci one month. (I came home and found an eviction notice on the door.) Oh, yes... there are worse people to live near and with.

Pocky Gone Wild

These are straw-like crackers dipped in either chocolate or some kind of strawberry-flavored white chocolate, like the stuff that coats yogurt raisins. At least they were when I was a child and they were one of my favorite treats.

We went to an Asian supermarket this morning and I was surprised to see the zillions of Pocky permutations. There's one called "Pocky Men's". I got one called "Pocky Chocolate Coconut" with little flakes of coconut all over it. This one is Pocky Chocolate Mousse, only the "chocolate mousse" is lavender colored. I don't know how I feel about that... it's a little scary... I can't think of any foods that are naturally lavender-colored, except maybe the inside of certain figs. Of course, no one pretends that Pocky is a natural food, but still - lavender food is weird!

The packaging of Pocky has certainly changed since I was a child. It used to be really plain. Pocky only came in strawberry or chocolate; and I can't remember the chocolate packaging, because I only ever chose strawberry, which was plain pink with the word "Pocky" on it. What's the world coming to? I guess I'm getting old. Soon I'll be like my grandparents, "When we were your age, Grandpa woould take me to dinner and dancing at the Claremont Hotel for five dollars! Five dollars!"

The Astounding Art of Fafi

The banner art on the blog is by a French woman graffiti artist named Fafi.
Her artwork is amazingly colorful, and her "fafinettes" (what she calls the girls she draws and paints) are strange, sexy, dark, and fashionable. To me, they're oddly futuristic as well. Tour her website when you have some time... it's like entering another world; a skewed fantasy world where girls have pink and aqua hair, enormous eyes, otherworldly animal companions, and lots of striped socks and armwarmers.

Click to visit Fafi!

Aqua Necklaces

I've got a real hard-on for this color family - turquoise, aqua, green, blue-green. These are some of my necklaces.
The second one from the right is a favorite. I bought it for myself on impulse, right before Christmas. I was going to a holiday dinner with my boss and some of my co-workers - we were going to the famed Zuni Cafe in San Francisco. I was super-excited. I planned to wear a black flowy skirt, very 40's-styled heels (Charles David), a black dressy camisole with little black seeds pearls on it, and this gorgeous sort of green-blue velvet jacket. The outfit was pretty, but so simple - it needed something funky and unusual, like a fantastic necklace.

Usually I don't buy myself ANYTHING between Halloween and Christmas. I've got an enormous extended family (with lots of adorable small cousins who all need cute presents!) and a PUNY income, which means I really have to aggressively save for Christmas gifts. Plus, my mom's birthday is December 27th, I'm her only child, and she's got expensive taste.

Filled with that mixture of pleasure and guilt which comes with overspending on something you really, really love but cannot really afford, I took the new necklace to work to agonize over whether I should keep it or return it. I polled various femmes at my workplace, who had lots of interesting ways to weigh the value of the necklace - "Will you wear it a lot?"
"Are those real pearls?" (One even scraped a pearl against her teeth to ascertain its real-pearlness!) "Is there something you want more that you've been saving for?"

I kept the necklace, I happily wore it to that holiday dinner, we ate the most delicious roast chicken with tiny little french fries and Ceasar salad (and about twenty different desserts), and I've worn it many times since, so I'm happy I got it. The pendant part is handpainted wood and the dark green bead things are dyed freshwater pearls. I curse myself for not being able to remember the name of the designer.

I've Got a Brand New Pair of Rollerskates... You've Got a Brand New Key!

A visitor to Femmetopia liked my rollerskates so much that she posted a photo I took of Skeepants inside one of my skates in her blog! (braehoward.covblogs.com/)


My skates were a gift from my boyfriend, who had them custom-made for me. He bought the sneakers (Saucony sneakers) and then turned them over to a fellow he knows whose family started a skate shop in Chicago fifteen years ago, which they still own and operate.
There is a metal plate connected to the sole of the shoe, and smooth-rolling, hot pink wheels were added. Whee!

Hard Candy "10 Years of Gloss" Lipgloss

I put a regular-sized Lush brand lipbalm next to my Hard Candy "10 Years of Gloss", lipgloss just to show how freaking ENORMOUS this Hard Candy gloss pot is! Pink gloss in a clear container with a giant plastic sparkly-faceted baby blue heart on the lid - this is a ten-dollar cure for the grown-up blues; with it, you can escape back to 7th grade! I'm a sucker for the cute packaging. The color isn't sickeningly sweet - it's a nice, neutral semi-sheer pink, and the texture is smooth and creamy rather than sticky. It feels almost like a balm, and smells like cake batter.