Once Upon a Time

I thought I'd share this photo of me. It's VERY old. Ha ha. It's unusual because my mom usually had me dressed in girly clothes, although my hair was short as a boy's. To be fair to her, it was my preference to wear "girl" clothes, because I got mistaken for a boy if I was in jeans, cords and tee shirts. I'm pretty sure I'm wearing my friend Mason's hand-me-down shirt--he lived in the same apartment complex we lived in and was a few years older than me, and we would run around together because there weren't boys his age for him to play with.

Blind Packaging, Gambling, Rainbow Toys

I've been bitten by the bug that is blind packaging. It all started (for me) when DD started working with Be@rbricks at work, showing me how there are several different bears in a series, and they all come in the same box, and you don't know which bear you're getting till you actually buy it and open the box, at which point you're either thrilled because you got one of the ones you hoped you'd get, or slightly disappointed because you got one you already have.

The small thrill I get from opening the mysterious toys is similar to the small thrill I get, say, scratching a California Lotto scratcher with a coin, or pulling the handle on a slot machine. Yes, blind packaging taps into the parts of us that want to gamble all our money away in a windowless, smoky casino. It's a powerful urge. Combine that with cute colors and faces, limited runs, and I'm hooked like a largemouth bass.

In general, I try not to "collect" stuff. Keeping my apartment, closets and life clutter-free has been an ongoing project/goal for several years now. But the lure of these toys, called Wish Come True and made by Strangeco, is too powerful to resist! I now have three of them, and at odd times during the day and night I find myself thinking about all the remaining packages of them and what might be in them... it's not so much that I want the whole series, I just want a FEW more. Ha ha.

Miss Manners says: go directly to Hell (do not pass Go)

It was such a beautiful day, and DD and I had frozen yogurt with fruit for lunch, which isn't much of a lunch, so we decided to go to dinner right after work at a restaurant where there is an outdoor patio eating area. The thing with going out to dinner right after work is that there are always a lot of 1) old geezers and 2) couples with young children having dinner at this time. If you eat dinner early, you're with the geriatric and pediatric crowd. That's fine, it's just funny to hear the typical San Francisco middle aged parents ordering a fancy fuji apple and daikon sprout open-faced grilled cheese sandwich for their little daughter-- hold the sprouts, can we have the apple on the side, and "Don't worry honey, we can cut your sandwich and fold it so that it's a NORMAL grilled cheese sandwich." Did I ever eat at fancy fusion restaurants when I was six, with a yuppie mom and dad who catered to my every whim and ordered a whole young Thai coconut with a straw sticking out of it for me? Oh, hell no. My mom was a struggling, single, early twenties schoolteacher. I ate what I was given, we never ate at restaurants, and we only had fancy extras like cookies and string cheese when she got paid, which was once a month, and the fancy stuff lasted about three days. I'm not complaining, I'm just comparing and contrasting my experience with Little Miss Fuji Apple Grilled Cheese Sandwich's experience...

Yet I still think I had the better childhood, for I did not have a disgusting, horrid father who BLEW HIS NOSE REPEATEDLY at the dinner table, out in public. She does.
Why do men do this? And it's always men who do this, never women. Even with my tummy full of fried food and coconut ice cream and espresso, and the beautiful warm evening, I got FURIOUS when this man started, and continued his nose blowing. I wanted to tell him what a gross, nasty, entitled f*ck he was, but I didn't want to traumatize Little Miss Fuji Apple Designer Grilled Cheese Daikon Sprouts. Never thought I'd say it, but I'm kind of glad I grew up poor and grateful and eating foods that are considered "weird" or "exotic". And I'm glad my dad was clean and well mannered. Sheesh!

The Purgatory Bed

Back from a week in NYC (that warm, humid, exciting city) I was struck by a few realizations. One, there is no summer in San Francisco. I know, it doesn't snow, it doesn't freeze... but it's all cold, damp mist and mold about fifty weeks out of the year.

Two-- unlike the amazingly comfy bed they had at the hotel in which we stayed, so plush and amazing it's apparently trademarked the Heavenly Bed, our bed at home is not heavenly. (No, indeed. In comparison, our bed is hard and cold; spartan; monastic. We've nicknamed it "Purgatory".) The first thing I did upon waking up in the hotel room after our first night was to start peeling back the bedding, counting the comforters and looking for name brands on the sheets so that I could replicate this heavenliness at home. All in all, it was a mattress with a pillow top thing on top, a bottom sheet, a top sheet, a down "blanket" they call it (not as heavy and thick as a comforter) another sheet, a "hypo-allergenic" comforter with a duvet cover, two hypo-allergenic firm pillows and two down filled soft pillows. Three sheets-- it's like a club sandwich. They actually sell the bedding and the bed but it's very expensive, so I'm going to have to go about replicating the heavenly bed on a budget. I was actually relieved to discover that the thread count of the heavenly sheets wasn't so very high. Last night I went to a discount linens store and got a new duvet cover and two new pillows, went home, washed them and used them right away. The thing about discount stores is they don't usually have terrific colors and patterns, but if you don't mind off-white or white or pink or celery green you can find 400 thread count bedding for a dramatically reduced price. I would have been okay with off-white or white but luckily for me they had chocolate brown, which I much prefer. Little by little I plan to make our bed over so that it's no longer akin to purgatory.

In my recent bed research I also learned that there was once a size called an "Olympic Queen", made only by Simmons, which is six inches wider than a regular Queen. A Queen is 60 inches wide and 80 inches long. A Standard King, aka Eastern King, is 76 inches wide and 80 inches long, while a California King, aka Western King, is 72 inches wide and 84 inches long. Too bad the Olympic Queen didn't catch on--it seems it would be just right for me and DD!

Be back in a week!

I'm off to NYC early tomorrow morning!

Someone's Got Tarina Fever

Lily Allen (top photo) is adorable, and it's not like I'm a fan. I did try to listen to her album a few times but it just made me irritable. I just don't see how anyone can deny that she's adorable. Her face looks exactly like those plastic dolls from the craft store that my nana used to crochet outfits for. I liked my nana's crochet work a lot. For some reason all her stuff came out too small, even though she measured us carefully. She measured me and she measured my dad, but I ended up wearing the fisherman's sweater she made for him, and that's when I was in second grade. But getting back to the point, Lily Allen looks like an adorable little Kewpie doll.

She apparently went to some Glamour award thing the other evening with pink hair, a bruise on her arm, a white satin dress with a bleeding deer complete with splashes of blood print, and aqua satin sandals. Maybe she's been reading Francesca Lia Block novels lately; maybe she's inspired by jewelry designer Tarina Tarantino (bottom photo). I just think Lily Allen should be wearing a piece by Tarina Tarantino in homage; at least acknowledge the inspiration lest people miss the reference.

There's a pink-haired Tarina Tarantino Barbie coming out soon. I've always disliked Barbie, but I want one. I shouldn't say I always disliked Barbie. I did have several or a dozen at any given time during my childhood, and I liked to experiment with their joints, but that's another story for another day; maybe tomorrow.

More fun than a barrel of monkeys: Work!

Three weeks into my new job, and all the happy shiny newness has worn right the fuq off. These people don't even have a SERVER. They share documents on google docs. My docs don't sync with my boss's... we just keep e-mailing versions of docs round and round. We use gmail instead of Outlook, except the CEO and the IT manager, who "can't deal" with anything that's not Outlook. Okay, so what makes them think any of us can deal with not having Outlook, if they can't deal without Outlook? And I am producing a business plan with many colors and spreadsheets and bars and detail on a low-end home office printer.


Boss: Why did you change this double line to a single line?

Me: I didn't. It's a double line on the computer, but because this printer sucks, the two lines are bleeding together and making a single line.

Boss: Well, can't you DO something about it?


Okay, the something I would have done would have been to have finished it two days ago and sent it to a professional printer.

_______________

Later On...

Me: Hey, I have So-and-So Bigshot on the phone for you. Want to talk to her?

Boss: NO! She's a narcissist psycho! She's insane!

Me: uh, okay.

_______________


I could go on and on, but the point is, I realize I left Hell and simply entered another dimension of Hell. Not the same Hell, a different Hell. Old Hell had a nicer scanner. Sweet computers. A SERVER. A SHARED DIRECTORY. Microsoft Outlook. Jesus, look what they've reduced me to... I'm an evangelist for a Microsoft product. New Hell has nice, genuinely awesome co-workers. A nice CEO. (Is that an oxymoron? Nice CEO? But he really is.) Toilet seat protectors... ohhh yeah....sweet, paper-covered CIVILIZATION!
But everything's so fuqqing inefficient, and my boss... oh, wow.

What to do?

In general, I try to use the word "totally" very judiciously. (It's difficult. I, like, grew up in Southern California during that time.) So, I save the T word for when I really mean it. That said, I am SO TOTALLY going to see the Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum next week!

It just so happened that I was in Los Angeles when the exhibit was at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art this past December (2007), so I got to see it there; however I didn't feel like I had as much time to look at everything as I would have liked. It will be so interesting to see some of the same pieces and how they look at the Brooklyn Museum; there were several HUGE sculptures; one of them ("Mr. Pointy") is 23 feet high. Someone told DD that there are only four museums in the world that can accomodate the @Murakami exhibit (we haven't confirmed the veracity of this yet), so I'm thrilled that I'll get to see it again!

@Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, New York
Through July 13, 2008

The Price of Tea in China

So, gasoline is now around $4.27 a gallon in San Francisco. I know that Europeans pay a lot more for gasoline than US Americans do, and I know we've been getting gas at a low price for many years, but I'm still so glad and grateful that DD and I both work WALKING distance from home, and our car kind of can just sit in our carport most of the time. Sure, there's a dead, dessicated seagull blocking the forest path where I walk on my way to work, and it's not like I can go around, since the path is a foot wide and each side is WALLED with poison oak, but hey, walking to work makes me feel alert and cheery at work in the morning, not to mention it makes me hella smug.

I'm also seriously annoyed that gasoline prices are around $3.87 per gallon in Los Angeles. What the heck?


This article, which is a Q&A with an economist, explains the gas price thing succinctly, and even I could understand it easily, which is good because I'd generally rather be reading novels with pink covers.

Vegan Virgin Valentine

I read this novel over the past couple of days. It's good; it's about (spoilers alert) a high-achieving "good girl" named Mara Valentine and what happens when her bad-girl niece V comes to live with Mara and her parents for a school year. It's kind of a classic sisters story, where very different sisters who kind of hate each other realize that each person has good qualities and they actually do care about each other. Mara lets loose a bit and V cleans up her act a bit and everyone feels good.

The one thing I didn't understand was whether Mara and her boyfriend James ever actually ended up having sex. The description of that was odd. They were both fully dressed and dry humping and it seemed like an orgasm happened, but it was somewhat unclear. What a rip off. Wasn't Forever by Judy Blume controversial because it had sex and the Pill in it? Circa 1975. Surely today's readers of adolescent lit deserve a little more than dry humping, no?! No?