Computer Doodles

Cat!

(via Boing Boing)

Meanwhile, one of the children just informed me that she's hiding from a mosquito that lives in a beehive, because it's a mosquito-bee. Apparently, it plans to eat her and is big and hairy.

So, you know, keep an eye out.

What I Want

For My Approaching Birthday:

1) This House:

Sunday Poem

To the Fair Clarinda
Who made love to me,
Imagin'd more than woman.

Fair lovely maid, or if that title be

Too weak, too feminine for nobler thee,

Permit a name that more approaches truth,

And let me call thee, lovely charming youth.

This last will justify my soft complaint,

While that may serve to lessen my constraint;

And without blushes I the youth pursue,

When so much beauteous woman is in view.

Against thy charms we struggle but in vain

With thy deluding form thou giv'st us pain,

While the bright nymph betrays us to the swain.

In pity to our sex sure thou wert sent,

That we might love, and yet be innocent:

For sure no crime with thee we can commit;

Or if we should -- thy form excuses it.

For who, that gathers fairest flowers believes

A snake lies hid beneath the fragrant leaves.

 

Thou beauteous wonder of a different kind,

Soft Cloris with the dear Alexis joined;

When e'er the manly part of thee, would plead

Thou tempts us with the image of the maid,

While we the noblest passions do extend

The love to Hermes, Aphrodite the friend.

Aphra Behn

I have many hands

Let's talk about clothes for a little minute.

I have a love/hate relationship with American Apparel.

On one hand, their designs are so simple I could pretty easily recreate most of their products on my sewing machine, which makes it hard to pay so much for them.

On the other hand, almost everything I buy there I wear constantly, so I guess I'm getting my money's worth.

On the other hand, they play loud and obnoxious music in their stores, which are frequented by assholes.

On the other hand, I just bought this skirt online for $9.

On the other hand, I have a compulsion to buy everything I like in multiple colors, even though I don't really need to. Who needs two circle scarves? My foolish heart is trying to tell me that I do, because olive is a better spring/summer color than black and would flatter my eyes and make everyone fall in love with me.

On the other hand, their clothes aren't made by exploited children.

On the other hand, I once wrote of their adds: "Why do they feel the need to put even their men's clothes onto naked, unwashed women? 'Observe how sexy this shirt will look on your bar skank the next morning, as she wanders around your apartment, glassy-eyed and still half-drugged, wondering what you to did to her last night and where her panties are.'"

On the other hand, I wish I had $50 to spend on their vintage sunglasses. I'd also buy one of those floppy hats, if I had the means.

On the other hand, this is not a dress:

And no sane person would ever walk around like that. Therefore, the ENTIRE SLIDESHOW of this young lady contorting herself to better show off her parts on your website is CREEPY. Shut up, American Apparel.

But on the other hand, it may just be the fact that I was playing Rock Band in Michigan until 3 a.m., slept on a couch, and then spent four hours on the road back to Chicago, but this "Thank You for Ordering" picture is actually kind of cute.

Sunday Poem

Siren Song
Margaret Atwood

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who had heard it
is dead, and the others can’t remember.
Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?
I don’t enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical
with these two feathery maniacs,
I don’t enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.

Guess What Disturbed My Sleep Last Night

It was just so... so messy.

I've always had a policy against watching movies that question the nature of reality right before bed. I shall now add "movie in which people live with raccoons" to that list.

Also, is that not the worst tag line ever?

Go Fug Yourself mocks is better than I could:

"Have you SEEN the tag line for Grey Gardens? It's something like, "the true story of Jackie O's incredible relatives." I'M NOT KIDDING. How freaking lazy is that? I mean, I guess it's DIRECT, but it's also BORING and doesn't seem to convey the idea that Drew is playing a woman who regularly wore her skirt on her head as a fashion statement. I'm serious. That needs to be better conveyed, and "Jackie O's crazy relatives!" doesn't do it. On the other hand, this would be an amusing trend. Like, "Terminator Salvation: Yeah, Yeah, This Is the Movie Where Bale Lost His Shit." Or, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince: The Awesome One With All the Flashbacks and Stuff, But Be Warned BAD THINGS HAPPEN AT THE END.." (iv) I guess that doesn't have anything to do with the matter at hand, but I had to get that out."

I take their word for it about Harry Potter, because for some reason I do not remember that book AT ALL. Apart from the end, which I believe I knew before I read it, I could not tell you a single thing that happens in it. Though I distinctly remember waiting anxiously for my brother to finish it so I could have his copy. And hanging out at some sort of garden party at one point, watching this little kid sit in the corner and plow through like 500 pages of text. And the Simpson's episode where Homer makes up a fake ending for Lisa so she won't be sad, and says "No man should outlive his fictional wizard!"

I wonder if the fact that reading it coincided with the period in my life in which I was spending a lot of time under the influence of a certain mood altering substance which seriously needs to be decriminalized has anything to do with it?

Monthly Mix

Just A Little Note, A Couple of Days Late

Dear America,

Please stop bitching about having to pay taxes. It's part of living in a society. Get over it.

Love and kisses,
Kitty Pimms

Messed Up

Shakesville has some good stuff to say about the Bush torture memos, which basically covers how I feel. I agree that people shouldn't be punished for doing what they were told was legal (though evidence of how easily people can be convinced to do that sort of thing always disturbs me), but I think there has to be some accountability somewhere up the ladder.

To ridiculously over-simplify, when one of the daycare boys got in trouble for throwing a rock at a passing car, the first thing he said was "I'm never going to do it again!" and he clearly thought it was unfair that he had to have a time-out for something he'd already agreed not to do again. But whether or not a deterrent was necessary, the rock had already been thrown, and the act itself was bad enough to warrant punishment. Even if you have such a Utopian vision of humanity that you believe that no future US administration will sanction torture, that we've learned our lesson, that doesn't absolve those who gave the orders from responsibility for the past.

Not to mention I'm sick to death of seeing people in power get away with shit. In my fantasy utopia, the people who have the means to do the most damage are held to higher standards or accountability than regular people.

All that aside, this quote, excerpted from the Washington Post, is messed up:

Some techniques were simply bizarre, such as placing a caterpillar into a confined box holding Mr. Zubaida -- who was believed to be afraid of insects -- as long as the insect did not sting and Mr. Zubaida was not led to believe that it was capable of stinging.

Whenever I feel like vast conspiracies are going on to oppress me, I take a moment to remind myself of things like this:

"Place guy in confining box for hours" = totally acceptable

"Sleep deprivation" = no problem

"Water-boarding" = so awesome

"Allow guy to falsely believe non-stinging insect might sting him" = morally objectionable

Because bureaucracy breeds ineptness as much as evil, I at least can hope to outwit them.

Daycarin': It's hard work!

Art?

I'm pretty ignorant/indifferent when it comes to Art (the expensive, capitalized kind you find in galleries). I can, and do, go on endlessly about Theatre, Literature, Music and Film, but my knowledge of the other stuff, the stuff that used involve canvas and marble and now involves human remains and feces, is admittedly lacking. In a conversation about anything that happened after the 19th century, art-wise, I'm basically confined to smiling and nodding.

If forced to express an opinion, I would say that I have no problem hearing about why 500 rubber chickens hanging from the ceiling of a black box with the sound of cash register ringing in the background, say, is a meaningful critique of factory farming, or a witty commentary on art as product, or whatever, I'm not especially interested in actually seeing it. If more work went into the artist's statement than into the piece itself, then reading the statement is, to me, a better use of my time than seeing the thing it explains. Once I know why some one believes that a chipped tea cup with a single raven's feather in it is worth putting on a pillar in a gallery, there's no need for me to haul my ass there and look at it; I've seen a tea cup before, I've seen a feather, I can extrapolate.

On the other hand, if that some one had painstakingly fashioned an exact replica of a tea cup with a feather in it out of plastic, or spam, or the hair of 1989 Pink Jubilee Barbie Dolls, I'd be all about seeing it in person, whether the rationale for doing so was interesting or not. I might look at it more in the way that I'd look at Corn Palace or the world's largest ball of twine than in the way I'd look at The Death of Marat, but I'd definitely be intrigued.

So, there's art whose concept is more important than it's execution, to which I typically say "Meh, who needs to see it, then?" And there's art whose execution is more important than it's concept, which may not even bother with a concept, to which I mostly say, "Sure, I'll gawk at that."*

But not until now have I said "I would like to be that art!"

In the New Museum’s first triennial survey, “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,” (because all the artists were under 33, I suppose), Chu Yun hired women to come to the museum and sleep in the middle of the gallery all day.



Seriously. How do I get that job? Icelandic Elf Inspector has just been bumped to second place on my Most Desired Form of Employment list.

You may also enjoy this condescending take on the exhibit's opening:

"Four floors of self-referential young-person art dealing with young-person topics. Think new-media references like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, Internet jargon (e.g., “OMG”)"

Now, I make no judgements on whether or not any of the art presented was any good, since I a) don't care to do enough research to figure it out and b) am not qualified to make that judgement anyway. But I find it funny how the things called "young-person topics" are mostly things that the agéd media has been squawking with alarm about ("Good heavens, have you heard that the childrens are sending naked pictures of themselves? Also, I fear they use poor grammar and baffling acronyms!")

What should art explore, if not the human experience? What is unique about the turn-of-the-21st-century human experience, if not our unprecedented access to each other's personal ephemera? If anything, young people should be faulted for failing to try and find what's meaningful about the strange combination of inerconnectedness and isolation internet life imposes. Those of us who were teenagers when the online community went mainstream are in a unique position to appreciate how it changed the way we socialize, the way we access information, the way we experience life (or, perhaps, fail to experience it in favor of "documenting" it).

Whatever, though. The real point is, how do I get paid for sleeping? I'd be awesome at it:





*And, of course, there's art which inventively employes craft in service of an idea. You know, the good kind.

For No Reason

This is what I feel like today:


I feel like the only thing that can cure me is curling up in bed and watching something ridiculous... Season 6 of Buffy? Will the musical episode make everything better?

Go home, children!

Go home so I can hide from the world.

Relive a Vacation?

A weekend on the shore

A friend was visiting me in Staunton and on something of a whim we decided to drive to Virginia Beach. We stayed in the cheapest possible waterfront hotel. It featured an indoor pool in a ridiculously overheated covered courtyard, which I thought odd. The pool was surrounded by an astro-turf-like carpeting. It is now the pool I picture whenever I read about some one drowning in a swimming pool.

We spent the first night wandering from bar to bar. Most bars in Virginia Beach are terrifying. We ended up getting pretty drunk in a sports bar off the main drag. The bartender told as about how his house was periodically blown away by tropical storms, and we met some friendly bikers. Then we wandered drunkenly along the beach, engaged in some 2 a.m. soccer with some equally drunk boys, and fell asleep in sandy beds.



The next day, it rained. We went in search of tasty seafood and new flip fops, and were moderately successful. We also found a rickety, overpriced carnival. Everything had a seedy, abandoned feel, perhaps because of the rain or perhaps because it was early May and the town wasn't crowded.

On the way back to Staunton we took a detour to Williamsburg and ate some weird colonial food (peanut soup?). We were too cheap to buy a pass to tour the houses, but we wandered around and stole some (very bad) street theatre by hanging around the restaurant while they set up the enclosure that was supposed to keep us non-pass-buying folk out, so that when we exited, the enclosure had been built around us... we were pretty proud of ourselves.



I remember that my friend looked quite fetching a blue dress as we drove back, while I was mostly dissatisfied with my packing choices that trip.

"It's alright, if you like Easter Parades..."

Happy Easter!


Other than this song, I think the songs with/about Judy Garland are way lamer than the Anne Miller songs... "It Only Happens When I Dance With You"! That red dress beats the pants off Judy Garland dressed like a cute hobo.

And here I am in my Easter bonnet...

Got 8 Minutes?

Why not spend them enjoying this:



A briefing on American imperialism delivered in the soothing, sexy voice of Viggo Mortensen.

Mmmmm... Viggo...

Sunday Poem

Whoso list to hunt ? I know where is an hind!
But as for me, alas ! I may no more,
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore ;
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer ; but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow ; I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt
As well as I, may spend his time in vain !
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about ;
' Noli me tangere ; for Cæsar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.'

-Sir Thomas Wyatt

Over the River and Through the Woods

This Tuesday morning, while I was taking the children to the park, my grandmother's house was on fire. 

My grandmother doesn't live there anymore (she died when I was in high school), so we didn't know about it until we drove by last night.

The addition that my grandfather put on the back of the house was totally destroyed (he died before I was born). This is where my grandmother would sit and watch through the window as my brother and I played on our Slip N' Slide, which was kept at her house because our backyard wasn't big enough for it. 

She wasn't the kind of grandma to actually come out and play with us. There was the risk of getting her hair wet, for one. She was more the sort of grandma who took us to Showbiz Pizza (currently Chuck E. Cheese's) and got freaked out when we wouldn't sit quietly at the table and eat our pizza.

But she was also the sort of grandma who let us root around in her basement for hours and play with whatever mysterious treasure we found, who never returned from a senior bus tour of an exotic local without a suitcase full of souveniers for the kiddies. I was especially fond of the tartan kilt-and-beanie she brought me from Scotland.

Holiday dinners often took place at her house, perhaps because my mother couldn't be trusted to do things properly.

Endless rounds of family pictures were taken in this living room.

The small Christmas tree stood to the left of the fireplace, next to a cabinet of Hummel figurines that I was often reprimanded for wanting to play with (the first time I touched them was when we packed up her possessions after she died).

I often spent weekends at her house, weekends which I both anticipated and dreaded. To this day, the taste of Diet Sprite makes me twitchy, because that was the only 'kid-friendly' beverage on offer in her kitchen, where we would cook dinner together and she would gently criticize my technique in everything from dough-rolling to egg-scrambling. 

It felt like failing a test in school; or, I imagined it did, since I was a fussy little bookworm who'd never experienced academic failure first hand. I knew that every test I failed in the kitchen was yet another example of my mother's lax parenting, so my compulsion to succeed was not merely that of a suck-up who got along better with adults than with other children and was therefore desperate to win grown-up approval. It was a matter of family pride, mom's side against dad's side, in which I fought to defend my mother's ability to educate me in the lady-like arts. 

As I got older, I also proved deficient in doing my hair, picking appropriate clothing and putting on make-up (she did not appreciate the my Goth stylings). But her disapproval was perversely complimentary, because what's the point of ripped fishnets and spiked collars if not to alarm the elderly? 

And, at a time when I hated everything about my body, it meant something that she said "What do you need all that make-up for, when you're a beautiful girl with beautiful skin?" 

Until I saw the burned-out windows of the house, I alway imagined (without ever realizing it) that the inside remained static, that the new owners would not dare tamper with the rust colored carpet, the crochet toilet-paper doll, the crucifixes in every room.

All that's left of the house as I remember it are the bits and pieces the rest of the family inherited. I myself scored a relief print of the The Last Supper, a nightstand-sized Virgin Mary, and a plaster copy of The Wrestlers.

I won't be surprised if they tear down the entire house now that it's been gutted. Instead of bemoaning the state of the lawn every time we drive by (the new owners were actually parking on it at one point), we'll be treated to a riff on the a new theme. Perhaps "That house was built in the 1950s and a single family lived in it for nearly fifty years with no problems, but as soon as we sold it..."

To add an element of weird coincidence, the park the children and I were playing at while the house was on fire was Ackermann Park, which is also my grandmother's maiden name.

Feral Children

I just watched the latest episode of Fringe (it's like the X-Files, but with that dude from Lord of the Rings), which featured a creepy bald kid psychic kid they found in a basement. "Inner Child" is the name of the episode, btw. In case you were wondering if that was meant to be a picture of my inner child, who actually looks like this.

In the "recap of the episode's influences" section (you know, the part where some smart type explains the historical precedent for the weirdness at hand) they mentioned several famous "feral children" of history, which reminded me of a book I had on the same subject that scared the crap out of me when I was younger.

In particular, there was a story about a girl from the pioneering days who was found in the woods and taken in by a young couple who had just lost their own child. Of course they tried to civilize her and make her wear dresses and what not. But when she heard wolves howling in the woods at night she would go crazy and try to get out of the house, so eventually they had to tie her up in the barn in order to get some sleep. And eventually, some people came to the house and found the young couple dead and chewed on and the girl nowhere to be found... but no one could say if the wolves had rescued her, or if she had escaped...

I was going to say I'd like to find that book again and see if it's really as frightening as I recall, but just typing that story creeped me out, so perhaps I'll let the book rest in whatever hole it crawled away to. Anyhoodle, the point is, I am easily disturbed by children behaving in creepy, non-childish ways (The Ring pretty much left me unable to sleep for my entire sophomore year of college). 

And speaking of feral children, we're going to have a house full of them tomorrow (twice as many as usual), and a schedule which includes two birthdays, egg dying, the music lady, and a special project with one of the parents.

So, if you happen to stop by later and find Linda and I half-eaten, the children did it.

Daycare

Wondermark never fails to amuse.

I've suggested several times that we draw upon the childcare expertise of Victoria orphanages and put the children to sleep with bottles of gin and water.