What did you do this weekend? I had my appendix out. Funsies.

July 25th, 2011

Ah, I have a tale to tell. Spoiler alert: it ends with me having an tiny obsolete chunk of intestine chopped out of me and lots of bed rest.

Friday night I thought I had a gas bubble lodged in my bowel, so I took some Gas-X and went to bed. Later, I was woken up by a not-excruciating-but-damn-persistent pain in the same spot. Figuring it was still gas, I did some stretches and wiggles in the hopes to jar it loose. Four hours later, I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t lay down, I was pacing around because that was the only thing that helped. Being that it was 5:00 in the morning, the only place to go was the emergency room. I won’t lie: I was hoping it was something remotely serious, because nothing is lamer than going to the emergency room for gas cramps (“I have a boo-boo, meeeehhhhh!”). Since I was profoundly grumples about the pain (I may or may not have used uncouth language towards everybody), the nice lady put a needle port in my arm and gave me Dilaudid.

Ahhh, Dilaudid. Let’s talk about Dilaudid for a minute. It’s a derivative of morphine, and you know how people get addicted to opioids? Yeah, there’s a reason. The next time I watch “Intervention” and someone is addicted to Dilaudid, I’m gonna cut them a little slack, because, damn.*

Then I was wheeled to have an ultrasound, and as soon as the ultrasound lady pressed that thing down on my lower right side, I said through my gritted teeth, “PLEASE. PLEASE DON’T DO THAT.” She said, “Oh,” in a knowing way. And then jetsetter me was off to have a cat scan! Whee! Where they were clearly able to see my inflamed appendix and then I was scheduled for surgery. Did you know when you have surgery they strap you down with your arms out a la the death penalty? I did not.

Which, don’t get me wrong, is a good thing. Funny story about how my maternal grandparents met: my grandmother was assisting in a surgery on a young adult male getting his appendix out and, in the middle of surgery he sat up, completely drugged, insisted he needed to go now, and had to be wrassled back down. My grandma eventually married him. So I think strapping down members of my family during appendectomies is a good way to go. Apparently we get feisty and like to wander a bit.

After I ate lunch the next day and didn’t barf (I actually didn’t throw up at any point in this process, very strange) they tossed me out. Everyone at the hospital couldn’t be nicer; They offered me Percocet, which I politely declined in favor of Tylenol (don’t worry, you’re not going to see me selling my lady-wares or plasma on the streets for hard drugs any time soon, despite my newfound love for Dilaudid) and now I’m home feeling sorry for myself. And, since I know you’ve been on the edge of your seat, here’s the picture you’ve all been waiting for:

*Even though this is insanely vulgar, it gives you a vague idea of what it was like. Start from 6:48 so you get the plot, but the pertinent bit starts at 9:16:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp5TeDVf1_Y

Posted in Stuff | 3 Comments »

Dollah dollah bills, y’all.

July 22nd, 2011

I have happened across a myriad of music about money lately for no reason in particular, just coincidence. These are the ones that I like.

1. “I Need A Dollar”. This song was recently used in a commercial and I immediately loved it. It’s deflated spirit but danceable underbeat reminded me of “Sixteen Tons”, another beloved song of mine.

2. “Money” by Pink Floyd. I have only recently been introduced to The Floyd (I know, I know) because I had always heard about how drug-infused their concerts were and I figured you needed to take copious amounts of LSD and pot to appreciate their music, so why bother? I now realize I was wrong, because they are rad, even when you are straight-edge.

3. “For the Love of Money”. This track is FUNKY. I always feel guilty boogie-ing to it because it’s got quite the grim message. It’s like gettin’ down with your bad self to “Luka”. This song is not for dancing. That being said, try to find a video of the O’Jays performing the song live. They do some fine choreography.

4. “Price Tag”. While the entirety of this song is charming, my favorite bit is a small chunk of the chorus. From about 1:13 to 1:17. If I hear this in my car, I’m singing with it, I don’t care who sees me.

5. “She Works Hard for the Money.” I love Donna Summer. One of the few tapes I had as a kid was her greatest hits album. Nothing sexier than a kid singing along with this and “Bad Girls” (beep beep, toot toot). However, this song is forever changed in my mind to Hank Azaria’s version from The Bird Cage. Forever. There’s no going back.

And additional monetary songs that I like but have not heard recently:  Kanye’s “Gold Digger”, Cyndi Lauper’s “Money Changes Everything”, P. Diddy’s “It’s All the Benjamins – Rock Remix” (we listened to this all the time in college), and, of course, “If I Had a Million Dollars” by Barenaked Ladies. So sad they broke up. Sigh.

Posted in Music Videos, Stuff, Teh Intarwebz | No Comments »

Charty chart-chart.

July 19th, 2011

I got charts for y’all!*

 

*Every time I hear this song, I change the lyrics from “Shots! Shots! Shots!” to “Charts! Charts! Charts!” Much more applicable to my life.

Posted in Charts | 2 Comments »

The internet is a gift for which I am forever grateful.

July 14th, 2011

1. I describe this cartoon to people all the time, because it is so very true.

2. Recently, I discovered this website, and now I cannot get any work done a’tall.

3. The internet has also kept me up-to-date on all things cute which is incredibly important to me. There’s a website called Must Have Cute that helps fill the gaping, almost-insatiable “adorbs” void inside of me.

Mustachio’d Pistachio.

A calendar where you draw a new line betwixt the dots every day. At the end of the month, you have a nice drawing.

The phattest kiddie pool ever. I won’t lie – I want it. I might even go outside during the day if I had one.

Measuring cups that make a robot when they’re all together.

And a variety of precious foodstuffs that warm my cold dead heart.

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Museums. (Musea? Museii? Whatever.)

July 11th, 2011

This past weekend I went to two museums. One was the Museum of Sex and the other was The Metropolitan Museum of Art, specifically to see the Alexander McQueen “Savage Beauty” exhibit. First, the Museum of Sex. It was okay. I’m going to make an analogy: Often places that specialize in sexual material are skeezy, like a middle-aged man with scruffy gray five-o’clock shadow and a dirty trenchcoat that doesn’t cover his knobby knees rubbing his hands together and chuckling softly to himself. That kind of gross. The Museum of Sex, however, more resembled a New York lady with oddly-shaped glasses who goes to gallery openings and gives lectures on women discovering their sexual selves in front of a giant painting of rockets. It was a lovely museum, although quite small. There were three exhibitions: Sex in Cartoons (lots of R. Crumb and Tom of Finland), Sex in Film (lots of…sex in film), and The Sexual Lives of Animals. Cricket and I saw an exhibit in London called Sexual Nature which was all about the sex lives of animals, so we thought that this would be the same. We were wrong. The one in London was all tongue-in-cheek, charming and naughty. This one was more ANIMALS BE DOING DURTY THANGS. There were life-size paper-mache sculptures of the animals doing the no-no acts, but in the interest of good taste I only took pictures of the placards near the art. There was this one:

This one:

And my personal favorite:

I’m surprised Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum haven’t outlawed Mallard ducks. If I were them, I would.

By the way, the funniest thing I saw there was a security guard who was clearly hired from some big agency and was profoundly displeased about working at MoSex (as the kids call it) with a black and shiny gold tie that read “I LOVE JESUS” over and over and over. It was his tiny little protest. Cricket and I were like, oooh honey, you need to find another line of work.

In somewhat keeping with the sensual theme, I went with Neenernator to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the Alexander McQueen exhibition. Alexander McQueen was a brilliant fashion designer who recently died, and this was a big retrospective of his work. I was vaguely familiar with this clothing and accessories, but now I think he might be my favorite designer. He was extremely concerned with taking the normal lines of the body and reshaping it – making different parts look longer or shorter or thinner or fatter, putting things in the incorrect place. Artists like Lady Gaga and Bjork really liked his work. McQueen stated that some of his influences were Tim Burton, The Brothers Grimm and Edgar Allen Poe. You’ll notice there’s a lot of references to death in his work, as well as S&M. At best, his clothes were uncomfortable to wear, and at worst they were probably a bit painful. I’m going to show you some of the more impacting pieces.

At the end of most fashion shows, they finish with the wedding dress. I love the fact that McQueen used antlers in one of his. I was told by my mother that under no circumstances was I allowed to ever get married with antlers on. She never lets me do anything.

One of the things McQueen was most well-known for was the lobster shoe. It is a ballet-shoe with a crazy-tall heel and the front bit protrudes out, making it look like a lobster claw.

Here’s a tattoo someone got of the lobster shoe. Hardcore, dude, hardcore.

My favorite dress that changed the perceived silhouette of the body was a dress I called the Christina Hendricks dress, because, well, it puts padding where one would have it if one was Christina Hendricks. Here two pictures of Christina Hendricks:

And here’s the Christina Hendricks dress:

My favorite dress was the horse dress. It’s molded to look like a nude woman on top, and then the bottom flares out and has horsehair hanging below. What makes this dress so great is the bottom flounces like the ponytail of the snottiest cheerleader in your high school.

And if you watch this video from 2:59 to 3:09, you can see the skirt-flouncing in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5gY5DXrb48&

My second-favorite item was the jacket made from the skin of a Thompson’s Gazelle with gazelle horns coming out of the shoulders. You don’t need to wear makeup or earrings or anything with that, the horns do all the work for you.

There were also some stellar accessories on display. Like the face disc:

And the metal jaw:

And let’s not forget the external metal skeleton corset or the feathered ear things:

But, not surprisingly, I was drawn, once again, to wearing dead things as ornament. Specifically McQueen’s dead bird phase. At one point I turned to Neenernator and said, “IMMA GO KILL A DUCK.”

So, today I went on the internet and looked up dead birds I could purchase. It turns out that whole dead bird skins are kind of expensive. I wanted to buy this Grey Peacock Pheasant skin, but it was $300.

And since I have less than no idea what I’m doing, I decided to go with some starling skins that are a mere $7.00 each.

We’ll see what I make of this. I have been inspired. I may very well go and see the exhibit again. I recommend you see it too. It closes August 7th.

Posted in Activitays, Beastiesbeastiesbeasties, Movie and Book Reviews. Possibly With Spoilers., My Art/Design/Business, Nature, New York, Teh Intarwebz | 1 Comment »

I am a crafting MACHINE.

July 7th, 2011

We have these window display areas at work, and I have had the same display up for two years now. Over two years, actually. I think it’s high time to change that. I set a deadline for this change at the end of August. So, because of that, I have been a-craftin’ at the speed of light. However, my old purse was starting to rip, so I had to take a break from window-crafting to make a new purse for myself. This one has a very nice jelly on it.

This weekend I hope to make a felt dahlia with dyed ink edges and maybe a drawing or two. We’ll see how it goes.

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Activitays with Cricket.

July 4th, 2011

Cricket and I tend to stay indoors and be little homebodies, so lately he has been insisting we get out of the house and do things. “Activitays”, he calls them. I send him emails of goings-on with titles like, “Possible activitay?” (or, if I’m sure he’ll be into it, “ACTIVITAY!”). So this past weekend, we made a day in the big city. In early afternoon we went to the Pompeii exhibit that’s on right now in Times Square. Even though it’s expensive ($25) and it’s got unnecessary cheesy special effects (Really? Do I need a constant rumbling soundtrack blasting out of speakers everywhere? Really? I get it. Volcano. Everyone died. Ominous. Oogy-boogy. I get it.), I recommend it. The thing I found most astonishing about the large quantity of artifacts was how similar they are to the things we have today. The anchors looked the same. They had loaded die for cheating and games. They had scales with weights for measuring and plumbing with valves. It’s amazing how advanced civilization was so early on. That was all in the pre-Vesuvius-erupting section. Then they let us into the post-Vesuvius erupting section, where all the casts of the bodies were. The most crisp and realistic-looking one was definitely the dog.

For anyone who doesn’t understand what we’re looking at, here’s what happened: Pompeii was blanketed in a thick layer of suffocating ash and toxic gases from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. This ash lay twelve feet thick over all the bodies of the deseased. Eventually, the ash hardened and the bodies decomposed, leaving body-shaped cavities in the now-hardened ash. These cast were all made of the negative space left behind, which apparently looked like this.

It was definitely worth going.

After that, Cricket and I headed over to the Highline. It’s been open for a while now, but I haven’t had a chance to walk it. The Highline was an elevated train track that had been sitting abandoned above the avenues on the west side of New York. Instead of tearing it down, they turned it into a park. Yay! Recycling in a positive way! It goes from 30th Street to 14th Street, and we walked the whole thing. Aside from having lovely plants all along the edge, there was also some art. At the base of the northern part was a small amusement park installation by Friends With You, and art group that I like a great deal.

Then, as you progress downtown, there’s a series of birdhouses which are, much to my dismay, kind of dumb. How did I come to this conclusion? Well, even though there was copious amounts of food and water and shelter, there was, in fact, no birds. Perhaps because it was mere inches from the walkway where thousands of people are traipsing by, I don’t know. I do know that if I was a bird and massive hoardes of giant loud monsters were thumping by on their giant feet all damn day, I wouldn’t set up residence there. I’m just sayin’.

Further down the Highline widens out and there’s an awesome piece of art there. There’s an overhang with a long strip of those small-paned windows that were so popular in industrial buildings back in the day. Now, according to the placard nearby, the artist went on an 11-hour boat trip on the Hudson and took a picture of the water every minute or so. I’m not sure if the artist took the dominant color or the color of the pixel in the center, but he did one of those two things and each pane of glass is assigned a color in the order they were taken, left to right, top to down, in rows. It’s so beautiful. Here’s a small piece of it.

Right across from the windows was a man selling homemade popsicles, and in front of him was a big block of ice. I said to Cricket, “I must have whatever that block of ice is associated with,” so when we got up to the front of the line, we just gesticulated towards the block, as if to say, “Please, do…whatever it is you do with that and give it to us, thank you.” The popsicle man then took a planing device with a cup at the end, like a diesel cheese grater, and he went skkkskskkhhsksshhh across the surface and filled the cup with shaved ice, and then he poured homemade rhubarb sweetened juice over the whole thing. Fabulous. If I ever have a fancypants backyard party, I will have a shaved-ice guy because it looks cool and it is delicious, which is a great pair.

Cricket and I purchased a Time Out magazine and looked through it, so hopefully there will be more exciting activitays to come.

Posted in Activitays, New York, Random Art Bloggery | No Comments »

Ugh. Must remember not to watch reality TV.

June 30th, 2011

I got home last night from a rather grueling week of work and I flipped on the TV just to cool and down and relax and possibly fall asleep. There was nothing, and I mean NOTHING worth watching, so I didn’t bother to change the channel from what I had been watching the night before (TLC). Here’s the problem: Toddlers and Tiaras was on. You could actually hear the “shlupth” of me getting sucked in against my will. I kept saying things like, “Okay, seriously, next commercial break, I’m changing the channel.” But I didn’t. And so I got to see a few things I didn’t want to see. And one thing I did. The episode I was watching was a Halloween pageant, so the little girls got to dress up in costumes. One was a bride, one was Little Bo Peep, etc. But there was one who was…different, and when they lined up on the stage, you could clearly see which kid that was.

I think of two things when I look at her: One, the Bee Girl from that Blind Melon video, and the girl from Little Miss Sunshine. I really wanted her to break into either “No Rain” or “Superfreak”, but if she did do either of those things, we didn’t get to see it.

I did, however get to see the worst thing ever in the history of the world. It actually caught me off-guard and I jerked back and said, “Whoa” to the invisible people who watch TV with me in my apartment. I tried to capture it with an animated gif, but I don’t think I did it justice. It’s a girl, about four years old, dressed as a kitty-kat. I think her mom told her to pantomime licking her paw or something, but that is not what it looked like. THAT’S NOT WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE. Even thinking about it, I gotta go wash my hands.

As an added bonus, here’s a video of Eden, one of the most famous pageant-circuit girls. I can’t stop laughing every time I watch this.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/theuniblogger/disturbing-toddler-beauty-queen-slowed-down-to-a-bhd

Posted in The Telly | 1 Comment »

I made another lariat! They’re like cocaine, they are.

June 22nd, 2011

So remember how after I made the last lariat, I said I wasn’t going to make another one? Apparently I was lying, because here’s another one! This one is quite a bit different. It’s simpler and it only has one tail. But don’t get me wrong, it still took forever and a day to make. I took pictures of it on my desk at work.

And here’s what the dangly end looks like when it’s hanging.

My mom likes it so much she commissioned one, so it looks like I’ll be making another one. Eh, it’s a good thing. Keeps me occupied, keeps me off the streets.

Posted in My Art/Design/Business | No Comments »

Torchwood and Winter’s Bone.

June 20th, 2011

How is it that there is nothing good on TV, like, ever anymore? House is tragically sinking into the mire like a baby mammoth in a tar pit; Castle, while starring the charming Nathan Fillion (browncoats forever!), has some of the hokiest writing this side of the galaxy; Law and Order SVU has totally jumped the shark and is completely cringe-worthy and unwatchable, and I am just not diggin’ Modern Family – everyone is a bit whiny. If it wasn’t for Tosh.0, Mad Men, Community, 30 Rock and Nurse Jackie I would have nothing to watch. So I have now turned to Netflix for all my TV needs. Did you know they have TV shows in their entirety on there? Very exciting. I decided to watch a show called Torchwood. I read on a blog that I like that Torchwood is a snazzy show, and indeed, the first two seasons were pretty good. It’s a spin-off of Dr. Who (which I totally need to get to watchin’) and it reminds me of The X Files, if The X Files were set in Cardiff, Wales. Here’s some interesting info on Torchwood: It’s a UK show, so the rules are different. And we here in the U.S. have a lot to learn. For example, everybody’s pretty bisexual. Seriously. It’s a cast of about five people, and all of them have made out with each other and everyone else in Cardiff. And no one cares. I would like to believe that homosexual behavior is regarded as normal there, that no one looks at it funny and the show is reflecting their society. That would be terrific. Also, sometimes people use the F word and the S word. They don’t bandy it about willy-nilly, but occasionally one pops up in a heated scene. And no one bursts into flame. You hear me, FCC? The earth continues to rotate. Stop being so puritanical.

Next I intend to watch Battlestar Galactica (also based on a recommendation). If anyone has any other TV shows, preferably on the instant queue of Netflix, for me to watch, I would love to hear it.

I saw the Oscar-nominated film Winter’s Bone last week. I used to try to see all the Oscar films that are nominated for Best Picture the week before the Oscars took place so I would be able to make intelligent choices as I yell at the television, but I don’t now for two reasons: one, there are ten of them now, and that’s too much film-watching for me, and two, apparently one of the qualifications for being a Best Picture nominee is being a soul-crushingly, depressingly sad film. Like chug-a-fifth-of-gin-to-forget depressing. So I space them out over a large period of time to soften the pain. Winter’s Bone was anywhere near as sad as, say, The Reader or Slumdog Millionaire, but it sure wasn’t happy. It’s about life in the Meth Belt. (Remember the Bread Belt? We now have a Meth Belt. Progress!) Quick plot summary: poor white teen girl supporting her whole family goes looking for her missing father all over the Ozarks, meeting many grim-faced white people along the way. There are no leaves on the trees. There are no plants in the ground. There are no pleasantries exchanged. No one smiles, ever. It’s a chipper film. That being said, I liked it. I was interested the whole time. It’s so incredibly foreign to me, the way they live and co-exist, it was like watching a foreign film in English. I recommend it, but don’t watch it waiting for explosions or nothing. It’s a quiet film.

Posted in Movie and Book Reviews. Possibly With Spoilers., Teh Intarwebz, The Telly | No Comments »

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