Friday, February 26, 2010

When I stepped out, into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman,and a ride home.

In the 7th grade it was cool to sign yearbooks with “stay gold.” (It was not cool, however, to recite the actual Robert Frost poem to the cute boy who smoked pot even if he did kind of have boobs and never grew taller after 13. Lesson learned.) Nature's first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold. / Her early leaf's a flower, / But only so an hour. / Then leaf subsides to leaf, / So Eden sank to grief. / So dawn goes down to day, / Nothing gold can stay. God, how I loved me some Dallas. Still do.

Happy weekend. Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold.
S

Monday, February 22, 2010

Tralalalala! (Trololololo!)

I almost feel sorry for Monday, the way everyone dreads it so. A case of the... it sucks, an awful way to spend 1/7th of your life. I figure if I live to be 87 (which is my goal), then I will have spent 63 years resenting one day of the week (philosophically I reason that I never truly hated Monday until I was 24, mathematically 87 minus 24 = 63). Stick with me here: 63 years of one day a week makes 3,276 days I will have spent bitter. Added up, that's 468 weeks total, 117 comprehensive months, 9.75 years. If I accept the fact that Mondays suck, I will have spent over 9 years waiting for the day to be over.

If that is the case I might as well throw away another 9 years and die at 78, which is not going to happen because Zoey will only be 45 then and will clearly still need me, right?

Yeah. Verging on Carl Sagan/Lao Tzu here, I know.

So Monday, here we are. Upon discovering the following video I immediately felt that I had found my spirit animal in this sexy beast Russian yodel-model man. Something about his hair, the swagger of his head, his nostrils... the way he smiles through both the high notes and the low. I am so totally channeling this guy today and every Monday from here on out.
9.75 years going hahahahaha! and pointing my finger; I vow to walk through the hallways of wherever I work singing this song without waiting for anything to be over.

Happy Monday, people. Watch the video and just you try and tell me differently.
xo,
S

Friday, February 19, 2010

Pretty Little Head

In my pretty little head this is what I will look like this weekend:
I should think the hair balls (not to be confused with, well, hairballs) would go nicely with this frock from my fantasies, n'est ce pas?
But the very best part? The part that will have me watching commercials in a Friday night fugue state rather than bableep bableep bableeping through them on my Tivo? The best part is that in my pretty little head of daydream believers I am going to swagger through the weekend like a Solid Gold dancer workin' the line.
And not one of my yellow hair balls will fall out.

We made it. Happy Friday. Now work it.
xo,
S

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Friday Eve

All of the chemicals in a human body combined are worth about $8.48 (if sold separately). I have been holding onto this photo for months now because I adore it, Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses, her mouth slightly open so. And then I stumbled across the above factoid and it just clicked. Do you see it? The connection? No?

Of course I have no way of knowing if this is true, if the combined chemicals in my body are worth $8 or $8 grand, though Kaiser does prescribe generic drugs so there can't be any inflated value there. Anyhoo, I found this fact on the internet SO IT IS TRUE. THE INTERNET TOLD ME IT WOULD NEVER LIE TO ME, SO THERE. QED, IPSO FACTO, $8.48, THE END.

Oh, and I also really dig Marilyn's stripe-y top.

We're almost at the weekend, people, not to mention spring.
xo,
S

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

I Swear! This is a Life-Affirming Post! Really!

We got a jumper. Just like that. Might as well prefaced her statement with ladies and gentlemen, like some kind of carnie, but she was our bus driver, and I am not mad. Not at her. Or at all. I like to sit in the very first seat of the bus on the passenger side, the windshield so wide and flat in front of me. Oh, I know if there was any sort of accident I would go flying into that windshield like a tomato in a can. Because one time? When I was little? My parents had a friend named Caroline who was in a terrible car accident on the bridge. When we visited her in the hospital I was scared, her eyes so ugly. My mom told me she was a vegetable, but later I heard another grown up say that on impact she had ricocheted inside of her car like a tomato in a can, and a tomato is really a fruit. (As far as I know, Caroline still lives with her parents, the mental capacity of an infant stewed, if she is still alive at all.) I have never understood why there are no seat belts on buses.

Still, I prefer that first seat on the passenger side, the windshield so wide and flat in front of me, like maybe I own it, the bus and the bridge and the sky. Here is a photo I snapped with my phone one morning last week:
Last night the bridge was backed up. What should have taken 15 minutes took almost an hour, and my cell phone was dead. Excuse me? Do you know what's going on? I asked the bus driver lady. A few weeks ago this same bus driver had yelled at me. Quiet down back there! This 'aint no happy hour! I had been talking to a friend and she had laughed, and then we snickered when we got yelled at, both of us children of California in the 70's when Proposition Something took away the state's school buses. It felt funny to be yelled at by a bus driver, like some sort of hackneyed after-school special starring Missy Gold. But last night the bus driver lady was my friend, and so she turned up the volume on her radio. There is a situation on the bridge... And of course I thought of Jersey Shore because I am broken like that.
I asked the woman next to me if I could borrow her phone. Which, on a commuter bus going home in which nobody talks and the hour has been deemed unhappy is kinda' like asking the person next to you if maybe you could borrow her undies. Just for a second? But she let me, and I cupped my hand around the phone as I whispered a message to Bryan real quiet. Then we crawled along around the curve to the toll. Still, we could not see anything.

We got a jumper, she said, matter of fact, which must be a pre-requisite for bus drivers, the part about being matter of fact. How do you know? I asked, because I am more matter of what than anything else, but she just shrugged. That's what they do sometimes, you know? Drive to the middle of the bridge and then just get out and jump. Empty car--jumper. Pshhh, and then she shook her head, it being the height of the commute and all. In front of us they had closed the right lane, and there it was: an older yellow Ferrari without anyone inside. Three police cars behind it, one in front.

I expected more, I think. A crowd peering over the railing, maybe, I don't know. I admit to having looked for years, periods in which I crossed the bridge twice each day. It's habit, to scan for someone walking alone. Does he look depressed? What's in his backpack? Who is she calling? The friend of a friend, a guy her husband grew up with, the photo of the girl on the desk of the woman I temped for years ago. The bridge a symbol of San Francisco and Something Else.

One day years ago a man bought a yellow Ferrari and felt happy. I am assuming it was a man because men buy Ferraris, and I am assuming that he was happy. That maybe he felt he had made it with the purchase of that car. And then something must have happened, right? And then something else. Something again, again, more until the man no longer felt happy or anything at all, and one day he drove across the bridge and stopped his yellow Ferrari mid-span and jumped. And then what?

I think about these things too often, what happens first and why and next. Not so much because searching for a reason matters, but because searching makes it whole.
Real. Maybe you think me macabre, and sometimes I do worry this is the case. How I drive over the bridge and look at the people walking alone. What is it? Who are they? The fog whipping through the gates like that. How is life so fucking unbelievably beautiful and so gut-wrenchingly empty at the exact same time? The moment it takes to slam a yellow Ferrari into park, and how I want to swallow it all to understand.

If you are anything like me you need to see this movie. Fair warning: it is intense and disturbing. Happy Wednesday. Seriously. :)

xoxo,
S

Sunday, February 14, 2010

February 14th

This is where I get all shameless mommyblogger on you and make you watch videos of my daughter while you sit there thinking about last night's episode of CSI Anywhere But Here.

Whatever. It's Sunday, Valentine's Day, the turning of a corner into spring. My daughter has professed her love for Filip, Keaton and Zack, all pre-K boys which thankfully means she cannot push her square of carpet next to theirs at naptime. Today we are going to cook broken crayons inside of heart-shaped silicone cupcake pans and then color and see what we find. Orange, green, blue bittersweet, a color called inch worm.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. Please give yourself a hug from yours truly.
xo,
S

Friday, February 12, 2010

I Only Wish My Name Were Kitten Natividad

I fell in love with Bryan because he said I look like a supervixen in a Russ Meyer movie.*
This is not me but it totally could be if I was someone else.
Who wouldn't want to marry a guy who sees her as a big-breasted pussycat who can drive a sportscar quick? And so I did and here we are, 34C and southbound while I drive my rented Nissan Sentra at the speed limit. Faster, Petunia Face! Kill! Kill!

If you have never seen a Russ Meyer flick, may I suggest you do so this weekend? Low-budget sexploitation camp in which big-breasted women overpower the men... perfect for a Valentine's Day weekend no matter your relationship status.

While we're on the subject--in Googling "Russ Meyer Girls" I stumbled across this painting which is pretty much sex on canvas and I need it/want it for the big day of the V:
This would look smashing above our bed, but since that's not going to happen then I implore my husband to draw me his own version on a piece of printer paper, mixed media of Bic and Sharpie. That's all this girl wants for Valentine's Day, some hand drawn soft-core porn and for my husband to forever see me as a girl with boobs as big as her head.

BTW, what's the best compliment you've ever received? (Let's go into this weekend with the positive...)

xoxo,
S
*Plus 17,000 other reasons

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

These Last Few Days (It Was Either I Write This Post Or Keep Her In My Pocket Like George)

We lean into the evenings now, longer, later.

Monday, 6:45pm:
Not 24 hours go by, sick from the boy at the playground, I am sure. He wore no shoes and a thin tee-shirt, sneezing all over the fiberglass turtle as he climbed. Every day, the light of the universe shifted.

Tuesday, 6:02pm
When she is sick she is still, and so I stare at her on the couch because I can. Sometimes it is like holding my breath underwater, how I flail my hands to keep me there. Exhale so that I may sink, it is so peaceful, this place behind her eyes full of everything.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Monday: The Smallest Possible Interval of Time

First they took away Pluto. Or maybe it was the brontosaurus, I don't know, so busy was I thinking granola was healthy. Turns out it's high in saturated fat, coconut oils, sugar, and get this--the brontosaurus has been deemed obsolete.

I know, right? The one dinosaur I could actually name. Apparently now it's called Apatosaurus which is like people calling me Susan which might as well be Pauline, it is that wrong. I am Susannah, the herbivore with the long necked small smile is the brontosaurus, and mercuryvenusearthmarsjupitersaturnuranusneptuneandpluto. Astronauts drink Tang, long division and the order of the solar system as they radiate from the sun: this is what I learned in the 4th grade and seeing as how I've completely forgotten how to bring down the one and the meaning of remainder they simply cannot take away Pluto or else I'll be left with just the Tang, i.e. fuck.


Zoey and I ate Lucky Charms for dinner last night. I know, I know, I'm a terrible mother but they truly are magically delicious and guess what? Maybe we didn't really eat Lucky Charms at all. Maybe I am not a terrible mother or a mother at all or a Susannah or a brontosaurus or a leperchaun looking for green clovers and purple horseshoes. Of course we have already established that I am not a Pauline. Because here's what they are saying now: the entire world might be nothing more than a hologram. Yep, our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface. Huh? Yeah. You there, YOU. Reading this blog. You may be sitting there sipping your coffee because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. WTF, right? But at the same time, don't you feel just a smidegeon of oh my god, I just knew it!?

It's Monday but maybe it's not. Maybe you're at work or maybe you're just a projection divided by the speed of light. Maybe you're happy, maybe you're hungry, maybe you're wondering if Tamra and Simon are going through with the divorce after all, I don't know. Turns out I don't know much, what with Pluto and the brontosaurus no longer what they once were. The ubiquitous they and what they say microscopically random, like a hot gas. Speaking of which, the good times start 0:55 seconds in; enjoy.

Mad props to anyone who can explain just what the hell is going on with the universe and entropy, holograms. Or if you can just explain the black hole thermodynamics of Mondays, that would be cool, too.

xo,
S

Friday, February 5, 2010

Dirty Hands, Happy Heart

The first Friday in February and everything’s a mess. Yesterday was my 5 year anniversary. We sat on the couch together and watched Big Love. I found the Halloween candy I had stashed away months ago and thought of the irony as I popped one Whopper after another into my mouth. They were waxy and white, but if I sucked on them long enough they collapsed in my mouth and it was satisfying. We never really took a honeymoon, having gotten engaged on a Wednesday and married that Friday. But since we had already planned a vacation to Costa Rica we called that our honeymoon and away we went. When I look back on that trip I think of lying on sandy unmade beds with my bare feet on the walls, how I told Bryan that if I got pregnant we would name the baby after the town in which it was conceived. This was in Pavones which I later found out means “vulture.” I think of the two dogs that followed us on a walk down the beach one afternoon; they had been having sex and were still hooked together, the female dog dragging the male behind her awkwardly, the both of them looking rather annoyed and hungry. The airlines lost Bryan’s surfboard on the flight to San José and he was pissed. Once he got it back, the surf went flat and then he drank some funky water and didn’t move for 4 days. In the photos from our honeymoon Bryan’s face is too thin, my eyes too pleading. It wasn’t until we got home that it became a wonderful honeymoon, romantic. Perfect! In my white woman way I wonder if I am only allowed degrees of happiness. I can have this, but not that, here, but hand it over. We are never going to get ahead, Bryan said to me the other night, and just like that I hated him. Why do I always have to be the cheerleader? I said. It’s exhausting! You’re always bringing me down! I don’t want to be with someone like this! And then he said something and then I said something and then I left the room and he stayed. I’m sorry, I said. Thirty minutes later. I’m sorry, and I love you. I would never leave, and I meant it, mean it, 5, 10, 15, forever years, my family. We are perfect in the way that dogs fuck and get stuck together, romantic sandy feet on white walls. I wouldn’t have it any other way, and if it’s true? If I am only allowed certain happinesses at the expense of others? Then I choose this, hands down. Waxy, dirty, broke but loved.

If I practiced polygamy I would also marry this. A poster the recipient completes by revealing spot-varnished type with hands made dirty by handling the poster, the back of which is coated with powdered pigment. This is the first of a series of posters. Via Love It A Lot.

Happy Friday.
xo,
S

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Tuesday: Its Only Identity That of Trash Night & the Day of See You Next...

You had to see this one coming...
It's Tuesday and I'm sick of myself. Sick of wet cars and no cars, bills, buses, birthday parties, my kitchen lined with ants. God, remember Adam Ant? My friend's older sister had his posters all over her room; my parents went to Hawaii for a week when I was in the 7th grade and left me there. My friend and I spent seven nights making prank calls, her mom had a mirror on her bedside table criss-crossed in white powder and her sister had Adam Ant on her walls. It all felt slightly sad and cooler than I would ever be. When my mom got back she gave me a bottle of pikake, the smell of which still makes me want to strip and cover up all at the very same time.


That's what Tuesday is, full of nothing really. But this. And that. Here: apparently American Apparel is having an open casting for Ass Models to be the new "face" of their brand. Honestly the only thing holding me back from entering the competition is good lighting and the fact that my ass is flat and a touch wide. White, yes, it's white, too, plus I think I have a subcutaneous cyst from sitting at a computer all day long. Still, it's fun to peruse the entries that aren't getting any votes and make supportive comments. Like this guy, under his photo I wrote: red is totally your color!

I don't know. Happy Tuesday.
xo,
S

Monday, February 1, 2010

RIP Ziggy Stardust, 1995 ~ 2010

Friends, we are gathered here today to celebrate the life of Ziggy Stardust, the aging sparkley-eyed starlet on wheels we grew to love. Ish. (Though she never did come close to being the BMW wagon I always wanted even if Bryan says she rocked practically the exact same body. Semantics, plus the matter of an accent. Ziggy Stardust never had that sexy Euro-trash accent when she called my name across a crowded parking lot. *sigh*).

I suck at eulogies.

Don't die, mmmkay?

On Friday I went to work. Took the bus, had some meetings, wrote a little of this, ate a pb&j, wrote a little of that, took the bus back to my car--we've gone over this before, right? The minutiae? But this time I unlocked my car at the end of the day only to find the floorboards 2" deep in water. Which was very confusing, as you can imagine, not being able to see the brake pedal through the silt. I checked my windows, not sure why--my roof--it was still there. Suddenly a man rapped on my windshield with a microphone and asked if I wanted to go on air for KRON 4 News to talk about the freak 7ft tides flooding all the cars and how none of them would ever work again seeing as how sitting in salt water will kill an engine not to mention fry a computer. And so I did what any drama queen would do in such a situation at 5:30 on a Friday night with a microphone pushed into her face--I cried.

If you are my Facebook friend no doubt you have read my weekend emo updates lamenting the loss of transportation, the financial suckerpunch, the very moon itself, that bitch who pulled the tide up and over my car. But you guys--I lost my car because I went to work. Nay, because I was being fiscally responsible slash environmentally aware by leaving my car at the commuter parking lot to take public transportation TO WORK. There are simply not enough upper cased italics to get me through the absurd woe-is-I-ness of that sentence.

On Saturday Bryan took me back to the scene of the crime to have my car towed to its more than likely *FRP. It was 8am and already there were 4 tow trucks dealing with the fiberglass cadavers: a Porsche, an Audi, Mercedeseseses (how does one pluralize Mercedes?). In total, roughly a dozen cars were killed that day. It's funny how insurance companies find religion at times like this, the tide an uncoverable act of God when everybody knows there is no God to be found in a commuter parking lot.

We estimate her time of death at 11:08am. High tide, while somewhere in an office building in San Francisco I was probably doing something like looking up a word in the thesaurus. Had I known, I would've looked up fuck:

Synonyms: be intimate, breed, copulate, fool around, fornicate, go all the way, have sexual intercourse, lay, make out, mate, procreate, sleep together, leave your car to go to work and find upon your return that it was been flooded, fried, you're screwed, fucked.

*FRP: Final Resting Place. My southern grandparents bandied about this term in casual conversation which I always found to be the height of sophistication, that and Cheerwine; of course this probably explains some of my more macabre leanings.

**Anyone have any recommendations re: how to find a super cute family car with low mileage for roughly $25? CA$H!!