Ressurecting Red

I got new red glasses. 

,

I'm so excited.

I just can't hide it.

They took two weeks to get here.  One week to make them, another to get lost by USPS and forwarded to god-knows-where because my address was "insufficient."

I finally got the package on Monday and went, "WTF WAS WRONG WITH THIS ADDRESS???  IDIOTS!!"

Anyway, they're so big and red and purty.  Perfect replacements for my sparkly reds that died sometime late last year. 

Mixing Feelings

Last week I had a coupon for Michael's, so I decided I would paint something. 

Of course, this necessitated purchasing paint, canvas, brushes, etc. etc. 

I was going to draw something buggy, but instead just went for a portrait.  Something simple.  Just to get my painting brain back.  I don't think I've played much with paint in ... well, maybe going on ten years.  I do a lot of *digital* painting, but it's not quite the same.  There are some advantages to working with data rather than chemicals, which is why I avoid the real thing.

Digital Paint Pros:
-Undo
-Select+copy+paste
-Magnify

The only thing I don't really like about digital painting is that it's harder to "mix" colors and get the shading you want.  It's similar in how you do it--layering colors, diluting colors--but it just seems harder on the computer.  With paint, I can just have a pool of white, a pool of black and some water.  I feel like I have a lot more control. 

But you don't have to wait for anything to dry on the computer ...

And real painting gives you a one-off, while the computer gives you limitless printing.

Hmm. 

I think the computer is probably better.  And cheaper.  But my tablet was a hand-me-down, so that basically means that *anything* is more expensive. 

I wanted this to be a little more stylized.  I gave up.  

My Ferritin Died Again

Back in 2011 I went in for my first ladyvisit at the ladydoctor on campus.  Your first checkup came with not just the pokey-pokey, but also a blood test to check for things like high cholesterol.  I'm guessing that the rationale is that a young woman is more likely to come in and get her bits prodded than she is to see a regular doctor for a wellness exam, so it's best to get that kind of thing taken care of while you're going in for your annual poking. 

Oh my god, but I love

thunderstorms. 

Love.

I feel like we haven't had nearly enough of them.  Not a fan of being trapped out in them, but I love sitting indoors somewhere and hearing the rumbles. 

Weight For Me!

My body is not known for its consistency. 

You can talk about "diet and exercise" all you want.  I was super-active as a kid and got up to nearly 150 despite that.  I believe my weight before heading off to Japan was 145.

After returning from Japan roughly 7-8 weeks later, my weight was around 125. 

The second time I went to Japan long-term, I dropped from around 125 to 110.  I didn't have a scale with me, so I'm not sure when exactly this happened.  But ... it happened.  Maybe a few months in I started to notice that, yet again, my pants were too big. 

That stayed pretty constant, even after I got back from Japan.  Then, when I got super-duper-sick, I dropped to about 104.  My doctor put me on prednisone and I shot up to about 120 within a month. 

I Beg Your Bechdel

At this point you probably know the Bechdel Test. 

Two female people
talk at length amongst themselves,
but not about men.

Do you like my haiku?  I made it bigger for you.  Because I'm nice like that.

It's rare to find movies that pass the Bechdel test, and especially rare for those passing movies to both a.) pass with flying colors, and b.) depict healthy relationships amongst women.

Actually, point b is rare to begin with. 

A few months ago I finally watched Pitch Perfect.  I wouldn't have thought to watch it except that my coworkers at the Banana Stand raaaaaved about it.  Sure enough, I enjoyed it.  And not just because it stars my (other, younger) celebrity doppleganger.  I thought the story was weak in spots (the stuff about the not-boyfriend, the stuff about the dad, the lack of any going to class at all), but I liked that it promoted friendship among women and presented a diverse-ish group of female characters. 

You don't see that much.

Dolly Racist

Back in the day--wayyyyy back when I first got into BJDs--there was Volks and there were a few Korean joints like Custom House and Luts. 

Now there are 80 bajillion BJD companies, 70 bajillion of which have been deemed "off topic" by the Den of Angels moderators.

I digress.

In the beginning I liked "pretty" and "cute" dolls.  I still like those, but lately I've been drawn in more by "unique" dolls.  Fantasy dolls, anthro dolls, and dolls with weird (but artistic) faces. 

No, not squooshy and weird Bobobie-type of faces that just look cheap and badly-sculpted.  I mean more like a really stylized face, or an interesting expression.  Just something unusual, but in a good way.  Even the very realistic Iplehouse sculpts would fall into this category.  Something outside the bishounen/anime aesthetic.

Recently I discovered Doll Chateau.  And I kind of want them all.

I love their peculiar bodies, which are emaciated and yet curvy, with multiple neck joints and long, skinny limbs.  I love Stacy and Chrstina's "starving model" type faces.  I love Elizabeth's spider body.  I love Lydia's wide-set eyes and I love how Queena is dressed up like a duck.  There's a Siamese twin body, a centaur-ish body that somehow reminds me of Human Centipede, and there's a ... I ... I'm not sure what this is.  I think she might have a mutant bee for a head. 


One of them has my name.  I don't want her because she has my name, but I'm glad she does because she's fucking awesome. 

(You might notice that I linked to Doll Chateau and then linked to a bunch of pages on Mint On Card.  This is because Doll Chateau lives in 1997 and their website is sloooooowwwww.)

I don't need more dolls, but ... ohhhhhh dolls.  I love dolls. 

So Pretty

So so so pretty.

I think about my dolls a lot because I'm totally ignoring them.  That is, they're on my mind a lot because I can't spend much time with them.  I need a good macro lens, and I want to go to Home Depot and build a nice, folding set for the larger ones.  The same special skill that allows me to create a costume based on looking at it makes me feel like I could do the same with a few planks of wood.  But it might require more tools than I actually own. 

And planning.

And a car.

Let me be as vague as possible.

Tomorrow I have my 6-month review.

I haven't actually been in my job for six months.  And my 3-month review was about a month ago.

Anyway, I was really worried about my review because something happened on Monday that made me fear for my job.  No, I don't think I would necessarily get fired (as a newbie) for what happened, but it still made me afraid that it would be this black mark on my record that might affect my future.  (Not that I'm terribly keen on having much of a future in this job.  But I'm also not keen on being canned.)

I Love Louis

I've been feeling a lot worse the last few weeks, so I decided to take it easy today.

I did this by eating a cookie and watching a billion Louis Theroux videos on the internet.

I've watched a few of his documentaries before, but today I went on a total binge.  It's amazing to me how he's able to get so much honesty out of people and push their buttons to a point where, I think, another person would get punched in the face.  And yeah, the skinheads looked like they were pretty close, but somehow he survives to document another weird cultural phenomenon.

I guess if you're a slightly nerdy-looking English dude (with an accent, of course), people are less likely to want to hurt you.

I think I know what I'm doing with the rest of my weekend.  

Speaking of My Day ...

All right, let's talk about that.

I got to work today and discovered that the internet was down.  We couldn't send or receive email, couldn't access any databases, and if someone called we were basically SOL and would have to tell them we couldn't do anything for them.

We all cleaned our desks for an hour and a half.

My First Foray

My First Foray
Into Rivet and Sway
Just Happened Today.


Too bad it couldn't have been oh-so poetic like those first three lines.

I tried a pair of sunglasses just before they added a whole bunch more styles.  They only had a few at the time, so I tried two of them.  I liked one, and all my friends liked it too.  So I bought it, as well as the pink Punchlines.

Alas.  Alas!  The sunglasses are horrible.  The pink Punchlines are fantastic, but the sunglasses are just the opposite of fantastic.  Wretchedly awful. 

I need a pair of big sunglasses to fight against my recent "oh hey sun allergy thing" that likes to afflict my hands and cheeks and nose.  I thought I could at least cover up my cheeks with some big-ass sunglasses.  Right?  The testers looked great, everyone gave the thumbs-up, and I thought they would be perfect.  They were a sort of tortoise-y red color, and red is the color of glasses.  (Seriously.  ANYONE can look good in red glasses.)

I don't know if it was the gradient lenses--I hadn't realized that you didn't get gradients if you need Rx lenses--or a poor memory of the color of the frames.  The frames I received today were black.  The sides were red, and indeed if you shine a light through the back of the frame, they're red as can be, but my face does not (yet) emit light.  So they just look flat black, and then the non-gradient lenses also look dark as dark can be.  With my whiter-than-white skin, that just leads to the sunglasses going OMNOMNOM on my face. 

So I need to go back to the drawing board.  Rivet & Sway swears they have a 60 day policy for returns, and I already know I hate these.  So I'm going to see what my options are.  Maybe try more frames and see if there's one that really works.  And I'll be sure to only go for things that look light.  They have some in a color called "grapefruit," so I may try those and see what happens.  And you can't go wrong with "tortoise." 

I still want red, though.  :/

I may be a bad person.

I'm going to the eye doctor tomorrow.

I don't think there's any change to my sight (not that I've noticed) and I'm not having any particular eye troubles. I used to have such trouble with blepharitis/huge-ass styes and random conjunctivitis borne of nothing more than my shoddy immune system. My eye would be blood red one day, and two days later it would be fine. My eyelids would bubble up like tortillas on a griddle from age 17-19. It was pretty awful.

Now I sometimes get little, clear bubbles on the rim of an eyelid. I pop them and they go away. The end. Dunno what changed, but I'm glad it did.

So I haven't been to any kind of eye specialist at all in a long time. Haven't had any issues with anything in a long time. The last time I thought I had a vision change, it went away within about a week. I think they were just dry.

I haven't been to the eye doctor in about 11 years.

I got a copy of my prescription when I went off to Japan in 2007, and at that time I think my prescription was kind of old. The eye doctor recommended I get an exam. I didn't. And I used the information on that prescription to get glasses and glasses and glasses and glasses and glasses.

I finally decided to make some purchases on Rivet & Sway, but I cannot find this ancient prescription anywhere. So I am going to the eye doctor to get a new one. And I figure it's good to get a "fresh" prescription before I make a significant purchase on eyeglasses. $30 isn't much to spend on glasses that might or might not be 100% accurate.

I am, I admit, a little worried though ... getting a brand new prescription and trying them out on new glasses for the very first time scares me. I almost want to get a pair of $30 Zennis to make sure the prescription doesn't make my brain hurt.

With any luck it'll be exactly the same. That would be nice.

Sweet, this is what I get for not realizing that my post was done in HTML mode. WALL OF TEXT YOU ARE NOW BROKENNNNNNN

Rivet and Sway, Take 2

They tried to dissuade me from ordering the sunglasses for try-on because they're so big compared to my narrow face, but come on. We all know that giant sunglasses make you look famous and important.

Okay, did you ever see a celebrity wearing tiny little spectacle-style sunnies? I don't think so. Alien eyes is the way to go. Fame and fortune and paparazzi will follow.

Vacations

I don't think I can afford to take a vacation anymore, but maybe sometime this year I'll blow my 40 hours of PTO and go somewhere nice.

My options right now are these:

In Honor of April Fool's Day

There's a stupid little ice breaker game called Two Truths and a Lie.  The point of the game is to tell those three pieces of information, and then other people are supposed to guess which one is the lie. 

Some people play this game stupidly--they make the lie really obvious by giving two mundane pieces of information and then a wild and crazy story that couldn't possibly be true.  Sometimes people play it smart and use a really mundane thing for the lie, which is sort of how you should do it.  It works well that way as long as your lie and one of your truths are really boring, because you trick people into thinking you're doing the aforementioned stupid thing.

I'm going to do one better--I'm going to give you three anecdotes from my weekend.

Adventures in Pillville

Let me give you a lesson on how they package birth control pills:

Generally, the pills are handed out in one-month (28-day) blister packs.  This is supposed to be convenient for people who are taking the pills to avoid baby-making, since you can start on a Sunday and work your way through the pack, making sure you haven't skipped any pills along the way.  There are generally three weeks of active pills and seven "placebo" pills, which don't do anything.  These were put in there to make people feel "normal" by giving them something like a "period."

Periods are the most abnormal fucking things ever, and any bleeding you experience while on the pill is not a real period. 

I digress.


The point of the placebo pills is ... well, there is no real point.  You don't have to take them.  Some people call them "reminder" pills, since they help you remember to take your pill every day, but there's no rule that says you need to take something that contains no active ingredients just because the company puts it in the pack.  You can simply not take the pill, or you can (as some women do) go straight to the next pack and skip the fake "period" bleeding all together. 

In Like a Polar Bear

Tomorrow morning I'm going to get up and wait for the bus like I do every weekday.  And like too many days this year, it's going to be in the negatives.  That's not wind chill and that's not centigrade.  The forecast for nine hours from now is -5.

I lived in this state for 22 years.  I know the weather is screwy.  But in all those years we never had weather this sucktacular.  The weather is literally making me angry because my "lack of reliable transportation" situation gets trickier with these ridiculous temperatures, and I get stuck in the house with no groceries, spending the day listening to the stomping and tantrums upstairs.

And I'm still annoyed by the heater situation and someone (no doubt someone under the age of four) coming in and turning on my Wii, so my brain is a big tangled ball of frustration, comprised of a bunch of rubber bands stretched out as far as they'll go.

(Don't get me started on work.)

At least if the weather were nice it would be one less thing to be irritated by.  I could deal with the toddler tantrums at home if the rest of my day weren't so stressful.

Breaking News

We've been expecting a winter storm this weekend.  Another one.  And we can call it a "winter storm" because it's still winter, even though March is generally associated with more moderate temperatures.  The low on Sunday night/Monday morning looks like it'll be around -7º F, and it might even get to -4º when I'm on my way to work.

This might be a good time to remind you that I don't live in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, or anywhere near the Canadian border.

The severity of the storm itself keeps changing, first for the worse and then for the better, but it still looks like we'll get *something* tomorrow and *something else* on Sunday.  Whether that's the five or six inches they're promising tonight or the foot or so we were promised this morning is yet to be seen.  Regardless, it all smells of a giant conspiracy between my mom and the groundhog to make sure that I suffer a little more punishment for leaving Hawaii behind.  Whether it's a foot or five inches, I still have to wait for a bus and tromp through ice and snow to go to work on Monday morning.  In negative-degree weather. 

Two weeks ago I took a day off thinking it was the last butt-ass cold day of the season.  And it was ... until it wasn't. 

In totally different weather-related news ...

When your immune system has it in for you ...

I don't get sick much, and being on immunosuppressants hasn't really changed that.  They say that your immune system will be weakened, but this assumes you had a normal immune system to begin with.  Mine is like a white guy in Florida surrounded by black kids with hoodies and boom boxes that are blasting rap music.  It's so paranoid that it sees danger everywhere and attacks whatever it sees.  I can only imagine that it runs out of actual pathogens and just starts looking for something else to fuck up.

The only exception to this "don't get sick much" seems to be whenever I move to a new place, so I've now had two bad colds since November, complete with congestion, green goo, and a good week or so of hacking up my own lungs until I gag.  It's been swell.

The extra fun thing has been this weird rash on my hands.  The doctor says it's eczema, although it's been fairly mild--just a handful of spots on one hand and a bit in the web between two fingers on the other--so he just gave me a cream to slap on it and called it a day.  One hand has been getting better, but the other one has been getting worse.  Eczema, like so many of the things wrong with me, is auto-immune business, which means that instead of dealing with this COLD FROM HELL, my immune system has been going after the skin on my hands.

Dude.  Like ... what?  Have you been ignoring all the green crap coming out of my lungs?  Do you not hear me coughing and snorfling and sneezing?  Don't you think your work would be best performed elsewhere?

Too bad I can't order my leukocytes around like little soldiers and get them to march, march, march where they need to be.

And now that the weather is going to get butt-ass cold again, which means spending a lot of time outside freezing.  Cold weather suppresses the immune system and facilitates the spread of viruses for science-y reasons (<--not a scientist) so that hasn't helped either.  (That and spending all that time on the bus.)

I just wonder if we can have normal temperatures by the time the clock skips ahead again.  And believe me, I am looking forward to that extra daylight.  Very much looking forward.   

Things I Don't Do But I Know I Should

1.  Replace the trash bag after I take out the garbage.  Then I want to throw something out and go, "Oh.  No bag."  And I leave it on the oven if it's "dry" garbage, like an empty box or whatnot.  I wait until I "need" or "have" to replace the bag. 

2.  Close the door.  Any door.  Or lock them, unless I'm trying to keep toddlers from walking in on me in the shower.  I like having air circulate through my apartment even if that's what led to the recent dog pee incident.  Toddlers will intrude regardless of whether the door is open or closed. 

3.  Floss.  It will be my downfall.  I don't have that kind of time. 

4.  Take my makeup off before I go to bed.  Sometimes I do, but usually I just wait for sleep to take off half of it and take it off in the morning.  Sometimes this is because I know I'm taking a shower in the morning and will take it off then.  It used to be advertised as "so gentle you can sleep in it," and I find that this is true. 

5.  Hang up laundry after it's finished drying.  Unless I'm putting out next week's load to dry, in which case I'll usually hang it up.  Or toss it somewhere.  I dunno.  I'm flexible.


I know, I'm a monster.  I guess the laundry is technically hanging anyway (to dry).

I'm sure someone will read this and take it to some wild extreme based on their own imagination.  But I'm just being honest.  

Style Over

I decided to watch Sin City today.  I'd never seen it, and ... I don't think I'm going to be able to finish it. 

It looks nice.  Yeah.  Sure. 

But all those other things that make a movie?

And I think it's very safe to say, "This movie has issues with women." Which I knew before watching it, but I didn't really get the extent to which this movie just hates women.

I know, I know.  I get it, Hollywood.  Men do things.  Women have things done to them.  Baaad things.  I know.  So instead of making this movie you could have flashed those nine words on the screen for an hour and a half.  Same effect, less Jessica Alba. 

Cheaper, though. 

Oh look, more hookers. 

Nooooooooo

Hank, the puttytat who ran for senate, is very sick.  Which makes me haz a sad.

No can haz cheezburger when haz sad.

Sending some good thoughts his way, and I hope you will too.

(I have a cold right now, hence why I'm up at 3 when I have to get up in three hours, so I need to keep a few healies here.  But the rest are going to Hank.)

Edit:  Not enough healies.  I just found out that Hank died earlier today.  Your serious expression and smart ties will be missed, and if Kitty Heaven has a senate, I'm sure you'll be the bestest, ballsiest kitty senator present. 

RIP Hank!

  

Dudes

This is your cynical Valentine's Day post.

It's a little early.  I figure you'll all be too busy shagging and boozing on Friday, so I might as well get this in now:

When I was 5-6 I had lots of male friends.  Then I left that school and went to a school where girls DEFINITELY had cooties, and I spent years wishing I had male friends to play with.  Street Fighter, X-Men and Ninja Turtles aren't strictly "boy stuff" obviously, but I  didn't know any other girls who had more than a passing knowledge of them.  The boys around me became very conflicted, since it's sort of like meeting a talking dog.  She likes what we like!  But she's a girl!  Should I be friends with her?  Or hate her?  I CAN'T DECIDE!!


In the end, they decided not to be my friends.  Oh well. 

Fast forward to college, where I reached a certain age and suddenly had too much of the wrong kind of male attention.  Which maybe some women like or want, but I still just wanted to play video games and hang out.  ("Hang out" is not a euphemism for anything sexy in this usage.)  Once again I was put in this position where gender roles and ideas about men and women and sexuality fuck everything up.  First it was girls being stupid and having cooties (girls are good for nothing), and then we were just good for sex.  Oh sure, maybe they liked being around me and talking and all that shit, but once they were sexually rejected, the friendships fizzled.

And now I'm just wary of any straight guy who seems to want to be my friend, because I'm worried he'll start to get handsy.  Or creepy.  That's happened a lot too.  Some guys just don't take rejection well ...  

I think I still believe that men and women can be friends without playing bedroom Plinko together.    I have more than a handful of gay guy friends who aren't interested in my pantaloons, which is nice, but I wish I didn't have to rely on someone having a specific sexual orientation in order to feel comfortable around someone of the opposite sex.  Shit.

So I'm still just looking for someone who wants to play video games and hang out.  And I don't think that's ever going to happen.   

 

Defective Pizza

I bought an Udi's frozen pizza at Walmart the other day.  It was $6, and they're usually $8, so I didn't really hesitate.  Yeah, it's steep for a frozen pizza, but they're pretty good.  And you feel a bit more comfortable with the frozen pizzas produced by companies that regularly deal with gluten free stuff than you do dealing with your Minsky's or other pizza parlor that promises gluten free crust. 

So I got my pizza.  Took it home.  Put it in the freezer.  All that good stuff you do when buying a frozen pizza.

Today felt like a pizza day, so I preheated my oven and got out my pizza.  Now, these pizzas strongly recommend putting them right on the oven rack.  I can tell you from experience that this is the best way to go about it, if possible.  They don't quite cook right otherwise.  And because you're putting it right on the oven rack, you want to be a little careful with anything that's hanging over the edge.  That is, the sauce and cheese that comes up right to the edge might drip or fall off, so I always pick off the bits that are hanging over and put them on the top.

I picked at a little bit of cheese and sauce at the edge of my pizza and the whole fucking layer of sauce and cheese popped off the crust.  And broke, of course.  So I had pieces of sauce + cheese that had basically become a puzzle on top of my pizza, and instead of putting a couple of bits of cheese in a safer location, I was trying to make sure that the sauce/cheese wasn't going to fall off entirely when I put the thing in the oven.

Often when I bake these in the oven, the edges of the pie will droop down, and sure enough I saw a big ol' cheese chunk at the bottom of the oven where it had just slid right off.  I'm not sure what happened to this pizza, since I handled it exactly the way I always handle them, and I probably eat these 1-2 times per month (too expensive, but I eat them fairly regularly regardless).  It's not like I did something stupid with it, or this is just "what they do."  My pizza was defective.  Majorly defective. 

It was still tasty, but I think when I pay $6 for a frozen pizza I expect it to "work properly."  (I'd be more pissed if I'd paid the $8 "suggested retail" price.)

Now I need to pick wads of burned cheese off the bottom of the oven.  :(

Kids Books Suck

Today I had two kids pile onto me and demand READING.  They handed me every book they got today at the library and I went through all six of them.  A couple were just boring because they were descriptions of what a pediatrician does (and so on).  The rest were just stupid, fluffy books for little girls. 

It was awful.  It was torture.  Angelina-fucking-Ballerina.  Barbie.  OH GOD, THE BARBIE.

That was the dumbest book I have ever read.  (I must admit now that I have never read Twilight.)  I would rather read the stupid pediatrician book 20 more times than read that fucking Barbie book again.  I don't think these girls will grow up to be idiots, but good god.  If they read more of that trash, then yes.  Yes.  They will grow up dumb.  That was a dumb book, and reading shit like that will marinate your brain in idiocy.  A filmy layer of stupid will grow over your brain, and it will make your gray matter melt like Velveeta and run out your ears. 

Ugh. 

I don't generally have shit against Barbie, but that story was the definition of "banal."

And "insipid."

AHHHHH SNOOOOOWWWWW

That was probably around 3 or 4:00 in the afternoon.  We've had about four more inches since.  SNOWWWWWWWWW.

What a Drag

Last Saturday I was feeling sick, and while my body was busy purging I wanted to find a show I could binge on.  I settled on Drag Race because ... okay, why not?  I like drag and drag queens, I have nothing against RuPaul, and I needed to watch something.

I started at episode one of season one, and at first I just enjoyed it.

Dog Pee Dog Pee Everywhere, and Not a Drop to ... to ... uhhhhh ...

Today was a bad day.

Like, in the tome of Really Bad Days, today was a Classic Bad Day.  NOTHING GOOD HAPPENED.  NOT A SINGLE THING.

Wow.

Since I felt so sick most of the weekend (after work Friday to Sunday evening = "the weekend") I didn't do a whole lot.  I only finally went grocery shopping at about noon today (Sunday), which meant walking (one mile each way) since there's no bus service on Sunday.

The only thing I accomplished was watching two seasons of Drag Race.

God, I want to cosplay so bad now.

This Winter is Driving Me Batshit

Now that I'm back on the "mainland" USA I have to deal with "mainland USA" problem.  One of those being winter.  Not a lot of that in Hawaii.  We had "rainy and 78 degrees" and we had "not rainy and 85 degrees."  Those were our seasons.  Now that I'm back in the middle of the country, we have several seasons.

Sometimes within days of each other.

Sometimes I spend hours

and hours trying to write a post.  I write one, delete it, write another, delete it, and finally I write nothing.

When all your dolls become LEs ...

I started with one doll, which was an MSD kit.  I had her assembled and painted by Volks, and she arrived to me posed in her little silver box.  She was the same cookie cutter sculpt with the same cookie cutter paint job that anyone in Japan could buy, but I thought she was lovely.

Gary Oldman = Pizza

Gary Oldman is one of those actors who is always good.  Even if a movie is kind of crappy, he turns in a stellar performance and creates a memorable character.

So he's kind of like pizza.  You know how they say that even shitty pizza is pretty good?  Right, it's that same kind of principle.  Even a shitty movie with Gary Oldman in it is watchable.

Eugene It Isn't

I like to occasionally take a look at the offender registries where I live.  I also like to check out my hometown, just to see if there are any more people I went to school with on there (current count: 2).

As I was scrolling down the page I realized that 10% of the individuals on my hometown's offender list have the middle name Eugene.  I'm not even kidding.  7/70 have the same middle name.  If you want your kid to live a life of crime, I suggest settling on "Eugene" for a middle name.

The number is a little skewed too, because there are a handful of women on there, and women are probably statistically less likely to have "Eugene" in their name.  Still, 10%.  If I throw out all the women on the list, the number is probably more like 11%.  

I double-checked and selected only the sex offenders (violent and drug were on the previous list).  I wondered if there were, say, more of them in one category than another.  But it turned out the list of sex offenders was 51 people, and 5 had the middle name "Eugene."  Still about the same.  

Now you know what not to name your kid.

You're welcome.  

  

Death Follows Me

Yesterday I passed a house that was surrounded by police tape.  There were police cars, officers, and a big ol' van all stationed outside, and I wondered what on earth happened.  I mean, especially since it was about a block (or less) from my house.  That's just unsettling.

While I'm complaining about fashion ...

There is a seriously disturbing proliferation of "mom jeans" at my workplace.

Can we just have every producer of fashion sign a pledge to NOT produce mom jeans EVER AGAIN?  I mean, I don't know who still makes ugly-ass (sort of literally) jeans, but STOP.

I'm sure that women will still dig them out of the back of their closets and wear them, but at some point they will become too old and worn out, and they will be recycled or tossed or donated.  Then the woman will go and buy some jeans that actually fit, and slowly those mom jeans will go out of circulation.  Slowwwwly.

Cropped Pants

I never understood this fashion phenomenon.  Either wear pants or shorts, but don't compromise.  (Capris are stupid too, but this is about cropped pants only.)

Back at Banana we had tons of cropped or "ankle" pants.  These are pants that, as you might guess, come to your ankle.  They're "high waters," in other words.  I tried ours on and found that the regular length was about 1/2 an inch too short for me to have them pass as regular pants.  But then they were also too long to look like crops.  So I just wound up looking like I was too tall for my pants.  And mine was a common problem.  Sometimes the shorter customers could get away with using a pair as regular straight-leg pants, but many fell into my issue of not really having the proper "petite" rise, but needing that petite length.

Now, you might say, "Duh!  Alterations!"  Yes, we did alterations.  But that takes time, requires having your pants sent off, no instant gratification, what if it's still wrong, etc.  And then there's the problem of shoes, since the length you need is going to differ if you wear heels vs. flats.  With a crop you're straddling that very fine line between "weirdly short pants" and "weirdly long crops," which can be a problem if you want to wear both kinds of shoes.

The shoe thing is a huge problem.  Sometimes with a longer crop you can wear a flat and get away with it, acting like it's just a normal pant.  But then you sit down and it hikes up to your lower calf, and you wish you'd shaved a little higher that morning.  (By the way, that was the other thing I hated--shaving my ankles to wear a pair of pants.  I know for a fact I'm not the only woman who avoids shaving anything that's not being seen.)  You might have better luck with any length when wearing heels, though if it's slightly too short then you probably end up looking like you bought pants for children or had them shrink in the wash.

I told you, it's a fine line.  The models kind of get away with it because they have long, thin legs.  If your figure is curvier (and this is not a euphemism for "fat," though it also applies if you're fat) or if you have short legs, you have to do a lot more to make your legs look longer.  Which means you don't want a lot of skin showing under your hem.  Too high of a crop can make you look shorter.  Heels will help, but not if you're 4'11" or have a wider frame.

And your shoe options suck.  I hate wearing shoes without socks.  Hate.  There is something very uncomfortable to me about the sweaty feeling of foot against shoe, and I need that barrier, whether it's a sock or tights.  I own a lot of boots, but I own some flats as well, and generally I'm wearing those flats with dresses and tights.  With crops you can't wear socks unless you're 85 and you don't give a fuck.  Fashion dictates that you wear a flat or a heel.  You might be able to do a boot, but that's going to depend on the boot and on how tapered the pant is.

I don't remember tons of people liking the crops.  I remember a lot of women complaining that they didn't want a crop.  They just wanted a pair of pants.  A lot of the shorter women tried to make the regular length crop into a straight leg pant, and many succeeded.  But very few were thrilled with that inch of pant missing.

So here's hoping that everyone gets their heads on straight and gives us our extra inch of fabric.  But I don't really have a lot of faith, considering how they keep trying to push and push and push all those damn skinny jeans on us.  (The solution to the skinny jean is a long, boxy blazer, btw.  JMO.)

Oh Horrible

Tonight there were guests over, and those guests had kids.  Two of them.  One and five years old.

There are already three kids in this house, with one of them basically demanding to be the center of attention and bossing the middle child--who just turned two--around.  So today we had five kids, two of whom could fully communicate, two of whom could toddle around, and then one who still does nothing but eat and poop and cry.

Tonight I was also pretty determined to be in bed by 8:30.  Normally the kids go to sleep at 8, but with the guests (still) over, that has been delayed somewhat.  And so has my own sleeping.  Delayed, delayed, delayed.

I'm so tired--lack of sleep and ladyproblems, plus the cold cold cold weather and my forever bleeding nose--that I just wanted to go to bed as early as possible.  To snuggle up with my fifteen blankets and sleeeeeep.  But nooooooo.  No sleep for meeeeee.  Hopefully in a few minutes I'll get there, but the kids are still up and having fits.  FITS.

How to Tell if You Live NOWHERE or SOMEWHERE

At work I had someone accuse me of being a "city kid."  While I find myself to be more of a city type, I was definitely not raised in one.  Yeah, it could have been worse--18,000 is kind of crappy but not TOTALLY crappy--but it still stands that we had to drive FOR-EV-ER to get anywhere.

For someone who gets motion sickness, that's the worst part.

Well, also the fact that my parents liked to not tell us where we were going.  So we'd get in the car thinking we would be going just down the road and then we'd go on an hour-long drive to God Knows Where ...

I digress.

The point is that I lived in the middle of nowhere.  Forty-five minutes in a car would get you to the nearest Real Mall, but the best shopping, movies, etc. necessitated a two-hour drive.  Taking an airplane anywhere meant 2.5-3 hours in a car, plus however long you had to spend in the plane.  Flying to Japan was essentially a 24-hour ordeal between driving to the airport and getting all the connecting flights.  Airports out here are good at getting you to Chicago or Dallas, but not much of anywhere else.

I had a friend try to tell me, "I feel your pain.  My town only has 4000 people."  That "town" was a suburb of Chicago.

Someone else tried to play that game with me.  He lived a half hour out of Dallas.  If your hometown can be considered part of a "metro area" that involves a million people or more, you do not get to say you live in the middle of nowhere.

Otherwise, here's a pretty good gauge:

Start at the center of town.  Drive (the speed limit, please) in one direction for fifteen minutes.  Are you still somewhere?  Then you live somewhere.

Drive in one direction for fifteen minutes.  Are you nowhere?  Congratulations!  You live nowhere!

Right now I do live in one of those metro areas.  It's nice, though I wish I lived a little closer to the city.  Living in a place like this is nice, but after spending most of my life with the inconvenience of sitting in the car for hours and hours, I like to know that Somewhere is always at my fingertips.