Bringing sexy back.

You know what hair fashion I really wish would come back? The French braid. I know that regular braids are still pretty stylin’ - the other week when my man and I went to see Dean and Britta at Schubas, Britta was sporting two little braids, furthering her status in Steve's mind as the Sexiest Older Woman He's Ever Seen. And Ariel Meadow Stallings has braids on almost a daily basis. Those braids are great, but I’m talking about the real French braid, starting right at the hair line, with little bits of hair intricately woven in with each twist. I was damn good at doing my own French braid, and moderately good at doing other girls' heads. Man, I spent a summer practicing on all of my dolls AND my mom’s preschoolers to get the perfect French braid, and for what? For that sometime-in-the-future little girl I may have? Such devotion, wasted. I know that some people could probably still rock the French braid in a stylish, ironic way, but I am neither that stylish nor that ironic, so I’m pretty sure I’d just look like a goob.

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My cat is currently on My List, due to a relatively sleepless night of meowing, needlessly bumping her head against mine, and, the coup de gras, playing with the metal mini-blinds. Then there were the times when she would finally settle down the way that we normally sleep:



only to then tilt her head back towards mine in a rapturous purr, leaving me with a face full of fur, and unable to breathe. God!

We used to think that this restlessness was hunger-related, because Babe is an Eating Machine. When we rescued her from her former home, we were told that she was on a diet consisting of 1 can of wet food, 1 can of tuna, and a bowl of dry food that was constantly re-filled. PER DAY. Well, we nipped that right in the bud, and now she gets ¾ of a cup of dry food a day. I feel that what I deprive her of in food, I make up for with love, stability, and putting up with B.S. such as last night.

We’ve solved the hunger issue, though, by giving her 2 of her ¼ cups of food at night, right before bed. So last night’s escapades weren’t because she was hungry. They were because she’s a spoiled Kitty Turd.

I’m just sleepy, I guess. And it is Friday, and work is slow, so it’s not a big deal. Plus, when Babe reaches up her little paws and meows at me to be put on the windowsill so she can watch the pigeon family that lives in the gutters next door (she’s too lazy to actually jump on the windowsill herself, but we won't get into that), well, you know, that just melts my heart.



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Would someone like to come over and make sense of my apartment? To put it plainly, I can’t decorate for shit. Nothing makes any sense. I wrote an email to citycrab in response to her request for votes on her two places to choose to live, and I outlined some of the oddities of my apartment to her:

- One bedroom that has an odd-shaped closet and only fits my bed.
- Another small bedroom that doesn't get any heat in the winter and no air in the summer.
- A massive space heater that can’t have any furniture within anywhere near it.
- Odd-sized windows (found this out trying to hang curtains this week).
- Slanty walls.
- Indoor/outdoor carpeting.

Nothing is organized, so most of my stuff and Steve’s stuff is just laying around because if we put it away, we’ll lose it. Every morning I go through a process of searching for my keys, the dog leash, or the doggie poop bags.

I really need help here. The only thing that I managed to do was paint a Marimekko fabric design on one of the walls in the living room. I had every intention of painting the wall opposite the design the same chocolate brown, but I hesitated, because I’m afraid that it will make the room too dark. See? I’m afraid of doing interior design, because I’m afraid of doing something too risky. Oh, but I have no problem painting big, loopy designs on my walls, though. What?

Apparently, any savvy I might have for various crafts does not translate to decorating my home. So if you have any ideas, send them my way. Heck, if you’re in the Chicago area and I’m confident you’re not a Killer, I’ll even have you over.

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Last of all, have any of you had a Grapple? They’re pronounced Grape – L, as the website wastes no time telling you. An apple! Infused with grapejuice! I’ve had two now, courtesy of my dear boss who has more guts at the grocery store to buy crazy stuff than I do. They're wild!

Party on, Internet.

Never meant as a compliment.

Just now, as I was doing a victory dance around my boyfriend and chanting, "Aww yeeeah, that's what I'm talkin' abou', son!" (after proving with cold hard facts that something he had said was totally, completely and utterly wrong), he just stared at me for a moment, then said:

"My God. You really are the whitest White Person ever."

Burn.

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Sorry I haven't been around, Internet. I have not felt inspired. I had no energy entering into this week, and I seem to have no energy as it peters out.

Here's hoping a pretty low-key weekend will get me out of this rut.

Fabulous fabulousness.

I can’t write here for very long because I need to get back to work. And boy, do I have a lot of work to do. I hate the end of a quarter in the business world. I thought I was done with quarters when I left twelfth grade. Apparently not.

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Hello, three readers. Sorry that I’ve been neglecting this. Chicago has been experiencing a record-breaking warm-up. Currently it’s 70 degrees outside. 70 degrees! It’s just a tease, though – we’re expected to go back down to 30 by the weekend – but it still has me feeling passionate! I also like a huge weight has been taken off my chest. Steve and I started out last week in the throes of winter depression. We didn't leave the house for two days, just because we could. And now here we are! Fabulous.

So that’s the first thing that has elevated my mood remarkably. Here are some others, in no particular order:

2. Daylight Savings Time starting 2 (or is it 3?) weeks early. Hooray! I can’t be more excited about this. I love coming home from work when it’s still light out. The change bit weekend plans in the ass a little bit: we had just gotten our first round of drinks at Club Foot and were about to start gettin’ jiggy with it when the bartenders yelled Last Call, even though our watches still all said 12:30.....but still! You can’t beat those 6:30 sunsets that make it absolutely impossible to drive West.

3. Being less irresponsible than my boyfriend. This morning, I opened the door to let the dog out, and there, still hanging in the doorknob, were my keys. Steve launched into his customary Shame On You speech that I get when I do this (ok, ok, it’s happened more than once), which I mostly listened to as the dog and I headed out the door. So I’m outside, following Mojo around as he does his business (Mostly to watch for any treats he might find...condoms! Baby diapers! Styrofoam cups!), when I turn towards the front door of my house. What’s lying on the top step? Steve’s car keys. Oh, revenge, thou art sweet! If I said I didn’t go into the house and proceed to viciously rub the fact that his blunder was waaaaaay worse than mine, well, then I’d be a liar. Also, it was sort of a good way to start out the day, realizing how flippin’ lucky we were not to have lost the car. Didn’t check to see if it had a shit-ton more miles on it than the last time we drove it – a la Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, you know – but the fact that it was still parked in front of the house is pretty frickin’ fabulous.

4. My Alma Mater has finally decided to get rid of it’s racist mascot. About damn time, U of I! Even though I have to sadly admit that I didn’t do a goddamn thing to help this cause when I was actually going to the school (hey, come on, I was busy losing my virginity...I had priorities), I still strongly stand behind this decision. Also, I have to say, that the passion that those that are pro-Chief have (including 3 people in my 6-person office....talk about a can of worms I shouldn’t have opened around the watercooler) makes me chuckle. Such devotion! And all for a dance that consists of jumping around in bare feet! And doing scissor kicks in the air! I do that at home at least once a week, people. Get over it.

5. Steve bought a laptop. A laptop which he’s going to mainly keep at my place, he says. I’m excited! I’ve never had a laptop before. Finally, FINALLY, my dreams of perusing Flickr while having some Quiet Time in the bathroom will come true! How awesome is that? Multitasking! Even better, and slightly less gross, is having a laptop at my disposal for when I go back to school in the summer. My last semester really drove home the fact that I can’t focus on work when I’m at home. There’s a whole harrowing story from that semester about a big paper, leaving it to the last minute, and walking out on a once-in-a-lifetime Iron & Wine/Calexico show whilst having an anxiety attack, but I don’t have to rehash that. I lived it.

6. I have the best boss ever. She gave me these black beads in the shape of birds, and she also let me borrow her idea to make these bird earrings:



I'm a big fan. I don't wear earrings often, so I still feel like I have two footballs hanging off each earlobe, but I think that feeling will subside.

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That's about it for me. Now, Internet, go take a walk. It's lovely out.

Big toe assault.

I have on the most ridiculous pair of hole-y socks today. They didn’t appear to be any different than all the other black sock-y drones in the my sock drawer, but I put them on and….wow. The heel on the left sock is gone, as well as the big toe portion on the right. It’s on days when I have a wardrobe malfunction such as this that I am really grateful that I have the choice to go home every day at lunch.

Update - it is now afternoon and I have on un-hole-y socks. They're Halloween socks, sure, but no holes.

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It’s been a pretty boring week over here at the home turf, which is just what I needed after my wild weekend of ballet and museums. Yeeah.

Last night Chicago got hit by a thunderstorm. A wild, winter thunderstorm. I woke up to lightning, and I tend to still do the “1-1000, 2-1000, 3-1000….” count to see how many miles away the lightning is from the time that I hear the thunder. Last night, though, there was a huge flash of lightning and I don’t think I had even finished saying "1” before there was a huge clap of thunder. It sounded like it was right on Chicago Avenue. Steve jumped up and checked outside, and sure enough, all the streetlights were out. But the electricity inside the apartment was still on, which was bizarre. Eh, it wouldn’t have mattered if the power had gone out inside anyways, seeing as how I have that awesome knack for waking up 10 minutes before my alarm is scheduled to go off. Hooray for anti-anxiety medications that pretty much never let you get a restful sleep. Hip, hip.....blech.

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I sent an email to Steve this morning, telling him that if he ever wanted to get me a totally awesome gift, he could plan a surprise trip to Toronto to, among other things, get Mojo’s picture taken by this guy. If you have a Flickr account, you should add him as a contact, because his photos totally brighten my day. That Great Dane that’s up right now...frickin’ precious.

I know that I live in a vast metropolitan area, and that there are probably several great animal photographers right here (I think many of them rent some advertising space on my vet's office walls), but hey! I’ve never been to Toronto, or anywhere in Canada, for that matter.

Toronto Trip is just a pipe dream for now, though, what with the fiscal situation and all, so I'm just going to have to settle for my slightly-blurry-because-he-never-stops-moving snapshots of my little guy. Specifically, these ones are of Mojo being tortured in the backseat of the car, because Steve had run into the grocery store to buy something, and Mojo can’t stand it when someone leaves the car without him. I think he was convinced Steve wasn’t coming back. I tried explaining that Steve was picking out wine and beer, and that that's a complicated process, but you know, Moj wasn't having any of it.





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Sidebar: I have 8 voicemails on my cell phone right now that I’m avoiding listening to. I hate listening to voicemails. I hate leaving them, too, and tend to blather on about blah blah blah and oh, did you hear about blah, blah, blah, and so give me a call back blah, blah, blah. So impersonal, I can’t stand it.

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I’m thinking of taking dance classes here. This won't be happening any time soon, because I still have to take a trip there to see what the place is like, plus I’m pretty much FlatAss Broke, at least for a little while. Seriously, I have not been able to get myself out of debt for about two months now. Thanks a lot, new glasses.

Anyways, the other itty, bitty, wee thing that's keeping me from joining these dance classes just yet is the dress code. Black leotard and flesh-colored tights. I’ll repeat: black leotard and flesh-colored tights. The Badunkadunk I'm carrying around isn’t really cut out for a leotard or tights of ANY color. Combine that with the fact that, historically, I have never had the nerve to venture out of the house in that sort of getup....you can see my reservations. That’s why I want to go to the place and see who else is in the beginners’ classes. Which is sort of a terrible thing to do, but hey, if my cellulite is the only cellulite dancing [jiggling] around the place, well, you know, that won’t do.

In the meantime, my running partner and I are continuing on with our running regime. Which is, you know, I call him up, or he calls me up, and we venture out. As we begin running we talk about all sorts of things, until we get to the point where I have to tell him if I talk anymore, I’ll drop down dead right there, somewhere in the square made by Ashland, Division, Western and Grand. It's an okay system for now. I'm just excited for the time when I won't feel like Death for the majority of the run, and we can talk our ears off about B-list movies and how awful the chairs at the Music Box are to our Badunkadunks.

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Over and out, Internet.

Brush with fame.

My brain is totally fried from sitting in front of the television set watching the Academy Awards. I don't know why I enjoy watching a big group of people with salaries I couldn't even imagine as well as bodies I could never even hope to attain get accolades for fulfilling their dreams, while I sit on my ass, drinking orange juice and trying to get the dog to stop licking the bottom of my foot because he wants attention. But I do.

Hey! Guess what? As my friends and I were going through the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry this afternoon, there was a guy running after his kid who looked vaguely familiar, and I realized that it was John Herndon from Tortoise. I had a brush with fame! I was looking at plastinated bodies with a famous musician. This was almost just like when I ran into Joe Perry of Aerosmith with his family at the Brookfield Zoo when I was in seventh grade. Umm, but minus the actual stepping on the feet of Joe Perry, because I was looking at the pygmy hippo and not him, and the subsequent dirty look that I got. Still. Wow.

And now - to bed.

Saturday night lists. Like Friday night lists, only more Saturdayish.

How has everyones' weekends been so far? Mine - pretty good.

1. Friday I went running for the first time in over a year, with my friend Pat. I almost died, but hey! I didn't. So I take that as a good sign, and once this ice-y rain/snow mix that's falling right now goes away (I just saw lightning. Lightning! In February!), I think I might try running again.

2. My mother, sister and I went and saw this performance by the Joffrey Ballet this afternoon. Damn, was it amazing. The last piece, "The Green Table," is an anti-war statement that was created between the two World Wars, and at first I hated it, and by the end I was totally shocked at how it pretty much summed up all of my feelings of what's going on in our world right now. And it was ballet! Ballet! Ballet doesn't usually stick with me - I'll be honest, I'm a season member of the Joffrey, and this is the first performance this year where I've made it through the whole dance without dozing off in the second act. Today, though, ballet knocked my socks right off.

3. Sharyn has definitely confirmed that she's coming to Chicago in the spring to see the Arcade Fire. And we're going to meet! This is the first time I will have met someone I talk to on the Internet in real life. I hope she's not disappointed to find that all of those times when I've confided to the Internet that I think I'm lame is, because, I truly am that lame.

4. Today was a big day for this lady. Her EP came out today! She and i stumbled into each others' lives in a pretty bizarre way, and we've never met in person, but I know her just enough to know that she's worked really hard on this. Check out some of her music at her main site or her MySpace page, and if you like it, show your support.

5. Because I'm too cold/tired/generally lazy to go shopping at an actual store, I've been cyber-windowshopping a bunch of websites. I've decided that I pretty much love all of this woman's stuff. I think I might need to have Dolly Parton hanging around my neck. Also, why does this stupid store have to have so many cute handbags that I can't have because they're about $500 a piece? Stupid Anthropologie.

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Time for sleep. Tomorrow I'm off to the Museum of Science and Industry to see Body Worlds. I saw Part One when it was in Chicago, and I have to say that I wasn't blown away by it. I'm not incredibly science-oriented, so I think it was hard to actually believe that those bodies were real. Also, there was the whole anti-smoking statement. We get it, Dr. von Hagens, we get it. Smoking is bad. Thank you for reminding us by showing black lungs almost exclusively. Blech. I wouldn't mind seeing nice, white lungs on some of the bodies that resemble those in people like me....those who took a few puffs behind Kate's garage in seventh grade, and smoked a few cloves during their Hipster stage. That would be nice.

Goodnight, Internet!

One reason to bring my mom in through the front door.

So we're doing some intense cleaning around the house (as in, we've been living in squalor for the past, oh, two weeks or so), and Steve's relegated to taking out the trash (I don't like to touch it).

Outside my kitchen door is an enclosed back porch. It's unheated, and holds stuff like the Christmas tree and boxes for moving, and bags of trash during the week, when we're too tired to take them to the garbage can. You have to go through this porch to get to my deck.

Well, when I moved here the enclosed porch sort of creeped me out, because there is a Frightening Dark Staircase that leads to a Frightening Boarded-Up Door, so Steve put an extra lock on my kitchen door so noone can get in. This has come in handy many times, especially because my landlord used to let the neighborhood homeless guy, Smokey (sometimes I refer to him as my "Homeless Doorman"), store some of his stuff in a closet in the enclosed porch. Smokey's a nice guy - and speaks fluent Polish, which I envy - but I don't really want him to come into the house, you know how it is.

OK, to finish up this story, while I was washing the dishes, Steve came in, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, "Ummm, have you ever noticed this?"



Stuck into one of the walls of the enclosed porch is a knife. Doesn't look like a switchblade - it's more of the steak knife variety - but yes, it's definitely stuck right into the wall.

No, I hadn't noticed it. And I'm quite glad that my man put that extra lock on the door.

And also, I love this town!

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The night before last I had absolutely INSANE dreams. Most of them were of the Real Life With Just One Strange Tweak variety, which I seem to have all the time, but there was one that was certifiably a Fucking Scary Nightmare. I don't remember much of it, other than I was in a scenario sort of similar to this film.

I trudged into work completely exhausted and, thus, a total wastoid. I don't think I got one work-related thing done. It was good that this happened on a Friday and all, because everyone left early and didn't really rely on me for much.

The one shining light of my day was that I read Jek's blog all the way through. I LOVE THAT WOMAN. I've been looking at her totally great, color-saturated, crafty photos on her Flickr page, but I had never read her blog before. She's so cute, and upbeat, and funny, and....well anyways I really needed it yesterday. And she has another blog that has all of her awesome craft ideas. I put them both in my links list, if you ever need a pick-me-up. Jek, if I'm ever in your neck of the woods, I'm totally going to look you up, and, I don't know, glue some stuff with you or something.

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I best get back to cleaning. But before I do, can I just say that this XM radio that I got for Steve for Valentines day - you know, the one that I had to ask about because I didn't know what the hell it was, is A-W-E-S-O-M-E. If I could just have the forties music channel and that was it, I would love it just as much. All these great songs about meloncholy babies, how great it is to be in the navy, etc., etc. I mean, come on, they just played Strip Polka! That song rules.

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Ok, I'm really going to get back to my cleaning now. I am, though, going to leave you with this. Click on the picture, and you'll be sent to probably the best cartoon ever.

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