Zebra

Meet the new member of the LitP-Kicking Puppies household: A ten-pound bag of rice I have named Zebra, for obvious reasons. Zebra is currently living on my kitchen counter, as I'm worried that he'll break my cheap-ass cabinets if I try to put him where we usually put rice. I think his future home will probably be the lower cabinet in which we store empty beer bottles, as ten pounds is nothing compared to the massive weight of our alcoholism.

Zebra is originally from the Indian Market up the street from me, and I aquired him in a two-for-one deal with my friend Naomi. I hope that Zebra will enjoy his time in our apartment - at least until we eat him, after which I plan to use his stylish bag as a purse.

My Apartment Is Full of Perverts (Even When It's Just Me and the Cat)

My cat has a shoe fetish.

Well, actually, it might be a foot fetish.

She loves shoes. But she doesn't love them in the way that Jill's cat Morty does, where he likes to attack small objects hidden in them. She doesn't hurt the shoes in any way.

When I come home from work, the cat runs to the door. Then there's usually a bit where she tries to wander out into the hallway, and I go and get her and explain that she's not allowed to escape and become a kitty hobo. Then I take my shoes off. And then she sticks her little tiny furry head deep into my sneakers.

You guys, I think she's smelling them. I have a theory that maybe they're interesting because they smell very strongly human. I like this theory because it's better than the only other available option, which is that my cat is a sicko pervert.

She does this to shoes that are just lying around the apartment, too. Sometimes she bites them, but gently, the way that I might bite something that I really liked. Her favorites where definitely the Pink! Boots! (and who can blame her?), and I don't think she likes flipflops very much.

But really, my cat is just a shoe slut.

Iggy Pop + Tom Waits = Cyn In The Theater

I saw the new movie Coffee and Cigarettes a couple of days ago.

Has anyone else noticed that Tom Waits is aging backwards? I swear, I could actually see him sucking the life out of Iggy Pop in their scene together. (Okay, you're right, that's what Iggy Pop always looks like. Still!) Maybe the black and white film made him look younger, or maybe clean living is agreeing with him, but I think he's up to something. ("What's he building in there?" Apparently, a reverse aging machine. Ha ha! Just a little Tom Waits humor for you.)

About the movie: It was good. Phil didn't like it at first, because I had just kind of dragged him to it without him knowing anything about it, so he came into it expecting it to make sense and have a plot. Instead, it's a series of vignettes that center around coffee and cigarettes. Many of them also feature extreme awkwardness. Many of them feature well known actors or musicians and get all meta with their public personas. (Y'all know how much I love the meta.) And it's funny. The humor saves it, I think. It balances the over the top pretentiousness quite nicely.

My favorite scene was the one with the White Stripes, entitled "Jack shows Meg his Tesla Coil." My new rule of thumb is that any movie with a lot of discussion about Tesla Coils is alright by me.

I Want a Sleepover

My roommate is in London for the next week. (London: Official location of all of my friends and not me.) Of course, I am hampered in my urge to take advantage of the lack of roommate by the fact that there's really not a goddamned thing I don't do when he's home. I suppose I could have sex in his bed or something, but that just seems needlessly cruel.

What I really want to do is have a sleepover. Who's up for sitting around in our jammies and watching bad teen movies and doing make overs and gossiping? Then in the morning we can have mimosas!

Speaking of sleepovers, did anyone ever go to one as a child that didn't turn all Lord of the Flies around midnight? I've been to good sleepovers in my high school/college/post-college years, but I'm pretty sure that all of them before that involved lots of recrimination and "If you were really my friend, you'd prove it by doing whatever" and small girls making other small girls cry.

My Feelings On Gas Prices

Ha ha suckers, I've got a bus pass.

(Yes, I am obnoxiously superior about not having a car. I'm okay with it.)

I Am Immature

I bought some frozen asparagus from Trader Joe's, and the packaging describes it as "Tips & Cuts." I find this oddly salacious.

In another not-so-shockingly unadult move, I managed to send an entire tube of lip gloss through the washer and dryer, so now all my darks are covered in glittery spots that smell like strawberry. I have chosen to accept this.

Quote

"Wallowing is sex for depressives."
-Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

This PinkHaired Life

I am newly obsessed with This American Life. I'd never heard it before, and then I clicked on it because I've been exploring the NPR site, and holy shit it's good!

You can listen to all of the old episodes off of their website, so I've been listening to one or two a day. Sometimes they actually make me giddy with happiness and I giggle to myself in my little office.

When I tell people about my new obsession, sometimes they recommend episodes for me! It's awesome. My friend Chris suggested the Superpowers episode, and then my manager suggested Fiasco!

The funniest part of the conversation with my manager was that we started talking about Superpowers, and when I asked if he would choose the power of flight or invisibility, he refused to tell me. He was like, "Well, - oh, no, I'm not answering." I decided I would choose flight, but only because then you'd get to travel everywhere really fast for free. Otherwise I would choose invisibility, because then when you felt awkward in social situations, you could just turn invisible.

I also really like Testosterone, enough that I may have to write an entire entry about it.

And yes, I do have a raging crush on Ira Glass now.

Because You Asked, Here Are Some Pictures of My Cat

Apparently my word pictures are just not good enough for some people. Here Sophie is dangling her arm over the edge of the couch, something she does all the time and which never ceases to be adorable.

Here she is in bed, being annoyed at me for throwing the covers at her.

If you've noticed that all of these pictures are of her sleeping and looking vaguelly annoyed at me, well, that's pretty much what she does. Well, that and rub her face on things and smell my shoes.

The Brush

My cat both loves being brushed and wants to bite the brush more than anything in the world. I brush her and she sits and purrs until she notices The Brush! It is right there, on her side, just waiting to be bit! Then she bites the brush for a little bit, and I let her, as it's pretty amusing. Then she notices the brushing has stopped, so she stops biting the brush and starts to rub her head against it, as though she's trying to brush herself.

The I start brushing again, and the whole thing starts over.

Think of Me As Just Your Fan

There's a line in the song "I Don't Really Love You Anymore" by The Magnetic Fields that goes:

"Cause I've read your horoscope/ and now I've given up all hope."

I think it's the most genius thing ever. Because isn't that how you know you're gone on someone? When you check their horoscope as well as yours? I know I do it. I'm not a regular horoscope checker, and I don't have much truck with astrology, but I read them when I'm reading one of the weekly free papers, and if I'm dating someone I always check mine and then my boyfriend/girlfriend's. I don't generally know their sign until we've been dating a while, since I'm not really into it, so the sign checking generally doesn't occur until we're some sort of a couple.

Strange but True: During the short period in which I had two boyfriends, they both had the same star sign.

Random but Annoying: It really bugs the hell out of me when people say things like, "Well since I'm an Aries, I'm blah blah blah." I seriously heard someone say, "Well, I'm a Virgo, so I have bad knees," on an old episode of This American Life, and I was like, "WHAH? Guh? Arrrrr."

I Took the 21 to Work: Triptych

1. I take the bus because it is pulling up to Farragut street just as I reach the corner. I'm only a block away from the El, and El is faster, but the bus is right there and will drop me off a couple of blocks closer to work. The truth is, I kind of like the longer bus ride when I have the time. It's 2:30 pm, so traffic isn't horrible, and it doesn't take too terribly long. I always allow far too much time for my travel in and out of the city, because I'm paranoid about being late. Riding the bus gives me a good long time to read Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which I've been saving to read on public transit. I love Eats, Shoots and Leaves, and thus am trying to savor it, to draw out the reading of it for as long as possible. It's only two hundred pages, and I could probably devour it in a couple of hours if I let myself. Allowing myself to read it for the entire forty-five minutes or so the bus will take is a special little treat.

2. The bus is at a stoplight. I look up from my book when an old woman on the sidewalk taps on the window next to my head. She tugs at her own white hair. I smile, confused. "She was asking if that's really your hair," the middle-aged black woman sitting behind me says, as the bus pulls away.

3. A middle-aged businessman type gets on and sits in front of me. "How is that?" he asks, indicating my book. "It's great! I love it," I tell him. He tells me he heard the NPR piece about it, and I say I did too. I tell him you can get it at Borders on sale for twelve dollars. I can't help but wonder what he thinks of me, a pink-haired woman in her early twenties, gushing over grammar and NPR. My t-shirt has a picture of a cat in a toaster with the legend "Good-bye kitty" underneath it.

Decanter

Jill, Monica and I all left work early yesterday because the fire alarms wouldn't stop going off, and the constant shrieking alarms and flashing lights were about to send us all into seizures. We ended up going to Ross for Less, because that's what you do when you leave work early.

Ross for Less had a goddamn lot of bar-related glassware. Bar-related glassware happens to be one of my many weaknesses, because it's damn cool. If I had my way, I'd have brandy snifters and champagne flutes and margarita glasses and red and white wine glasses and all those other weird glasses. Right now I have wine glasses and martini glasses (They're the Martha Stuart collection!) and hi-ball glasses, which double as, well, normal glasses.

And now I have a decanter. (And also eight more highball glasses, which are not pictured.) It claims to be both crystal and made in France. So I brought it home and poured the Jim Beam bourbon that was hanging out on top of my fridge into it.

So now I can almost pretend to be kind of classy, at least if you completely ignore the fact that it's Jim Beam in a decanter I bought for ten bucks at Ross for Less.

Humanity = Evil

You should all check out this really excellent Morning Edition story about how humanity is sadistic and evil. It claims to be about Abu Ghraib, but really it's just about how people are bad.

I'm So Eighty

I just bought a book on grammar and a magazine on knitting.

I'm so excited!

Back to Normal

It looks like you can email me at Cyn at pinkhairedgirl.com again. So hopefully everything has sorted itself out and this whole debacle is over.

I Am An Idiot

Hey, you know what sucks? When you accidentally let your domain and hosting expire, and you registered them both when you were still in college, so all of your contact information is different, and also you don't remember your password for them.

So I spent most of yesterday on the phone, being like, "No, that email address doesn't work. No, I don't know my account password. No, I don't live in Ohio anymore. No, I don't have the credit card number I registered it with. Um, can I just give you some money, please?"

Fortunately, the tech support people were very nice, and did not openly mock me for being a moron. Also, oddly enough, the phone support was much more effective than the email support, when usually it's the other way around.

My email is still kind of fucked up, although hopefully it will work itself out soon. In the meantime, email me at CynthiaBTaylor at Hotmail.

Because I Know You're All Dying To Know About the Kitchen Saga

So yesterday, I finally did dishes. All of the dishes. For example, I washed every cup that we own. And also every fork we own. And a large percentage of the spoons and knives. I washed dishes from 11 am until 2 pm. I think that maybe some of the dishes we didn't even own before, and the dirty dishes just started breeding at some point.

I also cleaned up the living room and some of the kitchen.

I had big plans for today. I was going to clean out the fridge, because it's gotten to the point where the fridge is full and we have no food at the same time. I was going to clean up my room, because right now it's at the point where if someone came over and I was giving them the tour of my apartment, I would have to point at my room and say, "And that's the room we never go in. They told us there's a curse, and any person who goes in that room will be struck with boils." Or maybe, "That's where we keep our third roommate, the cannibal."

But then I realized that if I sit in the living room, where it's nice and clean, I can't see the inside of the fridge or the inside of my room. And that kind of killed my cleaning motivation. My cleaning motivation requires the same kind of cultivation to keep alive as, say, a rare orchid.

On the "not a complete pig person" side, I have started cleaning the dishes kind of compulsively after getting them dirty.

Semi-related story: In college, I once drunkenly went home with a guy who was so ashamed of the state of his (presumably filthy) dorm room that he convinced one of his friends to switch dorm rooms with him for the night, so he could take me to his friend's cleaner room. Our dorm rooms had our names on the door, and since I had been drinking for the last twelve hours, this was really confusing for me. I spent a lot of time in my head going, "Wait, I thought his name was Dude's Name? But on his door it says Friend's Name? Have I been calling him the wrong name all of this time?"

Then I pretended to be asleep to avoid having sex with him. Which I think was a wise decision, as he was a Phish head. (Is "Phish head" one word or two?) And also, you know, took me to his friend's room to try to sex me up.

Related to the Aside Aside: I am not entirely sure which of my college friends said this (Julie, or one of the other roommates, clear this up for me, please.), but I definitely remember someone saying, "'Can I have sex in your bed?' That's like asking, 'Can I take a shit in your drawers?'" For maximum effect, saw "drawers" in a southern accent, like "draaaawrs." Also, remember that drawers in this instance refers to underwear rather than a chest of drawers.

City Chickens

Here are pictures of the chickens I previously mentioned. I took this picture at Walnut and 46th, but I've also seen them at Chestnut and 44th. Unless those were different chickens.

Being a city girl, I'm still kind of afraid they're going to fly at me and peck my eyes out. But mainly I find them kind of amusing and mysterious. Chickens! In the city!

Three Dollar Pitchers

It turns out that who wants to go drinking is my coworkers, and who wants to accidentally get kind of wasted and drunk dial her friends is me! me! me!

Unfortunately, whose kitchen smells kind of funny is also me! me! me!

Dirty

So the boyfriend is off to BoyfriendLand. (BoyfriendLand being New York and then London, which is highly unfair when you consider that CynLand is an apartment where the dirty dishes are threatening to take over the lease. How come he gets all the glamorous locales?)

I thought I had more to say here, but I guess that's basically it. My boyfriend is across the Atlantic for the next three months, and my aparment is about to be declared a superfund site. Who wants to go drinking?

Haircut

Here are some photos of my totally rad new hair, curtesy of the awesome Gwen. I love this haircut more than I love kittens and sunshine and rainbows. If I had to pick one thing to take with me on a desert island, it would be this haircut. It's super cute and punktastic and the messier it is the better it looks. My hair is the coolest.

Shawl!

This is the Children of Lir shawl from Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls. I made it with white Lana Gatto VIP, on size nine needles.

It's 22 repeats of three sets of a lace pattern that's 23 stitches by fourteen rows. You do eleven repeats, then pick up stitches and do eleven the other way, so that the shawl is balanced.

This is what it looks like in the back.

Here it is blocking.

This shawl is probably the hardest thing I've ever made. The lace pattern was too large to memorize, so I couldn't multitask when knitting it. However, it turned out amazing - I can't believe I actually made something this beautiful!

They Are Tired From Men

This spam excerpt makes me laugh so hard I cry:

How do they f@kk with snakes? Snakes don't have c0c.k-s!!!

Guys! Our g1r|s can do it with every creature they want!
They are ready for it! They are tired from men!

They do realize that wild @n1m@ls are f@kking like no man would ever f@kk them.
Cause they are animals and they f@kk just like everybody did thousands
and millions years ago!

In Which I Talk In A Semi-Hysterical Manner About Iraq

It's all politics and no vagina talk up this piece lately, which I suppose is what happens when I actually have contact with the media. I have the tendency to live in my own little world a bit too much, and sometimes have to be reminded that not everyone is down with the pacifist vegetarian bisexual pink-haired ideals. Seriously, sometimes I just forget that most people eat meat. It becomes like this big joke to me where I'm all, "Ha ha, who would put dead cow in their mouth? Oh, wait, everyone. Never mind." Not that I am judging you, meat eaters, it just all seems kind of strange to me at this point.

But enough of my meat digression. The point I was trying to make up there is that I have the tendency to be out of touch with both the news and the general American populace, which is how I like it, because both of those things tend to make me a little sad. But lately I have been going out of my way to listen to talk radio and also read The New Yorker, plus the boyfriend is all political and likes to tell me about these things and also mock me for being mainstream. (Ways in which I am mainstream, according to Rowan: I like NPR and The New Yorker, both of which are secretly pro-war! I pay my taxes! I like to buy things! I have a job!)

So I am semi-aware of the world at large lately, and it is making me really sad. I think it may be a bad time to be politically cognizant, as things seem to be extra-sad recently. Especially since I haven't managed to go a single day without seeing the terrible, terrible Iraqi prisoner photos in the last week or so, and now it turns out there are even more of them. The Washington Post apparently has like, 1,000 of them. So I am going to talk about them now, okay? You don't have to read it, it will make you sad and upset, probably.

You know that whole "bad apple" excuse that keeps being thrown about? I'm sorry, but that's such bullshit! I mean, it's clearly bullshit, the New Yorker article makes it clear that there were lots and lots and lots of people involved, but even if we found every one who was in any way responsible and got them lots of therapy or something and made them understand that what they did was very, very bad and they should never do it again, I still don't think it would solve the problem.

Because what we do with the military, is that we train people to kill other people. And maybe it's different if you're religious and you think that when people die they go to a big farm in the sky and get to chase cars all they want. (Wait, sorry, that's when dogs die. People get clouds and harps, right?) But I'm an atheist, and I think that when people die, they're just gone. And they don't get to sit on clouds and play the harp, they don't get to do anything, ever again, and they don't get to listen to the Decemberists, and you'll never know if they would like the Decemberists or not, because they're just completely gone.

And I think (I hope) that most people couldn't kill people who they still thought of as people. So of course things like this happen. Because we're taking these people who join the military, many of who are basically still children, and we're training them to obey orders blindly, and we're training them that these people are the enemy, and then we stick them in these horrible situations, and things like this happen.

The thing that I really can't get around, and I know that I'm going to get into a lot of trouble for saying this, and there are people in the military that I know, and that I like, and please don't yell at me a lot. But I really, really just don't understand how you can join an organization where there's a very strong possibility that you will have to kill another human being. And I really, really, really don't understand how you can make a career out of it.

Morris Animal Shelter: Bitches and Hos

The Philadelphia Weekly has an article on the Morris Animal Shelter. This is the same shelter that Phil and I attempted to adopt a cat from, and were rejected for not having vet references. The shelter that tried to make Phil get a reference from a vet in Chicago for a dog that had died three years ago.

Well, according to the article, they are pretty much like that with everyone, and a lot of animals die because of it. Which makes me very sad, and also filled with righteous indignation.

I'm not sure exactly what I can do about it, other than being sad. I am tempted to write a letter to their board of directors, but I don't know if it would help or not. If anyone has any ideas, leave a comment.

(Link via Library Grrrl.)

Complacency

This morning I began idly looking up places I shop on ResponsibleShopper.org. I'm a big fan of the personal is political, as it lets me pretend to be an activist while remaining completely unconfrontational. (See also, laziness.)

Amazon.com breaks up its unions. Target uses sweatshops.

Then I look up Borders, and it's clean. It has some wee anti-trust issues, but who doesn't? It even offers domestic partner benefits! I am completely shocked.

Then I realize that all this time, I've just been assuming that whenever I bought something from a large chain, someone was being exploited for it somewhere. And I become kind of depressed at how complacent I've become with the fact that people have to suffer for my psuedo-luxory goods.

Fortunately, lately I've been spending all my money at small, feminist-run sex shops.

Consume

I was listening to Air America this morning, on the recommendation of both Julie and Monica. Since I am a reclusive hermit who scorns most forms of media (with the exception of shiny, shiny magazines), it's been a really long time since I listened to the radio, and an even longer time since I listened to radio that had ads on it.

Radio ads are freaky.

There was a rap about Greyhound. Which by itself does not commute, but the fact that they're actually pretending that there's anything that doesn't suck about Greyhound makes it even more egregious. My ad campaign for Greyhound goes something like, "We hate your guts, but we sure are cheap!" or maybe, "Convicts and drunks sure make for some good stories!"

But the Greyhound rap wasn't anywhere near as bad as these ads for some sort of car product called something like OnStar. The OnStar ads centered around the concept that if you don't buy their product, something bad will happen to you. They featured horrible car accidents and dogs locked in cars. They were just obviously trying to play on people's fear, which I find completely disgusting. Don't try to intimidate me into buying your product. I'm not scared of you.

The Van Plan

I have a new work fantasy. As I've mentioned before, my old work fantasy was to move to New Mexico and raise goats. (Or possibly alpacas.) I sometimes got very into this fantasy, in which I drive a pick-up truck and have a golden retriever with a bandanna around its neck and drive into town once a month to drink at the bar with ancient ranchers.

But now I have a new work fantasy. In the new work fantasy, I get a van. And then I drive around the country in my van, visiting people I know. I blog about it from coffeeshops with free wifi, and possibly publish a zine and/or solve mysteries. Also, the van has windows in which I hang gingham curtains. And when people ask me what I do for a living, I say, "Well, I used to be a computer programmer, but now I have this van."

The problem with this plan is that it's a little too feasible. I could never actually become a goat farmer. Well, I could, but it would take way more effort than I'm willing to put out, and I would definitely be convinced of the error of my ways before I actually bought a goat farm. (Unless it turned out I really like goats, but I dislike dirt enough for that to be really unlikely.)

But I could really get a van. It would be easy! And I could really drive around the country and visit people. I couldn't support myself, or anything, but I could totally do it. So I find myself going, "Yeah. I could get a van. If I get into grad school, maybe I'll take some time off and drive around in a van for a while."

Of course, I don't know anyone in the middle of the country, and I would probably get all gross and stinky, and I'm not really all that crazy about driving, and I would probably get really bored. But still. I could totally get a van.

Ho Use

Because I am five, I find the gaps in this bar sign very amusing. Mc Cool's Ale Ho Use, y'all!

The Straight Boys & Porn & Me

Saturday night I have six gin and tonics and the straight boys convince me to buy a subscription to Sucide Girls, the indie soft-core porn site full of girls with tattoos and piercings and freaky hair. To be fair, it doesn't take much convincing, Ro just says, "You should buy a subscription, you have a job," and then my credit card numbers are in the computer and I have all the pictures of naked girls I could want.

I stay up until 4 am, drinking gin and looking at nudie pictures and reading poetry. (Adam calls at 3 am from a Decemberists concert in Seattle, and I hear Colin Meloy singing "I was meant for the stage" across the country.)

The next morning, the straight boys are downloading porn like Henry Ford built cars. They say things like, "We only have ten days, and we're still only on the As!" and, "There are 134 pictures in this photo shoot! Isn't there a zip file somewhere?" They have Byzantine deals that involve the pictures being saved to one's computer, and burnt onto cd for the other. They say, "Save these in some kind of logical order, so I can take over when I come back."

We rotate between making French Toast and the frantic aquisition of pornography.

Geekery

1. Can people recommend something to keep spammers the hell out of my comments? Or, alternately, some way I can track these people down and beat them?

2. How do I set my RSS feed so it includes the whole entry, instead of just the excerpt?

The Park Is Nice

My friend Carl is visiting this week, bringing the number of straight boys in my apartment up to two. (Strange!)

This morning I woke up around 1:30 pm, rather hungover. (I actually got out of bed only after my mother called me and mocked me.) But then we (we being Carl and Ro and I) made an amazing breakfast with fried potatoes (with peppers and onions and tomato) and tons of French toast. And then we went and bought comic books and magazines and lay in the park and read them. And then we walked home, and on the way bought samosas for fifty cents and the Indian market, and purchased The Fan of the Future at CVS. (It has two fans, and one of them sucks air in, and one of them sucks air out! And oh so many knobs and buttons) And then we watched Josie and the Pussycats. And then we got pizza.

If there's any better way to spend a spring Sunday, I don't know it.