elephantine

A-plus

Five rabbit holes of internetland worthy of exploring:

1. Creepy Live Action Spanish Version of the Simpsons. If I saw this in person, i.e. if I was on the set, I think it would make me so nervous that I would start chewing my hands off.

2. Lilly McElroy. "I Throw Myself at Men" is wonderfully literal and novel and funny. Also, it's (at least in my own experience) mighty tricky to photograph split seconds like this.

3. Found Cameras and Orphan Pictures. Intriguing because it's essentially an involuntary version of Flickr. Oh, and then there's that whole voyeurism thing.

4. Shawn Feeney: BFF. Photos of two friends + one sheet of paper = fused portrait. Some of the combos are admittedly kind of bizarre. The final portrait will be a 128 person composite. I suppose that's as close as you can get to drawing a standard face?

5. Yeondoo Jung: Wonderland. Photographs created from childrens' drawings. Dreamy and utopic, some so sweet I want to cry.

postage.

Oh, I need them, I really do: Begonia Necklace and Cameron Diaz ASOS dress.

This morning I am in desperate need of stamps. I find a smidgen of good fortune and catch the slightly earlier bus, then stop off at Rite Aid before going to work.

"Do you sell stamps?" I ask the clerk.

"No," he frowns, "but Money Tree does, right across the street."

I say thank you in the way that implies I'm about to head over there right then, but it really isn't the answer I wanted to hear. The Money Tree is literally neighboring my work building, and with the kind of luck I usually have, if I go in there I'll come out right at the exact moment that one of my co-workers will be walking past. And then there will be an exchange of expressions that will basically equate to this conversation:

"Hi," my half-smile will say. "I... was just... getting some stamps."

"Sure." They won't believe me, and for good reason, because there's an automatic postage machine in our supply room.

"No, really," I'll insist. "I don't need a cash advance. I'm not that much of a shopoholic. I can manage my money alright."

"Look, there's no reason to be ashamed. It's not a big deal."

"But, but I..."

So I don't go in. I end up using the machine at work and now, twelve hours later, I still need those stupid stamps for all the things I need to mail when I'm not at work. Money Tree, why do you have to be so kitschy? Why did you produce those old, asinine commercials with the actor dressed up in a giant caterpillar suit? Oh, shudder.

because I'm feeling snarky tonight

I saw this dog food package in Petco about an hour ago and fell in love (sweet camera phone photo, right? I feel like I could draw it better than that). I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure that if a sweet, domesticated Golden Retriever crossed paths with a five-hundred pound beast that eats other small animals as if they were hamburger patties, he would NOT BREAK INTO A LOVE-SICK GRIN and act as if he and the bear were posing for a HIGH SCHOOL DANCE PHOTO.

Thanks, you guys, for the thumbs up about my bus anecdotes. There was just one person who stood out to me today, a young man who full-fledgedly wanted to be Bob Marley. He had dreads, was wearing a sizable Reggae-colored sweatshirt, and carried a journal with Marley's name and face on the cover. He kept trying to write in the notebook with a mechanical pencil (and I could see that quite a bit had been crossed out already), but he was standing instead of sitting and the swaying of the bus made it pretty difficult for him. On top of that, honestly, he seemed to be a bit of a klutz, his arm flailing out at various points as he tried to regain composure. He also had headphones on, but they were plugged into a CD player that was patched up with duct tape in a few places. I really hope that he was listening to One Love, because that would have been picture perfect.

field notes on other people

I discovered the blog childhood flames yesterday via Wikstenmade: love her self-archiving of outfits. (Another good fashionista to follow is Piksi.) Don't be surprised if you start seeing a set of these types of shots on my flickr soon, even though I have far less of a photo-worthy wardrobe.

This morning I wake up "early," i.e. NOT EARLY because little do I know, the cat had stampeded across the alarm clock while I slept and set it back an hour. After writing off my fake early awakening to it being extra bright outside, I go back to sleep, then wake up at the seemingly correct (still incorrect) time. I figure it out before I'm a full hour late, grabbing all my stuff and scurrying out the door, it suddenly dawning on me why the cat had been mewing so furiously at 5 am. (He usually starts caviling around 6.)

Since I'm on a slightly later bus it means riding with a slightly different crowd of metro passengers: they are louder, quirkier. I'm a bit disheveled, though, too: damp hair, cat fur all over my shirt, jeans crumpled and stiff at the bottom because of being grabbed directly from the dryer where they had been hibernating for two days. I'm in the middle of a three-seater, in the seats way at the back of the metro that face perpendicular to the rest of the rows. Sitting directly across from me, in the opposite three-seater:

1. Girl with dirty blonde bangs, huge headphones, huge Chloë Sevigny-esque glasses, makeup that makes her look older than she probably is. She's wearing a black eyelet dress and kelly green knee-high tights under dark boots, but also shrinking inside a baggy overcoat and a scarf wrapped around her neck multiple times, tucked under her chin. She gazes to her right the entire time.

2. Taller, slightly leaner girl, also blonde, better makeup, and the largest eyes I've ever seen. She's wearing black capris and her legs are much, much more tan than the rest of her. She has five rings, a bird tattoo, and in-ear headphones strung to a Zune.

3. Man who is slightly shorter than the two girls to his left, dressed in a gray fleece pullover and jeans and sneakers. There are what appears to be full droplets of water in his hair, and it amazes me that they haven't burst yet. Either that or he has some super globby hair gel. He's also wearing a Mickey Mouse visor and clutching a Crown Royal backpack. Yes, seriously.

About four stops before mine, all three of them simultaneously get up and exit the bus, walking ducks-in-a-row in the same direction down the sidewalk. Today's lesson: set a second alarm that is out of the cat's reach. And try to read my book next time because I'm probably staring at other people more than I realize I am.

Oh, and to my co-worker: I feel bad that as the elevator door was closing and I saw you running to catch it, I accidentally pushed the close button instead of the open button. Seriously, my reflexes are backward. (When there's something gruesome on tv, and Stefan warns me, "Don't look," I always glance up at it, without fail. I must need some re-wiring.)

hello elloh

I came across elloh's quirky, awesome renditions of television & movie characters a few months back. For some reason it just popped into my head again and needed to be posted about asap.

Right now I have one of those impossible-to-scratch itches. I keep rubbing one hand with the other and it won't go away. It's like it's inside. As if it's the bone that itches.

And I finally remembered what I was trying to think of a week ago when I was asked what kind of music I liked most: I was supposed to say, "Post-rock... basically electronic, experimental, ambient," but instead I had only blurted out "Mogwai," and then drew a blank.

Some new additions to the desired music list: Talkdemonics, Ratatat, Clogs, Lamb, Amon Tobin.

swedening

I love Ikea too much for my own good. We did a quick trip this morning because I was getting my seasonal itch to decorate and they were having a Memorial Day tax-free weekend. Mostly I purchased candle holders, a few kitchen things, and some pillows for the sofas ($3 each, and they aren't that lumpy, and I didn't mind having to buy the casing separately). The one semi-big purchase was a new coffee table. We've been using a hand-me-down from Stefan's mom, which was trusty but didn't quite fit in with the rest of the room. Bonus, and newly learned: paying with your debit card = getting a voucher back worth one percent of your total for the next shopping trip.

The day I have a full-blown Ikeaized closet will be the day I will be utterly content.

One more Swedish thing – saw King of Ping Pong last night via SIFF. I'd file it under the Good But I Probably Won't Watch It A Second Time category. The language really is lovely to listen to, though. And Wild Strawberries (yes, also Swedish) is sitting about five feet away from me right now, begging to be fed to the DVD player. I'm already a fan of Ingmar Bergman, but this is the clip of this particular film that solidified my desire to watch it.

you look so tasty

 

Faves from Copenhagen Street Style and The Sartorialist.

I was just watching a show on tv that was basically the pet version of Supernanny: a frazzled terrier named Toby had a major problem with pooing all over the house and was, in addition, scared of men. To solve the poo problem, the family was instructed to not eat in front of the dog, which would "make him less stressed out," which I don't fully understand the logic of. To resolve the fear-of-men issue, they took him on a walk and threw pieces of (raw?) chicken on the sidewalk whenever a man walked past. I get this one: see man, get chicken. Chicken = good, so man = good. But I couldn't resist imagining that the dog might take it more literally, and that after a while he'd start hallucinating that men were actually HUGE KHAKI-WEARING CHICKENS walking around and start drooling at the very sight of them.

that feeling of finishing the last page

Marimekko Spring 2008.

I can feel myself slipping into the summer mentality: drinking iced mochas in cafes beside strangers and oversized fans; wandering through unfamiliar neighborhoods, dodging the sun under shivering shadows; endlessly reading paperbacks and thumbing through spines at used bookstores; lighting candles and incense in the evening; drinking pinot grigio out of cheap wine glasses; shelving somber rock for warmer, slower variations; escaping to cool movie theaters in relief of the mid-afternoon scorch; meditatively potting flowers and herbs and replacing them with new ones when they die three weeks later from neglect.

I finished The Namesake about an hour ago (and can now put the film on our Netflix... I don't know why, but I kind of have a thing for Kal Penn, despite cringing at the history of roles he's had.) I still like Lahiri's other book more – the writing, the descriptions, felt more richly crafted – but this one has a more substantial plot and character development. It reminds me that I shouldn't feel the need to find something distant to write fiction about, that maybe the best thing is what's right in front of me, what I know best, with a bit of imagination injected, alterations made.

Am also relieved that she frequently writes about the food that the characters cook, eat, have conversations over. I'm well aware that I write about food repeatedly and was in need of validation.

In keeping with that, two quick things:

1. Stefan's gerbil (not mentioned until now, I think?) has developed a disliking for any kind of food except for plain, sliced almonds. I offered one to him today and he held it with both hands, gnawing on it appropriately, the piece as big as a pancake to him. He's in his senior citizen years now, with ruffled, gray tinged hair.

2. I cleaned out our snack cupboard this afternoon and to my dismay discovered an uncanny amount of empty, expired cracker boxes. There were six, maybe seven, empty boxes, just taking up much needed space, fake like those hallow televisions placed methodically in furniture stores.

unrelated bits of bits

Motion work by KORB.

Five things that make me want to be in France right now: Synecdoche, New York (dir. Charlie Kaufman), Blindness (dir. Fernando Meirelles), La Mujer Sin Cabeza (dir. Lucrecia Martel), Adoration (dir. Atom Egoyan), and L'Echange (dir. Clint Eastwood).

I still have the taste of pomegranate mojito and sesame-encrusted halibut with coconut rice lingering on my tongue from a newly discovered grill up the road. It was very loud and enjoyable and I had to repeat myself too many times. I tried duck for the first time, dissecting a spring roll and only eating about a centimeter's worth of the meat. It was dry and didn't taste like anything, but I still couldn't bring myself to swallow much more of something that once more or less looked like this (and if it looked like this I wouldn't want to eat it, either, for a whole other set of reasons. I can't believe how HILARIOUSLY DIRTY that poor duck is).

sweet, So You Think You Can Dance premieres tonight.

I found this Linda & Harriett handwritten invitation on seesaw designs yesterday and fell in love. I'm so doing handwritten letterpress.

I have one of those mornings when I almost miss the bus because I can't find any shoes to wear. "Can't find any shoes", as in, "there's ten pairs in my line of sight and yet I'm not happy with any of them." I start to dig through the back of my shoe-and-coat closet and unearth a pair of skin-tight gold ballet flats only to put them on and rediscover a rip in the front of them. "Maybe it's not that noticeable," I tell myself, but when I check in the full-length mirror I see that almost half a toe is poking out, screaming with its tiny pink head, "ZOMG, NEW SHOES PLZ." (Oh, what? You say that if feet talked, they wouldn't speak in LOLisms?) After that, I opt for another pair of flats, these ones brown and lined with mini polka dots, even though there's still some trouble when I can't find the second half of the pair (which, turns out, is hiding under the sofa beside depressed dust bunnies).

In the afternoon, I have an offsite meeting with a photographer for work. When I get there, I'm about thirty stories up in the building, first to arrive, just me and an incredible expansive view of Seattle through dust-speckled window panes. The office space has been entirely cleared out, save for bits of chalky scraps and name tags and four-digit numbers still glued on each glass door. It's the kind of emptiness that still feels weighted from the things that rested there not so long ago.

Fast forward an hour and a half and I'm back in my own building, sharing an elevator with a coffee-toting thirty-some woman. When I press 13, she says, "I'm always happy to see buildings that have a thirteenth floor." I turn slightly toward her, look at her neck tattoos without actually looking at them, and start to say, "Yeah, I'm always quite paranoid about working there," but then realize that this is a lie and revise my words into, (polite laugh), "Well I try not to think about it, really," although I've caught myself too late and it comes out as one big smushy sentence, cluttered nonsense. She gets off at the twelfth floor, but not before adding, "Thirteen is a lucky number in China," and I have to wonder if she would have still told me that if I was 100 percent, instead of the less obvious 50 percent, Chinese.

(And is that even true? It rang a bell when she said it, but now all Google tells me is that eight is the primary lucky number in China... which lends a better understanding to the first sentence of this.)