Monday, which is really my Tuesday – ah retail, where the days of the week, much less holidays or all the other stuff the middle class enjoys, mean little. However! This is where I work, or, well, part of it, the back room, stock room, break room part. I bitch but, you know, I work surrounded by books. There are worse fates.
It’s my super power.
I was so tired when I got home from work yesterday – you would think by now that I would have learned I cannot go out on work nights but I still will do it and then bitch about paying the price – that I couldn’t come up with much of a picture. After a dinner of pure D comfort food I just went to bed with the camera and the cat and so here I am, crampy, cranky and cozy.
I am like the worst vegetarian in the history of vegetarianism; really, I have turned into one of those mythical vegans I used to make fun of, the ones who live on tater tots and PBR. Except in my case it seemed perfectly reasonable to have mashed potatoes and a croque monsieur (made with fake veggie ham, ok?) for dinner. Healthy! Balanced! Only about 7000 calories! But very, very comforting all the same.
The cramp thing is a problem. It’s one of those adolescent problems like zits that I thought would go away and somehow, didn’t. Zits are one of the worst things in that category, along with self consciousness and self loathing: adolescence! It never, actually, ends and there you are, or there I am, swearing at the mirror and applying unfamiliar makeup type things. I’m not good at the makeup thing and I hardly ever wear any but because I am female, I have a whole ton of random bits of it that I am desperately hoping won’t kill me despite their expiration dates of only a decade earlier. The only newish bit of makeup I own is some green eyeshadow I got to camouflage myself for Halloween, which somehow I suspect won’t hide a chin zit well. It doesn’t matter anyway, because you cannot hide a zit and to add total unfairness to injury, having zits does not in fact make you look younger. You just look like an old person with zits. It’s your choice as to whether you look like an old person with makeup on a zit or an old person with just a zit. The zit doesn’t care.
And then there are cramps, which just get worse, another thing I didn’t expect and so every so often I have to give up and go to bed. That would be terrible but fortunately, I have a cat and she approves of me going to bed whenever I want to do it. She won’t let me move much – Okra feels strongly that her human cushions should stay in one place for maximum cat convenience – but on evenings like last nights, that’s okay.
Started out this morning with unexpected snow and ended up the day at a not entirely unexpected party, so all in all a damn good Saturday.
Yup, this is in fact a terrible picture of clouds. It might not have been so bad if I had gotten out of the goddamn car, thus eliminating the dirty windshield smut everywhere. Windshield smut is more defensible when I’m indulging my favorite truly terrible habit of shooting photos while driving the car, but I was sitting in the parking lot outside work, so, uh, no defense. Actually, it’s occurring to me that really, this blog is turning into the catch all for bad photos – the good ones are up somewhere else and get linked; the ones that are kinda, um, just go here. So enjoy the sucky photos! Argh!
Yeah, sorry about that. This blog is way more of a work in progress than it ought to be three weeks in, I know. But these things happen and anyway, once it’s really up and running I’m going to be shamelessly begging for money, so really the rough draft is probably better on some levels.
Oh and this mornings thing was a note from my dream which I think might make a kickass YA horror novel. It’s still creeping me out.
I dreamed I was telling a group of children a scary story.
“Remember, you must be careful of the unchildren,” I said, “They whistle.”
The unchildren. They whistle.
My aunt the Queen of Bohemia had a small scare today – her vision got blurry and her feet wobbly, so off she went to the ER, where I duly joined her as soon as I could leave work. Turned out to be nothing at all, just a small blip in the matrix I guess. Those blips happen when you’re 85 – hell, they happen at my own, not quite as advanced, age, so I get it. I only ended up being there an hour or so, which is pretty much three lifetimes in non ER hours, but still, it was really as nothing. Much worse for her and my brother, who were there for far longer.
As I was sitting there amid the beeps and bings and purposeful people rushing around I was thinking though, about my own eventual old age. I’m hoping not to have much of one; after watching my mother and now my aunt, not to mention various other friends and relations, go into, through and out the other end of seniorhood, I’m not particularly interested in that carnival ride. No, instead I think age 80 sounds like the ideal time to discover just what all the fuss has been about heroin. I used to think I would live in a dumpster behind the Waffle House with a shopping cart full of cats while I indulged my newly found drug heaven, but you know, some dreams may just not be achievable. One hopes.
However, as I was musing upon how miserable the whole indignities of old age thing looked from this side (look, old ladies, depends, all the jokes, all the cystitis in the world and yet again being female fucks you over physically towards the end, YARGH, keep those kegels coming although it probably is not enough) and then I thought, girl, when you were, say, 20, if you had looked at yourself now, what would you have thought about your lifestyle? OH GOD NO is pretty much the answer to that one and I’m not even as much older than my 20 year old self as Annie is to me.
So perhaps it is fine to be aged after all, because I don’t really hate my lifestyle so much as I think it could use some major improvements, namely, a ticket back to the middle class. Or, failing that, at least an answer to the eternal question, what the FUCK is that smell in the kitchen and how do I make it go away forever? I will hope that all this will have some answer someday.
Anyway the photo, of the oh so exciting ER entrance at Mission Hospital, has been fixed to make it, like old age itself, almost bearable and somewhat less boring.
Wait wait wait wait. If you already know that the group of 11 hominids died at the same time in the Rift Valley 4 million years ago, then clearly Evil Helen going back in time to kill them is not in fact going to wipe out humanity because otherwise you wouldn’t exist, you git, and there wouldn’t be a wikipedia entry.
is another Instagram shot taken during our brief but beautiful blizzard this morning. It was my day off today and the theme seems to have been Things That Didn’t Turn Out as Intended But Were OK Anyway. I – finally! – finished a calendar and ordered it from Adorama, who, by the way, are the best photo and camera people ever in the world. And huge thanks to my friend Jay who gave me a gift certificate there for my birthday which I had been hoarding towards this moment. The calendar had way more starts and stops this year than ever before and a lot of stuff that I was planning didn’t happen, due to the fragmented nature of the internet. It was all a lot simpler before I divorced Flickr, I must say. However! It is done!
I was going to make photobooks too, but I can’t possibly afford them. So I ordered prints instead, 265 photos encapsulating 2012 and 2013 that will come in the mail and have to be put into two old school photo albums in chronological order. That’s going to be fun. Not. So it isn’t what I planned on doing, however, it is done!
I made minestrone, which turned into, um. I don’t know exactly what you’d call it, either the thickest soup ever made or the thinnest pasta, but either way, while it isn’t minestrone, it’s delicious. And I am working on my giant knitting project, which I suspect is turning into one giant knot and not an infinity scarf at all. It is possible I’m not good enough at this knitting stuff to tackle anything more difficult than a straightforward scarf or a hat. I mean, they seem to expect you to remember whether you knit or purled last. Ha ha! They must be joking! I can’t possibly remember that. So as is my usual approach, I just keep on going. Sometimes I knit, sometimes I purl, sometimes I drop a couple of stitches. Never unravel, is my knitting mantra. Holes make it art. It doesn’t look too promising but maybe a knot is what I really want! Who knows?
It occurred to me as I was puttering around too that while my house is a horrific and disgusting mess – I didn’t call the stove repairman because I was too ashamed of the dirty oven, not to mention the giant piles of archaic defunct stereo equipment that are all over the living room (don’t ask; it’s apparently some plot of my brother and son to drive me finally insane) to ask anyone into the house. Then I spent the oven repair money on photo prints and thought, well, ok, things are not what I hoped they would be but at least the food is good and the animals? The animals are happy. Even in the snow.
It occurs to me that I take this picture over and over again – bare tree, cloudy sky. It’s always a different tree and different clouds but it’s basically the same picture. Which is kind of cool, because I suppose it’s a clue as to what I find most visually interesting in the world. I never get tired of bare trees and winter skies – I don’t think I could live somewhere it was sunny and warm all the time. Although let me say that if somebody is willing to foot the bills for me to live near the beach in, say, Bali, I’m perfectly willing to make the experiment. No, really.
6000onions 