christmas: season of despair, just short of spiraling into cannibalism.

the holidays are fast-approaching your gentle author (me) and, because i am no stranger to whining, i'll be detailing the supposed highlights of this visit. to give you a fair first impression: do you recall the raft of the medusa .





involves:

. avoiding talking about my personal life in any aspect. i will bring home some mechanical pencils that say my company's name, and distribute them in place of "kaylen's life" details. which always spiral into the sad task of familiarizing my mother with my ever-continuing dislike of the notion of marriage. also, as a side battle––children. reminding her i have adopted a strict "you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here" philosophy for my ladywomb.

. pretending to like "fun" gifts from my mother: ie fuzzy gloves in "kooky" colors, theme socks (current catalogue to date includes '"kiss me!" frogs', 'smiley-face daisys ' and a dozen others i have managed to leave behind or discard along the way), and the ever-popular christian reminders (jesus calendars which say, "always in my heart", etc.)

. smiling around my extended family who have adopted the notion that for several reasons, i don't "deserve christmas". last year i didn't deserve christmas presents from anyone. this year they strongly believe i don't deserve to be home for christmas. why? because i don't go home often enough.

. wearing longsleeve shirts, constantly, to hide my punctuation tattoos.

. as protective as i have become of making holiday dinners, my family seems even more enthusiastic about slaughtering my attempts toward a delicious meal. either they beat me to the punch, pad my traditional meal with nonsense additions like stromboli and teriyaki chicken, or they find some way to do away with it entirely. this year, my mother's highschool friend "denny" is being paid to "cater" the "meal". i find i can't even say "denny" without scare quotes. you think "caterer" implies "nice". well, it doesn't. who the fuck caters christmas dinner, first of all. what kind of caterer isn't busy on christmas (yes, i know this is a little conflicted). and what kind of talent could he possibly possess, having lived his entire life in the rusting, cultural wasteland that is western pennsylvania.

there are other things to whine about. my father fighting constantly with my brother, my mother getting upset and crying because she doesn't "touch me" enough, crying because even when i'm there i can't help cringing when she hugs me (i'm sorry, it's an asperger's thing), my parents fighting with each other in the way that involves my mother crying and my father leaving the room to obsessively load the dishwasher - or re-load the dishwasher, as i never do it right. ("the spoons will nest!")...and being surrounded by my mother's gaudy taste in christmas decorations. she has a thing for fibre optics...

anyways. happy holidays, dudes.

annual winter show & sale review

finally posted some time after the fact...

this year's ACAD show&sale will be coming to you sans images. i know, it's sad, but with my brother in town i wasn't mindful of the usual routine. i'll bring a camera to the spring show&sale, i promise. for now, enjoy luxurious, verbal descriptions.

this year's favourites include:

1. painting of flying elephants.
2. what appeared to be a close-up of a hermaphrodite butt.
3. a curious amount of seahorse-themed work.
4. portrait of an old naked guy with really droopy man-bosoms.

then there were all the usual jmi hendrix fan arts and all the awful paintings that were too horrible to sell last year. ah, hope springs eternal.

noteworthy:
i broke two paintings. not on purpose, i turned around, bumped into one and due to the shoddy way they're all resting precariously on pegs or leaning against other crappy art, it set off a chain reaction. two men lay dead on the field, frames scattered. there's no way to be sure they're destroyed as i bolted when the volunteer came over and said, "i think i can get these frames back on".

just another sad glove song. (plus freaky-but-nice update which isn't so sad.)

another old unpublished-til-now post.

so my pretty white gloves are no longer a happy pair. due to my sleep sensitivities and actually having dreams where i replace my alarm clock... i have downloaded a mac alarm applicaiton that launches and plays a list from my i-tunes. i picked out some nice songs that wake me up slowly (yo la tengo's "black flowers" and beirut's "elephant gun" are favorites. it also helps that music is nothing i have to hurry out of bed to turn off.

this has worked splendidly for about a week until i-tunes randomly asked me to upgrade. i woke up 40mins late yesterday morning. an in running for the bus one of my gloves must have dropped. it is nowhere. god knows how cute or how white it is either.

not that any of that really matters, i am just peeved at how many things i'm losing this week.

lost:
. my new id/access card (twice)
. keys (would have been lost but rhianna found them in one of her shoes)
. yoga top
. button
. coby (our $30 DVD player - actually he died but. that is still lost)

acquired
. fixed and cleaned coffee grinder thanks to lou - who actually opened & repaired it on his office desk...
. a basic comprehension of Norwegian


UPDATE
found my glove. it was laying across the seat of the bus stop bench two days later. the strange thing is, it wasn't there the day before and for all my wondering, i can't fathom how it got there. the most likely conclusion at this point? fairies. i posted this anyway, because... c'mon "another sad glove song"... that's an awesome title.

lame animals = pollution.

in an office presentation on living greener, great care was taken to impress on us the dangers to the environment that are... (drumroll)... plastic shopping bags.

most of you understand that i'm a firm believer landfills will save us all. when landfills get gigantic they squish them down, cover them with turf and build condos on top of them. these rising landscapes are a pretty awesome defense against those rising sea levels, people.

of course if you present any rational argument that plastic bags are just fine, people will a)think you're in league with satan and b)refer you to lame internet links.

some misleading "facts" as presented by an organic grocery store's website:

"Plastic bags create pollution and kill wildlife in the USA every day of the year." (this seems to be written by a five year old for a school report. how much more vague can you be than "create polution" and "kill wildlife every day of the year"? what wildlife and how many, morons.)

"Over 100,000 birds, whales, seals and turtles worldwide are killed by plastic rubbish every year." (note how it says "plastic rubbish" not "plastic bags". ooooh, tricky.)

when i said i wanted actual facts i was also directed to a 'map' showing the are of the ocean fallen to plastic pollution, which was actually a picture of a map with a big drawn circle saying "PLASTIC RUBBISH!" which is not "science" or "fact", and clearly took someone all of 2 minutes in MS Paint.

websites show only only a stuffed pelican that was allegedly choked by a plastc bag:


and two animals that had cuts because they had been tangled in plastic bags. note: they were still very much alive. some even seem to enjoy it.


aw, he likes it.

further, the perks of being an animal include: sharp nails, teeth, heightened sense of direction, and super-flexible spines in a lot of cases. if you can't find your way out of a plastic bag with that kind of natural equipment, that is obviously a sign you aren't living up to standards. survival of the fittest, dudes. i sure don't want those lame animals cluttering up my world. that's pollution of its own sort.