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>Today’s stuff:

I think I have a spray paint headache.
Am having a lot of fun with these tho.
Having so much fun, in fact, that I have no energy for blogging today.
I’m a busy girl…I’m unemployed!

Voulez-voulez-vous huffing…

>Due to popular request (or more to the point, harassment from my friends and relatives) I am getting off of my ass and am going to be selling my masks. So, here they be:

This one is now sold.

This one was very labor-intensive, being one big doodly line.

$105.00

$95.00

$85.00

$100.00

$95.00

And this one isn’t finished but I wanted to see what it looked like with white-on-white.

I can negotiate if someone wants me to color-customize it for them.

So, there you all are. Please feel free to let me know if you want to help a poor, starving artist who hasn’t had Pellegrino in ages.

Voulez-voulez-vous advertising

>Sleep is overrated.
At least my brain thinks so.

Thus, I blog. This is what I’ve got at 4 am:

I have two favorite fruits. Pomegranates, as I have discussed before, and Asian pears.

Thursday. Pike Place market. Post-job interview (and one that I really, really want…).

As I emerge into the hordes of mindless cattle (otherwise known as tourists), the sea of carbon-based life forms parts long enough for my eyes to fall upon what I can only define as one of those things that you assume must defy all laws of nature. I recoiled in both astounding awe and, I must confess, abject terror.

Permit me to explain.

“Asian pears have a high water content and a crisp, grainy texture, very different from the buttery European varieties. Also, Asian pears are not as intensely sweet, having a more refreshing, light taste. It is not a cross between apples and pears, as common names like apple pear may suggest, but its shape and crisp texture are reminiscent of apples.”

So if you were to use the above human hand as a scale reference, unless this dude was Andre the Giant you would surmise that an Asian pear was roughly the size of a baseball.

Apparently the folks at Pike Place market have other ideas in mind.

I mean…how?? I don’t…I mean, come on…what happened to this damn thing?
The pomegranate is not one of those minuscule, beginning of season waifs…it’s a good size pomegranate, a little bigger than a baseball. But the pear, holy freakin’ cow. Once I saw it, I knew it had to come home with me. A mutated ball of freakishness such as this was far too awesome to stay in a nondescript heap of less astounding fruit unworthy of its wonder.

This damn pear was so freakin’ huge it was difficult for me to grab it out of my backpack one-handed.

One of my housemates dubbed it “Pearzilla”.

Voulez-voulez-vous insomnia, pears, and flying fish.

So, my parents are interesting people.
I’m currently living in a house with two new parents, and as such I have observed that the parenting techniques with which I was raised are quite a bit different than the approaches that seem to be popular at the moment.
Not so much in the technique, per se, but more along the lines of communication and jargon.
It was really a situational thing. Observe:

*Note: Please keep in mind that the following -isms were said in jestful, humorous situations, not incidents of verbal child abuse. Otherwise instead of sharing them, I’d be at my therapist.

1. Leaving the door open:
“Were you born in a barn?”

2. Standing in front of the TV:
“Your father weren’t no glassmaker, move!”

3. Random acts of illogical behavior:
“You wouldn’t know your ass from a hole in the ground!

4. Inability to find objects in plain sight:
“You couldn’t find your ass with both hands!”

5. Backtalk:
“If I wanted shit outta you, I’d squeeze your head!”

6. Talking too much:
“What, you got diarrhea of the mouth?”

7. Asking for something I was too lazy to get up and get it myself:
“What, yer legs broke?”

This one was my grandpa’s:

Flicking the top part of my ear with his fingers:
“Does that ear-itate ya?”

Driving his knuckle into my friggin’ ear canal:
“Does that bore ya?”

And my mom thought I had “selective hearing disorder”. Ha.

Though, one of the funniest memories I have from my childhood has nothing to do with me, but my brother, who is 5 years my junior.

Where we grew up in Issaquah was somewhat of a rural area, so it was not unusual to have an area of suburban-style homes surrounded by farmland and pastures.

Our house was in such a location.

Right across the street was the property of my friend Tricia’s family, who owned some kind of gravel company. So on the right side of the street, you had houses. On the left, barbed wire forming a barrier between the grassy acreage and aforementioned houses.

I liked Tricia because she had a really cool house, big dogs, and horses.
Big, beautiful ones that would come up to the barbed wire so you could feed them grass and their fuzzy muzzles would tickle your hands.
I was 8. My brother was 3.
Three.
Three is like two on steroids. Only more mobile.
A little too mobile for my mother’s preference.

One afternoon I had come running into the house to grab some Kool-Aid or a Twinkie or some other overly-advertised cliche-ridden icon of my childhood, and my mother asks…

“Where is your brother?”

I dared not respond with any biblical references.

“Uh, I dunno..”

Furrowed brow.
“He went out there to find you!”

“I said I dunno! I didn’t see him!”

“Oh for chrissakes,” she muttered, and went storming out the screen door.

About 18 seconds later:
“KEVIN MICHAEL!”
(oh, shit…he got the two-name salute…kid’s in deep shit now…)
“Get your ass back over here RIGHT NOW!”

Like any good sibling, when you hear your brother/sister getting the riot act, you have to run to the scene immediately in order to be in sufficient gloating range.

To my combined delight and horror I saw what was causing my mother’s elevated blood pressure.

My brother, all three years and 2.7 feet of him, had miraculously wedged himself between two rows of barbed wire and was now grinning like a dope…

And standing right behind the McCann’s 23-year old, curmudgeonly, 1100-lb Quarter Horse mare by the name of Stella.

“Stellllllaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!”

I have to confess my gloating waned a bit.
We eventually got him back on the safe side of the fence (the busy street with no stop signs) and with the stereotypical “young man!” and “never, ever…” and “wait till your father gets home” tirades she shuffled him back through the aforementioned screen door.

(I would like to interject that this will be the same screen door that my right arm will plunge through two years later when my brother slams it on me while I had my hand outstretched. Only it plunged through the glass portion. Another time, perhaps.)

My mother thought long and hard to come up with a solution that did not involve locking my brother in his room.
She had a giant supercomputer named Deep-Thought built in order to…
Okay, maybe not. But she did have what she called “A moment of genius!”

+


=

Complete and total abject horror from neighbors and passers-by. And reassurances from my mother that it was not considered child abuse and was in my brother’s best interest. And Stella’s.

On occasion you would hear mournful, dissatisfied wails from a small, toe-headed boy who had inadvertently wrapped himself around a tree and was flailing helplessly against his new restraints. He did not consider this a good prize. After much diligence he figured out a system. Partly out of convenience, partly defeat. He often glared at the equines across SE 134th st.

Stella swept flies off her back with her tail.

 

Voulez-voulez-vous when I was your age…

>

Okay, so even though I’m inversely adopting this philosophy, I thought I’d still share it since I thought it was pretty damn funny.

Though boredom kind of sucks ass, too.

I think I need to go hop on the bus for a few hours and expose myself to the oddities of humanity to give me some material to write about.

Be back in a bit.

(three hours later…)

Well, the only noteworthy thing that was happenin’ on the Metro Transit System today was a guy that was sitting up front so he could chat up the bus driver (this can, at times, be a
not-so-pleasant experience for the Metro employees.) He was discussing the personal life of a friend of his who insisted on reproducing even though she had neither financial nor emotional means to effectively care for said children. Apparently the “babies’ daddy(s)” were nowhere to be found and “she ain’t got a fuckin’ clue wit what she doin’…”. Love it when people have no reservations whatsoever about dropping f-bombs in public. Or disclosing the personal lives of their acquaintances to anyone and everyone. I did not introduce myself.

So as far as material goes, the trip was unsuccessful. Save for the pomegranates. I popped into Madison Market to see if they had any amazing deals on food for starving artists like yours truly and to my utter delight and surprise that had moderately happy-looking ones for $1.29. So, there was that.

I am picking myself up and out of my funk. Things could be much worse. I may be unemployed, broke, and heartbroken, but I have amazing friends and a wonderful home to live in with “landlords” I love dearly and their 2-year old daughter intensely so. Save for a few recent snags, I am truly fortunate.

Voulez-voulez-vous glass half full.

>So, nothing fun to post about today.

Didn’t get the job I wanted. They “chose another candidate”. I really wanted this one. To say I’m disappointed hardly does it justice. I’m kinda crushed.

Unemployment will kick in in 3-4 weeks. Yay. 3-4 weeks? That’s, like, a month! Lord. I’ll hopefully have a job by then and won’t need the ruddy unemployment.

I’m trying to get some art pieces finished so I can throw them up on Craigslist to see if anyone wants to buy them. I’ve even been looking in my jewelry box, appraising, then realizing what a mistake that would be and quickly closing it and refraining from looking at my coin collection.

My friggin epilepsy meds aren’t pulling their weight and I’m not used to stress, so I’ve been having 1-3 seizures a day.

Why did so many things have to change at once.
I liked the way things were.
Wanting and getting are two different things I suppose.

So, there’s the Po’ Po’ Niff blog. Share and enjoy.

Voulez-voulez-vous waiting…

interviews
resumes
walking
phoning
emailing

…

An actual job isn’t this much work.

So, I’m spending the evening with the house to myself save for a cantankerous feline by the name of JuneBug who absolutely despises me and shows it by randomly hissing and swiping her paw at me. I’ve decided to give up on salvaging our relationship and have taken to hissing back at her for no other reason than for my own amusement.

So my evening has been reduced to spinach enchiladas, oolong tea, and watching “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” for the upteenth time on my computer while using said computer to switch alternately between writing this and completing my online crossword puzzle.

“What? No, we can’t stop here! This is bat country…”

Made the mistake of laying down with a crossword puzzle around 3 pm and dozed off. Woke up 5 hours later. I’m never getting to sleep tonight.

So, things I found noteworthy today:

– A woman boarded the bus with a large, red plastic bag that resembled the ones you receive when you’ve made a purchase at a sex shop. A gentleman made note of this, and asked her about it.

“No,” she replied. “I have human organs in here.”

The gentleman looked baffled. “You mean, like hearts and kidneys and stuff?”

“Yes, but don’t worry. They’re in ice chests. They won’t fall out.”

I examined the bag. There were no sharp corners or solid protrusions through the plastic that would have indicated such contents. In fact, the bag looked somewhat…mushy.

The gentleman maintained his baffled expression. “you work at, like, a doctor’s office?”

“No.” She looked irritated. “You don’t get organs at the doctor’s office. You get them at the DMV.”

He looked awestruck. “Ah!” he said. “The DMV…that’s where, you, like, get your driver’s license and stuff, right?”

She looked relieved that finally, he knew what she was talking about. “Yes! Because when you select ‘organ donor’ on your license, that’s where people take them. I’m delivering them to people.”

The gentleman commented on her brazen act of philanthropy and went back to singing “What a friend we have in Jesus”.

Jane Doe the Body Thief got off at 3rd and Union. Probably went to peddle her wares at Pike Place Market or something.

Voulez-voulez-vous As your attorney, I advise you to take a hit out of the little brown bottle in my shaving kit.

 

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100% recycled drivel turns two years old today!!!
(even if 2006 sucked in terms of blogsphere productivity…)
But it is the longest relationship I’ve had in a while…
(insert laughter here __________)

voulez-voulez-vous Happy birthday, blog!

>My favorite tea as of late has been yerba mate, a south American gig that not only has the same amount of caffeine as coffee (NOT a fan of coffee…) but has a bunch of other miscallany in it that’s good for you. Or so they say.

So, very stoked was I to learn that Tully’s served yerba mate in regular tea form as well as hot or iced lattes. As I am usually not that into lattes, I preferred the bottled form they sold in the coolers alongside the assortment of Odwalla juices.

However, with the recent piercing of my tongue I have been forced to switch to iced beverages at the direction of my piercer in order to reduce the week or so of swelling that can ensue after having a 12 gauge rod shoved through your tongue. So in lieu of my usual bottled tea I decided to get the latte, soy, iced.

There is a Tully’s across the street from where I work. This is where I would buy my bottled mate. This is where I decided to start trying out the iced yerba mate soy latte.

Yerba mate they can sort of understand.
Yerba mate latte takes a bit of explanation.
Yerba mate soy latte requires a teleconference with South
America as well as the WestSoy corporation.


Finally, finally, they get it.

Until.

I ask for my iced soy yerba mate latte blended.

You know, in a blender.

But the combination of “blended.iced.soy.yerba.mate.latte” just

ABSOLUTELY FREAKS THEM OUT. The entire explanation of my order even without the blended requirement zips out the window and I have to relay my instructions all over again.

The smug-looking barista I have been dealing with does not like me very well, I fear…

What blows my mind is I have ordered this ruddy thing from her at least 6 or 7 times by now and inevitably it requires the same explanation every.single.time.

After I had ordered it a couple times with the same ensuing sighs of exasperation and slamming of tea-making devices around in order to subtlety convey her irritation, they began to explain to me that they didn’t have a way of ringing it up.

???

Uh, it’s on their menu.

I pointed this embarassingly obvious fact out.

Uh, we charge for blending, they say.

???

Are you kidding me?

Huh.

I decided to get to the bottom of this. I called the Tully’s on 5th ave.

“Thank you for calling Tully’s, how can I help you?”

“Hi. Do you have a charge for blending your iced drinks?”

“a charge for blending iced drinks?”

“Yep.”

“Uh…no…?? Why would we?”

Exactly.

Voulez-voulez-vous to be continued…