Blogged By Jaye

We're getting married!

2011-06-08T13:49:00.000-05:00

Well, we're having a wedding, at least.

Screw waiting for legality, we want to have a party and wear pretty dresses like all the cool hetero couples, so we're planning for a wedding in July 2012. Well before the apocalypse, you know, so we can get our honeymoon in before the end of the world. :D

We wanted to get married on the date we already celebrate as our anniversary (July 24), which would be our 8th anniversary in 2012, but it falls on a Tuesday. A Tuesday wedding would be kind of weird, so we'll have to go with a plan B. We're thinking the 28th instead. I suppose it all depends on when we can reserve a space we like.

At this point it's still in the "hey, we could totally do it like this" phase, although I signed up at TheKnot just to have a better idea of all the things we should do and when to do them. But at this point we're thinking a casual, simple affair. We'll wear wedding dresses because we're excited about that part, but casual for everyone else. No bridesmaids, because that gets complicated and expensive. No flowers (except maybe our bouquets) because there are other materials with which to decorate, and flowers just die so it's a big waste of a lot of money. We plan to DIY a lot of stuff, and I'd like to have the ceremony and reception all in the same spot so everyone can watch the ceremony from their tables and then nobody has to go anywhere for the party. My philosophy has always been that a wedding should be a short, minimalist ceremony and then a long, fun party, not a long, boring ceremony and a stuffy, short party.

So now begins the wild and weird process of wedding planning. I went through the checklist on TheKnot thinking I'd be able to just delete half of it, what with the lack of need for florists and bridesmaids dresses and such, but the list is still quite long. We're hashing out the "how are we going to pay for this" part. And at this point the first big thing is probably to tell my parents. I don't expect them to be very excited about it, although I'm sure they'd be pretty upset if they didn't get an invite. I guess we'll just see how it goes.

Nothing like looking out your window and seeing...

2011-03-18T21:59:00.000-06:00

...flames shooting 20 feet in the air from a burning van.

Of all the potentially scary things I've encountered at work...

2011-03-16T22:30:00.000-06:00

...today was the scariest.

I've had people throw things at me. I've called 911 from work more times than I can count. I've had people get in my face and scream at me. I've had people case the place and make me think they were about to rob it. Hell, I've been through a tornado at work. But none of those things have left me truly shaken.

The first mistake I made today was to forget my cell phone at home. It spent the day on the bathroom counter instead of in my pocket. I very rarely forget my phone. I feel naked without it, and was annoyed at myself all day for forgetting to bring it along.

The second mistake I made was going outside for a smoke break. I was supposed to quit smoking at the first of the year. I'd been doing okay at cutting back, at least, and for a good while had stopped taking breaks at work. For some reason recently I've fallen back into old habits.

So anyway, after spending several hours working on organizing and stocking the cooler, I went outside to have a smoke and warm up a bit. We're not supposed to smoke where customers coming in and out of the store can see us, so we go around to the back of the building. I like going back there, since it gives me a chance to make sure none of our usual panhandlers are hanging around out of our sight, trying to convince people that they need money for gas for the cars they don't own.

What I usually don't see when I go out back for a smoke is a dog trotting around dragging its leash behind it.

Now, I'm not a big fan of dogs. I'm a cat person. I prefer animals whose methods of showing affection don't include a lot of wiggling and slobber. I don't hate dogs, they're just not my thing. I certainly am not one who would ever try to pet a dog I wasn't really familiar with.

Anyway, this was a large-ish dog. I would have said it was part Rottweiler, although I've been told it's a German Shepherd. Whatever, I'm not good with dog breeds. The point is that it was certainly not a small dog. I assumed it had run away from a nearby yard, since it was still wearing a chain. It was walking a little funny, like maybe one of its back legs was tender, but otherwise didn't seem aggressive in any way.

So I lit my cigarette and watched it go by. After a minute or so I went and looked around the corner to see if it had left the lot, since I didn't want to just ignore it and let it wander around all night bothering customers. It was still there, just wandering around the lot, and when it saw me there it came over. Again, not aggressively, just trotted over.

My first thought was that it hoped I had food or would pet it, and I certainly didn't want to touch it. I don't touch stray animals if I can help it, especially at work where I deal with food. Who knows what a stray animal has been rolling around in. So I just stood there, hoping it wasn't about to come over and jump up on me wanting food or affection. But when it got closer and I noticed again that it seemed to be walking funny on one of its legs, I said, "aw, are you hurt?"

It growled, charged, and snapped at me. I just stood there, frozen, knowing there was no way running from this dog was going to end well for me, and praying that if I stood still long enough it would back off. It didn't. It stopped growling after a bit, but it just stood there within biting distance, staring at me. I was behind the building, meaning I had no idea how long I might have to stand there before somebody happened along who could get this dog away from me. I couldn't call anyone -- my phone was sitting unhelpfully on the bathroom counter at home.

Luckily, the dog wasn't a stray. It belongs to one of our regular customers. I've heard that there have been complaints about his dog snapping at people, and he's been told not to bring his dog around, but I hadn't actually seen his dog before so I didn't recognize it as his. He had chained it up on the back fence, but the dog had broken the chain. As soon as he came around, the dog went right to him.

I lit into his owner. I've never yelled at a customer like that before. He admitted the dog was aggressive even at home and had already bitten somebody. I made it clear that if any of us saw that dog anywhere near the lot again the authorities would be called.

It took a half an hour for me to stop shaking.

What if it hadn't been me? What if it had been some kid who wanted to pet the stray doggie? People should have to get a license to own a pet. That dog has NOT been treated right.

4 Reasons Gym Class Failed Me As A Kid

2011-02-26T21:49:00.000-06:00

I was never a fan of gym class when I was in school. I wasn't obese at the time, but I was surely technically overweight, and despite the fact that I was a cheerleader from 8th grade through high school I just generally wasn't very athletic. Why didn't twelve years of gym class help me at all?

1. Most gym teachers treated me like I wasn't as important as those who were athletes.

I don't know how it is now, but in my day once you got into junior high the gym teachers were usually also team coaches. That meant that half their time was spent coaching athletes to compete with other athletes, putting them through workouts intended to improve specific skills. The rest of their day was spent with classes made up mostly of unenthusiastic, out-of-shape kids, forcing them into some kind of activity for an hour at a time.

From my perspective, those classes seemed to be something these coaches had little enthusiasm for, themselves. Those of us who weren't participating in team sports were treated like we were either lazy or incapable of actually being athletic. Those who were already athletic were praised heavily and got a lot more activity during gym class, which is actually pretty backwards when you think about it.

Granted, the rest of us had a pretty bad attitude about even being in gym class, but that might have been helped tremendously if the classes had been conducted differently. As it was, I remember spending a lot of time standing around while more athletic kids played games or being talked down to because I couldn't do a pullup or climb a rope or generally perform as well as the proven athletes. I got the clear message that the gym teachers really didn't like me much, being all weak and unable to run a mile in 12 minutes. They certainly liked the kids who were good at those things.

And yes, before anyone comments to correct me, I'm sure I was on the other end of that equation in academic classes. I got plenty of praise from math, science, art, and English teachers, but I don't recall those teachers treating the rest of the class like their brains must just not be capable of learning. If anything, the extra praise got me less work to do, not more. But gym class felt like ultimate judgment. "Climb that rope. No, three feet isn't good enough. You get an F. Sit over there with the other losers and watch these guys show you what a winner looks like."

2. Gym class didn't actually teach me how to be more physically fit.

With the exception of the one weightlifting class I took in high school, most of the time I spent in gym class was focused on either finding a way to make us sweat for an hour or teaching us the rules to various games and sports. All the things I've learned about exercise as an adult is pretty much new to me. We didn't learn about the benefits of strength training (even in weightlifting, really -- we only learned how to do it, not why) or how to properly do cardio. We'd briefly talk about obesity in health class sometimes and why we should want to be a healthy weight, but not in enough depth to really teach any of us what to do about it beyond "eat less and be more active." I remember talking about target heart rate a bit during a semester class I took in high school on aerobics (Not aerobic activity in general, aerobics tapes. We did aerobics tapes for gym class. Seriously.), but we never learned how to actually improve our fitness level. We did activity just to do activity. Until it came time to do the President's Physical Fitness Test each year (or semester? I don't remember now.) our fitness abilities weren't regularly tested or tracked for improvements. We showed up, did some kind of calisthenics or stretches to warm up, and then played some kind of game or did some group activity for the remainder of the class. And that was it. And while for most of us who are now trying to lose weight it's a good thing to just get in the habit of moving around more, that's not all there is to being physically fit. But they didn't really teach us anything beyond "it's good to move around enough so you sweat sometimes."

News flash: learning how to keep score during flag football doesn't improve one's fitness level.

3. They tested us, but didn't make us practice for the test.

Remember the President's Physical Fitness Test? I don't know if they still do this, but back in the 80s and 90s in my area, the school system used it as a test for all students at the end of every year. I remember it consisting of a mile run, a flexibility test, situps, pullups (eventually the girls only had to do a bent-arm hang), and some other things I don't remember. I remember that the test was actually intended to be a program where awards would be given to students across the nation who scored really well on all the exercises. But that's not how it was used in the classroom. If you didn't score well enough to qualify for the award on each exercise, you didn't get a passing grade for that exercise. The only reason I got good grades in gym was that there were usually some written tests or participation points or bonuses you could get for wearing school colors to class every day that made up for my lack of performance.

You know what would have helped my performance? If we'd have actually trained to be better at the things we were tested on at the end of the year. As you know, I'm now training to racewalk a marathon. To prepare, I'm doing a lot of walking. I'm not preparing by playing a lot of raquetball because playing a lot of raquetball isn't going to help me come race day. Unless the spectators will be throwing balls at us as we go by, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Anyway, in gym class we were tested on our ability to do situps and run, but trained for those tests by playing frisbee golf, standing on the sidelines of basketball games, and sometimes jogging a couple of times across the gym. If they wanted us to run a mile in 12 minutes, why didn't they make us do more running? If they wanted us to be able to reach past our toes, why didn't we spend time on flexibility? (And I was actually good at that one because of all the time I spent on flexibility for cheerleading. See how that works?) If they wanted us to do pullups and pushups, why didn't we do exercises to strengthen our arm and back muscles? Or if they were going to spend most of the time teaching us to play team sports, why weren't we tested on our ability to play team sports?

4. It sucked, and I hated being there.

I always got the sense that gym classes were really meant to get kids to have a more positive attitude towards physical activity, which is an admirable goal. But even beyond being treated like useless non-athletes and tested over things we hadn't trained for, nothing about gym class was really pleasant or fun for anyone who wasn't already athletic. It wasn't fun to play team sports when nobody wanted you on their team and you spent most of the time on the sidelines or in positions where you were least likely to screw things up. Exercise is fun for me now not because the act of doing it is somehow less painful than it used to be but because I know there's a purpose to it and I can see a payoff. But that's not how it felt in gym class. The only purpose I could see to going through the motions of gym class was to preserve my GPA. I didn't see improvements, I had to do the same activities I didn't enjoy week after week, year after year, with seemingly no purpose other than keeping us corralled and moving around for an hour at a time. It didn't make me enjoy physical activity. In fact, it made me dread it. I dreaded being made to feel fat and incapable.

It's really not that I don't like playing team sports. I do enjoy them in the right context. I used to work for a company that competed in corporate league sports. Okay, I use the term "competed" rather loosely, since we never won a tournament or even harbored the delusion that we might. But we had fun. I played volleyball and softball and bowled. I wasn't especially good at any of it, but I wasn't forced to the sidelines or made fun of. And because I spent time actually playing I did get better over time. I found the things I was good at, like serving a volleyball. I was allowed to play shortstop because I was better at it than being in the outfield. Office sports were fun and I looked forward to them despite my lack of natural skill or athletic ability. Hell, I actually played hard enough that I got injured a couple of times! It's never been the sports I didn't like, it was always the environment in which I had to play them.

It's just that gym class was seemingly engineered to be discouraging. We had to do things we weren't good at in an environment that didn't make us feel like we had any hope for improving. And I was somewhat middle-of-the-pack. God help the obese kids. It must have been forty times worse for them.

I can only hope gym classes are less horrible these days. My gut feeling tells me they're not. Of all the classes I could have benefited from in school, gym was probably the one I needed most. And yet it was the one that totally failed to deliver.

I do have to say I had a few understanding, non-judgmental, encouraging gym teachers. One even fudged my mile run time one year because she didn't want my gym grade to damage my GPA and I had just barely failed the mile by a few seconds. When I got to high school and was able to select what gym classes I signed up for, things were better. I didn't dread going quite as much. But I didn't really learn more. I didn't get in better shape. And those classes didn't teach me what I needed to know about being healthy and active. They did teach me that there were certain physical activities that I enjoyed more than others. Valuable lesson, but not enough to keep me from gaining a ton of weight later in life. And when I did go to the gym as an adult, I had no idea how to really get the most out of it. No gym or health class had ever really taught me how to create a workout regimen that actually did much of anything to improve my fitness level.

It's rather sad to think that we spend all sorts of time in school learning things that aren't directly useful in our adult lives, and yet when it comes to something vital like our physical health we get a small amount of basic information on diet and fitness and spend a lot of time being herded into classes that mostly teach us to play games we won't ever play again.

Once again, don't mind me...

2011-02-21T23:05:00.002-06:00

...just testing something. Trying to get links to new blog entries to show up automatically on my Facebook.

20 Things I Learned in France

2011-02-18T13:40:00.000-06:00

Back in 1997 I spent six weeks in France with one of my architecture classes. Here are a few things I learned:

1. If you want to get hit on by weird foreign guys, the easiest way to get attention is to sit down with a sketch pad and start drawing. You'll end up with more phone numbers than sketches.

2. Nothing tests your mastery of a foreign language like trying to talk your way out of an encounter with a creepy foreign guy intent on taking you out for coffee.

3. The French are great with food. The French are not great with Mexican food. French bartenders are also unclear on what goes into a margarita.

4. Duck pate is fabulous, but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

5. Being able to lounge in the sun on the beach in Calais in June might seem like a sure thing, but it's also possible to find that the expensive bathing suit you purchased in Paris two weeks prior was totally unnecessary given the windy 40 degree weather on the beach the one weekend you're there.

6. If you get the chance to run naked into the freezing cold waters of the English Channel in the dead of night, go for it. You'll regret passing up the chance and being the chicken who held the clothes.

7. 284 steps sounds like a lot of stairs to climb. It feels like more.

8. When a group of drunk French college students and a group of drunk American college students try to teach each other good drinking games, everyone ends up way too drunk and nobody really learns anything.

9. Late night American TV means lots of infomercials. Late night French TV means lots of soft core porn. Or maybe we just stayed in the wrong kinds of hotels.

10. No matter how much you study a language, there's a good chance you'll not be familiar with the words necessary to ask for something you really need.

11. That will also be the one time you forget to bring your French-English dictionary with you.

12. Padlocking the zippers of your backpack together might look silly, but he who laughs at you will be the first to have his passport stolen.

13. Signs warning you to keep off the grass also mean don't play hacky sack in close proximity to the grass.

14. If you pack art supplies in your luggage for a long flight, make sure they're extremely secure. The last thing you want to spend your first day in Paris doing is trying to scrub conte crayon out of your clothes.

15. Looking for extra excitement while traveling abroad? Bring along a 3-year-old.

16. Walking a lot only leads to losing weight if you don't simultaneously gorge yourself on pastries and wine.

17. Watch out for air bubbles lurking in the melted butter underneath your escargot. They will explode in your face at the slightest provocation. Strangers will laugh at you.

18. She who turns her nose up at being served a big slice of Bambi is likely to find that the dinner she gets instead is a big slice of Thumper. Both are delicious.

19. It doesn't matter how nice the boat is, it will never make up for finding out that the hovercraft you bought tickets for is out of service for the day.

20. Cats can, indeed, be leash trained, and it's adorable.

10 Reasons I've Chosen to Participate in a Marathon

2011-02-09T19:12:00.003-06:00

This time, there's no turning back (unless I want to waste the registration fee and feel really crappy about giving up). I'm officially registered to participate in the 2011 Chicago Marathon. Yes, I currently weigh over 200 pounds. No, I've never done a marathon before, or even a half marathon, and it's been a long time since I participated in a 5k or 10k race (I've done the distance recently, just not in a race context).

Yes, I do still think I will be able to complete the marathon in less than 6 hours come October.

Am I crazy? Maybe. And I have to admit that as I entered my training schedule into my BlackBerry's calendar the other night I had a moment where I felt a little crazy for even considering it. There's certainly an element of insanity to my goal. Hell, there's something a little insane about marathoning in general.

So why am I doing it?

1. For my health.

Believe it or not, this is perhaps the least compelling reason for me to take on this challenge. Yeah, it's partly about weight loss, but if all I wanted to do was get fit and lose weight there are a lot less demanding ways to do that. Still, there's no way putting in what will amount to hundreds of miles over the next 8 months (and that's not counting all the strength training, occasional yoga classes, and time on the elliptical machine) won't result in me losing weight and getting in better shape. It's what started me down this path, and had I never gotten to the point of committing to losing weight in the first place I wouldn't be ready to commit to this. Plus, having this very huge goal lurking in the future means I have a compelling reason not to skip workouts. Mostly this whole thing -- the weight loss goal, the fitness plan, the desire to complete this marathon -- is about me spending some time on myself, working through some very personal emotional issues. But the health aspect of it is a huge side benefit.

2. Because distance walking is both challenging and enjoyable.

Over the past few years I've discovered that I really, really love walking long distances. It started when I decided to try and save gas money by walking between my business and my night job. The trip was about a mile and a half each way, which at the time took me a full half hour each way to complete. But those half hour walks were something I looked forward to. It was just me, the music in my headphones, and the thoughts in my head. Those walks were therapeutic in ways I have a hard time describing in words. There's nothing quite like pounding the pavement to the rhythm of a really gut-wrenchingly meaningful song, especially when the beat is fast enough to really push my heart rate up. Walking has become like meditation to me. Active, sweaty meditation. It's the best way I've found to work through stress, deal with emotions, think through problems, and let my thoughts just wander without interruption. It is the
best excuse to spend a lot of time alone. It's physical and mental all at once, and even if I start a long walk mentally stressed and physically tired I always end up clearheaded and energized (even if I am drenched in sweat and end up falling asleep on my keyboard a few hours later).

3. Because it's totally personal.

I'm a person who likes to set goals. It's one of my favorite hobbies, and I'm good at it. I like doing research and planning out all the steps required to get to the end. In the past, however, all the goals I've set and the plans I've made involved other people in some way. Either I needed the assistance and support of others to reach my goal, I did it to please others, or my success depended on the judgment and approval of somebody else. This marathon, though, is just about me. Although I may have a partner to walk with at times or a trainer to guide me, nobody can force me to do the work or take up the slack if I don't carry through. I'm not doing this for the attention or praise of anyone else. Nobody told me I should do this. In fact, I'm guessing there aren't too many people out there who don't think I'm a little nuts for even trying. And the difference between success and failure is not subjective: either I finish while there's a finish line to cross or I don't, and my performance will be judged only by a clock. This is all about doing something I want to do because I think it will be a beneficial experience. It's time I did something for myself, just because it will make me feel good.

4. To prove that I am able to carry through.

Like I said, I'm a person who sets big goals and makes big plans. What I'm really not good at is seeing these plans through to the end. Sometimes I've settled for less than the end goal I wanted because I'd failed to do what I knew I needed to do to succeed. Sometimes I've abruptly abandoned one goal and set out in a very different direction to cover up the fact that I knew I couldn't make up for all the progress I hadn't made. There hasn't been even one time that the reason I fell short of my goals didn't boil down to me simply not carrying through. I procrastinate. I take huge risks involving unorthodox methods and shunning the involvement of others to avoid smaller risks that might mean me being criticized or held to standards I'm not sure I can meet. I make elaborate plans and ditch them the moment I realize I've fallen behind schedule or failed to make progress fast enough for my liking.

Marathon training, though, can't be like that. Either I commit and put in the time, or I find myself not prepared. I can't skip a lot of training and expect to be able to make up for lost time. I can't just wing it and expect to complete the race within the given time limit. Nobody gets a medal or certificate for almost finishing. And I'll be honest, as I'm writing this there's a very loud voice in the back of my head questioning whether I'll actually make it this time. But if I do this I will be proving to myself that I can carry through all the way to the end without somebody else pushing me along.

5. To prove I'm as capable as I like to think I am.

I grew up being told I was talented and capable of doing just about anything I put my mind to. It's a great thing to be told when you're a kid, and it's the reason I learned to dream big without doubting myself.

It's also the reason, though, I've learned to doubt myself as an adult.

I bought into all that positive reinforcement as a kid, but now that time has passed and I've consistently failed to live up to my own dreams and, often, the expectations of others, my confidence isn't what it used to be. I know I theoretically am capable of achieving big things, but my track record certainly doesn't show it. And in this instance I know that I'm theoretically capable of going from a more-fit-than-average 215 pounds to fit and prepared to racewalk a marathon over a period of 8 months. A lot of people probably scoff at that idea, but it's theoretically doable if I put in the work. But I'm tired of living in the world of dreams and theories. It's time I stepped up and proved the theory. It's time to put up or shut up.

6. Because it's reasonably huge.

I've been asked a few times why I'm going for a full marathon instead of starting with a 5k, 10k, or half marathon. The answer is simple, really. It's the longest distance event I think I can be ready for within a year.

When I was in college I participated in a charity 10k with a few sorority sisters with, as I recall, no real training. I don't remember how fast I completed it, but I completed it. I was exhausted at the end and I was sore for a while, but I did it without much trouble. After spending the last year and a half putting feet to pavement I see 10k as, well, not enough of a challenge. That's a moderately easy walk to me now. And I've walked up to about 10 miles at a time before, so a half marathon doesn't seem like a very big challenge, either. But a marathon? It's a big challenge. There is, honestly, a huge question mark lurking at the end of this process. It's a matter of going big or going home.

7. To practice following the wisdom and advice of others.

As I said, I'm big on setting goals and making plans, and not real proficient at following through. Part of the reason I often fall short of my goals is that I am far more likely to try and avoid the watchful eye and judgment of others by trying to come up with unorthodox methods of my own than to follow the lead of those who have gone before. And to be honest, the first few times I've embarked on a marathon training plan I've not totally followed the tried and true methods of training. I fell into my old bad habit of telling myself that I can ignore the experts just so that I don't have to live up to the expectations of others or put myself in a position where my progress or lack thereof could be judged or criticized.

I know I can't do that. I knew it then, I think, but I'm owning up to it now. I can't cut corners and pretend that I have better methods than those that have been developed by those who have successfully run marathons for all these years. I'm not just committing to completing a marathon, I'm committing to doing it the right way. So I will take the advice of those who know better. I will follow a reasonable plan, not trying to push for too much progress too fast and not cutting out parts that I don't like. I will work with the proper gear and take the suggested precautions so I don't risk injuring myself or burning out. I have no excuse for not doing this the right way. This is a good opportunity to practice humility and discipline, for my own good.

8. Because there doesn't have to be anything beyond the finish line.

This is an unusual type of goal for me not just because it's completely personal, but also because it doesn't necessarily carry with it a complete change in the direction of my life. This is the first goal I've set that doesn't involve making decisions and commitments that completely change the trajectory of my future. I can do this once, pat myself on the back, and decide that's enough. Sure, I could finish and decide I want to do it again, but whether or not that happens is irrelevant at this point. Each marathon I do could be the last one I decide to do, and once I decide I've done my last race I can simply stop. I've committed to getting to the finish line on October 9th, to putting in the time and effort to properly train to do so, and that's the extent of it. I don't have to give up on other commitments to make this one. I don't have to change my career goals or rethink my other involvements. This isn't a prerequisite for any other event important to my future. This could be the start of a new hobby, or it could be a cool thing I do one time, and either outcome is just fine.

9. Because once I earn it, it's mine.

Once I cross that finish line, nothing can change or diminish the fact that I did it. It doesn't matter how many other races I do or don't do after that. It doesn't matter how many other people do the same thing and do it faster. You have to earn it and there's no way around that. And once you've earned it you can always look positively on the fact that you did it.

10. Because failure isn't a catastrophic option.

I'm certainly not going in this believing that I will fail. I believe I can do this. But if I don't, the world doesn't end. I would be disappointed in myself and I would likely beat myself up over it for a while, but that's it. Failure doesn't carry big consequences. It wouldn't mean I couldn't try again. It just is what it is.

In the end, I know it's time to make a big change in my life, and I think this is exactly the challenge and experience I need to teach myself (or reteach myself) a lot of very important lessons. I've spent a lot of time trying to change my life situation in an attempt to feel better about myself, only to finally realize that it should work the other way around. I have to work on myself if I want my life to be any better. Over and over again I've put time and energy into trying to create an ideal career situation, to win the praise of others, etc, only to sabotage my own efforts because ultimately I was trying to avoid facing my own issues and shortcomings. I was trying to substitute the esteem and attention of others for my own self esteem. So I guess in large part I'm doing this for my own emotional health. I've learned over the past few years, finally, that what I've always really wanted -- the root of all the things I've tried and failed to accomplish -- was simply to feel good about myself and my capabilities. Every time I've failed I've looked to some even bigger goal thinking that reaching it would make up for all the goals I didn't reach. This won't make up for those regrets, but it will be the first step in relearning how to be the person I used to be (or at least used to believe I was).

Plus, you know, I'll be damn sexy at the end of all this. And that's pretty damn cool, too.

Becoming a gym junkie

2011-01-15T11:00:00.000-06:00

After almost a year off the weight loss wagon, I got the kick in the ass I needed to help me hop back on. A friend recently joined a local private gym and gave them my name to try and get a referral bonus. So shortly before New Year's I got a call offering a free month trial membership. My first instinct was to say no, but some little voice in my head prompted me to make the appointment knowing that I could simply not go if I changed my mind later. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that this might really be a good idea. I could take the one free month and see just how often I ended up working out. It's not like I've been successful at dragging my ass out in the freezing cold of winter or extreme summer heat and humidity to walk. I decided if I ended up actually using the gym on a regular basis then I'd look into a membership somewhere cheaper, since I just had the feeling there was no way I could afford a membership at a private gym.

So we went. And we sat through the hard sell. And it turned out the deal they offered us was cheaper than a membership at the YMCA because they put us on a joint membership, something all the other gyms would only do for married couples. Plus, they pointed out that a gym membership costs less than the amount we spend on cigarettes and junk food.

And they're totally right about that.

For somebody who has almost 100 pounds still to lose and a marathon still in her future plans, spending money on lattes, restaurant food, snacks at the convenience store, and cigarettes without a second thought while balking at the idea of a gym membership is ridiculous. If I'm serious about getting in shape and dropping a significant amount of weight I should rearrange my priorities accordingly. It's part of the lifestyle change, just like changing one's eating habits and increasing activity. I should be rearranging my financial attitudes as well. I can't claim that I can't afford to pay for something that would help reach me reach an important goal when the truth is that I'm spending more than that on stuff that's impeding my progress.

And then I realized what's really kept me from joining a gym before. It's not the money. It's not the contract commitment. It's the ridiculous idea that I shouldn't need help to train for a marathon or lose 130 pounds. It's the feeling that it's somehow nobler or better to do those things without assistance or expensive tools or traditional methods. It's me subconsciously knowing that if I go it alone and fail that I can try and blame the failure (at least in part) on the fact that I didn't have the luxury of a trainer or a gym membership. It's the fear that others who are striving towards similar goals will be judgmental of the fact that I'm not doing this all on my own.

And all of that -- ALL OF IT -- is ridiculous.

This isn't a contest. It's not a race. It doesn't matter how fast I get to my goal, it only matters that I get there. Someone who loses weight on their own without using any fitness equipment isn't any better than somebody who has to have a personal trainer kicking their ass on a regular basis or somebody who has to have surgery to help lose the weight. If this goal is important to me -- which it is -- then I should be willing to do anything reasonable that would help me get there in a healthy manner.

And that means I need to make going to the gym a hobby. I need to be one of "those girls" who use their days off to take an extra class or get in a longer workout than usual. While I was losing the 55 pounds I dropped in 2009 and early 2010 one of the things I learned is that losing weight takes a lot more activity than the media would have you believe. I didn't lose 55 pounds doing half hour workouts three days a week. I was walking as hard as I could manage for at least an hour almost every day, sometimes over two hours. I'm well aware that it takes serious commitment of time and energy to raise one's activity level high enough to lose a considerable amount of weight at any noticeable pace.

So we joined.

And then we signed up for sessions twice a month with a personal trainer.

That means every month the membership fee will come out of the bank no matter what, and we shouldn't waste it by not using the gym. It means we don't have the option of wasting the money on something else and deciding we "can't afford" the gym anymore. It means we've got somebody whose job it is to hold us accountable and guide us through an appropriate workout plan to get us to our goals. It means we can no longer avoid doing strength training by claiming we don't know if we're doing the exercises properly. It means we have only two choices now: get serious about getting fit or get serious about wasting money and not taking care of ourselves.

It means we've made the choice to invest in fitness instead of investing in junk.

I joke about becoming one of "those girls." You know, the skinny girls who are always talking about spending time at the gym or catching a step class or going out for a run in the mornings. We talk about them like they're some other species, like they're fundamentally different from "normal" people. We look at them like the must have just been born knowing how to use all the equipment, as if skinny people have some special knowledge the rest of us don't get. We roll our eyes like their workouts are totally unnecessary, as if they just play around at working out because obviously their skinny bodies will just stay skinny no matter what they put into them. But the truth is that the skinny girls at the gym are skinny because they spend time at the gym. They care about their bodies. And we can roll our eyes at that all we want, but we should be doing the same thing. If we want to be fit and we want to lose weight, we have to care about our bodies and spend time on them. Period.

So my resolution this year is to become one of those girls. I'm going to become a gym junkie. I'm going to spend time learning how to use all the equipment instead of spending time tending virtual cities and farms on Facebook. I'm going to rush to the gym so I can catch the beginning of a good TV show on the elliptical machine instead of waiting to leave for the gym until after the show is over. I'm going to be one of those people that the front desk staff recognizes. And I'm going to do it simply because I know it will help me get to where I want to be.

A-Ha!

2011-01-06T01:12:00.002-06:00

2011: Here's to more of the same!

2011-01-01T19:24:00.002-06:00

Well, happy 2011, everybody! Happily, I'm not having to clean up after any parties, and the very minor hangover I had this morning is long gone. We've already been grocery shopping and had lunch with my family. I went out today and picked up a book I've been meaning to read (A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking) and got a new juicer. So far, the year is off to a good start.

I'm going to start with a good ol' detox diet (thus the juicer) because I've been feeling pretty, well, bloated. I don't think I've gained a significant amount of weight back this year judging from the fact that I can still zip my smallest jeans, but they're tighter than they used to be and I know I've relapsed on some bad habits. I do not need to be eating Little Debbie snack cakes. Ever. So I'm going to take a few days to clean up my act, and then get back on a sensible eating regimen.

I also think it's time to finally do the one thing I've been putting off. Quitting smoking. It's not so much a New Year's resolution. I've just recently come to the decision that it's really time, and it just happens to coincide with the new year.

And, although I know I've been talking about this for well over a year now and had plans fall through twice, I will walk a marathon this year. I will. I don't care if I have to do it alone, although with my sister home from the Middle East I finally have somebody to train and plan with.

Otherwise, though, I refuse to make plans for 2011. I'm not setting a bunch of goals or making a list of things I hope will happen. I'm looking forward to seeing Does It Offend You, Yeah? open for Linkin Park at the end of the month. I'm looking forward to doing more cooking, planting another garden this spring, and having a long, caffeinated relationship with my Keurig. Basically, I'm looking forward to another year of simply living day to day and enjoying it.

brushes dust off blog

2010-12-30T22:40:00.003-06:00

I got the urge out of the blue to look and see what I'd blogged about last New Year's. Turns out, nothing. Odd, considering that last year marked the end of a long decade of pretty good ups and horrendous downs. There were the good bits: meeting Kourtnie, getting to know her over the course of three years, declaring the relationship and letting her move in with me six years ago, selling a fair amount of artwork to people all over the world, seeing Neurosonic live and meeting the band, discovering NIN, getting to see NIN live three times, meeting Trent Reznor, the 2008 presidential elections. But there were also a lot of not-so-good bits: getting fired from my first job out of college, having to move back in with my parents, declaring bankruptcy, having a hysterectomy (which in the end is a good thing, but I would have rather avoided growing a tumor and having major surgery, especially the part about the huge hospital bill afterwords), opening a business and watching it fail, the ice storm, 9/11, the recession.

But this year was pretty bitchin' for the most part. I did stuff, I learned stuff, and this was the first year in recent memory where nothing really significantly negative happened to me that I can think of offhand. I switched to a more natural diet and ate less restaurant and drive-thru food. I found out that I do have a "dream car," and that car is a DeLorean. I said goodbye to MySpace, because it's lame. I made my own laundry detergent. I built us some capsule beds. I finally completely said goodbye to Fashioned By Jaye, and felt better for doing so. I planted my first garden, which yielded a bunch of tomatoes, lots of Anasazi beans, basil, beets, a few carrots, one adorably tiny bell pepper, and lots of marigolds. I joined the modern era and got a smart phone. I got addicted to Facebook games, for which I blame Kourt. I discovered the joy of the TomTom, as well as the joy of being in a car for 19 hours straight, and the joy of spending an entire week in New Jersey. I got to visit the Mutter Museum, which was every bit as interesting as expected. I started a second big renovation project and learned what it's like to battle 80 years of wallpaper and paint. I've gotten promoted. Twice. The biggest negative thing I can think of this year is how hard I had to fight to get that second promotion, but it all turned out okay in the end and good things are worth fighting for.

We have a tendency to head into each new year with grand plans for big accomplishments and big changes, but there's a lot to be said for completing a year and being able to look back at twelve months of normal. My house isn't any cleaner than it was a year ago, I've not lost any more weight, and I don't have a lot more money than I did, but it's all okay. Things are going smoothly, and there's almost nothing better than enjoying a little smooth sailing for a change.

That, I think, is the most positive change I've made for myself in 2010. Finally, for the first time in my entire life, I've come to realize that happiness isn't something you chase through accomplishments and grand goals. A happy life doesn't come with an ideal career or perfect home or perfect body. I've finally realized that the life I want is attainable now, not just at some future ideal point where I'm living in some perfect house, working a perfect job, etc.

So, I bid a fond farewell to 2010. It's been a good one. No regrets.

So, here I am, awake at 5 am...

2010-05-19T05:04:00.000-05:00

...trying to get the hang of my new BlackBerry. Kind of sad that I'm just now joining the world of smart phones, but I am the girl who was still playing CDs on an ancient Discman plugged into an even more ancient boom box as late as 2003, so I guess it should come as no surprise.

Honestly, there is zero point to this blog entry. Just curious to see just how much of my normal internet life I'll now be carrying in my pocket. And trying to get better at typing with my thumbs. How do girls with long nails even do this?

Dear assfaces at Rockstar, Inc.;,

2010-04-30T22:56:00.000-05:00

You suck.

As of a couple of years ago, I swore energy drinks would kill us all and I refused to start drinking them. The one time I had consumed a Red Bull it scared the fuck out of me. I'd gone to a karaoke bar with some friends, and about halfway through the night I was hit with an intense caffeine withdrawal headache because I hadn't had coffee all day (and I'm a long time coffee addict). The bar's coffee machine was broken, so I let myself be talked into a Red Bull. Soon I was bouncing in my seat and singing Britney Spears songs in public. I couldn't fall asleep that night, and spent several hours convinced my heart was going to explode in my chest.

It wasn't until I got a second job working overnights that I got desperate enough to try energy drinks again. You know you're really tired when you're falling asleep while working a cash register. So one morning I headed back to the cooler and picked out an energy drink that looked appealing. The one think I knew for sure is that Red Bull tastes like a mixture of Mountain Dew and what I can only assume goat piss must taste like, and I wanted none of that.

Then I spotted the pretty purple can.

Guava sounded nice and fruity and tropical and yummy. The can boasted a 50% juice content, which gave me hope that whatever was inside that can would taste pleasant and sweet. I only drank about half of it because I didn't want to induce heart palpitations again, but I easily could have kept drinking because it tasted that amazing. Nectar of the gods, that was.

Maybe I'm a hypocrite. Maybe I was right all along and energy drinks contain some kind of super dangerous addictive substance that will eventually send us all to an early grave. But damn if I didn't get horribly, horribly hooked on the contents of that lovely purple and gold can.

I tried other flavors. I tried the other Juiced varieties when our store was out of Guava, but wasn't impressed. Pomegranate is okay, but... meh. Orange is too sour. Punched is too tart. The new lemonade one tastes okay, but contains too much artificial sweetener. The coffee flavored varieties taste pretty good, but don't give me the energy boost. In the absence of my precious guava I've strayed to other brands, but none can compare.

When I gave up high-fructose corn syrup, I was delighted to find that I could still drink my Guava Rockstar. When I started watching my calorie intake, I was delighted to find that a can of Guava Rockstar only had 180 calories in it and I didn't have to drastically curb my consumption. It was perfect.

Last night I purchased two cans of the new formulation. I noticed immediately that the can looked different, but I ignored the warning signs and popped it open, expecting the familiar sweet liquid I love so, so much.

You've fucking ruined it, douchebags. You took the most wonderful beverage in your whole lineup and turned it into crap juice. Yes, crap juice. If I wanted my energy drink to taste more like tropical punch, I'd just buy some fucking tropical punch. Now it's got more calories, less juice, and it tastes awful. Don't think for a minute that I'll grow to like it. No, I'm going to buy up every can of the old stuff I can find, and when that stash runs out it's bye bye Rockstar. You're dead to me.

Go fuck yourselves.

Fashioned By Jaye -- a little update

2010-02-25T20:28:00.000-06:00

It's been about 4 months since I ended my occupation of 212 S Campbell, and while in some ways Fashioned By Jaye had a good run it's left me somewhat burned out (thus the lack of activity in 4 months). However, it's occurred to me (as I'm sitting here working on my tax return) that there are a lot of loose ends left to deal with and I haven't even posted an update on what's happening with the company.

In short, not a hell of a lot.

I'm not sure where I want to go with my little endeavor at this point, although I am sure I don't want to let it die. The absolute honest truth, though, is that FBJ turned into something that I didn't enjoy by the end of it. I made a lot of compromises to keep things running, and before long the person who ran the company and the person who created stuff under the FBJ label might have shared the same body but were two different people. The Jaye that many people met at the shop was a sanitized, artificial version of the real me, and it's not good when you don't feel able to be yourself in your own store.

It's not a huge leap from Business Owner Jaye to the regular version (sounds like I should be made into collectible dolls), it's just little things. Business Owner Jaye was so worried about paying bills that she was afraid to offend anyone. She didn't play the music that really inspires her in the shop because it wasn't radio friendly. She nodded and smiled when customers talked about controversial opinions with which she didn't agree because she didn't want them to feel uncomfortable about buying something from her. She referred to her girlfriend of almost six years as her roommate. She kept her personal life segregated from the business.

Bleh. Enough of that.

I started FBJ because I wanted to make a living making and selling my art. That's not what it became. At this point I'm not even all that concerned about the money part. I have a job I like, and my art doesn't need to be anything but a hobby. So if I'm going to keep FBJ alive as a means of creating and getting my creations the hell out of my studio where they're just going to collect dust, it needs to be an honest, enjoyable endeavor.

So...

What does that mean for FBJ? It will live on, but it won't necessarily be as warm and fuzzy. No promises about update frequency, amount of work produced, or content thereof. I will probably merge fashionedbyjaye.com, the long-neglected bits-of-paper.com, and my blog into one site. I might do more vlogs. I might do a lot of things. I'm just going to see what happens.

If you want to see what happens, too, stick around. Subscribe. I might send out newsletters. I might not.

I will be lending my magazine weaving abilities to the Black Owl Bread Company, which is the brainchild (ovenchild?) of a good friend of mine. She makes awesome bread, and you should order some. Seriously. It's fucking good.

My crazy family: the sad reality of Republican politics

2010-01-21T13:48:00.000-06:00

You know that funny nostalgic feeling you get when you think about some of the naive things you thought as a kid, like how you believed in the existence of Santa and the Easter Bunny? I get that feeling now when I think about how I used to revere my parents for their logical, intelligent approach to politics and religion.

I really used to hold them up as an example of how religious parents can be reasonable, open-minded, and tolerant. And then I left home. Traveled. Met people from a lot of different places. Realized that a fervent belief in the correctness of one's beliefs doesn't, by default, make those beliefs correct. Started to see how little tolerance and open-mindedness my parents actually exhibited.

Actually, it wasn't until the months leading up to the presidential election that I fully realized how wrong I'd always been about my parents. To be precise, I lost my childlike naivete the day my mother looked me straight in the eye and said, "Obama is a socialist, just like Hitler."

First of all, Hitler wasn't a socialist. Hitler got rid of labor unions and gave a ton of power to business owners who had to do what he said to keep that power. That's not socialism. That's fascism.

Second, the real inference of the statement is that somehow Hitler was or became a mass murdering fuckhead because he (supposedly) was socialist, and that since Obama (supposedly) is a socialist, too, he's likely to become a mass murdering fuckhead as well. Or, phrased in less heavy-handed way, socialism is evil because everything you can associate with Hitler is evil, so Obama is evil, too. If that isn't obviously absurd to you, read it again. If that still doesn't smell like a ton of bullshit to you, brush up on your logic and history, and then read it again.

Third, socialism comes in a lot of different varieties, and nothing Obama has sought to implement is any more socialist than many of the government programs we already support. There seems to be a real lack of understanding of what socialism really is in this country, and evidently my parents are no exception.

I thought my parents would have been able to see the vast lack of logic in their statement. They're college educated people. Unlike a lot of Americans, they read on a regular basis -- and real non-fiction books, not crap like Twilight. Sure, they're conservative Republican Christians who listen to Rush Limbaugh and such (and Dad is a preacher to boot), but I always thought they were the kind who could smell bullshit when it was thrown at them.

Turns out I was wrong.

Needless to say, it's been a very long year and a half.

It's frustrating to see them spouting half-truths and outright fabrications as if they were absolute truth, knowing that they're completely uninterested in the real truth. And, even worse, knowing that they got these "facts" from some neoconservative pundit on the radio who they believe without question.

The most recent "WTF!?!" moment came during a discussion about my increasing interest in eating more organic foods. I've been paying more attention lately to what I buy at the grocery store, and just recently took my first grocery trip to a local natural foods market. I was explaining to them that the reason I'm committing myself to a more organic diet isn't so much the nutritional quality of the food itself, but the effects of the methods used in producing the food. After all, huge factory farms, especially those outside the U.S. that provide us with meat, are in large part to blame for things like the swine flu, not to mention the impact of chemical pesticides on the environment and the increasingly troublesome production of genetically modified crops.

I remember during my high school years, when the pressure to recycle and plant trees and "save the earth" was ramping up, that my parents patently refused to worry about it. I read Silent Spring in high school mostly because my parents claimed that it was a propaganda piece full of lies. Even then, I understood where their objection came from: religion. If Jesus is going to return, and if the good Christians are going to be raptured before the earth REALLY gets bad, then there is no need to worry about saving the earth ourselves. If you really truly believe modern protestant interpretations of the Bible, there's no way we'll be allowed to destroy the earth before Jesus comes back to save it.

What I couldn't understand even then (when I actually shared their basic beliefs) was why it made sense to carelessly use up the earth's resources when we were admonished to be careful what we did to our bodies. If your body is a temple given to you by god that you're supposed to take care of even though you won't actually have to worry about its condition in the afterlife, why does the same philosophy not apply to the earth we live on?

Ironically, my parents are now far more diligent about recycling than I am, and we don't even have a curbside recycling program here. They actually collect all their plastic, paper, cardboard, and aluminum; rinse, sort, and bag it all; and haul it themselves to the recycling center. Yet the idea of supporting smaller organic farming operations instead of huge factory farms seems to offend their sensibilities in some way.

Initially, when I was talking about what I'd bought at the natural foods market, their response was that they just weren't convinced that eating organic or less prepared food would make me healthier or cause me to live longer than they would, but that if it made me feel better to spend the extra money it was fine. (Condescend much?) My sister actually said she liked processed foods with chemical additives. Then again, my sister just likes to do everything opposite of what I do now, which is ironic considering how when we shared an apartment by ourselves she copied my every interest.

But I digress.

When I explained that it was less about nutritional differences and more about supporting more sustainable farming methods, their response wasn't any less negative. In fact, my parents proceeded to "inform" me that there is actually a negative impact to all this environmental responsibility. Their example? They claimed that since DDT was banned, the threat of malaria in third world countries has increased exponentially and, because nobody can use DDT, millions of people are dying. Furthermore, they claimed that science has proved that DDT is harmless and doesn't kill birds and other animals, and that it's basically the fault of Rachel Carson that all these unfortunate people are being forced to die.

*digs out from under load of bullshit*

My initial response was that I was skeptical of the claim that DDT was harmless and that I'd have to do some research myself before I bought that kind of claim. And, luckily, that was the end of the discussion. They rolled their eyes at me and I rolled my eyes at them, and we continued eating lunch.

When I got home I did some poking around and, indeed, most of their claims are complete crap.

First of all, DDT is not banned for use in fighting malaria and, in fact, because the World Health Organization has recommended that DDT be used to kill mosquitoes in areas where malaria is rampant, many third world countries have long used programs wherein they go into houses and spray the surfaces directly with DDT. So any claim that the ban on DDT is causing all manner of malaria deaths is patently false.

Second, all reputable scientific data points to DDT being a carcinogen. Not only that, but it has profoundly negative effects on birds and aquatic life forms, and is blamed for the near-extinction of not only the bald eagle but also several other bird species. Even the World Health Organization, despite approving the use of DDT to combat malaria, recommends that its use eventually be phased out.

The saddest part is that I strongly suspect that they would persist in their belief that the world would be better off if we went back to dumping tons of DDT all over the place even if I printed out a metric ton of evidence to the contrary for them to see. I did mention to my mother that I'd done some poking around and that the use of DDT to combat malaria has been the status quo in many African countries for a long time now. Her response? "Well, maybe they're spraying NOW." As if Rush Limbaugh talking about it would suddenly prompt the powers that be to give Africa DDT. I told her that no, DDT has never been banned for killing malaria-spreading mosquitoes, only for agricultural use. She pursed her lips, I left, and I'd bet a million bucks she never looked any further into the issue.

It would be one thing if they just held opposing ideas. If they simply believed that it's worth the environmental and long-term health risk of spraying DDT in order to prevent malaria deaths, fine. If they simply believed that it's not worth putting extra tax burden on people to provide increased health care availability or to attempt to boost the economy, fine. What bothers me is that they believe these things because they've "picked a side," and anything fed to them by those who are on that same side is swallowed and regurgitated without a second thought. Not only do they not seem to be interested in fact-checking, they actually believe that any evidence contradicting what they've been told must be fabricated. Their side is good, everyone else is evil, and to question that belief is dangerous.

I talk to some people online who assume that these opinions must be the exception, not the norm, even among Republicans. Well, not so:

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=8FD5BC44-18FE-70B2-A8F16FA9CBA5781E

63 percent of Republicans believe Obama is a socialist
24 percent said Obama wants “the terrorists to win”
31 percent agreed with the statement that Obama is “a racist who hates white people”
36 percent of respondents do not believe the president was born in this country
21 percent think the liberal advocacy group ACORN stole the election for Obama
23 percent want their state to secede from the union
51 percent of those polled believe sex education should not be taught in schools
77 percent want creationism taught in schools
31 percent want contraception outlawed
34 percent believe birth control is “abortion”

If we want to start drawing parallels between modern politicians and Nazi Germany, I say let's start with a discussion of scare-tactic propaganda.

It's one thing to stand up for what you believe in, and a far different thing to stand up for what somebody tells you to believe in without questioning. What happened to independent thought? What happened to freedom as an American ideal?

I'd ask what happened to my parents, but I don't think they've changed. I remember back in high school standing next to them in pro-life demonstrations. I remember the discussions around the dinner table. The only thing that's changed is that the hysteria has increased (and I've since come to my senses). The basic idea, though, is exactly the same. And that saddens me, not just because I thought my parents capable of engaging in a logical debate about actual issues without throwing around insanely illogical half-truths and propagandist bullshit, but because I can't just dismiss them as part of a radical fringe. It's not some exaggerated caricature of "crazy Republican America" the "liberal media" has latched onto in an effort to discredit otherwise logical mainstream conservative viewpoints. No, it's very real. And I'm living in the middle of it.

Ten miscellaneous brilliant ideas, suggestions, hopes, and random thoughts for the new decade:

2010-01-20T13:47:00.001-06:00

Okay, maybe some of them aren't exactly brilliant, but whatever.

1. While we're freaking out about climate change and attempting to make more environmentally responsible decisions, wouldn't it also be smart to start thinking ahead to how we're going to live with the probably inevitable consequences? Like not building or buying more real estate in coastal areas that are likely to be underwater if the oceans rise a foot or two. Even starting to relocate inland while there are still a crap ton of cheap houses to buy so that when the water does start to rise we don't end up with a zillion climate change refugees who expect the rest of the world to foot the bill for their lack of forethought.

2. This one isn't mine, of course, but how 'bout everyone commit to wearing their pants with the waistbands where they belong?

3. Selecting and supporting a political candidate, issue, or party should not even slightly resemble deciding whether you're Team Edward or Team Jacob. Seriously, people. It's the government, not a fucking fan club.

4. While we're at it, no more Twilight. We'd all be better off.

5. More NIN music. Less people whining, bitching, and complaining about NIN.

6. As much as the recession sucks, isn't it a prime opportunity to restructure your life so that when the economy does recover you're in a good position to profit from it? You know, accept the consequences now and take it like grown-ups. Face it, even when the economy recovers, it won't be like it was a few years ago. The rules will have completely changed. Might as well get used to it now.

7. By the end of the decade, I'll be almost 45. I resolve right now not to be a bitter hag of a 45-year-old. The world changes. No generation has ever succeeded in bitching and moaning enough to make the world revert to some earlier state in history that they decided was "better," and neither will ours. Besides, humans have an uncanny tendency to view the past with rose-tinted glasses, even when the past was shitty.

8. Since we're in the midst of a period where technology is advancing at unprecedented speed (Moore's Law FTW!) and we're becoming socially dependent on stuff like smart phones, I think it's time for somebody to throw my little software idea into the mix: There should be a small device (something small enough to place in a piece of jewelry or whatnot) that, when discretely activated, would call your cell phone and fake an important phone call so you could get out of awkward situations, boring conversations, etc at will.

9. I kind of hope something weird happens on December 21, 2012. Nothing catastrophic or anything, just something that will make everyone stop and think.

10. If Nickelback is still recording in ten year's time, there will officially be no hope for humanity.

oh my god, shoes

2010-01-20T06:49:00.001-06:00

I'm not exactly a shoe fanatic. I get the appeal of shoes, and maybe if I had enough income to warrant blowing a large chunk of it on footwear I'd have a closet full. Maybe. As of now not only would I much rather spend my extra cash on other things, but I don't have the necessary closet space to fill with rarely-worn shoes.

I used to have a compulsion to collect things. Not so much shoes (although I did have a pretty good collection of chunky-heeled boots and dress shoes back when I was in Chicago) but just... stuff. Toys that reminded me of my childhood but that I never played with, random kitchen gadgets I rarely used, more stuff to tack onto my walls than I had wall space for, movies I rarely watched... I can't even begin to estimate how much money I've wasted over the years on junk I didn't really use or even enjoy. I think I really just bought most of that stuff to make myself feel good about being able to spend the money.

These days I'm embracing a much more pragmatic approach when it comes to acquiring stuff. When I need it, I'll get it. If I find myself unable to find appropriate footwear in my closet for a certain event I'll go buy some. Until then, there's no need. Thus why I basically only wear three pairs of shoes on a regular basis.

My work shoes

They're red. They're cheap. They're ugly. But they feel like a cushy pair of house slippers. They're as close to the feeling of walking barefoot as I can get at work.

My walking shoes

Actually, they're running shoes. But I walk in them. I've put my hardcore marathon training on temporary hold, but it really is important to have the proper footwear for fitness purposes. If your feet aren't happy, you're fucked.

My black patent leather Docs

Black. Patent. Leather. Doc. Martens.

I can't imagine I have to explain why they're awesome.

Anyway, It took me a long time to understand that it's more satisfying to have the ability to buy things I really need/want because I didn't blow all my cash on frivolous junk I thought I wanted at the moment. I tried it the other way for a long time and it's infinitely frustrating to realize that all the things you accumulated in fits of pointless retail therapy don't compensate for the fact that something you suddenly need or really, really legitimately want is out of your financial reach as a result.

It's sad that it's taken me until the age of 34 to figure this out, but one of the biggest keys to happiness in life is setting your priorities and figuring out what it is you really, really want most. It's also taken me until the age of 34 to realize that the answer to that question isn't as obvious as it seems it should be.

I'm still trying to sort out what it is I want most. But when I finally figure it out...

"I'm going to get what I want!"

Hibernation

2010-01-14T09:20:00.001-06:00

Cosy

I think the animal kingdom has the right idea. When it starts turning colder it's time to fatten yourself up and sleep through the freezing temperatures. Or head for warmer climates, I suppose. Personally, though, I prefer the idea of hibernation.

Not that I don't like winter. I prefer it to summer. It's more fun to dress for cold weather -- hoodies and jackets and boots and scarves and putting layers over layers... You can use your entire wardrobe in the winter, but you can't comfortably use your winter clothes in the dead of summer. And all the good holidays happen during the colder half of the year.

And there aren't many things that feel as good as lying in bed in a slighly chilly room, cocooned in blankets.

How much mentally healthier would we be if we all spent more of our time during the winter just resting ourselves? After all, the nights are longer. The nasty weather makes travel more dangerous. It only makes sense to take advantage of the opportunity to shut out the world and commune with our mattresses.

Lakefront memories... (and I swear I won't post any more Plinky crap today after this!)

2010-01-13T12:30:00.001-06:00

Today's Plinky prompt: What's your favorite beach or lakeshore?

I'm not much of a beach person. The sun and I have a hate/hate relationship. My friends and family use me as a comparative when talking about other people who have pale skin. If I had a nickel for every time I heard the phrase "almost as pale as you," I'd probably be able to buy a new computer. Not that I'm complaining. I mean, I used to hate it, but then the whole goth thing became cool and strangers stopped commenting on my apparent lack of sun exposure.

Anyway, the idea of spending time on a beach doesn't really appeal to me. In general, I'm not much of a nature person. I like nature, I'm all for preserving nature, but I don't want to spend a lot of time out in it. And I love swimming, but I'd prefer not to share the water with non-human swimming companions or have to walk on rocks while doing so.

That said, my favorite beach or lakeshore would have to be the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago. In the three years I lived in Chicago, I think I only visited the beach twice. The first was for a corporate beach volleyball tournament. The one game we played was pretty fun. Okay, so we didn't "play" so much as "lose quickly so we could get to the bar for the afterparty before all the other losers ate the free appetizers," but it was still fun.

The second time was when some friends from college came to visit. We'd gone to the Lincoln Park Zoo one afternoon, and as we were wandering around we kept seeing people come up over the hill with beach stuff. My old roommate asked if there was a pool or something nearby, and couldn't believe that there was an actual sandy beach that far north (she's from Texas). So we left the zoo for a stroll on the beach to prove that it actually existed. It was May. The weather was beautifully warm. The water was fucking freezing.

There was the time that the company I worked for had a dinner cruise for its Christmas party. The boat cruised along the shore for a couple of hours while we had dinner and got drunk at the open bar. I think I had five cosmos. I don't remember much about the cruise.

I may not miss hanging out on the beach, but I do miss living near it. I liked having a view of the lake from the roof deck of my apartment. I loved having the lake breeze blowing through my apartment in the summer. I missed going to Navy Pier with visiting guests. If I still lived there, I'd totally take advantage of the miles of paved trail along the beach for my fitness walks.

But you'd never catch me laying out on the sand.

"Actually, I had another thing planned for that night and I... Oh, there's going to be food? I'll be there with bells on!"

2010-01-13T09:53:00.001-06:00

I'm a pro at saying no.

I grew up in a family full of people who suck at it. They don't want to offend, inconvenience, or disappoint anyone. Instead they frustrate, inconvenience, and deprive themselves. I've watched people around them continue to take advantage, ultimately resulting in all sorts of weird frenemy-type relationships that aren't satisfactory to anyone.

So I resolved a long time ago to stay the hell out of that kind of cycle. If the benefits of saying yes to someone or something don't outweigh the negatives, forget it. No regrets.

So what can't I say no to?

Free food.

I used to be a sucker for free shit of all types. If somebody offered it, I would take it in hopes that I might someday be able to use it. But I got over that pretty quick after having to move a few times (once with no help). Nothing makes you evaluate your attachment to your possessions like being faced with the task of physically carrying them from place to place. I still collect far too much stuff in the hopes that it'll be useful in an art project some day, but otherwise I'm getting a lot better at paring down how much clutter I accumulate.

But food? Diet aside, how the hell can you turn down free food? Even if I'm not real keen on spending a meal with somebody, I'll make an exception if it means not having to spend money on food. It doesn't matter how annoyed I am at my parents or what they're serving, if they offer to feed me I'm there.

If I find out-of-date food at work that's going to be thrown out, I'll bring it home. It's not like food magically goes rancid the day after the date on the package.

But hey, what could possibly be wrong with being a food mooch? It's not like I show up on anyone's doorstep begging for a meal. Okay, sometimes at my parents' house I do.

I resolve to shop more this year!

2010-01-13T07:11:00.001-06:00

I slept all evening yesterday, and now I'm not tired enough to sleep. I was going to be productive and work on my taxes, but then I realized that by closing my business bank account I made it impossible to retrieve my electronic statements online. Oops. They're going to email them to me, but it'll take a few days.

I can't clean because everyone else in the house is asleep, so I have to be relatively quiet. And I can't run errands because nothing is open.

So I'm going to bug the hell out of anyone who might be awake and paying attention by posting a crap ton of Plinky answers! Yay!!

Where do I resolve to go more this year?

The grocery store.

Kourt and I have a really bad habit of eating out ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Quick drive thru snacks, late night breakfasts at Ziggies or Waffle House, the once or twice a week sit-down dinners, and the more-often-than-we-should trips for sushi. Beyond that, I have an even worse habit of eating food from the convenience store while I'm at work, and you know gas stations are short on healthy and even shorter on affordable healthy.

I like to cook, but I hate to cook in our kitchen. We know it's cheaper and healthier, but it's not as convenient. Not by a long shot. But this year is going to be all about concentrating on more long-term goals like saving for a house and getting to my weight goal.

So I'm determined to actually make use of our kitchen by eating mostly at home. I'm going to take my meals with me to work, keep the cupboards stocked, and cook meals in bulk on my days off so we have easy solutions ready in the house when we get hungry.

Plus, I want to start buying more organic and whole foods. I truly think that the root of the increase in obesity and related health problems these days comes less from our lack of activity than the artificial nature of our diets. I gave up high-fructose corn syrup a while back, and I was amazed at how different I felt and how much less I craved sweets. And this Thanksgiving we ate an organic, free-range turkey instead of getting a frozen bird from the grocery store. It was the best tasting turkey I've ever eaten in my life. It might cost a little more to get good quality groceries instead of the cheapo regular stuff, but it can't cost as much as eating out every day.

I'm not an attention whore, but I'm not going to sit on the sidelines

2010-01-13T03:05:00.001-06:00

As I said in my last post, I've spent a lot of time lately (as in the past couple of years) thinking about the world, my life, and what's important to me. I reached a point a while back where I realized that I seemed to be constantly sabotaging myself and keeping myself from achieving the things I thought I wanted most. It's been a long, strange trip through my psyche ever since. I'm certainly not finished with that trip, but I'm at a point where I feel like I've learned a thing or two, and the changing of a decade seems an appropriate time to put a few observations down in words.

Anyway, I turned to Plinky in the hopes that among the inane suggestions for blog topics something might pop up that might prompt some of my jumbled thoughts to congeal into something relevant. Breakfast? Not so much.

Today's prompt? Better. Would I rather see or be seen? Am I an observer or an attention-getter?

Let's take a trip down memory lane...

Like pretty much every other kid/teen in the world, when I was younger there was nothing I wanted more than positive attention. When it came to the adults in my life I knew exactly how to achieve that. It wasn't complicated. They didn't play games. It wasn't a competition.

With my peers it was a lot more complicated.

It's not that I wanted to be super popular. There had been a time in elementary school when I had felt like I fit in. I was always a little shy, always a big nerd, and never had the most fashionable clothes or most popular toys, yet I wasn't excluded from the social scene.

And then my parents decided to put us in a different school. Suddenly the things I'd been raised to be proud of were a source of ridicule. I simply didn't fit in at the new school. I didn't dress right, didn't listen to the right music, didn't play the same games on the playground, didn't share the same interests with everyone else. I'd never had to work that hard to fit in, and I didn't know where to even start. And suddenly, every bit of social confidence I'd ever had was gone. Since I didn't know how to fit in, I stuck with what I did know: making adults happy. At the time I thought I was being pragmatic -- I figured that succeeding at my goals in life would hinge more on my achievements than my social success.

The bad thing is that, over time, I developed this belief that adults treated me differently than my peers because adults valued different things than teens. I really believed that once I got out of my teenage years that the social rules would change, and I couldn't wait.

It didn't take very long before I started to realize I was wrong. As I passed from high school into college and then into the work force I realized that adults act just the same as teens -- petty, jealous, vindictive, judgmental -- only they're sneakier and quieter about it. It's all the same pack mentality and clique behavior as in high school, but with a thin veneer of maturity. This time the problem was that, although I knew how to gain the praise of those around me, I was tired of doing it. I was bored with it. It didn't make me happy.

So I stopped.

I lost my job in 2002. It was my own fault, but I didn't expect it to happen. And I guess it left me not knowing who I was anymore. My identity had been wrapped up for so long in being the girl who excelled at stuff, and now that I'd failed at that I was left just... floating. I started to feel the same way in the "real world" as I'd felt in my teenage years, so I started avoiding attention. I told myself that it was because I wanted to excel on my own terms, but it was really because I was hiding. Pretty soon I was subconsciously keeping myself from really achieving anything significant because I didn't like the feeling of having people looking at me. As much as I wanted to succeed at projects or endeavors, my subconscious fear of exposing myself to the potential of having all of my mistakes and failures poked at was a far more powerful force.

It seems to me that there are two reasons for wanting attention. One is to compensate for insecurities, needing the validation from others to build the self-worth you don't otherwise feel. That's where I was as a kid. The problem is, though, that you then get caught in a cycle of trying to do what everyone else wants in order to maintain their approval.

It's only been recently that I finally realized that being an attention-getter also has a positive purpose. In the years of trying to achieve my goals while avoiding the attention of others, I realized that it's almost impossible to get where you want to go completely on your own. I might not want everyone's attention, but I won't accomplish my goals without the recognition, validation, and ultimately the help of certain people.

I was on the right track as a kid, realizing that there were some people who's approval and attention carried more value than others. What I didn't realize then was that it's all the same game. As much as most of us don't like it, the truth is that we exist in hierarchies. If one wants to move up and get ahead, you have to get the attention of certain players in the game. It's not a bad thing, it's just how the world works.

So, now, I'd have to say I'd rather be seen. I just want to be seen for who I really am and what I can do. I want the attention of those I respect, those I love, and those who can help me get to where I want to go. Otherwise? I'm over it.

A stumped blogger's breakfast

2010-01-11T08:35:00.001-06:00

It's been a good long while since I posted a Plinky answer, but I thought maybe it was time to do so again. After all, not only am I kind of bored this morning, but I've also been suffering from blogger's block and that's what Plinky is supposed to help.

It's not so much that I don't have anything to say, I just can't seem to get my thoughts to gel. After all, it's a new year. It's a new decade (in the culturally accepted way, not mathematically, but whatever). There's all sorts of stuff going through my head about all the shit that's gone on in the past ten years both globally and personally and all the things I anticipate, hope, fear, etc for the next ten years. But for some reason I just can't get it to come out in any coherent form.

So instead of talking about change and self-reflection and such, I'll just follow Plinky's lead and talk about the components of my ideal breakfast:

Scrambled eggs

I've been doing this whole healthier eating thing since mid-May, and the one thing I learned early on about my "natural" eating habits is that I don't tend to eat enough protein. It's not really because I don't like protein -- I'm a committed omnivore who prefers her steaks bleeding, her peanuts spicy, and most of her meals to be accompanied by a big glass of milk -- but just because I tend to eat on the run and it's much easier to find quick food heavy in carbs and fat. Given the time to sit down for a real breakfast, though, I'd probably have eggs every day. And no, that's not bad for my diet.

Oatmeal with honey

Actually, I like grits with butter even better than oatmeal with honey, but the oatmeal is lower in fat and higher in fiber, and honey is like a miracle food. Plus, oatmeal comes in those handy instant packets, and you have to measure out grits to cook them. I'm all about easy.

Coffee

Every meal has to include coffee. Period.

Well, now I know.

2009-10-20T08:41:00.000-05:00

Ever since I started wearing my NIN shirts on a regular basis, I've had various people start up conversations that often lead to the question of whether I like other industrial* bands. And I've always had to say I didn't really know, since I'd never really listened to any.

So, I've been on this little project of broadening my music horizons by checking out a fairly long list of artists vaguely related to or linked to NIN in a "six degrees of separation" kind of way, and now I can answer the question:

No, not so much.

On an only tangentially related note, can anyone explain to me why playing Tool at work seems to be an open invitation for guys to hit on me? If this keeps up I'm gonna delete all of it from my iPod. It's getting creepy.

*Term broadly used -- yeah, yeah, NIN isn't really industrial, blah, blah... Spare me the lectures, I've heard 'em.

Do I need to talk about the wedding on the internet? -- A helpful flowchart

2009-10-18T20:29:00.000-05:00

40 pounds!

2009-09-26T19:22:00.001-05:00

Yep, I've officially lost 40 pounds now. Only 90 more to go!

I'm still wearing my size 20 jeans only because I don't have any 18s left in my closet -- it might have been a bit short-sighted of me to get rid of them all. I don't really have the money to go buy new jeans at the moment, but I won't worry too much about it. That's what belts and sewing machines are for, right?

My next small goal is to lose 10 more pounds before my birthday/Halloween. Mostly because I don't want to look too fat in my Jem costume. I don't want it to look like I ate the Holograms.

Halloween approacheth

2009-09-23T02:08:00.001-05:00

We take Halloween seriously. My birthday is right before, so it's become just an extension of the celebration.

Okay, well, in some cases, it IS the celebration. My family has become quite skilled at fucking me over on my actual birthday, so Halloween is the chance to get shitfaced and hang out with drag queens to make up for the craptasticness from two days before.

Anyway, I had a hard time for a while figuring out what I wanted to be this year. Kourt settled on pirate quite a while back, but I was a pirate three years ago and I didn't want to recycle it.

Then, in a moment of sheer inspiration that came while I was in the bathroom at WalMart at 2am, I decided on the perfect costume: JEM!

In some ways, it's a simple costume to put together. If you get the hair, eye makeup, and earrings right, the rest just has to be pastel, 80s, and girly. Since it's been quite a few years since I saw an episode of Jem, I looked up some images just so I could be sure I was getting it right.

While google image searching Jem, I discovered that lots of people like to dress up as Jem for Halloween. And lots of people end up looking horrible in the process. You can't just grab any old pink wig, throw on the first 80s-ish outfit you can think of, and be done with it. The hair, especially, is crucial. It's not bright hot pink. It's very pale pink. In fact, in the cartoon it's almost white most of the time. And most of your run of the mill inexpensive pink costume wigs are more like neon fuchsia. Plus, her hair was a huge 80s pseudo-mullet, and they simply don't make pink wigs that come anywhere close in style or sheer volume of hair.

See, this is Jem's hair:

These are NOT Jem's hair:

It became obvious quite quickly that if I were to really pull off a good Jem costume, I'd have to put some time and effort into the wig. A little research uncovered the fact that you CAN color a synthetic wig with some rubbing alcohol and a few sharpie markers. (Thank you, cosplayers!) So Kourt and I took a trip to the Halloween store and I picked up this wig:

I also picked up a package of doll hair, a handful of pink sharpies, and a bottle of alcohol. Over the past week I've been cutting the proper layers into the wig and sewing the resulting loose wig hair (as well as the doll hair when needed) back into the wig to give it the proper shape and volume.

Oh, and while I worked on the wig, I watched every episode of the cartoon on YouTube. I didn't actually intend to do that -- I just started watching for research purposes. But it turns out the show is remarkably fun to watch, even after all these years.

Anyway, it still needs a good finishing trim and a lot styling (I want all the ends to curl under), but in the end I think I've got it just right:

I know it's hard to tell from small, sideways pics of the disheveled wig with nothing there to gauge the scale, but it's a whole hell of a lot of hair. It comes just short of armpit length in the back, and it's about twice as thick as the original wig.

I say not bad for my first attempt at working with a wig like that.

I've played around with the makeup part, and I think I've got that down. It's not difficult, it's just very... pink.

Next step: the Jem star earrings. I haven't quite figured out the ideal material out of which to make them, but they shouldn't be hard to pull off.

Oh, and I found the perfect pair of shoes at the secondhand store for $4: A pair of pale aqua pumps -- you know, the kind you can have dyed to match bridesmaids dresses and such? Looks like they were worn once with a hideous bridesmaid's dress and never worn again. Jackpot!

This Halloween is going to be truly outrageous.

As if I didn't have enough things to stress over...

2009-08-18T07:54:00.000-05:00

...our house got broken into last night.

Luckily, the guy was an idiot and my sister was home.

I left for work at 10pm. Kourt works until 11pm. My sister is always home during that time, but anyone watching people come and go via the driveway would think the house was empty because my sister parks her car in my parents' driveway next door and comes in the back.

Evidently, whoever this dude was saw my car leave at 10, saw that there were no other cars around, and decided the house must be empty. He pulled the window A/C unit out of the living room window and climbed in that way. So far so good, for him. Amy's room is in the very back of the house, and he was in the very front.

We guess that at this point he took the air conditioner and then came back, because it's nowhere to be found. After that, though, it's obvious he's not much of a criminal mastermind.

Our house is messy. Very messy. None of us are champion housekeepers, and it's worse since I have been working so much over the past three years. You know that episode of Friends where Ross is dating the girl that's perfect in every way except that her apartment looks like a trash dump?

We're not QUITE that bad.

The point is that it's not immediately obvious that we've got much of anything worth stealing in the house. And getting to that stuff requires dodging piles of laundry and such. And, honestly, what we DO own isn't worth THAT much. Just a few computers and a PS3 with all the Rock Band instruments and a few small personal electronics.

Seriously, I've had moments when I wanted to pawn anything we owned that would be worth even a little bit to try and pay bills before, and it's not worth the trouble. We've checked.

So, Mr. Brain Trust gets back into the living room and decides that the best course of action is not a) grab the PS3 and climb back out the window, or b) look around the house and find something else easy-to-grab like the laptop on my desk, but c) grab the largest object he sees and try to muscle it out the back door.

The largest object in the living room (well, besides the eliptical machine which is downright impossible for one person to move and didn't even cost $300 when it was brand new) is an approx 30" TV. Not a plasma or flat screen. A 10-year-old monster of an old picture tube TV. It's not worth anything. And carrying all 50+ pounds of really awkwardly shaped, front-heavy, nearly-wider-than-our-tiny-old-narrow-doorways TV is not an easy task. And not only does he decide that the monstrous ancient TV is the thing he really wants to take, but he also decides against the easy option of taking it out the front door that's 4 feet away. No, the back door seems like the way to go.

Yeah, I'm sure he was probably thinking that somebody might see him if he went out the front. Still, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see, even from the far side of the living room, that taking anything through the kitchen -- especially something of that size -- requires two tight turns in a space that's MAYBE 3 feet wide.

Our house, you see, is a tiny little thing that's probably 100 years old. The doors are narrow, the windows are small, and the rooms are practically doll sized. Kourt and I sleep in a bedroom that's smaller than the bathrooms or closets in most newer homes. The kitchen is even smaller. Beyond the kitchen is a laundry room. That used to be the end of the house, but when we moved in my parents put on an addition, which is where my sister's room is. There's a screen door that opens inward where the back door used to be, and then you have to turn again into a narrow entry way that leads to the "back door" (which is actually on the side of the house and opens onto the driveway). So, if he'd actually been alone, he'd have had to muscle the TV through the kitchen, set it down on the dryer so he could open the screen door, get it through the entryway, find a place to set it down again so he could open THAT screen door, unlock the back door, and then carry it outside and between the narrow space between the house and garage to get to the back yard.

Which is fenced in.

So, he'd have ended up having to either go back out front with the TV and risk being seen, or go through my parents' yard and down their driveway and then around the block and risk being seen, OR jump a fence. Carrying a gigantic TV.

Somehow, he managed to make it to the laundry room without really damaging anything else in the house. He was even so thoughtful as to take the time to detach all the cables that connected the TV to the PS3 and the DVD player and the cable hookup, get the TV unplugged from the power strip, and THEN steal it. However, once he got it into the laundry room, the noise of him muscling this stupid TV around got my sister's attention.

Now, she's used to noise in the laundry room. The cats hang out in there. That's where their litter boxes are. Ever heard the sound of cat claws sliding down the side of a washing machine? But the noises he was making were, of course, not like what the kitties usually sound like, so she comes out to investigate and finds a large black dude she's never seen before holding our 30" TV.

If he were smart, he'd have dropped the TV and ran right then. But he didn't. He stood there holding the fucking television set and tried to say that he saw somebody come into the house and that he was just checking to see if my sister was okay.

WHILE HE'S HOLDING A TELEVISION THAT PROBABLY WEIGHS HALF AS MUCH AS HE DOES!

I don't know exactly what the chain of events were over the next few minutes, but the TV is now sitting on the dryer (because none of us are strong enough to muscle it back to its place by ourselves) and he ended up running out the front door. I guess she called the cops first, and then my parents, and then me. It wasn't even 11pm, so all of this happened within about a half hour after I left for work.

We're lucky all we lost was the air conditioner. It took Kourt a while to find all our cats, but they're accounted for and fine.

My sister's first thought when she got to the living room after all this and found the front door open was that I must have left it unlocked. I spent a whole fucking hour trying to remember if I might have forgotten to lock it. I ALWAYS lock the door just by habit when I leave. But after freaking out for an hour I'd decided it was possible that in my haste I'd not gotten the lock fully engaged or something. I felt like shit about that until everyone (police included) came to the conclusion that he came in the window after he got the air conditioner out.

It still totally freaks me out, though, that he must have been watching for me to leave for work. I know there are some not-so-upstanding citizens residing around here -- I mean, we DO live in the 'hood for fuck's sake -- but still. Gah!

What's worst, though, is that my mom is now bitching about how messy the house is and she wants to come in here and clean. And the very, very last thing I need in my life right now is my mom pawing around in all our stuff in the name of clutter control and bitching at me all day.

Actually, scratch that. The worst part is that today is Kourt's birthday. "Happy birthday, honey! Hey, now that the TV is on the dryer, you can watch your shows while you fold laundry!"

Meh.

Fat Girl Trains For a Marathon!

2009-08-13T10:08:00.000-05:00

I know I've mentioned it before, but I figured that since I haven't had a hell of a lot else to blog about recently, and considering that this whole weight loss and fitness thing has become the main focus in my life recently, I might as well make it the focus of my blog for a while.

The idea to walk a marathon wasn't mine. It was suggested by a couple of the girls on the nin.com forums, and although their idea was to do a half marathon, I'm one of those people who always shoots slightly beyond what most people would consider a reasonable goal. And when they said "maybe we should get together for a marathon" I assumed we were all thinking about the whole 26.2 miles.

So I did a little research, and found marathonwalking.com. The more I read, the more reasonable it seemed to expect to get my flabby 235-pound ass in good enough shape to walk 26.2 miles by the end of February.

You may wonder why not a 5k? Or a 10k? Or at least a half marathon? Why jump all the way to the whole damn marathon?

Well, I already knew that I could walk 3 miles at a time, no sweat. Last summer I got into the habit of walking back and forth from Fashioned By Jaye to the convenience store, which is 3 miles round trip. And a 5k is 3.1 miles. So that wouldn't really be much of a challenge unless I went for speed. And a 10k? I actually did one of those in college with no prior training and came through just fine. Not to mention, it's not like I never had a reason to walk the 3 mile trip to and from the convenience store twice in the same day. So neither of those seem very epic to me. I may weigh well over 200 pounds, but I'm not incapable of sustained movement. I just figured that if the beginner marathon training plan takes six months and I have seven months, why stop at a half marathon?

There's a park in the area that we've previously used for fitness walking that has a nicely paved 1.5 mile trail, conveniently marked off in 1/4 mile increments, so that seemed the logical place to start training. If you go in the direction they recommend (as indicated by the sign marked "start" with an arrow), you get one fairly steep hill to climb right before the first 1/4 mile marker, one very short but very steep incline right before the trail comes back around to the starting point, and the rest is nearly flat.

(Yes, I can hear all of you math geeks out there -- the rest of the trail averages a slight downward slope, because since the circuit is continuous the total elevation change has to equal zero. Duh. Doesn't feel that way when you walk it, though.)

A lot of people walk it in the "easy" direction, but I decided not to. If I'm going to really commit to training, I shouldn't look for the easy way. I better learn to climb the hills.

So, I planned out my training schedule (rounding all the distances to 1.5 mile increments so I could do whole laps) and gathered the best gear I have. I have a pair of walking shoes, but not good-quality, properly fitted ones. I don't have a stopwatch, so I time my laps on my cell phone (not like it's not a good idea to keep my phone on me anyway, since I do sometimes walk alone after dark). I pawned my own iPod a while back in a fit of financial panic, so I have to borrow Kourt's. And cell phone + iPod + car keys + large water bottle = need to have some way to carry it all. So I've been using a little sling purse so I don't have to juggle it all -- the big pocket holds the water bottle, and the iPod slips into the small pocket on the front. It's not the best solution (especially since with a full water bottle the strap gets a little uncomfortable), but it's what works for now.

I've now been following my training regimen for four and a half weeks. I'm another 9 pounds down since I started, and I'm up to 6 mile long walks. In a couple of weeks it will jump up to 9 miles. Pretty soon I'm going to have to invest in some better gear -- a better solution for holding water, good quality shoes, and some good non-cotton socks.

The one big problem? My feet FUCKING HURT!

They hurt before I started this whole thing -- I spend all my time at the convenience store on my feet, and at my weight that means foot pain no matter how much cushion I put in my shoes. In fact, I'm fairly sure I now have plantar fasciitis. Plus, my ankles aren't super strong due to a lot of things, not the least of which was all the abuse they took when I was a cheerleader in high school. Add to that the fact that my shoes aren't really up to par, and the training walks aren't exactly helping my feet out any. They feel fine while I'm walking, but after I get done and the muscles tighten up it's hell. I've started wearing ankle braces at work and during my walks since that seems to help some, and there are some exercises and stretches to do for both ankle strength and the plantar fasciitis, but mostly I think I'm going to have to get some good shoes and keep losing weight. They say every pound you lose takes 4 pounds of pressure off your knees, and that can't be too much different than for your feet and ankles. Better to get it under control now while I'm walking fairly short distances so I'm not in agony when I increase my mileage.

Overall, though, I'm feeling really good about the whole process. My speed is getting better, and even the 6 mile walks are pretty easy. The first time I had to walk 6 miles it totally wiped me out, but last Saturday I worked my store all afternoon, came home and changed, did my 6 mile walk, came home and showered, and then worked a whole shift at the convenience store without either falling asleep or being stiff and sore all night!

Some new stuff

2009-08-06T10:51:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow is the First Friday Art Walk, and Kourt and I are doing a joint show of digital work. So I've got some new stuff done:

And the diet goes on...

2009-08-01T04:00:00.000-05:00

Yep, still at it. 24 pounds down so far, and no huge bumps in the road. I did have a little bit of a setback with the sorority convention. Disney can bite me. No internet access or gym use without paying more than I was willing or able to shell out, and eating what they served us sent me way over my daily allowance. I gained three or four pounds back that weekend, but it's since come off again and I'm back on track.

The big news is that I've decided to train to walk a marathon. It wasn't my idea, but a couple of the girls from the nin forum weight loss group suggested we all get together for a marathon and after a little research I decided it would be a reasonable goal. And not the half-marathon, either. The whole 26.2 miles.

We've set our sites on New Orleans in February. I'm just finishing up my third week of training: three short walks during the week and a long walk on the weekend. So far, the short walks have been 3-4.5 miles, and the long walks have topped out at 6.

The first week fucking killed me. I walked the first three mile walk with Kourt -- not really pushing myself as hard as I could so I didn't leave her in the dust. My usual walking pace is just about 3 miles/hour (20 minutes for a mile, if the math is too hard for ya.) But I wanted to see how fast I could walk if I pushed hard, so the last mile I did in about 16 minutes.

The next morning I was really, really sore. But I didn't want my training schedule to get derailed just one day in. So I headed out for the second day and did the three miles at as fast a pace as my sore, fat legs would manage. I was totally exhausted, and I still had to go to work that night. By morning I wanted nothing more than to just go to bed and sleep off some of the soreness, but stupid me had picked up an afternoon shift at another store to get in some extra hours, so I barely got any sleep before having to stand at a cash register for yet another shift. I hurt so bad by that night that Kourt and I opted for a nice, leisurely 3-mile stroll at something like 3.5 miles/hour.

I started to wonder if I'd make it through even one week of the training program.

But by the weekend I had recovered, and did my 4.5 mile long walk with no trouble at all.

Since then it's gone well, except for last week's poorly-scheduled 6 mile long walk, which ended up getting pushed to Monday morning because of other conflicts. For some reason I thought 8:30 am would still give me pleasant temperatures to walk in. By the time I started mile number 4, the sun was pretty high in the sky, and the temperature was in the high 70s.

Oh, and I'd only brought one large bottle of water with me.

I don't get along well at all with sunlight. Or heat. The first three miles were cake, the last three were hell. But slight sunburn, borderline heat stroke, and very tired muscles didn't kill me, thanks to a quickly-administered bottle of gatorade and a few hours in the air conditioning.

So, anyway, so far so good, and I'm enjoying watching my measurements drop as I get toned up. Just 11 more pounds before I really start celebrating, 'cause that'll put me back at the weight I was before I opened the store.

Weight Loss Update -- One Week on SparkPeople.com

2009-06-12T16:18:00.000-05:00

When I started trying to lose weight a few weeks ago, my only real intent was to lose as much as I could for the sorority convention, but I want more than that. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to NOT repeat my past dieting habits because they've ultimately led me to over 250 pounds. If I can lose ten pounds or twenty pounds, there's no reason I can't lose all of my excess weight, daunting a number as that may be.

So about a week ago I finally took the advice of a good friend who has lost over a hundred pounds. She should know how to do this, right? So I joined SparkPeople.com. I was slightly skeptical, and certainly not convinced I needed to get addicted to a new website, but it was a good way to get a NIN fan weight loss team going, and the more I poked around the better it looked.

My diet strategy immediately changed. It's amazing what a little food-tracking can do for your diet outlook. I've sort of tracked my intake before, but this is better. Counting points or carbs or whatnot is easy, but it also makes it easy to work around the system. You can't argue with straight up calorie and nutrient counts, and the only way to make it look better than it is in reality is to flat out lie.

I've learned quickly that it's pretty easy to blow through the allowance for the day, and that my instincts on what's going to be a good balance often aren't so great. Like last Friday, when I went WAY over on fat and under on carbs, even though I thought I'd done really good with my lunch salad and egg-and-toast dinner. But I totally blew my fat and calories by putting too much butter on the toast and the dinner roll that came with the salad, and by drinking full-fat chocolate milk at breakfast instead of skim. Three little changes, and I'd have been able to have a healthy, carb-rich snack after dinner and been in the right range on everything. Oops.

And I've learned not to let myself consume calories while distracted. Wednesday morning I mixed up a bottle full (3 cups) of cranberry juice from concentrate, but before I could pour out just one serving into a cup the phone rang, and while I was caught up in conversation with a friend I hadn't talked to in FOREVER I ended up sipping twice that much straight out of the bottle. My carb allowance was gone far too fast, and my snacks at the convenience store that night had to consist of 2 oz of beef jerky, 2 boiled eggs, and a protein drink just to bring everything else up into balance. 2 oz of beef jerky is a hell of a lot of beef jerky. Gah.

I've also realized that this myth I've believed about myself -- that the reason I don't lose weight is partly because I don't eat enough -- isn't true. At all. I've been consuming far too many calories for far too long. It's amazing how many calories are in most of the things I'm in the habit of eating.

Anyway, I guess the best part of SparkPeople.com is that if you actually use the resources there, it forces some honesty about exactly what you're doing to your body. And I'd say for most of us the honest truth isn't pretty.

Mooo!

2009-06-07T07:14:00.001-05:00

I've always been overweight. Even as a cheerleader in high school, at 155-160 pounds I was the "fat" cheerleader. Because I was bigger than everyone else, I was always the go-to girl for lifting and throwing everyone else. It bothered me, but not enough to make serious moves to change it. I would diet now and then, lose ten pounds, and before long the ten would be back. The only time I was very successful at weight loss was my senior year when I started an after-school job as a telemarketer. I also happened to have a trial membership at a 24-hour fitness center, so after being hung up on and yelled at for five hours a night I'd hit the treadmill and work out my frustrations. I don't remember how much I lost, but I remember feeling really good about the fact that I not only fit into smaller jeans but also became strong enough to do a really good toe touch.

Then I went to college. I wanted to try out for the squad there, but when the coach announced in the informational meeting that she was glad all the girls there were thin because she'd just ordered new traveling sweats and they were all size medium, I knew I wasn't going to make it. So there went my daily practices and games, and instead I spent time studying and chugging down Mountain Dew. Oh, and working my work study job at the cafeteria bakery, which didn't help at all. I didn't gain the freshman fifteen. I gained the freshman forty. By the end of the first semester, none of the clothes I'd moved in with fit anymore. Still, I was just barely in the "normal people size" range, so I didn't try very hard to lose any of the weight.

Every year it seemed another five pounds snuck on. By the time I graduated I was about 210 or 220. Now and then, just like I'd always done in the past, I'd try a diet and lose ten pounds, hit a plateau, and give it up. In 2002 I did the low carb diet thing and dropped a quick 20 pounds. But again, I stalled out for a week or two and gave it up. I didn't gain it all back right away, but eventually I just stopped paying attention and there it was again.

A couple of years later I tried again, more sensibly, and did the same exact thing all over again. 20 pounds gone fairly quickly, then a couple of weeks of no loss at all, and before long my diet had gone right back to what I'd always eaten and the weight was back.

Then I opened my business in 2006, and for the last three years I've done very little in the way of taking care of myself, or even paying much attention. I stopped wearing makeup, even, because with two jobs and a zillion places to be I just didn't have the time or energy to care anymore. I've worn pretty much nothing but baggy jeans and t-shirts and hoodies, none of which are good about letting you know that you're slowly expanding.

Through all of this, though, I've recognized something very strange about myself. When I was 155 in high school, even though I knew I was technically overweight, when I looked in the mirror I didn't see a fat body. Even up until a few weeks ago when I tipped the scales at 255, what I saw in the mirror was not an obese person. I've never had that part of my brain that looks in the mirror and sees a reflection that's worse than reality. I always see better. And it's not until I see a picture of myself that I see the awful truth (and wonder if that's really what everyone sees or if the camera just caught my "bad side").

Or, I suppose, until I reach 255 pounds and stand in front of a 3-way dressing room mirror in a little black dress that just cannot cover up the reality of how much weight I've gained.

I've spent twenty years believing that I would always look like I weighed less than I really do. I've spent twenty years halfheartedly attempting to diet and never getting past the 20 pound mark. Except now I DON'T look like I weigh less than I do, and 20 pounds isn't going to cut it. But it ends now. It has to, because I know that if it doesn't I'll soon find myself at 300, and I can't even imagine letting myself get there. But I know that three years ago I couldn't imagine letting myself hit 250, and yet here I am.

This time, I'm not going to let the 20-pound curse stop me. I know it can be done, and there's no reason I can't be successful at it. It's been my own lack of real motivation that's allowed me to get off the wagon before, but this time around I finally understand how you have to feel for this to work. I'm disgusted with myself. I'm uncomfortable with how I look and how I feel. I honestly would rather give up all my favorite foods forever than look like this for the rest of my life.

It's great to feel comfortable in your body no matter how much you weigh or what you look like, but I think as a society we've gone too far with the attempts to boost the esteem of the overweight and obese. You can dissect all the reasons we overeat, but you can't argue the fact that those of us who are overweight are overweight because we eat more than our activity level will burn off. Period. It's that fucking simple. I'm fat because I eat too much and I'm not active enough. And you can tell me I'm beautiful all you want, but it doesn't negate the fact that this is not the way my body is supposed to function. My feet hurt. My knees hurt. If I drop something and I have to lean over in my chair to pick it up off the floor, I have to hold my breath. I'm pushing the weight limit of just about every piece of home fitness equipment you can buy, and when you're too heavy to even be able to safely operate the only fucking eliptical machines you can actually afford to buy, you know you need to do something.

But most of all I'm tired of being the fat girl. I'm tired of standing behind everyone in pictures so you can't see most of me, and trying to figure out the perfect way to hold my head for photos so I don't have a double chin. I hate the fact that in the picture Rob took of us with NIN at the KC show I look like a fucking cow next to Trent. One of the coolest memories of my life, and the souvenir of it shows me at my absolute fattest.

So I'm done. No food in this whole world is worth all of this.

NINventure Kansas City!

2009-05-29T01:43:00.000-05:00

The backstory:

Kourt and I had wanted to maybe do more than one NIN show on this tour, but after thinking about it and looking over our finances at ticket purchase time, we decided to be responsible adults and just do the one show nearby. The cost of travel and lodgings to any of the other nearest shows would have been prohibitive.

Recently, however, we ended up selling Kourt's second car. The Jetta had been sitting, neglected, in the driveway for over a year, waiting to be fixed and cleaned up and sold, and when we finally got it ready we actually got a lot more for it than we expected. Yay for low mileage! So, when Trent tweeted about raising money for Eric, it just so happened that we had some money left from the car sale.

So Kourt called me up that night saying she needed me to talk her out of spending money on something, because that's what she does when she's not sure if I'll agree with a large purchase. I'd been off the internet for the most part for a while, so I hadn't seen Trent's posts, but when she told me about it (despite the fact that usually I'd balk on spending $300 bucks on... well... anything) I couldn't really see a downside to donating.

I probably should have been really excited from that point on, but to be honest I've been really trying to stay off the interwebz and spend the time I needed to spend on my to-do list. I've got some high-priority stuff to focus on. So it didn't really hit me until last weekend. And then on Monday night it finally REALLY hit me, and I went directly from "I get to meet Trent!" to "Holy shit, I'm going to meet Trent..." I had absolutely nothing to have autographed except the hat I put Rob's AIR patch on, and that just didn't seem like a great idea. I had no idea what to say. And I was fairly sure I'd say something dumb to embarrass myself.

By Tuesday night, though, I was back to being really excited. Kourt and I stopped at a local independent record store and had a nice convo with the NIN fan behind the counter. We ended up picking up copies of TDS and The Slip to have signed, which were a) the only NIN CDs they had and b) conveniently appropriate. Kourt had been a NIN fan from way back, but lost track of what Trent was up to during the long down time after TDS. I became a fan just before The Slip came out and got her caught up again.

The NINventure:

We went to bed at midnight on Tuesday night, thinking we'd sleep a full eight hours and be on the road by 10am. Unfortunately, I woke up at 4:30 and could not get back to sleep. It was weird and frustrating because I hadn't gotten any sleep after work Monday night and only about 2 hours of napping in during the afternoon on Tuesday, so I knew if I couldn't get myself un-excited and get a few more hours of sleep I'd be in trouble driving back after the show. I finally managed to play games on the web until I got tired again and caught about 2 1/2 hours before finally getting up at 9:30.

Kourt had to do some stuff at work before we could leave, so we stopped by there and didn't actually get on the road until 11:30. (We're never on time with these things, so we weren't surprised.) I'd picked out a tank top to wear and brought my With Teeth hoodie for when it got cold or rained, and realized about halfway into the drive that I probably should have thought out my wardrobe better. Hoodie on, I was too hot. Hoodie off, I was freezing. But whatever, as the weather got shittier I just resigned myself to being in the hoodie.

We arrived at about 3. There weren't many cars in the lot yet and only a few people by the gate. We milled around the gate area for a bit as more and more people showed up for the meet and greet, watching deliveries come in and out and the staff setting up the presale tents. At about 3:30 or so they lined us up to get our presale tix and had all the donors stand under a tree to wait. (I wondered if they weren't trying to get us struck by lightning to thin our numbers a bit.)

The meet and greet:

At this point Deighe and Casee showed up with their husbands, so we got to talk a little before they got the donors together to take us inside for the meet and greet. We only got to chat a little while, though, because they then lined us up to have our bags searched and get our hand stamps (for $300 donors) and purple stickers (for $1000 donors). After everyone got through security (with only minimal confusion, I might add) JT came out to tell us how things were going to go. Based on the stories of those who had gone to previous meet and greets we were expecting a more unstructured event, but the sheer number of people involved have necessitated a more structured approach. We were told to have one and only one item to get signed and that we'd be lined up to go past the band and meet them and get our autographs. After that we'd be lined up again, and each donor and their guest would have their pic taken with the band as a group.

So, we headed down into the venue and around the side of the stage to the back of the venue where there was this... shack. Well, maybe not a shack, so much, since it wasn't enclosed, but it was a covered storage area of some sort. Kind of weird. A few people at a time were led up the ramp into the sheltered area for autographs. Kourt and I were about a third of the way through the line, which moved pretty quickly. Brett and Leo were there, standing around just being Brett and Leo.

I let Kourt go first, but honestly I didn't hear much of what she said to the guys. Robin was first at the table. We had a kind of awkward conversation. He's rather soft-spoken, and I was rather at a loss for anything to say. To be completely honest, I think the guys in the band are extremely talented and great performers, but I'm a NIN fan because of Trent, and I don't have any real emotional attachment to whoever he's currently paying to play the live shows. It's the lyrics that have gotten inside my head, really, and they don't have anything to do with that. I don't really even remember what I said to Robin. Something came up about if we were from KC or not, I remember that much. His hair was fantastic, though.

Justin was next, and he thanked us for donating to help Eric. I thanked him for doing all this to help raise the money, especially since this was going to be my last NIN show and it made for a really great way to kind of bring my live NIN experiences to a close. He assured me that I'd really love the setlist, and I said I was sure I would.

Next was Trent, and I was really surprised that I didn't completely clam up. I introduced myself, and he said, "This is your last NIN show?" I said yeah, and then said that we'd wanted to have him sign our car but that security wouldn't let us bring it into the venue with us. He laughed, and then said, "You car?" I explained that we'd painted the stripe from The Slip down the sides of our car, and he said I should send them a pic. I said we had the pic on our camera and we were going to show him, but Kourt had it. And I thanked him for doing the whole fundraising thing.

They had Ilan last at the table, and I thanked him for doing all this and said I was looking forward to the show. Really quick convo. His hair, too, is really fabulous. I kinda wanted to touch it.

I joined Kourt in the second line and we Twittered our excitement while we waited. I was just happy that I'd not only managed not to completely embarrass myself, but that I'd actually gotten Trent to laugh.

When they finally got everybody through the first line, Rob came out to take the pics. They lined the band up against the brick wall that, I assume, was the back of the venue itself. When Kourt and I got up to take our pic Kourt stood inbetween Trent and Justin and I got inbetween Trent and Robin, saying that "we should put Trent between the lesbians." Justin started cracking up, and Trent tried to keep his "serious picture" face on but couldn't quite hold it with Justin shaking with laughter on the other side of Kourt. He let out a... chortle? It was funny. Once Rob had gotten the pic, I said we were going to use that pic on our Christmas cards, and Trent said that, yeah, we should do that. I kind of wanted to thank Rob for the patch I'd put on my hat, but I didn't want to hog time when there was such a long line behind us.

Once our pic was done, we went back down the ramp to line up on the little sidewalk leading back around to the seats, but after a few minutes it started raining on us and they let us come back up under the shelter to wait while they finished the pics. We kind of hoped once they were done that we could catch Rob and talk to him, but once they had us all photographed he got us together to film a little video for Eric, and then he left. They took the $1000 donors on to where they'd get dinner, leaving the rest of us standing around waiting to be taken back out.

And we waited.

And waited.

The young security dude said he didn't know why it was taking so long, and that he didn't want to go ask because he'd been assured that they'd come back for us when they were ready. I thought they were probably waiting until the presale people had been let in, but when I tweeted that Casee tweeted back that the presale line was already in. Eventually JT showed up and thanked us for our patience and assured us that it wouldn't be much longer. And after about another ten minutes he came back and let us into the venue.

The show:

Kourt and I made our way first to the bathroom and then to the merch table. I got the olive green shirt with the white logo on the front and the "Wave Goodbye" logo on the back without the concert dates on it. Kourt got the black shirt with the dates and the turquoise green logo. By then we were kind of hungry, too, so we split a funnel cake. Funnel cake isn't really on my diet, but as Lisa said, NIN/JA day is splurge day!

Our seats were even better than we expected. Nine rows back, center section, by the aisle on Robin's side. By the time we sat down, it was FUCKING FREEZING! I ended up putting my new shirt on between the tank top and the hoodie just for the extra warmth. We tweeted while we waited for Street Sweeper Social Club to start, and made some small talk with the people around us.

Our section was just about half full when SSSC took the stage. They were phenomenal! Some people stayed seated during their set, and that blew my mind.

After their set we went up and had a smoke and then went back to our seats. The break inbetween SSSC and NIN was a lot shorter than I expected, which was fine by me. With no crowd jumping around, the temperature was really uncomfortable.

The setlist started with Now I'm Nothing/Terrible lie, which I was hoping we'd get. Then right into Discipline, March Of The Pigs (which is really odd to see live without being in a pit, I have to say. I couldn't jump around as much as I wanted to, because when I did I ended up taking an armrest to the thigh, which is rather painful.), The Frail and (thankfully!) The Wretched, Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now), The Becoming (which was the one song I most wanted to hear live -- it's my all time favorite, and I was blown away), Burn, Gave Up, Echoplex, The Fragile (yay!!), The Way Out Is Through, Wish, Survivalism, Physical, The Hand That Feeds, and Head Like A Hole. For an encore we got Hurt, which was kind of annoying because it seems to be an open invitation for idiots to yell dumb things like "happy birthday" and make obnoxious "woooo!" noises. My only complaints during NIN's set were that the idiots behind us kept talking really loud about stuff like the girl's insistence that she could sing the songs better than Trent because his voice was worn out. Oh, and the couple beside us who kept having to squeeze past us again and again for more beer and bathroom trips. Seriously, how many fucking cups of beer do you have to drink during a show? You miss shit while you're gone, and by the end I can't imagine they were able to remember much of what they saw. But whatever, their loss. And the dude in front of me kept swaying side to side and blocking my view, so several times I had to kind of straddle the armrest between Kourt and I so I could watch Trent over her shoulder. But still, none of that was enough to really impact how perfect the whole show was.

After NIN we went up and had another quick smoke, and tweeted that any of our twitter pals who wanted to grab a cheap dinner after Jane's should meet us at The Slip Car. We went back down to our seats and waited for Jane's Addiction, which I was hoping would really impress me.

I guess I just don't "get" Jane's. It was a good performance, but I can't say I enjoyed it half as much as SSSC. And their fans are annoying. Everyone was drunk, I was starting to get a contact high, and there was a lot more flailing around than seemed warranted by the music. Oh, and because of the shitty Missouri weather, Dave wasn't even shirtless. About two-thirds of the way through their set Kourt and I made our way back up to the lawn area to sit down where doing so wouldn't be disrespectful to the band.

After the show:

By the time we left and met up with Casee at The Slip Car, Deighe and her husband had already gone back to their hotel. We made plans to meet at the Waffle House near their hotel to hang out and eat. However, it took Kourt and I a good hour to get out of the parking jam and finally find their hotel and then ride with Casee and her husband to the Waffle House. We had a good time hanging out over waffles and eggs and such, and finally got back on the road home by about 1:30. I was exhausted, but still running on residual excitement to keep me awake for the drive. Finally, a trip that didn't include any drama or catastrophies!

Once Kourt gets the vids and pics edited and uploaded I'll post them on here. We got some good stuff, which is the upside to having NIN start their set in daylight. Usually once a concert is done and we get home I have this sort of withdrawal thing. Post-show depression or something. But it's like I have closure on the whole thing. As much as I'd love to see another show, I'm totally satisfied with this being the closing chapter on my live NIN experiences.

It couldn't have been a more perfect day.

Yeah, I am on a diet now, thanks for remembering!

2009-05-13T13:23:00.001-05:00

Damn you, Plinky, and your infernal Google maps!!!!!

Yes, I'm diving back in to Plinky again in hopes that I can get back into a groove. Today's topic? Best desserts.

Yeah, I am on a diet now, thanks for remembering!

And she returns...

2009-05-12T22:08:00.000-05:00

*swipes dust off of everything, sneezes*

Okay, then.

The winds of change have started blowing around here, and I can actually say I think I've gotten to a point where I'm looking forward with more good feelings than bad. Honestly, right now I'm fighting the urge to just take the quickest exit route I can find, damn the loss of potential income, and get ready to face the "next big thing," whatever that turns out to be. However, I've got a metric crap ton of stuff to deal with at the store, and I mean that in a literal sense. Piles and piles and piles of fabric and art supplies that don't have a place to go just yet. More supplies than merchandise, actually. And right now my mind is on other more pressing things, timeline-wise, so I'm going to just have to stick with my gradual exit strategy.

In the meantime, my third and very last NIN show is coming up in a couple of weeks, and I'm super pumped. The setlists have been looking AMAZING (please play The Becoming!!!!), and even though I would have liked for there to have been a pit, I'm kind of glad we don't have to sit in line all day. In the sun. Getting sunburned and dehydrated. In the sun. Have I mentioned I don't like the sun?

Anyway, in anticipation of the last tour (and mostly because we finally sold the Jetta and thus came into the amount of expendible cash that would allow us to do all the stuff we've talked about doing for, like, months) Kourt and I got new tattoos and NIN-ed out her Beetle:

It had been over three years since we'd gotten inked, which is longer than I think I've ever gone between tats before, so we were long overdue. We didn't intend to get two each, but they charged way less than we expected for the large ones we got, so we decided that while we were already there we might as well get those tambourine tats we'd been joking about getting ever since last November.

Kourt's been talking about painting the stripe from The Slip down the side of her car for a month or two now, and although I have zero experience in painting cars, I agreed to give it a go. It's not the most professional paint job ever done, by any means, but it didn't turn out half bad. Granted, now we've got a shit ton of red car paint in the garage that we don't know what to do with, but the quart container was the smallest amount we could get.

Of course, now we kinda look like psychotic fangirls, but whatever. At least we're not slashing our wrists over Trent's engagement or gnashing teeth over Jane's Addiction closing the shows or whatever else is now the fangirl crisis-of-the-moment.

Then, after the NIN show is past us, I have to get ready to attend the KD National Convention in Orlando at the end of June. I got to go to the National Leadership Conference in Boston last summer by virtue of being the only alumna who could get off work for that many days, and it was a lot of fun. I'd been to one NLC while I was in college, but I've never been to an actual Convention (they only happen every other year). I was afraid somebody else would be able to go this time around and I'd have to play fair and let somebody else be the delegate, but since all the other alumnae have inflexible job schedules and/or children and/or impending births, I get an almost free trip to Disney! I'm way more excited than I probably have a right to be over the fact that I have to get a formal gown and a cocktail dress for the festivities. It's been ten years since I really, really dressed up for anything.

However, now that I'm actually looking for nice dresses to wear, I'm completely disgusted by how much weight I've gained over the last four years or so. This is the fattest I've ever been in my life, and there's just no way I'm going to feel good in a dress when my body looks so horrible in one. I tried on what would be a really adorable black cocktail dress tonight, and looked so insanely horrible in it that I can't even put it into words. It's not that I ever expect to be skinny, but I was actually pretty happy with how I looked when I was around 200lbs and still shapely. The past three years, especially, I've kind of let myself go.

So it's time for drastic measures. No more crap junk food at the K&G while I'm working. No more big meals. I'm cracking down over the next seven weeks, for my own benefit. I think this might be step one in concentrating on myself again, instead of expending all my energy focusing on so many other things.

Okay, enough words for the night.

Plinky, you sneaky little bastard...

2009-04-24T01:11:00.001-05:00

Huh. Weird. I DO have some explaining to do. Plinky, you sneaky little bastard...

I've been absent from my blog. Blabsent? Abslog?

Oh, fuck it.

My last blog post probably gives you a pretty good idea why I've been shunning internet society for a while. I'm slowly feeling better about things. Still, though, my internet mojo (intermojo?) isn't back to full capacity yet. Almost. Well, getting there.

Anyway, since I'm reticent to start sharing a whole ton of over-thought emo musings on how bad life can suck ('cause I know you don't want me to do that to you), I figured I'd explain what I've been doing on my blogging break (blogreak? Okay, seriously, I'll stop now)...

1. I've managed to keep my bimbos alive and thriving. In fact Frenchie leveled up the other day. Now she has to become an architect, which she doesn't have the money for quite yet (she went on some shopping sprees) and which takes, like, a fucking month. I've got news for her, she'll probably get out of architecture school and go to work, find that sitting in a cubicle all day doing everyone else's work without getting any credit for it and not getting paid for the overtime she puts in sucks monkey balls, and then decide to try something else. I have a feeling, though, that the next step on the bimbo career ladder doesn't include waiting tables and tending bar for four years before starting up a boutique and failing at it. That's probably because the programmers who created the site would rather not bum everyone out.

British bimbo is still a couple of weeks away from her target level of Bimbo Attitude, so she's still stuck on level 18.

2. Playing games at iWon. My favorites are Collapse, Alphabugs, and Addiction Solitaire. They're a complete waste of time, and frankly I don't have much hope for ever winning anything there, but it's a great avoidance technique. Who has time to be all forlorn and depressed when your brainwaves are entirely consumed with puzzles?

3. Posting all over nin.com EXCEPT for in the Party Room. Evidently no matter how down I'm feeling, I never lose my desire to argue with people. I've been spending a lot of time posting in Politics and Current Events and checking out what's new and exciting to dump on in NIN Discussion and keeping tabs on the Shitlist. Oh, except when I drink a little it suddenly seems like a more fun activity. Yay, booze!

4. Occasional drinking. Not a lot, but the thought is more appealing lately.

5. Not going to the store much. When I do go, I certainly am not getting much done. Not anything much at all, really. Mostly I just sit there and do the above-mentioned activities in the store instead of at home. Except the drinking. I only do that at home.

I'm about to become a statistic

2009-04-09T07:04:00.000-05:00

It was pretty much exactly three years ago that I started seriously thinking about opening my own business. Thinking back over those three years, I can see now a whole list of things that happened that probably should have shaken some sense into me, or at least made me pause and think things through just a little more thoroughly. Hindsight's a bitch.

That's not to say that every setback I've encountered since I started writing up the first draft of my business plan was something I caused or could control. Maybe without that devastating ice storm in January 2007, or the lengthy theater construction process that had our block closed to traffic for over a month, or the crappy economy in general the slips in judgment I've contributed to the bigger picture could have been overcome. But I couldn't control those things, and I've managed to screw myself over with all the decisions that I could control.

So I guess this is the beginning of the end.

I know everyone likes to say I'm being too hard on myself, but I'm not. Really.

When the deal with the mall fell through, I should have just shelved the project for a while and taken the time to consider options. But I didn't. I'd already borrowed money and purchased a little bit of inventory, so I just pushed ahead and took the first property I saw that I could afford. I knew my market research didn't really apply anymore, since I'd based all my numbers on mall traffic and such, but instead of figuring out how to really get accurate figures for the new location and spending some time reworking the plan, I pulled numbers from random data and hoped for the best.

After the first few delays in getting access to the property I should have known better than to jump the gun and quit my job. Those delays ate up a great deal of my startup capital, and had I continued working I could have maybe even added to the pot instead of having to dip into it early to cover the down time.

I should have managed my personal finances better for the last three years. Every time the business itself was doing better, I let my own bank account crash and burn. I knew better. I know better. And yet I still keep doing it. And every time it happens it just gets worse and worse. The purpose of having a second job is so that I have money of my own to contribute to saving the business, yet I continually screw up and dig the hole deeper and deeper. If I could take back all the money I've wasted in my personal life, I could probably save the business. But I've been stressed, and I've let the stress cause me to spend money on stupid stuff to try and make myself feel better.

I shouldn't have procrastinated and let that opportunity for free advertising go to waste. I feel exceedingly stupid for that.

I should have tried my best to get help from others. Instead, I kept telling myself I could do it all. Clearly, I can't. By the time I knew I needed help, I was so busy with two jobs that I wasn't around enough to be available to network like I should have. I didn't ask for help or take advantage of the help that was offered because I kept waiting to get time to sit down and make a plan and figure out what to delegate and what kind of help I needed. The one time I should probably have jumped on opportunities instead of taking things slow, I opted to take things slow and the opportunities drifted away.

Ultimately, I could probably find some way to keep going. Hell, I've kept this little venture limping along for three years already. It's not like my sales aren't slowly growing. Very, very slowly growing. But I'm under far too much stress and it's affecting my health and my mood and my productivity. My brain is fried. I'm beyond broke at the moment, mostly because I've screwed the pooch yet again. I can't help but be aware that my parents are not a bank and the availability of their personal funds is not unlimited. They're in my life far too much now, too, and that brings an entire new level of stress with it. They're at an age where I can't continue to demand so much of their time and funds. Our house is in such a mess that I can't possibly get it under control while the store is still open. I can't continue to put my student loans on forbearance anymore, and I can't make the payments if all my money is going to the store.

So there it is. They say that the vast majority of small businesses don't survive to see five years. I really thought mine would.

It's not like it's going completely away. I can't stop making stuff. And on the plus side, I have made some contacts over the past three years that might open doors that weren't open back before all of this, back when I was trying to make a go of this on the internet.

Still, though, this is now the second time I've fucked up my life and had to start all over again. I can't keep doing this.

So if you're reading this and you're interested, I'll be desperately trying to sell off as much inventory as I can over the next six months. I haven't yet figured out how to start the process of shutting things down, but I'll get there. I'll keep everyone posted.

So Many People are gonna miss you guys...

2009-04-06T12:53:00.000-05:00

This may be a bit late in coming, but I've been too busy lately for this to have settled in my mind, I guess. But since it's finally sunk in and I've finally got time to blog about it, I have to say I'm a bit of a sad panda.

I'll start from the beginning, and I guarantee you this won't be a short story.

It all started December 3, 2007, just after midnight. I had the night off at the convenience store, but it was the middle of the holiday season so I had a ton of stuff to do at the shop. I'd planned to stay all night. Lindsay had come over to chat. Kourt and I had made plans for a middle-of-the-night dinner, so as soon as Lindsay left I headed home. I listen to the radio in my car because I have an old Oldsmobile that isn't equipped with a CD player, and at that point I usually listened to a local station that plays lots of 80s music. I'm not sure why, but that night I switched over to one of the local rock stations for the short commute home.

I didn't know it at the time, but I tuned in just in time for "The Evolution," which is a full hour of metal. Generally, it's crappy metal. Sorry, E-Man, but you play some awful shit on Sunday nights. But I forgive you because on December 3, 2007, you played So Many People by Neurosonic at the exact moment when I was driving home.

Of course, you didn't bother to tell anyone that's what you were playing. I had to go home and google the lyrics to figure out what it was. And that's exactly what I did, which is also really unusual for me. Usually when I hear an interesting song on the radio I just make some kind of mental note to look it up later, and then promptly misfile the note. This time, though, I made Kourt wait while I googled the song before we left for dinner. My search turned up the video:

After dinner I came back to the shop and googled Neurosonic again, thinking I'd look up the rest of their music and see if it was any good (because we all know having one good song isn't necessarily indicative of the quality of the rest of the catalogue). I listened to the samples on iTunes, and then went to their MySpace page to see if they had full-length songs on there. And to my surprise the first things I saw on the top of the MySpace page as it loaded were:

December 3
Springfield, MO
Remmington's

My first thought was that they were a local band, and the radio station had played them because they had the show coming up, but no, they're from Canada. And I suppose they probably included the song in the playlist that night to promo the show, but the weird thing is that the concert was sponsored by the OTHER rock station in town. The venue also happened to be right across the street from my shop. At first I figured it would be imprudent to spend the money on a concert ticket, especially since I had to work that night and would only be able to see a couple of songs at most, but for some reason I clicked through to the details about the show.

Because it was sponsored by 106.7, it cost $1.06 to get in.

Of course I went. Only got to see two songs, but they were awesome. Oh, and later that night they stopped at the convenience store to fill up, and I got to have a very short conversation with Jason Darr as I was ringing up his purchases.

Anyway, I was totally hooked. In the spring of '08 they opened for Puddle of Mudd, and Kourt and I went all the way out to Oklahoma City to see them play. They fucking rocked. Plus, I got pics with all of them, a signed poster, and big sweaty hugs from Troy and Jacen.

I also almost gave them all the flu, but luckily I think I never heard anything about them all coming down with anything.

We didn't even stay to see Puddle of Mudd.

After that tour they kind of disappeared, periodically posting short updates on their MySpace page and releasing one more video, but no more tours were announced. I hoped they were in the studio working on another album, since they'd been playing some new material in their live shows when we saw them.

Meanwhile, I got sucked into the world of NIN. To be honest, Neurosonic had a lot to do with that. They got me listening to that rock station more often, which happens to be the only one in town that consistently plays any NIN at all. And Darr's a huge NIN fanboy.

Anyway, the announcement recently appeared on their MySpace that Neurosonic is no more. Troy and Darr both got married (lucky girls, whoever they are) and Shane and Jacen both have other projects going. I was really hoping that once the NIN/JA tour was over and the dreaded "break" hit us, I'd have new Neurosonic to keep me occupied for a bit.

But I guess not.

Anyway, I'm sad to see them go. They were fucking awesome live, their one album (Drama Queen. Go get it now.) was amazing (seriously, So Many People is probably my least favorite song on the album now), and they're just genuinely nice guys.

I'm not about to believe that without Nirvana the prevalence of mall bangs would have done us in.

2009-04-06T02:59:00.001-05:00

Those of us who lived through the 80s remember when everyone in the world was up in arms about the hole in the ozone layer and how we needed to stop using so much damn Aqua Net before we destroyed the planet.

Guess what? It's 2009, and it seems the problem was slightly overstated. Granted, the grunge era pretty much put an end to the stifling clouds of cheap aerosol hair spray, but I'm not about to believe that without Nirvana the prevalence of mall bangs would have done us in.

I wouldn't say that's the only reason I'm not just totally terrified by the panicked response to global warming, but that's part of it. Do I think we should be trying to do better as far as our negative impact on the world around us? Sure. Do I think using less fossil fuels is a good idea? Absolutely. Do I think the earth is going to be totally unlivable if we don't all change our light bulbs and buy hybrid cars? Eh.

In some ways, I'm a big recycler. I'm not so great about sorting my garbage and such, but I use a lot of materials in my art and craft projects that would otherwise be thrown out, like old magazines and aluminum cans. I support things like Freecycle(TM), because if we're concerned about filling up our landfills we should pay attention to how many large items we throw away that could be used by somebody else. I like to buy used stuff. It's got more character, first of all, and it's a lot more environmentally responsible to get all the use we can out of things we've already produced.

I try not to drive a lot. Even at the price gas is at now, it's kind of expensive to use my car all the time. Plus, it's not like I can't use some exercise. My two jobs are a half-hour walk apart, so when the weather is nice enough I take the opportunity to get in an hour of good exercise and quiet time, just me and my headphones. Honestly, I'm less concerned about how our dependence on oil effects the environment as I am about how it effects international politics and economics, and what we're going to do when we inevitably run out of feasible places to drill. I'd get a hybrid if I could afford to buy one, just for the fact that it would save money on gas. In fact, I wouldn't even own a car if I didn't have to. I liked not having one in Chicago. Buses and trains FTW!

I've switched to compact fluorescent bulbs, but only because I'm sick of changing light bulbs all the time. I figure if it's ultimately cheaper to buy a more expensive bulb that lasts longer and doesn't use as much power than to buy cheaper bulbs that have to be replaced all the time, there's no reason not to switch.

And honestly, I think that's pretty much how most people are. Don't scream about how we're all going to destroy the planet if we don't make changes. Just make it logical and economical to switch. I don't think there's anyone out there sitting in their huge houses with the sprinklers running 24/7, lights on in every room, air conditioning cranked down to 65, sixteen SUVs in the garage with their engines running, cackling with evil laughter at how they're going to bring on the end of humanity. It's just that humans are lazy and you have to make it easy and economically beneficial to do "the right thing."

Some shout-outs to the Twitter Bitches!

2009-04-06T02:14:00.000-05:00

If you're a friend of mine on Facebook, you'll be able to see this video. Otherwise, you won't. 'Cause that's just how I am.

Yep, that's right, I'm permanently on display in the bathroom.

2009-04-05T16:10:00.001-05:00

If you ever find yourself in Poplar Bluff, Missouri looking for something to do, there's a little museum in an old house on, I believe, Main St. It's called the Margaret Harwell Art Museum. When you're done looking through the two floors of art, head down through the gift shop on the first floor and visit the restroom.

Yeah, I'm serious.

I've used the username "jayetheartist" on various websites in recent years, and it's not just something I thought sounded cool. Not only do I actually create artwork, I've also sold a fair amount of it over the years. A while back I even sold two pieces to the Margaret Harwell Art Museum for their permanent collection.

So after you've seen all the other exhibits and are using the restroom, just look up at the wall across from the toilet, and there you will find one of my works. Yep, that's right, I'm permanently on display in the bathroom.

Really, it's the most god-awful song ever to hit the airwaves.

2009-04-03T07:43:00.001-06:00

THREE SONGS I WANT ERASED FROM MY MEMORY:

Sitting at a Bar by Rehab

I'm not the hugest country fan.

Okay, that's a severe understatement.

With very few exceptions, twangy music hits my ears like fingernails on a chalkboard. So that's strike one against this song.

Secondly, I've become quite picky in my old age about the message in a song's lyrics, and these are about as lame as they come.

Sitting at a Bar by Rehab

Really, it's the most god-awful song ever to hit the airwaves. And the fact that they play it on the radio station I listen to -- which is supposed to be playing ROCK music -- just pisses me off. You have never seen a convenience store clerk move as fast as I do when that song comes on, 'cause I don't even want to hear one note of it if I can avoid it.

Sitting at a Bar by Rehab

Seriously, it sucks.

Adventures in corporate mergers, part II

2009-04-02T07:17:00.000-06:00

I'm almost done with my second week as part of the transition team for this lovely little takeover, and I'm longing to get back to my own store. However, I can't say I haven't learned a thing or two through this whole process, and I'm going to share my insights with you. I'm sure you're excited.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED FROM THE CODY'S TAKEOVER:

Change must be statistically the single scariest thing in the world, just based on how many people have trouble with it. It's amazing how much people rely on their routines and traditions, even to the point of not being able to handle cosmetic changes. Take their usual convenience store, make the staff wear a different uniform, move the shelves around, change the name, and switch a few product brands, and people freak the fuck out. Some even freak out so much that they make completely illogical decisions. For instance, when their favorite "local" convenience store gets sold to a larger corporation, they threaten to show their disgust at the change by going to a different larger corporation's store. So now, instead of just accepting a new name and a few new faces and maybe buying a different brand of honey bun, now they're going to completely change the route they drive to work and buy a completely different brand of EVERYTHING. Yeah, that makes sense.
Even if ads are stretching the truth, most people eat it up. A multimillionaire real estate developer can buy a little local corner store and turn it into a pretty large chain -- despite not knowing a damn thing about running convenience stores -- with the sole intent of growing the company and then selling it off for a profit, and still get everyone to think of the chain as a quaint locally-owned homegrown store. In fact, he can convince people of that to the extent that when that same real estate developer offers the chain to a larger company and not only succeeds in selling the company for a profit, but manages to strike a deal whereby the larger company still has to lease the properties themselves from him, people will be outraged at the big, bad corporation that "took over" their little hometown shop.
A necktie is evidently one of the worst methods of torture ever devised, as it seems at least 50% of the population simply cannot handle having anything touch their neck. I've heard more than one person verbally consider quitting and taking their chances in this horrible job market simply because they had to trade in their black pants and polo shirts for khaki pants and white dress shirts with ties.
Most guys these days have no idea how to tie a tie.
Tater tots are pretty yummy. But if you put melted cheese inside them, they're more addictive than crack.

Bad pics and mystery waves aside, I think I did okay.

2009-03-31T13:33:00.001-06:00

The Plinky prompts have sucked ass for the past few days. I feel like they hit a high around the "zombie preparedness" prompt and then quickly rolled downhill. I didn't even bother with yesterday's. Not only was it lame, but I'm supposed to be busy with Art Walk preparations.

To be honest, I've been mostly busy with napping and fighting to stay awake between naps. That damn truck stop wore me the fuck out. It was definitely an interesting experience, though. They go through an awful lot of gravy:

Tonight I begin Week 2 of my Adventures in Corporate Mergers, and I'm more than ready for this all to be over. I miss my KG. I miss knowing exactly where everything is. I miss being all alone on my shifts. I miss the 3-minute commute. I miss knowing what the fuck I'm doing!

Anyway, between sleeping and almost sleeping, I've done a few productive things. I cut my hair on Sunday. It's been a very long time since I cut my own, but it was getting really long and unruly, and I've been griping about not having the time or money for a haircut for way too long now.

Before:

After:

What you can't tell in the pics is that it's really an asymmetrical bob. Or, well, it was when I cut it. Then I washed it again, and these waves appeared out of fucking nowhere. I really don't remember them being there the last time I had short hair. But whatever, bad pics and mystery waves aside, I think I did okay.

Anyway, I guess I should get back to my Art Walk preparations.

Oh, and the Plinky prompt for today? I get my news from nin.com.

My unreasonable demands:

2009-03-28T15:32:00.001-06:00

Hot turkey sandwiches, minus the hot and the sandwiches
Consult Kourtnie's mother for the recipe.

A box of chardonnay
Brand may vary. Must be presented in a white-trash-appropriate manner.

Jugglers
So that when I'm severely annoyed I might pop one.

The constant presence of the Invisible Russian Mafia
Because I very well might be lying about the price of cigarillos. They should, however, leave their weapons outside.

Fog machine
Wait for it.

Cheese
For cleaning the kitchen.

Flan
It's my whole existence.

TEN BONUS POINTS IF THEY USED TO BE SOMEBODY YOU KNOW!!

2009-03-26T18:39:00.001-06:00

I'm all for disaster readiness, and I do think zombie preparedness just doesn't get the attention it deserves. So what will I do when the zombies come?

First of all, I'm going to assume that we're talking about the slow, lumbering type of zombies and not the fast, terrifying kind, because I think fast zombies are just illogical. If you're basically dead flesh, you're not gonna be capable of sprinting, you know?

So first of all, the problem isn't that they're very smart or physically more capable than a living person. They're just numerous, unresting, and focused completely on one thing. Kinda like NIN fans. *rimshot*

My thinking, then, is that you basically just don't want to be noticed by the zombies at all. If they don't know you're around, you're probably good to go. They're running on rotting brain matter, so I'd imagine that a cunning hiding place would be your best bet. Even better if it's inaccessible by massive amounts of people, like something you'd have to climb a ladder in single file to get to.

Can zombies even climb ladders? I think not.

So I'd think some kind of house on stilts would be an ideal zombie-proof living arrangement. They would have to be some pretty sturdy stilts, since a hoard of zombies pushing on the structure is probably not something structural engineers generally design for. I certainly don't remember discussing zombie holocausts in any of my structures classes in architecture school. My instincts tell me, though, that concrete piles would likely work just fine.

I don't live, however, in an elevated domicile. My hiding place will have to be slightly easier than suddenly creating a new home out of thin air in a hurry. Chances are that the zombie hoards will remain a danger for a long period of time, so I'd have to have access to provisions. One would also assume that there would be some warning if a hoard of zombies was headed your way.

So here would be my plan:

As soon as I heard news reports of impending zombies, I'd gather up everything useful in my house. Items that can be used as weapons, non-perishable foodstuffs, changes of clothes, various toiletries, board games, scented candles, a few good novels, sex toys, spare batteries, a saucepan, a spatula, a coffee mug, a corkscrew, booze, black eyeliner, several pair of scissors, a teddy bear, incense, thumbtacks, toenail clippers... You get the idea.

Then I'd get in my car. There's no fucking way a zombie can outrun a car. Plus, I imagine there'd be something really satisfyingly gruesome about playing Zombie Pedestrian Polo. TEN BONUS POINTS IF THEY USED TO BE SOMEBODY YOU KNOW!! Let's see Mr. Zombie come after me with crushed legs! Ha!

Then I'd drive away from the zombies. Far away from the zombies. Once out of the zombie zone, I'd stop and pick up some food and such. Non-perishables, more toilet paper, bottled water, and a couple of books of sudoku puzzles. Stop and wash the zombie guts off my car. Fill the tank. Maybe grab a meal at a Waffle House. I do really love me some grits. With extra butter.

Anyway, once I had enough food and such stocked up in my car to last me for a bit, I'd find some off-the-beaten-path place to stay. The danger of zombies is their numbers, so I'd say as long as I stay away from most other humans I'll be okay. They'll be going after the most plentiful sources of flesh. Any single zombies that stray from the herd will be fairly easy to combat, and if nothing else I can just drive away. And while I'm living in my car waiting out the zombie migration, I can busy myself writing folk songs, just like Jewel used to do!

Once the zombies moved past, I'd go back home. I'm sure there would be a lot of zombie mess to clean up, but with the zombies doing their thing elsewhere, I'm sure I'd have time to bleach everything I ever owned, dig a large moat around the house, and then put up a razor wire fence.

I suppose I could just go ahead and dig that moat and put up the razor wire right now, except that it would take a lot of hassle with building permits and zoning disputes, not to mention the expense. Once the zombie hoards have decimated the area, I figure zombie-proofing won't be something I'd have to justify to Planning and Zoning, and I can probably just loot the necessary supplies from the nearest abandoned Home Depot.

Then, once the zombies are finally annihilated, the moat and fence will be useful for keeping my nosy neighbors, stray dogs, and Jehovah's Witnesses off my property. Yeah, let's see you try to tell me about Jesus now, fuckers!

And if all else fails, there's always the approach my brother and his friends took to combating zombies (my brother's the one defending his rose garden):

Adventures in corporate mergers

2009-03-25T19:18:00.000-06:00

As I've mentioned before, I work at a convenience store. It's a pretty big chain, although nobody outside the midwest will probably have heard of it, unless you've watched the first Jackass movie.

Our company recently bought out another local convenience store chain. People got pissy. They liked the local chain because it was local. And it had a really big selection of food -- stuffed crust pizzas and chicken and sandwiches.... Not the pre-packaged microwavable kind, actual fresh food. Sounds great and all, I know. But first of all, it's not like big bad corporate giant swooped in and forced ma and pa convenience store owner out of business. This is a local chain with something like 40 stores whose owner approached our company and wanted to sell. So the pissy people can shove it.

Also, the pissy people should get a look behind the scenes of their beloved Cody's. The stores were fucking filthy. Kourt and I stopped by one a week or two ago and were disgusted. So it was really no surprise to me that last night when I arrived for my first night of "shadowing" at a newly converted store, the second shift staff had stories of uncovering little piles of dead bugs and such.

When I arrived, things were much cleaner. All the machines had been replaced, the store completely rebranded, and most everything in its place. There was still a great deal of confusion and chaos -- taking over and transitioning this many stores is, of course, going to come with some confusion. We didn't know the passcode for the drop safe, we had to trial-and-error our way into guessing the one and only login code for the registers, and we couldn't find half the things that we knew were supposed to be in the store.

Plus, when the transition team set the store up, they just shoved everything they couldn't find space for or didn't have time to put away into the very, very tiny back room.

(Sorry for the pic quality -- I need to clean the lens on my camera phone.)

That's the back room. All of it. And that pile of crap in the middle -- that's AFTER we started finding space for it all.

If that had been at a store as busy as mine, I'd have been a little pissed off to have to deal with it all. This store, however, is in the middle of fucking nowhere. Seriously, when I went outside to have a smoke I could hear wild animals in the distance. We saw five customers all night. Five. That half hour it took us to figure out how to log onto the register? Not a soul came onto the lot.

Anyway, my two trainees and I started poking through the big pile of crap and found interesting stuff. Outdated stuff. This pic is of the expiration date on a soda bib. Do you know how long it takes for soda syrup to expire?

Neither do I.

We've never, ever, had a soda bib expire.

I heard that before we got there, they pulled several totes full of expired chips and candy off the shelves. Isn't that comforting, Cody's fans? You've been buying stale chips for months and months now. Some of it since last June. How's that for a great convenience store experience, huh?

Not that everything K&G has done with the place seems like the greatest idea, either. Like this:

Now, I know I work in the 'hood and this store is in BFE, but no locked liquor cases? Really?

Oh, well. I guess if you only see five customers a night, it's pretty easy to keep an eye on people.

Anyway, since all the machines and fixtures were brand new and sparkling clean, and nobody came in to mess up our freshly scrubbed bathrooms, floors, or countertops, the three of us were left with pretty much nothing to do but find spots for all the stuff that had been piled in the back room that WASN'T out of date. We found new displays that hadn't been put together and stocked, squeezed the forty billion boxes of drink cups onto the available shelf space, and distributed some of the stuff out onto the shelves. When all was said and done, we had accomplished this:

I know it doesn't look all that much better, but really, that's all the floor space available in that room. All the backstock fits on the shelf, and once they get the outdated product out of there it should be a workable workspace.

I go back tonight for another epically boring eight hours of thumb-twiddling. I'll probably teach them how to clean the coffee pots and soda nozzles, write up some instruction sheets for future reference, and then maybe go out front and see how many coyotes I can get to howl at 2am.

C'mon, Plinky, I know you can do better than this.

2009-03-25T18:48:00.001-06:00

Today's Plinky = kinda dumb.

Nobody may care what I had for lunch, but I probably have more to say about that than I do about the difference between sexy and slutty.

C'mon, Plinky, I know you can do better than this.

For the life of me, now, I can't remember his name. But we got along just fine.

2009-03-24T16:15:00.001-06:00

GO AWAY, SILLY MAP! Seriously, Plinky, nobody wants their blog to have fucking Google maps of the same damn places posted all over the place. You need to implement an option for "No, thanks, I don't want one of your crappy maps cluttering up my answer, so fuck off." Seriously, the only reason to put a map in a post about my first kiss is to let my stalkers know where to go build their shrine.

Anyway.....

Hm... My first kiss? Funny story, actually.

I'd gone to a high school dance. I believe it was my sophomore year, and it was probably the first one of the year -- I remember it being outside in the alley between the main building and the art building/gym. I'd gone alone, as usual. A guy in my class had brought his cousin with him from out of town as a date for one of our mutual friends, but it hadn't worked out very well. So they hooked Mr. Cousin up with me instead. For the life of me, now, I can't remember his name. But we got along just fine.

After the dance let out a whole group of us went to Waffle House. Now, this was at about 10pm, which is far later than I usually stayed out. It wasn't that I had a curfew, I just didn't have a life that would necessitate a curfew. So when Dad came to pick me up I told him everyone wanted to go get something to eat, and my instructions were to "not stay out too late." No specifics.

So we all went to Waffle House and ate, and then dude-whose-name-I-can't-remember drove me home.

Sometimes it pays to never break rules. Not only did I not have a specific curfew, I realized when the guy pulled into the driveway to drop me off that my parents went to the other side of the house so I wouldn't feel like they were eavesdropping on us or whatever. They trusted me.

So we stood on the porch and made out for, like, five minutes. Yep, me-who-never-did-shit-like-that and dude-whose-last-name-I'm-not-sure-I-ever-knew with our tongues down each other's throats on my parents' back porch, while I'm sure they were sitting on the couch watching The Tonight Show and thinking we were just talking. lolz

We didn't carry on any sort of relationship after that. I think he went to one other dance with me, and then hooked up with another girl in our class for a month or so, and then disappeared back to the backwoods town from whence he came.

But the kissing part was a pretty good beginner's crash course.

Another blog that caught my fancy:

2009-03-23T19:25:00.001-06:00

LIFE VEST
http://jeeinshin.blogspot.com/
Cool images, no excessive verbage (obviously not a standard I hold myself to, lolz), just nice and clean with fun, interesting stuff to look at.

A windy Monday afternoon

2009-03-23T18:43:00.000-06:00

I like to keep a little project going up at the counter at my shop. My workshop area is in the back, and it's visible and all, but when people are shopping I want to be sitting up at the register. That accomplishes two things: First, it avoids giving shoppers the impression that they have to interrupt my work to purchase something. Second, it puts me in a position to keep an eye on little grubby hands that might be itching to shoplift. But I don't really like to just sit there sipping coffee and staring into space, because then that gives the impression that I'm hoping they hurry so I can get away from the cash register and do something more fun. So the nice compromise is for me to always have some little simple jewelry project or whatnot to keep myself busy while still being attentive and conversational at my post.

Today's little project? Finding something useful to do with the end pieces of chain left over from the charm bracelets I made from the chain I salvaged from the handles some purses that I made three years ago but never sold. (Can't let stuff go to waste, now, can we?) The purse bodies became smaller pouches, and the handles are becoming bracelets and earrings:

(That's patent leather accenting on the pouches, and yes, those are pretty large earrings.)

So, I was sitting up at the register making earrings while some girls shopped, and one asked about consigning some things, and in the conversation she mentioned that I looked familiar. Turns out her dad was one of my old architecture professors and she spent quite a bit of time in her childhood running around the architecture building selling Girl Scout cookies and such. She's in college now, and does pottery and sews.

I kind of hope she drags her dad in to the shop at some point, because the last time I saw him it was right after I'd bailed out of architecture as a profession and had come back to Missouri and had just started waiting tables at the OG. Needless to say, I think he was a little disappointed.

The other thing I've been doing today, other than packaging and rearranging merch and hanging out at the cash register, is going on a search for some cool music. I don't know what prompted it, but I decided the other day to start building a playlist of artists who have something to do with NIN -- have opened for them, collaborated with Trent (even just once), involve current or former members of Trent's live band... Kind of a "Six Degrees of Nine Inch Nails" playlist. Yeah, it's a really long list. So I've been going through and giving these bands a listen, and I have to say some of them really super suck.

Evidently, the number one way to make a song completely unlistenable to me is get a singer with an obnoxious voice. Granted, the definition of obnoxious is open for debate.

But I am finding some stuff I really like. Like El-P. Lovin' it.

But Ilan? Thank god you got away from the godawful Lostprophets. You're so much better off with NIN.

I know what you're thinking... Where's the fun stuff?

2009-03-23T17:24:00.001-06:00

MY "BUCKET LIST"

Make my business truly profitable.
I mean, sure, it makes me happy. And it makes some money. But ultimately I want to be able to rely on this business as my sole income.

Lose about 100 pounds.
I want to look good at my funeral.

No, seriously, I just want to eventually be a healthy weight. I don't mind the way I look now, but I think it would be nice to be able to shop for clothes without worrying that a particular shirt might make me look pregnant or complain that they don't make nice belts for fat girls.

Sing in a band.
I don't want to make it big as a singer or anything, I just think it would be a kickass hobby. Play shitty local clubs on the weekends and such for fun.

Own a house or a condo.
I'm 33 fucking years old. It's about damn time I started doing those things that adults are supposed to do, like take ownership of a piece of property and turn it into my own little dominion. I just don't want it to have a big lawn. Fuck grass.

Go back to school.
Okay, yeah, I already did that once and got a degree, but I'd like to maybe go back and study something that's useful for my life now. Like get my MBA. Or study fashion design. Or even take some metalsmithing classes. I miss school.

And I know what you're thinking... Where's the fun stuff? Travel in Europe? Meet famous people? Become famous? Jump out of a plane? Climb a mountain?

Eh.

I've already done some cool stuff in my life. Traveled in France a couple of times, sold some artwork to a museum, built houses for families in need in Appalachia, started my own business, etc... What I haven't seemed to be able to do with my life so far is settle down. I feel like it's time.

Attention Papa Roach fans: if you go up against the NINternet, you will always lose.

2009-03-22T16:59:00.000-06:00

Sure, you thought you were winning yesterday, but that's only because nobody had called this poll to our attention yet. We have better things to do than read up on the latest stupidity pouring out of the ass of the music industry, so we generally don't give a rat's ass what's new at Fuse.tv.

But now that we've noticed (and rallied the troops on nin.com, twitter, ETS, the NIN Hotline, etc...), you see that your fanbase has nothing on the sheer bordering-on-batshit-crazy devotion of the NIN fanbase. Plus, we outnumber you.

Also, the results of this poll are entirely indicative of the relevance of Papa Roach in relation to NIN. To think otherwise is just ignorant.

(The poll is still open here, so if you want to get in on the slaughter, feel free.)

Who knows who NIN will be pitted against after this, but fans of those bands should also take note. We own you.

ADDENDUM: Somebody thought to search out the Papa Roach forums where the PR fans have been happily voting and pwning other bands as this poll has played out. So I find it even funnier, now, to see them go down. NIN pwns everything. EVERYTHING.

I really do spend too much time on the internet

2009-03-22T16:05:00.000-06:00

And yes, I almost typed "ninternet" out of habit.

I was just linked to an interesting little Twitter-related site by one of my Twitter buddies. Tweeps? Twitter bitches?

Whatever.

It's TweetStats. Here's mine: http://tweetstats.com/graphs/jayetheartist#tstats

Honestly, I'm not bothered at all by the number of monthly tweets, or the fact that I twitter most during the middle of the night. The thing that sticks out to me is on my Tweet Cloud, where you find out what word I use most often in my tweets.

lolz

*sigh* I've been brainwashed.

facepalm

2009-03-22T15:31:00.001-06:00

You know, I really like the idea of Plinky, 'cause lord knows any blogs I've had in the past have suffered from lack of stuff to talk about. But some of these questions are seriously lame.

Like today's: "Engineers are getting closer to the dream of the flying car. How would you sell one of these if you were an auto dealer?"

Really?

Extremely wealthy guy walks into a dealership looking for a cool car to impress his friends with. There's fifty different models of your conventional "rolls on four wheels" car, and one that flies. And you think you're going to have to twist arms and threaten to break kneecaps to get him to spring for the flying model? Seriously?

*facepalm*

In other non-Plinky-inspired news, I've been looking around blogger for nifty blogs to subscribe to, partially for inspiration and entertainment of various varieties, and partially as a networking pursuit to drum up some interest in my own little blog.

I WANNA FEEL LOVED, PEOPLE! FOLLOW ME!!!!

/attention-whoring

My criteria are basically that it catches my fancy, looks like a blog that might survive through at least a month or two of updates before its owner loses interest and moves on, and uses Google Friend Connect so it's simple to become a follower. So far, I've found and followed the following blogs:

THE ARTIST BABES
http://artistbabes.blogspot.com/
It looks to be a nice little gathering of women who do artsy things, which is, of course, right down my alley. Plus, the pic in the newest entry (the nice detail shot of some gorgeous piece of fabric) is just awesome. They've got a good idea, too, with having several people contribute to the blog so it's less likely to get neglected when pesky real-life crap interrupts somebody's blogging groove.

TEA FOR JOY
http://teaforjoy.blogspot.com/
Slightly girlier than I usually get, but a nice mix of how-to, shopping finds, and cool links, none of which make me roll my eyes and want to barf. I believe I found this one through the "blogs of note" feature on Blogger, so she's already got over 400 followers, and my goal is partially to find blogs that aren't super popular yet. But still, there's a lot of cute stuff there.

SKRONKED
http://skronked.blogspot.com/
I'm not an avid fan of comics, but this, I believe, was one of the "blogs of note" at some point recently and I dig the drawings.

ROTTEN BANANAS
http://rottenbananasblog.blogspot.com/
Okay, anyone who knows me knows I'm really not the sort that has the free time for things like hosting dinner parties or worrying about bald spots in my lawn. In fact, if I didn't have somebody else around to take care of the lawn, I'd just cover the whole thing in gravel or pavement and be done with it. But something about this blog struck me as interesting, so I'm keepin' it on my list. I dig resourcefulness, and there's some cute ideas in there that I could actually take away -- like the drawstring laundry bags a few posts back. I just have a feeling that among all the tips and ideas that aren't useful for lives like mine, there will be some really nifty inspirational ones that I can actually use.

PHOEBE'S DAILY FEET
http://mydailyfeet.blogspot.com/
What's not to like about a blog consisting of nothing but artsy pictures of feet?

M E L . W O Y . P H O T O G R A P H Y
http://melwoyphoto.blogspot.com/
I'm an unapologetic omnivore and food mooch who rarely cooks, so the vegan cooking bits really aren't my thing, but there's just something about the blog that makes me think that this chick is pretty cool.

LEARNING TO LIVE LARGE AND SMALL
http://learningtolivelargeandsmall.blogspot.com/
A quaint little blog filled with crafting and travel and music and random musings from someone who I think is a lot like me if I were, you know, more toned down, feminine, and conventional (all of which are qualities I admire in others, so I'm not saying they're bad things).

THE PERFECT PRESCRIPTION
http://licardi.blogspot.com/
The dude that runs this must not be a man of many words, but the images that are there caught my attention, and sometimes that's all that matters.

I'd be more than happy for anyone who is actually reading this blog to send me links to blogs that might interest me, as long as there's an understanding that I just might not be interested, and there should be no resulting butthurt if I don't follow and link what you send me.

Also, I know I'm following the blogs of a few of my nin.com peeps, but haven't listed them here because I don't know how "public" they intend for those blogs to be. Let me know, guys, if you want me to help you spread the word (as if I've got a ton of readers to spread the word to. lolz).

Now, since the bottle of root beer I just opened decided to spew its contents all over my jeans despite the fact that the bottle hasn't been moved or jostled in any way for at least two hours, I'm going to wrap up this post and move on to other things. See, this is what I get for giving in and buying soda made with high-fructose corn syrup....

Anybody wanna let me borrow their credit card?

2009-03-21T14:56:00.001-06:00

My gadget wish list:

1. A Blackberry or iPhone or something similar.
I'm on the internet all the time. My life practically depends on it. And while I've got my phone all set up with unlimited internet and such, logging on to a website from my phone is like using a 10-year-old computer on a dial-up connection. It works, but it's not exactly convenient. To really be productive and organized, what I need is the ability to handle emails, keep track of a schedule, make to-do lists, keep lengthy notes, and look things up on the internet from wherever I am, without it taking five minutes for a page to load, even without pictures. Being able to log onto the NIN forums and twitter 24/7 is just a perk.

2. A new iPod.
I recently had a financial freakout, and in a scramble to get emergency cash together I ended up having pretty much no choice but to sell off several non-necessity gadgets, the most missed of which was my 30GB iPod. I don't mind admitting that I cried over its loss.

3. A new computer.
I don't need anything huge and cool and powerful, but I'm currently running my store's music and a few other necessary in-store computing needs on a 10-year-old Hewlett Packard that has, well, seen better days. Running any other program on it while iTunes is playing causes the songs to skip. It's annoying.

4. A bar code scanning system.
What I wouldn't give for the ability to just scan items at my store to ring them up and have a computer track the sales for me. That would be heaven. Of course, that would probably need to come with another new computer and a flat touch-screen monitor, too.

5. An embroidery machine.
*drools*

Anybody wanna let me borrow their credit card?

Just in case you've ever wondered, a 1996 Oldsmobile Ciera will indeed do over 90mph under the right circumstances.

2009-03-20T20:32:00.001-06:00

The question: Hybrid Prius or Escalade with gold rims?

I'm all for random indulgences, but there's no way I'd ever drive a pimped-out Escalade. All I need my car to do is get me from point A to point B in a reliable fashion, not bankrupt me with gas and maintenance costs, and hold a large volume of garbage in the passenger seat floorboard area.

Beyond that I suppose I have a few things that I consider highly useful non-necessities. This would include cruise control, because I have a tendency to get a little bit of a lead foot when driving on the highway to songs like, say, March Of The Pigs.

Just in case you've ever wondered, a 1996 Oldsmobile Ciera will indeed do over 90mph under the right circumstances.

Also, I've been living behind the times, and would love a car with a CD player at the very least, and preferably an iPod hookup. But it wouldn't be a dealbreaker.

But that's pretty much all I would ask of a car, and considering how fucking wasteful SUVs are -- and the fact that for several years now I've ranted against people owning them when they don't actually do any off-roading or such -- I'd go with something more sensible like a Prius.

Things got a lot less complicated when I gave into the truth and switched to girls.

2009-03-19T19:22:00.001-06:00

I've never been through a proper breakup.

Really.

One of two things happen at the end of relationships in my world, depending, it seems, on how stable the other person is emotionally and mentally. I'm not saying I like to date crazy unstable people, but I do seem to emit some kind of pheromone that attracts them. Something that makes insecure, needy people think that maybe I'm cool with carrying all of their emotional baggage for the rest of my life. I've gotten better at weeding them out early, but now and then they sneak under my radar.

Anyway, most of my relationships have ended rather amicably. Usually what happens is that I date somebody for a while, and then after the honeymoon period wears off we end up realizing one day that we're really just friends and that maybe we should stop pretending it's more than that.

Yes, after I've dated somebody I really can just be friends with them.

Really.

I think there's only been one time that the "hey, aren't we just fooling ourselves?" moment caught me off guard and nearly qualified as dumpage. I dated a guy starting in high school all the way until our first year of college. It was a long-distance relationship until the college portion, and being a "good Christian girl" at the time, there wasn't really any physical side to the relationship at all. In fact, since he was even more super-goody-goody than me, we didn't even kiss that I can remember.

Yeah, okay, I was lame back then. Totally lame.

Anyway, I believe it was my birthday. He gave me a gift and a card, but instead of signing the card "love, *name removed to protect the innocent*" he just signed it "your friend" or something. I don't remember now exactly, but I know it really knocked me for a loop for a bit. Had I done something to scare him off? Had he met somebody else? WHAT WAS GOING ON?!?!

I eventually got a long, handwritten response that basically said he had thought back over our relationship and decided that maybe we just weren't ever "in love" with each other, and were more like just really good friends.

I know what you're thinking, but he's not gay. I think that the problem might have been that I'M mostly gay. I mean, heck, when nearly every relationship you have with a male over the course of a decade ends in the realization that it was probably just a good friendship and not love, you've got to wonder.

So that's the worst "being dumped" story I've got.

Me dumping other people is a whole different topic.

Remember all those wackos I mentioned before? Let's see....

There was the old dude that attached himself to me when I lived in Chicago. I made the dumb mistake of having a one night stand with him. In my defense, I actually said, "I'm not interested in getting involved in a relationship or anything, but if you're okay with us just having sex tonight and leaving it at that, then let's go." He said that was fine. And then started writing poems about how god had brought me into his life and shit. He didn't leave me alone until I moved back to Missouri, and even then it took a series of increasingly hostile emails along the lines of "leave me alone, I don't want to talk to you, get a life" before he actually stopped trying to contact me.

Then there was the dude who I hooked up with before he shipped off to Iraq. Every time he came back to the states I got phone calls. I had to start screening my calls and have my sister tell him I didn't live there anymore.

Come to think of it, I think I just shouldn't have casual sex. Evidently, I'm highly addictive. I don't like it.

Things got a lot less complicated when I gave into the truth and switched to girls.

Maybe they're tired of staying at home every weekend playing World of Bunny Warcraft

2009-03-18T17:47:00.001-06:00

I'm not a big reader these days. It's not because I don't like to read. It's really just because I find more enjoyment creating things than I do appreciating other people's creations. I keep myself busy with so many things that it just doesn't leave time for things like novels.

Not reading them, at least. There's a nearly finished novel manuscript sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to finish the final edit and send it to somebody.

Anyway, most any reading I've done in the past five years or so has occurred at Barnes and Noble while either waiting in line to buy coffee or while enjoying a coffee during my breaks when I worked at the Olive Garden. Thus, I rarely had time to actually read a whole book, so mostly I'd pick up interesting looking books off the display tables and skim them for the really good parts.

Of all the books I picked up during those bookstore cafe visits, the one funny one that sticks in my mind is "The Book of Bunny Suicides: Little Fluffy Rabbits Who Just Don't Want To Live Any More."

Maybe the price of carrots has skyrocketed to the point where these bunnies are struggling too hard to make ends meet and see no other solution but to end their fluffy little lives. Maybe they're tired of staying at home every weekend playing World of Bunny Warcraft while all the cool bunnies are off procreating like.. well, like rabbits.

In any case, these bunnies are hilariously creative about ending their lives. Toasters, DVD players, rockets, blenders, weightlifters, fat people... There's seemingly nothing in the world that a bunny can't use to off itself.

Plus, they're just too adorable, even as they're preparing to crush their own skulls, saw themselves in two, or dissolve themselves in acid.

Even a fake gun will get the real cops called on your ass

2009-03-18T06:12:00.000-06:00

I've worked overnights at the convenience store for two years now, and to date have not been robbed. I've had lots of shoplifters, but no actual robberies or robbery attempts. I chalk that up to several things:

1. Police officers are in our store a lot. They get free drinks. Plus, the police department has a contract with us for car washes, so when an officer needs to run his cruiser through the wash they stop at our store. Oh, and also the main police station is, like, three blocks away.
2. One of the local hospitals uses our station as a post for their ambulance crews to cut down response times to the center part of the city. So we've got ambulance crews just hanging out most of the time.
3. We're a busy store. No halfway intelligent robber wants to be interrupted in the middle of a holdup, and you'd have to be just damn lucky to be in our store more than five minutes without somebody else showing up, even during the middle of the night.
4. I'm not dumb. People know I don't have money in the register. Regular customers see me drop money into the safe on a regular basis, and I refuse to take large bills on my shift, and when I open the drawer to make change there's rarely anything but fives and ones in there. I'm also pretty quick to call the cops on people if they're acting hinky. The locals know not to fuck with me.

So I was pretty shocked when tonight, as I was making change for a customer, I looked up from the register to see a guy pointing a gun at me.

It only took about two seconds for me to realize that it wasn't a real robber pointing a real gun at me so his real accomplice could steal beer. Instead it was a real dumbass pointing a gun-shaped novelty cigarette lighter at me so I'd know for sure that he was lacking in mental capacity.

He thought it was funny as hell.

I thought it was a prime opportunity to teach a fucker an important lesson about fucking with the wrong convenience store clerk.

Had I been by myself I'd have pushed the panic button. After all, threatening a cashier with even a fake gun will get you charged with armed robbery, and for those two seconds he had me fucking scared. But I had a trainee with me, so when the dude turned his attention away and put the "gun" back in his pocket I quietly called my trainee up to the register and took the phone into the back room to summon the cops.

Meanwhile, the "robber's" friend had gotten a case of beer and brought it to the register, at which point the "robber" grabbed it and took it out of the store before it was paid for. His friend retrieved the beer and paid for it, which I actually thought was kind of unfortunate, 'cause I'd have loved to have added shoplifting to the dude's list of offenses. It did, however, mean that the cops had that much more time to get there and intercept the drunken idiots, who took off on foot.

The officers arrived in just a few minutes -- just in time to catch the guys as they stopped in a parking lot across the street. Four cruisers, lights and sirens, the works. They had both of them cuffed and were searching them within moments.

Now THAT was funny as hell.

Unfortunately, the story didn't end in an arrest. The cop came over and asked me what I wanted him to do with the guy. He said the most he could charge him with, given that he didn't actually demand money or anything, was unlawful use of a weapon, but that the prosecuter probably wouldn't pursue it. We decided that banning him from the lot under threat of arrest for trespassing was probably the most we could feasibly do, so that's where it ended.

I hope that dude pissed himself thinking he was going to jail. And I hope his friend kicked his ass afterwords for nearly getting him arrested, too.

The good news is that the whole thing didn't scare our trainee away. I think he's a keeper.

You know, they say that smell...

2009-03-17T20:25:00.000-06:00

...is the sense that most strongly triggers memory, and I totally fucking believe it. The weather has finally turned beautiful (at least temporarily) in the Ozarks -- warm enough for short sleeves, even. I used to really love winter, but these days down here in Weird Weather Land winter is hell. I'm sick of ice storms, sick of wind and cold with no snow, sick of the snow we DO get always falling over a two-inch layer of ice that came before it...

Anyway, I've been itching for spring to get here if for no other reason than winter weather really kills my business. If it's warm and sunny outside, suddenly people get increased motivation to actually walk around after a movie or before dinner and see what's new.

I spent yesterday and today at my store since I had last night off at the convenience store. Just me, hangin' out takin' pics of merch to add to the website and otherwise wasting time with my nin.com peeps. I noticed late in the day that even though it was something like 80 degrees out, the inside of my store was almost frigid. I had all climate control turned off, but the building my store is in is built like a fucking cave. The back part is below grade, and it's surrounded on all sides by other buildings, so once it hits a temperature range it likes to stay there. 80 degree day, and I was inside wearing a sweatshirt.

So today when I opened I decided it was prime weather to prop the front door open, actually hoping to let some of the heat in. I still spent the day in a sweatshirt. I tried toughing it out in just a t-shirt (and jeans, I assure you, despite it being No Pants Tuesday), but I just couldn't take it.

It wasn't until about 5:30pm, as I was surfing through blogs looking for interesting ones to subscribe to...

(On a side note, I realize that most of the world speaks languages other than English, but seriously... Must it be that hard to find interesting blogs that I can actually read? I think 75% of the blogs I landed on using the "next blog" link in the navbar were in other languages. And 90% of the English ones were just plain boring.)

...that I experienced this weird flashback-esque reaction to the smell of the neighborhood wafting through my door. It was that "urban springtime" smell, and they should totally make car air fresheners that smell like that. It's like the world around me just morphed into something completely different. It felt like warm days used to feel when I lived in Chicago and existed in a world where windows were left open most of the year. And I suddenly felt strangely more connected to the world or something, a sudden urge to go find interesting people and do interestig things and get the hell out of my cooped up, lethargic existence for a while.

Okay, enough of me waxing vaguely poetic. I hear you rolling your eyes.

It was a super nice change after the afternoon's ticket purchasing frustrations. Like in some karmic exchange for not getting tickets today, I got springtime instead.

Hey, Live Nation?

2009-03-17T15:36:00.000-06:00

What the hell, man? I mean, I understand the scam you're running. I get it. But with the nin.com presale you're supposed to at least sell THOSE tickets on the up and up, right?

*shrugs* Guess not.

Kourt and I both logged in for the Camden presale at 3:00. We both get in, and both pull up seats. Not a problem... if we'd wanted seats. Call us silly, but we want lawn tix. We can't afford pit, so we'll sit in the back on the grass where we can have some fun with the other fans we know. And we need three tickets, so Kourt was going to buy one and I was going to buy two. Thinking that maybe your computer system would start spitting out lawn tix after the seats ran out, we emptied our carts and kept trying.

Now, here's where it gets weird. After a little while, we're on the phone (logged on from different places) talking about what we're going to do and contemplating trying to pull up three adjacent seats, and suddenly Kourt says the tickets are sold out. She's getting the "not enough available tickets to fill your request" message.

Funny, I'm looking at a pair of seats. Section 202, Row R, Seats 1 and 2 or something. So I dump my cart and go back and see if I get the sold out message.

Nope, now I pull Row R, Seats 32 and 33 or whatnot.

Kourt tries again, still nothing. I try again, now I'm on Row Q.

She keeps trying, I keep pulling tickets. Single tickets, pairs of tickets, Row P, Row Q, Row R, all different seats...

So I figure maybe she's got something in her cache or her cookies or hasn't emptied her shopping cart or something, so I tell her to try logging out and logging back in and trying again.

Still sold out for her.

I'm still getting available seats. In pairs.

By now it's 3:15.

I go upstairs to my other computer and log in under her name there, still logged in as myself on my laptop. She's about to blow a fucking gasket. I try to pull up some tickets.

Under her account, tickets are sold out. I try again and again, singles and pairs, different price levels, all sold out.

Under my account, I'm still pulling various seats in Row R.

So what's the deal, Live Nation? Kourt's not good enough for tickets? Did you tag her account to sell out early? Or am I just that special?

If money were really no object... Chi-town. Big house, lots of cats.

2009-03-17T13:21:00.001-06:00

I'd probably move back to Chicago. Get a nice brownstone on the Near North Side, open a boutique and gallery in the neighborhood, and get a bunch of cats.

I almost said that if money were really no object I'd move to Paris. But on second thought, Paris is more of a nice place to vacation than a place to relocate to, for me. I'm kinda fond of American culture in general, and I'd have to be flying back to the States all the time to see concerts and visit friends and family and such. What a pain in the ass that would be. Plus, Kourt would have to learn French (and I'd have to do some SERIOUS brushing up) and then we'd have to get a whole new social life... Too much work.

So yeah, Chi-town. Big house, lots of cats. We'd leash train them all and take them for walks through Lincoln Park and let them beat up on tiny dogs. I'd spend my afternoons in my art studio doing sketches of naked women while drinking coffee and Twittering. I'd fix up part of the house like a bar, stage and all, so that when friends want to go out and party we can just stay in and party and avoid all the stupid people.

In my spare time, I'd finally put together a band and play shows on the weekends for fun, even if we just play in my home bar with the cats for an audience. I suppose in that case it would just be me singing karaoke, but whatever.

I'd still keep my business back in MO, though, and let somebody else manage it. I'd probably fly in once a week or so to make sure things are being done correctly. Oh, and to get some cashew chicken and Andy's. I can't live without periodic doses of cashew chicken and Andy's.

Sockpuppet Douchebag Theater Presents: NIN fans bitch about NIN/JA tickets

2009-03-16T15:51:00.000-06:00

"Treeeennnntt... Why do the tickets for the NIN/JA tour have to cost so much? If I have to pay this much for my ticket, I want a bunch of flashing lights and lasers and dancing girls and my very own beer wench and for you to personally dedicate Closer to me in front of the whole arena! It doesn't matter that I'm getting to see Jane's Addiction, too, and that the ticket prices are still lower than most big shows. I'm gonna feel personally shortchanged if this show isn't at least twice as flashy as the Lights In The Sky tour! If you don't do this for me... I mean us, your loyal fans, then you suck!"

"But if I can't get a good seat before they sell out, what am I supposed to do without buying from a scalper? If I can't get close enough to the stage to be able to count your nose hairs, then I just don't want to go at all. If I can't get the exact ticket I want, I'll just have to stay home and listen to The Fragile in the dark and cry. I'd rather do that than sit with all the losers that are dumb enough to buy cheap tickets where they can't possibly get splashed by even a drop of your sweat! I need to be splashed by your sweat! It's important to me!!!!!"

"Hey, what are you guys even bitching about? At least you can afford the tickets. I don't have any money. Trent gives us everything else for free, why couldn't he make it so everyone can go to the show without paying him? I've been his absolute biggest fan for eleventy million years, and it's wrong for him to deprive me of the opportunity to see this show. IT'S HIS FAULT! DO YOU HEAR ME, TRENT? IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT!"

"Shut up, loser. I love him more. And because I love him more I need to be able to get way close so he can see me and know how big of a fan I am. And for the record, I've been his biggest fan for eleventy million and one years, so you can kiss my ass."

"You're just an elitist asshole. Just because you can afford to spend a lot of money doesn't make you better than me. I listen to NIN 24 hours a day. I tape headphones to my ears when I go to bed so I can listen in my sleep. I pick all the letters out of my Alphabits except N and I because it just means that much to me. I'm just so mad that now Trent has made it impossible for me to see the show. Doesn't he know that the economy is bad? Isn't he a multi-kajillionaire? Can't he just afford to keep giving us free stuff forever and ever? DOESN'T HE REALIZE THAT I'M SUFFERING HERE?"

"Idiot. Of course he can't do this for free. It's a big concert. He's got to get paid. But damn it, Trent, if I'm paying you then I should be able to get exactly what I want!! I PAY YOU!! I'M THE BOSS!! GIVE ME LIGHTS AND LASERS AND THE DANCING GIRLS!!!"

"I hate you all. I have box seats that I paid for. They cost a lot of money, but I'm rich, so I can afford them. And now I might have to be moved out of the way of all you stupid peons who don't make as much money as I do. Trent's a jerk for putting you ahead of me. Doesn't he know that I paid for the priviledge of flaunting my douchebaggery for everyone, and he's interfering with that? If you all want to be as cool as me, you should just get out there and make a lot of money. I'm tired of rock stars paying attention to poor people who care about their music when they should pay more attention to rich people like me who don't actually care."

"If rich bastard gets food and drinks and special seats, then I should at least get a beer wench! I want a beer wench! Wearing flashing lights and lasers! The music isn't enough!"

"If the Spiral were still around, we'd get beer wenches with lasers and meet and greets and little vials of Trent's saliva to take home with us. Bring back the Spiral, Trent! We're special and we deserve it!"

"Paying for a fucking fan club doesn't make you special. Anybody with money can do that. I carved the NIN logo into my left pinky toe with a spork. THAT makes me special! Send me a free ticket, Trent! Please!!!!"

"Did one of you just touch me? Oh, god, now I have poor people germs on me! Get away from me, all of you! This is all your fault, Trent! It's your fault poor people are touching me!"

"LASERS! LASERS! LASERS! LASERS! LASERS! LASERS! LASERS! LASERS!"

"I'M GONNA HOLD YOU PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE IF I CAN'T BE FRONT AND CENTER ON THE RAIL, TRENT! I LOVE YOU!!!!"

"MY LIFE ISN'T WORTH LIVING!!!" *sobs*

"I'm going to go spend a weekend doing really expensive rich people things. You all disgust me."

*sigh*

The only way I'd ever be featured in an issue of Sports Illustrated would be if...

2009-03-16T12:45:00.001-06:00

The question: Congratulations! You're going to be featured in the next issue of Sports Illustrated. How does your bio read?

The only way I'd ever be featured in an issue of Sports Illustrated would be if:

1. They started publishing a BBW swimsuit edition.
2. I did something stupid at a sporting event, a la Steve Bartman.
3. Procrastination was declared to be a sport.
4. Sleeping was declared to be a sport.
5. I drank an entire bottle of tequila and in my drunken stupor decided to hold the entire staff of Sports Illustrated hostage until they agreed to put me in the magazine, photoshopping my face onto cheerleader bodies to accompany the story.
6. The printer mixed up "Internet Addict Monthly" with "Sports Illustrated" and accidentally put the six-page feature article on the ins and outs of pwning n00bs on nin.com in place of a spread on the NCAA Basketball Tournament, leaving both sports fans and fangirly web geeks severely confused.
7. I followed the SI photographers from event to event, strategically placing myself in the background of every photo while wearing a red and white striped shirt so that readers could play "Where's Jaye" while skimming the articles.
8. My illustrious career as a high school cheerleader suddenly became a topic of national interest.
9. One of my friends decided it would be funny to hack into SI's computers and change the layout of the magazine to include a long feature outlining all the things I do on Superbowl Sunday instead of actually watching the game.
10. A freak zombie holocaust occurs, mysteriously leaving only really athletic people, sports fans, and me alive to rebuild human civilization once the zombies have been annihilated, in which case I'd become a global celebrity by virtue of existing as the only human on Earth who doesn't play or watch sports.

I'd rather not end up with my spleen displayed in a mason jar in some weirdo's living room, even theoretically.

2009-03-15T15:28:00.001-06:00

The question: Who would you rather be seated next to on a daylong bus trip: a talkative person with a really irritating voice, or a quiet person who keeps staring at you?

This one's a toughie.

A lot depends on how good a conversation the irritating talker is capable of. I can get past an irritating voice if there's at least some intelligence behind it.

Also, a lot depends on the definition of "irritating." Are we talking squeaky? Too slow? Low talker? ('Cause if it's a low talker, I'm out. Too hard to carry on a conversation if you can't hear the other side, and I don't think talking to somebody should involve that much work.) Weird laugh? Stutter? Voice like a carton-a-day smoker? I mean, "irritating" can mean a lot of things.

On the other hand, "staring" can mean a lot of things, too. I'm assuming we mean that creepy kind of "I'd like to watch you in the shower" or "I'm thinking about chopping you into tiny pieces and storing the bits in my freezer after I rape your dead body" kind of stare and not the "I'm too shy to say anything, but I find you totally captivating" or "hey, you've got a booger hanging out of your nose" kind of stare.

So, assuming that we're pitting "squeaky voice but intelligent convo" against "probably a serial killer plotting my demise," I'll definitely go with the irritating talker.

I'd rather not end up with my spleen displayed in a mason jar in some weirdo's living room, even theoretically.

Yet more new stuff for sale

2009-03-14T15:06:00.001-06:00

Leather jewelry!! Prices range from $4 to $8. As always, the newest additions to the web catalog can be found here.

Ticket brokers can go fuck themselves

2009-03-14T12:45:00.000-06:00

And Trent Reznor agrees:

"Thanks to those of you pointing out the obscene ticket reseller prices. We are actively trying to combat these parasites."

"I will post more on ticket-resellers in a bit, I'm trying to take the day off. In the meantime, do your part - DON'T BUY TICKETS FROM THEM!"

Considering some of them were selling NINJA tickets before they were even available, it cannot be considered in any way ethical to do what these parasites do.

Thank god for artists like Trent who understand that the good seats should be in the hands of fans and sold at face value, not sold to ticket brokers who will turn around and assrape fans with obscene prices.

For what it's worth, Kourt and I have ninth row seats for the KC show, purchased through the nin.com presale for the regular ticket price. And that's how it should be.

Imagine a mouth full of finely ground coffee beans.

2009-03-14T10:06:00.001-06:00

I used to work at an Italian restaurant as a server and bartender. You know the one. Where when you're there, you're supposedly family?

I don't know what they're talking about, 'cause I don't generally bring food to members of my family, and there's no way in hell I'd let them treat me the way I had to let customers treat me there.

Anyway, part of bartending there involves operating the cappuccino machine. It's one of those automatic ones that costs as much as a small car, where you just put the cup underneath the spout and push a button for whatever drink you want, and it grinds the coffee beans, steams the milk, etc, etc, and dispenses the drink. When it's done, the tamped-down patty of ground coffee gets dumped into this little receptacle on the side. They're tamped down pretty hard inside that machine, so the patties tend to stay intact.

One of our managers used to love to come to the bar on slow nights and dig out a couple of coffee patties, arrange them nicely on a plate, and top them with chocolate sauce and whipped cream, then take them to new members of the kitchen crew.

Imagine a mouth full of finely ground coffee beans.

Worked every time, too.

Misty watercolor memories of the imaginary buildings I designed

2009-03-13T23:34:00.000-06:00

I've been scanning and uploading all the many, many pictures I've been keeping in boxes and assorted albums from earlier portions of my life. Somebody seriously needed to pry the fucking camera out of my fingers in college. I'm surprised I didn't bankrupt myself buying film.

Yes, I went to college before people had digital cameras, kids. In fact, we didn't take laptops to class (we didn't have them), nobody I knew carried a cell phone, and most of us didn't have a computer in our dorm rooms. We didn't have wireless anything. I remember switching from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. In fact, I took a class during my freshman year where we learned to use the internet!

But I digress.

Anyway, I've had hundreds and hundreds -- probably a couple thousand, but I haven't counted -- of photos sitting around in storage, and I recently decided to accept the reality that I'm never, ever going to get around to putting them all in proper albums. So I'm storing them digitally, so at least they're indexed and accessible.

And the most recent pile of pics I scanned into my photobucket account were pics I took of my architecture school projects through the years. A few are linked above. I might be kind of biased, but I think I did some pretty cool shit.

Random shit that comes to mind because I've had too much Laffy Taffy

2009-03-13T22:39:00.000-06:00

1. Did you know that ass peanut butter grows on trees? In jars, even. I just made that up.

2. *farts*

3. My French bimbo got a makeover!

4. YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP!

5. SOMEBODY TAKE THIS LAFFY TAFFY AWAY FROM ME!

More new items on the website!!!1!!!!!!!eleventyone!!1

2009-03-13T14:33:00.000-06:00

Copper tie chains by Dad's Designs

New items can be found on fashionedbyjaye.com here.

Breakup, schmeakup...

2009-03-13T11:40:00.001-06:00

Three songs to help you get through a breakup:

Somewhat Damaged by Nine Inch Nails

So, I probably have a little bit of a different approach to post-breakup recovery than most. Forget sappy, sad, stupid songs. I'd want all the raging, screaming anger I could pack into one song.

"How could I ever think it's funny how everything you swore would never change is different now, like you said, you and me, make it through, didn't quite, fell apart, WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU?"

Love Is Not Enough by Nine Inch Nails

"I've gone all this fucking way to wind up back at the start..."

Bye, Bye, Bye by 'NSync

Really? This should need an explanation?

The convenience stores, they are a-changin'

2009-03-13T05:08:00.000-06:00

Our chain bought out another convenience store chain recently, and the big transition is about to take place. About a week ago my manager asked if I'd be willing to shadow some of the new stores' employees as a trainer to help the transition, and I agreed. No sense turning down an opportunity to kiss a little corporate ass, right? Besides, training is fucking easy. I get to stand around and tell the newbs when they're doing something wrong. Otherwise, I pretty much don't have to lift a finger.

Well, today I arrived for my shift to find the schedule for the training, and where I'll be going. A couple days out in Rogersville next week, and then two days at the truck stop, a Springfield store after that. And then the last week of the month? Joplin.

*record scratching sound*

Wait, JOPLIN? As in an-hour's-drive-away Joplin?

At first I was kind of pissed. I really wasn't counting on a two-hour round trip commute to help with this fucking training shit.

But then I read the info a little closer. They're putting me up in a hotel and giving me a $25/day meal allowance.

SCORE!

I've been saying for a while now that I'd kill to get a night at a hotel with nothing to do. Like a one-day mini vacation. And sure, the whole thing involves two overnight shifts of training, but I hear the hotel is near an Olive Garden and even if I have a roommate, they'll likely be working a different shift than me. Long night in a nice hotel bed, with free time to tool around on the computer? Sounds like a nice vacation to me.

Gave up

2009-03-12T20:05:00.001-06:00

Got one thing off my plate today, and passed the presidency of the sorority alumnae association off to somebody else. I've been doing a crap job at it for at least the past year, despite any nice words anyone has to say to try and smooth over that obvious fact. It all started off pretty well, agendas and communication and all. But I've obviously got more on my plate now than I can handle, and some things have got to go.

I didn't plan to take on the presidency to begin with, but agreed to it thinking that it really wasn't going to take up that much of my time. And to be honest, it's not that it would have taken that much time to do a good job. I like to say that I just don't have time for everything, but in reality I think the problem isn't dwindling time as much as it's dwindling capacity to keep everything straight in my head.

It used to make me feel really good to have a lot of things going on in my life at once, lots of things to juggle. But I'm increasingly realizing that there's a limit to that, and priorities have to be set. The store has to be my main priority, and it's hard enough to keep all the pieces of that in the air, much less all the other things I've taken on in addition.

So now it feels really good to pass that off to somebody else. It's not like I'm abandoning the alumnae stuff altogether. I just need a little bit more mind space and, well, a little less guilt. Every time a meeting rolled around and I found myself unprepared yet again, I felt really bad about it. Self-induced guilt is not conducive to productivity at all.

I Wanna Go Back...

2009-03-12T19:32:00.001-06:00

The question: Paul Simon was going to Graceland, Toto blessed the rains down in Africa – what place would you write a song about?

I lived in Chicago for three glorious years after I got out of college. I'd only been there once, and that was only for a weekend, but for some reason after that I was completely in love. Before that, I'd had this idea that I'd stay in Missouri after graduation and set up a nice quiet faux-suburban existence, but that one weekend convinced me that I really belonged in the city.

So after graduation, I moved. By myself. I didn't know anyone there, didn't know my way around, had no idea what I was getting myself into. And it was fucking fabulous! Had a tiny little shoebox apartment by Lincoln Park, got me a job out by O'Hare and commuted on the train everyday...

God, I miss it. Even thought it damn near bankrupted me to live there and I ended up getting dragged back to Missouri and into my parents' house under duress after I fucked my life up, it was the best time of my life. I feel like I turned into the person I am today while I was there. That's where I finally took the first few steps towards making a life as an artist. That's where I sorted out a lot of stuff in my head about who I was and what I wanted in life.

Actually, I did write a song about it a long time ago. Not so much about Chicago itself, but just my desire to go back to it. To go back to the way my life was there.

But I'm not ready to share it with the world at large just yet.

I went back for a visit a few years ago, and I was actually kind of scared to go back. I was afraid to go back and find that it didn't feel the same, that things had changed while I was gone and that it would kind of ruin the memory. Either that, or it would be exactly the same and it would make it hard for me to come back home and be happy with the way things had turned out. Because by that point I'd made peace with the fact that I'd fucked up and that even though I didn't like having to leave, that the life I'd built back in Missouri was good in its own way.

I was pleasantly surprised. Most everything was just how I remembered. It felt the same. I still felt connected to the city somehow, like we belonged together. But it wasn't a depressing experience. It was like this little reminder that there wasn't a time limit on things -- that if I someday manage to move back to Chicago it'll still feel the same, but that I don't have to feel rushed to do so. It's not the right time to go back right now, and that's fine. The city will wait for me.

And maybe someday soon I'll get a chance to play with my songwriting again. That's something I started in Chicago, too. It's been on the back burner for quite a while now. But when I get a chance to get back to it, maybe I'll share.

Introducing My Bimbos!

2009-03-11T21:27:00.000-06:00

Kourtnie got me totally hooked on raising virtual Bimbos online. It sounds completely stupid, but there are two sites where you sign up for a "bimbo" that you then have to turn into a, well, really accomplished bimbo. She has to get a job and a boyfriend and an apartment, and then buy clothes, win challenges, regulate her weight, get plastic surgery, etc, etc, to level up.

The original site is all in French, but it's pretty easy to figure out, even if you have to rely on an online translator. (Hey, at least I'm using my French minor for something, right?) It's at www.ma-bimbo.com, and I think it's way better than its newer English knockoff. Less glitches, better clothes, better games, etc.

This is my French bimbo, CrazySheila. She's on Level 20. I just leveled her up today. It'll take me another month or more to reach Level 21 -- she needs to get about 50,000 more Bimbo Attitude points, and she only gets 1,320 of them a day from her boyfriend and apartment. But that's fine -- I need time to get money together for the dress she'll need to reach one of the next few levels, and it costs 20,000 Bimbo dollars.

I've had my French bimbo way longer than my English bimbo. Honestly, I like the look of the French ones better, anyway. When I first signed up on the English site, it was basically a mirror of the French one, but I guess copyright and such got in the way and they had to completely revamp it. So the English bimbos got a complete overhaul, and they're far more cartoony now. Cute in their own way, but not as sophisticated looking. The English site is at www.missbimbo.com.

This is my English bimbo, conveniently also named CrazySheila. (They're named after a song by Neurosonic, by the way. If you haven't heard of Neurosonic, I strongly suggest checking them out.)

She's only on Level 18, which she'll be on for a very long time. She's training to become a journalist, which will take 16 more days of training. She also needs about 50,000 more Bimbo Attitude points, but she only gets 990 points a day, so it'll probably be another two months before she levels up. But that's okay, since it'll give me time to get the money to buy the 17,000 Bimbo dollars' worth of items she needs to put together a really dumb looking outfit for the next level.

Yeah, I know all of this sounds too dumb to be fun, but it's surprisingly entertaining, and surprisingly not time-consuming. In fact, you can't really spend more than ten minutes or so a day on it before you run out of things to do with your bimbo.

If you're already playing on either site, feel free to add me as a friend.

More new merch!

2009-03-11T14:12:00.000-06:00

Reversible tote purse made out of old upholstery samples. Find it here.

Tealight holders decorated with poly clay and fun wire, found here.

Several designs of placemats here, here, here, and here.

Mind Fuck Wednesday

2009-03-11T09:14:00.000-06:00

Of course I can spell Wednesday. *facepalm*

So, today (in the world of nin.comers on Twitter) has been declared #mindfuckwednesday. Evidently it started with the mention of an old typo. My dear girlfriend changed her username to Tnert_Ronzer. Then I became Tront_Razzle. Now everyone's jumped on board.

As long as we don't change avatars, this'll be fun.

Still not quite as cool as #nopantstuesday, though.

Oh, god... they've started changing avis...

(image courtesy of Tront_Razzle)

Fun times....

2009-03-11T09:07:00.001-06:00

The question: If you were a member of a Native American tribe that used names like 'Dances With Wolves,' what would your name be?

Feeds The Trolls.

My peeps at nin.com know what I'm talkin' 'bout. Aw, yeah....

Fun times....

More evening bags!

2009-03-10T16:53:00.000-06:00

More clutches added to fashionedbyjaye.com!

This time they're gold brocade and gold lame, perfect for special occasions. And they're $10 each. One of a kind and handmade with love!

Find the listings here and here.

New items added to fashionedbyjaye.com!

2009-03-10T15:00:00.000-06:00

Evening clutch bags with wrist straps

Find them here and here.

$6.00 each, plus shipping if applicable.

Exactly what is the point of this?

2009-03-10T07:40:00.001-06:00

Glad you asked!!

I figure it might be a cool idea to add yet another useless web destination to the long list of places I exploit to mostly waste my time. This time, however, the goal is to make a clearinghouse of sorts for everything else I do online.

So when I add photos to my photobucket account, I'll tell all about it here.

And when I put something up for sale on my fashionedbyjaye.com site, I'll post it.

And if I add a video to my MySpace or YouTube account, this blog will get a new post to tell you all about it.

New art on deviantart? Sure!

Something hillariously funny on nin.com? Absolutely.

New flair on Facebook? No, probably not that one. I'd be blogging every ten minutes. Seriously, people, I've only got so much space for flair!!!!!!!!!

You get the point.

Oh, and also I've signed up for a nifty-ish thing called Plinky, which poses a prompt every day to make it easy to generate blog content. Kind of.

Shark versus bear? Please...

I have heard that Nad's makes a tasty snack spread on some wheat toast.

2009-03-10T07:20:00.001-06:00

As tempted as I sometimes am to purchase things from the likes of Vince -- whose nuts I'm sure I would love -- I always wait until the items show up on the shelves of Walgreens before taking the plunge. I've certainly spent enough wee hours of the morning enduring endless infomercials simply because there was nothing else on TV at the time. To be honest, those Magic Bullets look amazing.

My guess is that they fall apart after two omelets.

But I digress.

I did once invest in some Nad's. I saw it at Walgreen's and thought, "Hey, not having to deal with leg hair more than once a month would be awesome!" So I bought some. Sure, it works. The only problem is that I forgot something about myself as I was lost in my "as seen on TV" euphoria. (Brace yourself for some TMI...) I don't bare my legs. They're white as the driven snow, and do not respond positively to sunlight. Thus, I already don't worry about my leg hair more than once a month. Total waste of money.

I never tested the theory, but I have heard that Nad's makes a tasty snack spread on some wheat toast.

I also own a Spin Spa. Given that I usually only have five or ten minutes for my entire shower routine, I haven't often taken the time to prepare the pumice attachment and exfoliate my feet, or put soap in the scrubbie attachment to exfoliate elsewhere. But I knock it off it's little hook almost every day. I guess that's how it reminds me that it's there.

Remember those storage bags you could put your clothes in, zip shut, and squeeze the air out of to compress and vacuum-seal your belongings? Yep, got those, too. I saw that at some point they made a variety that you actually hooked your vacuum up to, and I hope they worked better that way, because to matter how hard I tried to emulate the simple "press and roll" method of getting the air out of the enormous ziploc baggie, it never quite got things squished down to nothing the way they did in the commercials. Smaller, sure. Not microscopically thin. And if you can't make a wool sweater flatten to a thickness less than 1/4", what's the point?

Those suction hooks where you just flip the hinged hook part down and they're magically stuck in place? Got 'em.

And those magic closet organizers that hold a metric crap ton of hangers on little hinged plastic arms? Got those, too.

The hooks work great. The closet thingies less so.

However, despite the lackluster track record of infomercial products, I'd still be absolutely willing to shell out however much it costs to get one of those Tassimo coffee machines. Those look like heaven.

Shark wins, by the way.

2009-03-09T19:50:00.001-06:00

Seriously? I sign up for Plinky hoping to get epic inspiration to spawn epic blog posts, and I get bear versus shark?

*facepalm*

I guess I'll go with shark, only because the question reminded me of a discussion we had at a family lunch a few weeks back. It's tradition in our family to get Chinese takeout on Saturdays and eat over at Mom and Dad's house with whatever siblings are available to attend. My younger brother is usually there, and is always full of stories and opinions to share. And I don't say that in the bad, eye-rolling sense. He's a fucking riot.

I don't remember how we got on the subject. Hell, it's the way of our people to flit randomly from topic to topic at gatherings, sometimes tackling two or three at once. It's how we roll. But somehow we got to talking about horror films, and my brother went off on a rant about how horrible Italian horror flicks really are.

Anyway, he starts talking about zoom lenses and one particular director who, in one film, shows what it would be like for a zombie to fight a zombie. And then, to top that, what it would be like for a zombie to fight a shark.

According to him, once you've seen it, you'll realize you don't care. Now, I haven't seen these fights, but considering we're talking about the slow, lumbering variety of zombies, I can only imagine how lacking in action those fights must be.

Oh, and in shark vs. zombie? Shark wins, by the way.

It was way funnier the way he told it, but I unfortunately didn't get that on video to show everyone. Wish I had.

But back to the question: If you want to get all technical, the only way there could actually be a fight between a bear and a shark is for the fight to be in water. If it were out of water, there wouldn't be a fight as much as a bear mauling a shark as it flopped around helplessly on the shore. And in water, shark definitely has the upper hand over bear.

But really, shark vs. bear? Who the hell thinks up these questions, anyway?

Is there anything more disturbing...

2009-02-25T08:57:00.000-06:00

...than finding out that your mother has a Facebook page?

If she ever gets a MySpace, I'm fleeing the country.

I HAVE THE POWER!

2009-02-25T07:57:00.000-06:00

As if I don't spend enough time online, now I've been given the ability to waste time on the hnterwebs vha cell phone without worrying about the extra charges on the bill. *evil laugh* Now you'll never be rid of me! Except when I'm asleep.

A year of mostly fail

2008-12-16T08:58:00.000-06:00

So, at some point early this year I made a list of things I wanted to accomplish during 2008. Don't know why I felt compelled to do so, since I suppose chances were slim that a significant portion of it would actually get done. But since somebody on the nin.com boards started a thread on New Year's Resolutions (I think the best one so far was 1260x1080 lolz), it got me thinking about this list and how I kind of forgot about it.

Let's see how I did:

I want to get at least one more tattoo, as I went all the way through 2007 without getting inked.

Fail. But that's probably for the better, as I haven't had the dough to be doing things like that. Plus, when we did spend extra money it was for stuff like NIN shows that were more satisfying. And it's not like I've really had anything specific in mind for a tattoo until recently. I do want Kourt and I to get matching tats comemorating Tambourine Incident 2008.

I want to get 5 stars on all the songs on Expert on Guitar Hero II and III.

Fail. Heck, I've barely gotten the chance to play. We just got Rock Band, so these days when I have gotten a chance to play video games, I've been drumming instead of playing guitar. Someday I'll want to get back to Guitar Hero. Someday.

I want to at least be able to drop down to only working three nights a week at the Kum & Go.

I'm down to four, so that's only a partial fail. I certainly couldn't afford to drop to three at this point. Heck, I really need to be working a full five nights for my budget's sake, but we're dealing with it. When I work five nights, I get overtime, and our district manager doesn't like that. So I'm stuck with four for now.

I want to get the house really clean and really organized and have it stay that way for at least a whole month.

EPIC FUCKING FAIL! It might be marginally possible to get the house really clean by New Year's, although I'm not holding my breath on that. It's just so discouraging.

I want to actually see an entire Neurosonic show, instead of just the first two songs before having to rush back to work. And if that's the only concert I get to see in all of 2008, I'll be just fine with that.

Finally, an EPIC FUCKING WIN! We did see Neurosonic, and it was epic and awesome (even though I was afraid for a full week afterwords that I might have accidentally given the band the flu) and we got sweaty rock star hugs. But, of course, it didn't end there! We saw LP, which was epic in ways that can't all be classified as good. And then, of course, the two NIN shows, which were epic in ways that nothing else can ever come close to, especially since we're looking into a not-so-distant future where there won't be any NIN tours to see.

I want to get over 1000 friends on my store page!

Not quite total fail. I'm getting closer.

I'd love to find the time and proper frame of mind to finally finish that damn novel and see if I can't get up the guts to send it to an agent or publisher.

More fail. I just haven't had the time.

I want to be able to buy myself and Kourt something really great for our birthdays and Christmas, without having to agonize over how much money I DON'T have to spend.

Sigh. Fail. Although for Kourt's birthday we did see both LP and NIN -- but those weren't really on my dime, so...

I'd like to have the time and clean kitchen to actually cook a meal or two from scratch.

HA!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!!

I want to go to Silver Dollar City at least once this summer.

Nope.

It would be great to not have to stay at work two hours later just to take another damn "random" drug test with zero notice (which is why I'm still up at this hour today. GRR! I hate peeing in cups.)

I think I had two additional random drug tests this year, but after throwing a royal hissy fit I've gotten my boss to give me at least enough warning that I'm not stuck screwing up an entire day's schedule because of a stupid ten minute drug test.

And I really want to get through 2008 without any major weather disasters, family crises, emergency vet or doctor visits, floods in my store, or occasions where I might be compelled to call some pathetic tech- or customer-support person rude names out of sheer frustration.

Hm. Maybe win? We did have that tornado, but it didn't really have a significant effect on my life other than to give me a cool story to tell. Otherwise, things have been pretty smooth.

So, for 2009? See, here's the problem with resolutions or goals or whatnot: All that stuff I listed up there? Here we are at the end of the year, and there's a lot of that list that I just don't even care about anymore. My only really big concern for 2009 right now is my store -- nine months left on the lease and I've got to figure out where to go from there. If it's not a lot more profitable by then, I'm going to need to find a way to really start reducing my overhead costs. Like finding a smaller building with less rent to occupy.

I guess to sum up my resolution for 2009: Get money, get paid.

NIN, take 2!

2008-11-22T08:59:00.000-06:00

I believe in the blog I wrote about the NIN show in August, I expressed a fervent desire to be in the pit instead of in seats for the next one. So, if the curiosity has been killing you, we did indeed get presale GA tix for the show last night in Columbia. Also, while I have decided that I am in no way too old to be in the pit, I am really out of shape for it. My legs are killing me already.

Anyway, a probably overly long recap of the day:

We found out a few months ago, after we got our tickets, that one of our friends was also a NIN fan and wanted to ride up with us if she got a ticket. Which was fine with us, except the presale was already sold out and she'd have to be in a different line and everything, and we knew there'd be little chance of staying together once we got to the arena. But with all of that understood, she got her ticket and wanted to go anyway.

I decided that if we were going to do this, we were going to do it right, and that meant being right down on the rail. So we left town at 6am with plans (and an arsenal of cold weather gear) to wait outside in the freezing cold all day like real die-hard fans. I was half afraid that we'd get there and find a whole line already waiting, and half afraid we'd get there and have nobody else show up until hours later. Reality was a bit more on the side of the latter. When we arrived, there was little sign of an impending concert besides some security barriers outside and a couple of empty chairs that looked to be waiting for the first two people in line to return. We went to the box office area in the lobby, and then spotted about four people already camped out down at the other end. Kourt was worried that we were going to end up in the wrong place or miss something, so we asked them where we were supposed to be, and they said that the presale line was around the corner, but that we could wait in the main lobby for the time being.

Over the next hour or two, a handful more fans trickled in, and we started to actually socialize with each other. We played a few rounds of Uno and Bullshit, joked around with each other, and had a pretty good time. One girl remained passed out totally asleep in her sleeping bag for the entire morning, snoring even, in the midst of all our noise and her cell phone ringing off the hook.

All through the morning, one of the staff at the arena would pop in periodically to tell us what the plan was for lining up and such the rest of the day, and he asked how many of us were presale and how many of us had just regular tickets. When our friend Lauren said she just had a regular ticket, another guy who was waiting with us said he had an extra presale ticket with nobody to give it to, and that he'd let her take it so the three of us wouldn't get split up.

I just have to say for the millionth time now really awesome NIN fans are.

So yeah, they actually let us wait inside the lobby instead of out in the cold until about 2pm, when they moved us down to the basketball office entrance and, again, let us line up and wait inside that little lobby area. Of course, by that time comatose girl had woken up, and it became quite clear that we all liked her a lot better when she was asleep. Turns out she's one of these superfans who, somehow, has the means and time to go to half the shows on the tour, has all sorts of (probably exaggerated) stories about meeting various band and crew members, knows what hotels the band is going to stay in, has Trent's autograph tattooed on her back, etc, etc. Couldn't shut her mouth to save her life. Also couldn't put her cell phone down for more than ten minutes. Oh, and also hadn't showered in at least a day.

Anyway, we waited around in the little lobby for several more hours as the fans trickled in. We met some really cool people in line, including some that I know from the nin.com forums, and we all had a really good time talking and sharing snacks and playing the occasional card game. We talked a bit, even, about what we'd do if one of us caught Trent's tambourine, and decided it would be cool to pull it apart and take the little cymbal pieces out and let everyone have one, because they'd make cool necklaces.

Around 5pm the line started to finally get pretty long, and we prepared to get our tickets and get down to our spots on the floor. That process didn't quite go as smoothly as it could have, partly because the staff at that part of the process had a median age of around 70, and seemed to have very little clue what was going on. But the NIN crew got things under control and made sure we got our tickets, got through security, lined up again, and got taken down to the floor without the line order getting messed up and people mauling each other.

When we finally reached the rail, Kourt and Lauren and I were just off front center, slightly to Robin's side. We chatted a bit with the security guy in front of us, who was really cool.

Annoying girl got slightly more annoying once we hit the floor. A friend of hers, who had just arrived prior to us being let down onto the floor, made her way to the front. They talked a bit, and Miss Superfan goes into this lecture to her friend about not letting people push their way to the rail, all the while making room for this girl to do just that.

It was a bit of a blessing in disguise, though, since it meant Kourt had a one-person buffer between her and the other chick.

The opening act was a Japanese band called Boris. They're okay. I honestly couldn't believe that anything that loud could actually lull me to sleep. Yet it can. No thirty minute long strobe light solos this time, just a ten minute feedback solo, during which time the security staff gave several people earplugs.

The NIN show, however, was beyond amazing. There was one small technical glitch before Me, I'm Not, but it was quickly resolved without Trent resorting to smashing anything, and everything else seemed to go off without a hitch. The setlist was similar to last time:

999,000/1,000,000, Letting You, Discipline, March of the Pigs...

I really expected the pit to get really brutal during MOTP. There was a lot more crushing going on and people were definitely jumping around behind us -- not like we weren't jumping too -- but it wasn't anywhere near the brutality we experienced at LP this summer. Granted, being on the rail is a lot easier than being back in the crowd with nothing to hold on to, but still...

...Head Down...

We knew Trent would be throwing the tambourine during Head Down, and he lobbed it high and hard enough that it came down a few rows behind us. One guy managed to catch it, and the douchebag behind me tried to grab it out of his hand. There was a little bit of a scuffle, but there were enough of us around trying to get the second guy to back off and not be an asshole that he finally wised up and let go. Yay for fairness!

...The Frail, The Wretched...

One of the guys near us had a set list before the show because his mom was part of the arena event staff and brought it out to him, so we already knew we'd be getting The Wretched after The Frail. I'm almost a little sad that I knew what was coming, because it took the suspense out of things. Still, though, I was super excited to finally get to see ALL of the Wretched without being pulled aside and chewed out for shooting videos. In fact, the security guys were actually going out of their way to move out of the way so we could shoot pics and video unobstructed.

...Closer...

Trent's got some cool new visuals to go with Closer this time around, and he actually sang as part of the chorus of The Only Time instead of just using the breakdown in the middle.

...Gave Up, Me, I'm Not...

Like I said, there was some little technical glitch before the song started. Trent was actually kind of funny about it. I think we got some video. Once they got everything working, the song was great.

...The Great Destroyer, 5 Ghosts I, 17 Ghosts II, 19 Ghosts III, Ghosts Piggy, Pinion/Wish, Terrible Lie, Survivalism...

They SO should have had the cameras on our part of the rail. We were going nuts. The girls who were on the screens were just standing there being dorks. FAIL.

...31 Ghosts IV, Only...

It's so much cooler to watch the effects on that from the floor than it was from the seats, as cool as the view from the seats was. In fact, I think that was true for the whole show.

...The Hand That Feeds...

I was super happy that he didn't skip it this time like he did in St. Louis. Thankfully he's stopped having to do the whole "picture of George Bush morphing into a pic of McCain" visual to go along with it. It's fine on its own.

...Head Like a Hole. And then for the encore: Echoplex...

After which Trent gave his customary band introduction and speech. We just got a short couple of sentences in St. Louis, but he was kind of talkative tonight. He asked where he was, because he said it was the part of the tour where they just get off a bus, go into the arena, do the show, and get back on the bus again. He asked if there was anything cool to do in the area and if it was a cool place to live (and got mixed responses) and said he grew up in a place where there was nothing to do. Then he introduced the band, and made some joke about how he'd called Justin the wrong name at the beginning of the tour, calling him Jeordie White. Then some guy held up his iPhone with a scrolling request for Trent to play The Big Come Down, and Trent told the guy that if he downloaded the iPhone update he could get the words to scroll faster so he wouldn't be wasting everyone's time. And then finally he told everyone to go get The Slip for free at their website, and to get every other album they'd ever done for free from everyone else's websites, because he doesn't give a fuck anymore.

...The Good Soldier...

Here's where it takes a little turn for the worse. At the end of The Good Soldier, Trent had another tambourine to toss. He'd looked our way a few times during the song, and when it came time to throw it he lobbed it our direction. The problem was that the lights cut out just as it came into reach, so nobody could see well enough to grab it and it fell inside the rail in front of where we were standing. We'd already joked with the security guard about how if a tambourine fell down inside the rail he should give it to us, but when he picked it up and the lights came on again the annoying chick screamed and reached for it. She's taller and louder than us, and he handed it to her. We protested, pointing out that it landed in front of us and that she not only already had an autographed tambourine from another show, but she also was going to another handful of shows on this tour. The guy apologized and said he didn't know that. Kourt tried to reason with the chick, but she wouldn't give it up. So at that point we figured there was no point in putting on a nice face to her like we'd been doing all day for the sake of peace in the line, and got hateful. Kourt pointed out that it's really no surprise she goes to all these shows alone, and as we were leaving I made a point of stopping to tell her that every time she'd left the lobby during the day, everyone else had made fun of her. Not that it helped, and it certainly wasn't mature, but the bitch needs a fucking reality check. Nobody likes her. The NIN staff obviously barely tolerates her -- you can tell by the looks on their faces when she talks to them. She only thinks she's special and isn't a "stalker." I'm sorry, having a list of all the hotels the band will be staying at officially qualifies you as a stalker.

...Hurt, In This Twilight.

Again, I cried a little at the end. Maybe it was exaccerbated by the fact that I was pissed off about the tambourine. I don't know. It's hard not to tear up, though, when he's singing Hurt just ten feet away from you.

So, after the show, we planned to go grab some dinner with a friend we met in line from the nin.com forums, but we couldn't find a place close and she didn't want to drive too far out of the city because she had a hotel room to get back to. So the three of us ate dinner in Jeff City. We were starving and exhausted by that point. The drive home was harder than we thought, since we were all not only tired from being awake something like 20 hours, but also from the exertion of being in the pit. But we made it safely home with no major catastrophes, and only one minor one -- I accidentally sat on my purse while we were playing cards and put a dent in our digital camera. It still works fine. Just now it's got a NIN concert battle wound. Sort of.

We got a crap ton of good video clips this time. I'm sure Kourt will be uploading them soon.

I hope they tour again in the States next year sometime. I wanna go again!!!

All over the place...

2008-09-08T09:00:00.000-05:00

For some reason I feel like blogging. Don't know exactly why, as my thoughts are really pretty scattered right now. I can't even decide if I'm in a good mood or not. I'm not in a particularly bad mood -- just vaguely apprehensive or stressed about something I can't put my finger on. It probably has to do with money. It always has to do with money.

On the mostly good side, today is the presale for the NIN show in Columbia. Totally pumped about the show. Totally wishing the presale wasn't until next week or the week after. But whatever, I guess. Can't argue with it. But the amount we have to spend to get the tickets (while not the most we've ever spent on that sort of thing) is an amount we probably shouldn't be spending. But it's pretty much buy now or not go, so...

I'm getting into another phase of being totally addicted to internet time-wasters of various levels of stupidity. I'm pretty good about only checking stuff inbetween doing more important things, but I still have a certain amount of guilt over it. First it was Mobsters, and then I got a couple of bimbos to take care of (one on the French site and one on the British site), and then it was the new nin.com forums (nothing says time waster like spending time on a forum with a bunch of other geeks, debating which is the best track off of each NIN album or laughing at badly photoshopped pics of Trent or trying to figure out if NIN fans generally fit into certain Myers-Briggs personality profiles...), and yesterday I signed up for a deviantart account. Yeah, okay, that last one isn't really a waste of time, but I'm sure it will take up plenty of it.

At least we're past the exhausting month of August, where Kourt and I tried way too hard to pretend we had an active social life. I don't know what we were thinking. Probably that we didn't really need sleep, which is totally false. Really very totally false. Heck, we went to a little informal get-together to celebrate Kourt's b-day and another friend's b-day, and I was so tired I kept dozing off. How sad is that?

I guess that's what's good about keeping one's social life centered on the internet. You can interact when you want to, and then turn the computer off and do all those other things you have to do in your life without interruption or disruption. And if you doze off in your chair while in a chat room, you don't have to worry about somebody writing on your face with a sharpie.

Not that anyone did that, but I heard that the idea was discussed.

Anyway, I suppose I should stop aimlessly blogging and actually get some sleep. My to-do list really isn't getting any shorter.

Not as exciting as NIN, but probably more important... I’m getting locked up!!

2008-08-25T09:00:00.000-05:00

Seems by opening my own business, I've become one of those members of the community who gets called upon to participate in charity-type things. Specifically, I'm participating in tomorrows "Lock-Up" event for the MDA. You know, Jerry's Kids. The telethon and all.

So, yeah. I'm going to go to Bass Pro tomorrow and put on the convict stripes and sit in front of a telephone for an hour trying to raise money. Both the MDA and I would prefer, though, if I showed up with some of my bail already raised.

Okay, yeah, it's short notice. See, I only got the necessary materials maybe a week ago, and then NIN kind of intervened, so....

Anyway, even if you dear friends of mine could just find it in your heart to give five bucks, that would be AWESOME! And there's two easy ways to help out:

1. Go to https://www.joinmda.org/springfieldmo2008/artist and donate via the MDA's secure donation page just for me. There's an option at the bottom of the suggested donation amounts to just give the amount you want, so don't freak out when you see the amounts they suggest.

2. If you're around downtown today (Monday) or tomorrow (Tuesday) before about 2pm, feel free to drop by my store (Fashioned By Jaye) at 212 South Campbell and donate there. We can take cash, checks made out to MDA, or credit cards. Even if you want to dig the change out of your car or couch and bring it by, that would be cool. Seriously.

Thanks!

Jaye

Best. Concert. Ever. So.... Now what?

2008-08-21T09:01:00.000-05:00

After last week's concert escapades... or whatever we want to call what transpired last Wednesday... I had pretty high hopes for the Nine Inch Nails show tonight. Or, I don't know if hopes is the right word. More like I sure as hell was not going to let tonight go down in anything but awesomeness. And as I'm sure you can tell from this blog title, it was fucking... indescribably amazing. But I'll try. Not that there weren't a few less-than-perfect moments, but I don't think anything short of complete catastrophe could have ruined tonight.

First off, we actually left ON TIME! Yeah! Really! I was going to pretty much go straight home from work and go to bed, but I was on the verge of bouncing right out of my skin all Tuesday night, so I was in no mood for sleep when 6am rolled around. So I took Kourt to breakfast, then stopped to get the cash and energy drinks and gas for the trip taken care of so we wouldn't have to worry about it later, and then we decided to make good use of the box of black hair dye she had sitting around in the bathroom. And for the first time ever... really... I painted my nails black. Because it just seemed like if I ever had an excuse to be a little silly and absolutely stereotypical that way, a NIN show would be it. Anyway, not much sleep was had, but way more than I had last week, and I was running on adrenaline anyway.

So, yeah, out of the driveway at right around three, as planned. Quick stop to pick up some cheap lunch at McDs, and we were on our way. Uneventful drive up -- as it usually is to StL since it's impossible to get lost -- with NIN blasting most of the way and me bouncing in the driver's seat. Well, okay, we listened to Eddie Izzard part of the way, too. We only kinda got lost once on our quest inside the city to find the arena. Not my fault -- the directions didn't tell us which way to turn, and I guessed wrong. Quick correction, and we found the venue with no hassle, and even had an easy time finding parking.

Picked up our tickets at the special nin.com window ('cause we're cool), and still had a bunch of time to spare. I had to pee after the drive and the caffeinated beverages I'd consumed, so we walked over to Union Station to find a bathroom (the venue only has bathrooms past the turnstiles -- what's up with that, anyway?) and an ATM (kinda forgot, when I was getting cash for a t-shirt, that we'd probably have to pay for parking). Conveniently enough, the ATM was Bank of America, so I didn't have to pay a fee on the transaction -- which is what I was trying to avoid by getting the cash out before we left -- so bonus good news on that one. And I showed Kourt that arch thing where you can whisper on one side and the person across the arch can hear. She thought that was pretty cool.

By the time we got back over to the Scottrade Center, they'd opened the doors. So yay! No lines! There was a special entrance for us cool nin.com presale ticket holders, so we got right in. And bought t-shirts, which of course are awesome, and cost exactly the amount of cash I'd pulled out at the ATM, which of course was awfully convenient. And then we went to our seats...

...WHICH WERE FUCKING AWESOME, TOO.

We thought from looking at some seating charts beforehand that we were in the second section back from the stage, but we were actually the very first section of seats, right off the side of the stage, ten rows back. Great view. Sat next to a couple of pretty nice guys, too. As I predicted, the crowd was considerably older on average than the one we were in last week, and far less... um... high strung, maybe? Assholeish? I mean, let's face it -- it's not like Trent's been busy making super commercial, "this sounds just like Downward Spiral so I know everyone will buy it" type albums for the last 14 years, so it's the older folks who have been fans for years and years that show up. (And me -- who kinda just now caught up, but whatever.) I mean, for fuck's sake, the man plays a freakin' xylophone in his show now. You can't mosh to a xylophone. Knocked a few things over, but didn't break anything (though he did throw a mic stand during March Of The Pigs, but it wasn't even close to hitting anything or anyone else on stage, and he pushed his keyboard over at one point). I saw three guys try to start a mosh pit during Wish, I think, and nobody around them would join in and they gave up. Funny -- somebody on the ETS message boards said it looked like the "pit was in full force tonight" but compared to the LP/Atreyu pit last week it was nothing! Which in my book is a total thumbs up. That's not to say that the crowd wasn't into it -- it was a really great crowd -- but it didn't look like anyone was getting mangled down there. Looked like the most noteworthy thing happening in the pit was when somebody started tossing around a roll of toilet paper.

That was actually damn funny.

Anyway, we shot the breeze for a while until the opening act that nobody had ever heard of took the stage. A Place to Bury Strangers. They weren't bad, I guess, though I couldn't understand a single lyric. Probably would help if the singer stepped an inch or two away from the mic instead of trying to eat it. It was somewhat entertaining, though, until their last "song" which involved a half-hour long strobe light solo. I'm sure they were playing their instruments during that time, but it didn't matter since my brain was incapable of registering anything sensory other than the too-fast, too-bright, pulsating light that I think could be used as an alternative to pepper spray or a taser. I'm surprised nobody had a seizure. Kourt spent the time with her face buried in our new t-shirts. I spent it laughing hysterically out of sheer discomfort and staring anywhere but in the direction of the stage. The dude next to me said he couldn't stop staring, but he didn't know why. Most agonizing half hour ever. Okay, it was probably just ten minutes, but still. Everyone applauded at the end, but I think we were all applauding the comfort of darkness and not the band. And then the half of the crowd that hadn't made a run for the hallway during the strobe light assault made a run for it to get their senses back in order for NIN.

Seriously, it was that horribly uncomfortable.

Back in our seats, it was a fairly short wait for them to set up for Trent and Co. Lights went down, 999,999 started up, and the awesomeness commenced. Trent is evidently still battling his throat problems (he's had to postpone two shows already this tour), and is still pretty hoarse, but I didn't even realize it until near the end of the show when he finally talked a little bit.

They played just about every song I was hoping they would, with the exceptions of The Hand That Feeds and Getting Smaller. Love the new version of Piggy -- didn't know what it was at first and everyone kind of looked around bewildered for a second before the lyrics kicked in, but it's awesome. Just in case you're curious about a set list... 999,999, 1,000,000 (got good video of everything after the first verse), Letting You, Discipline, March of the Pigs (got awesome video), Head Down, The Frail, The Wretched...

Okay, at this point I was super excited about them playing The Wretched, and I was catching it on video. And I know the signs on the doors said no audio or video recording devices, but they always say that and people do it anyway, and I know I wasn't the only one. But the security at the Scottrade Center are video nazis and we were close to the end of the row so they could see us, and they fucking pulled me aside and up to the landing to jump all over me for shooting video. Kourt followed, because she was afraid I was getting thrown out. I was afraid we were getting our camera confiscated. He just asked me to delete the video, which I didn't know how to do, because the camera is brand new. So Kourt grabbed it and deleted what I'd gotten of The Wretched, and said she thought that was all, so he let us go back to our seats. If I'd lost the other two, too, I'd have been pissed. But still not as bad as getting our camera taken away or getting thrown out.

The bad part was that while we were getting scolded by the miniature security guard, we missed getting to pay attention to the first half of...

...Closer (but we got back to our seats in time for that The Only Time breakdown part), Gave Up, Me I'm Not (I'd been SOOO hoping they'd include it!), Great Destroyer, Ghosts 17, Ghosts 28, Ghosts 19, Ghosts Piggy, Greater Good, Pinion, Wish, Terrible Lie (thankfully, because some 40 year old idiot behind us kept yelling "TERRIBLE LIE!!" during the Ghosts, so after that he shut up -- I just wish the "I LOVE YOU, TRENT" girls behind us would have done the same), Survivalism, The Big Come Down (yay!), Ghosts 31, Only, and Head Like A Hole.

And then for the encore, which they've been starting with Echoplex for I think every show so far. And then they played Love is Not Enough, which I think is a first this tour, so that was fucking sweet! Then Reptile, God Given, Hurt (which I'd been saying he could totally skip for this show because it's not one of my absolute favorites, but I have to say I'm glad he did it), and finally In This Twilight (at which point I kinda teared up).

I'll try to get pics and video up soon. Pics were hard to get with all the LCD screens and lights and visual effects and stuff -- either there was too much light for the camera or not enough -- but I think we got some good ones.

And once it was done, we didn't even have any trouble getting back to our car and back on the road. Probably if we'd parked in the parking garage we'd have waited in a line forever, but we were inadvertantly smart that way. The only hitch on the way home was the on-again/off-again torrential downpours and Kourt's contact-induced migrane, but we got home by just after 3am with all four tires intact. So yay!

Now, though, I can't sleep. It's like I've become an addict -- now that it's over and I've experienced the high, I don't want to just go back to the everyday crap. I WANT MORE! I want to go again, and not wait until fucking November (not that I'm going to complain about two NIN shows in close proximity in one year). I wish I'd gotten the video footage I wanted to get, so I could at least relive the show. Security bastards. It's not like Trent cares.

Sigh.

It was just so good, I'm bummed it's over.

I so want to be down on the rail (or at least close to it) for the show in November. I know Kourt's not all that excited about the prospect, but I think this is one of those things I'm going to have to be selfish about. Me want!!!

And I totally agree with her, even though I've only seen video footage of Trent from back in the day, that fit-and-sober Trent is an infinitely better performer (and songwriter, IMO) than drunk-and-strung-out Trent.

Is it November yet?

The whole story...

2008-08-16T09:01:00.000-05:00

So, Kourt skimmed the highlights, but I figured I'd weigh in on the whole Linkin Park concert experience. It had it's highs and lows -- actually, by the time I got home I wasn't the happiest camper on the face of the planet, but that could partly have been due to sleep deprivation. I get cranky when I'm tired.

Anyway, we had GA tickets, like Kourt said, so since I knew she and Jerry were pretty excited about the concert I suggested we leave around noonish, so as to be there and in line by about four. Actually, the last time we drove to a concert in KC, we got there in about two and a half hours, so I was counting on a long afternoon of sitting in line in the sun.

Don't worry. I remembered to get sunscreen. If I'd burned to a crisp in addition to all the rest of what happened, I'd probably have passed out in the pit during Atreyu.

I planned to catch four or five hours of sleep before leaving, and then catch a few more while Jerry drove us up, since I had to work the night before. Well, I guess adrenaline got the best of me or something, because all I caught was about an hour and a half before we left, and it proved impossible for me to sleep in the back of a VW Beetle. **insert Mall Rats joke here** But I was pretty solidly awake all day, despite all that. However, during my attempt to sleep in the car, I wasn't paying attention to where we were going. All I knew was that Jerry said he knew a way to cut some time off our drive, so I just crafted in the back seat and paid no attention.

If not paying attention to what route we were taking was mistake number one, number two was not drinking enough on the way up. I had a Guava Rock Star (best stuff on the planet, by the way), and then a strawberry shake with lunch. No water. Don't know what the hell I was thinking.

We arrived in the late afternoon -- I think maybe somewhere around 5-ish. Granted, since Kourt and I can't ever seem to get on the road in a timely manner (this time it was getting me awake, and then having to run around for things like a bag to carry our stuff in and the sunscreen and a bandanna so my head wouldn't burn), we didn't leave until 1 or maybe a little after. Still, seemed like it took longer than it should. But hey, when we got there they hadn't even opened the gates to the parking lot, and we were only two cars back, so it was all good.

And yes, we do all know the words to "As Long As You Love Me," but only when the windows are all up.

They let us line up at about 6:30, I think, so we really weren't in line that long. Good thing, too, because by then I was already getting dehydrated. Kourt had about half of a one liter bottle of diet Mountain Dew in the car, so I got that and drank it all, which helped a little, but not quite enough. First thing I did when we got through the gate was go drop six bucks on two little 20oz bottles of water, since they made me throw the empty Mountain Dew bottle away at the gate. Even with us stopping for water and a t-shirt, though, we ended up just about four people back from the rail.

Not too shabby, I say.

Now, it should be said that, since I'm not really a veteran concertgoer, I'd never been in the pit before. In fact, this made the first non-pop arena concert I'd ever been to. The Neurosonic show was GA, but that was just a club show. And even though we were GA for a Justin Timberlake concert (VIP, actually, to be accurate), it's not like JT fans get rowdy. They just deafen you with the uber-high-pitched fangirl hysteria.

So, yeah, four rows from the rail. I felt like we'd done good, and Kourt would be happy to be that close to Chester.

The first opening act was Ashes Divide. They were really good, the crowd was in a pretty laid-back mood at that point, just enjoying the show, and didn't even crush in when Chester came out to sing with them. All was good, except that I'd finished off my bottle of water and was still thirsty and, even though I'd gone to the bathroom and come back once before the show started, I hadn't even thought to refill the thing at the sink. Yeah, I can be dumb sometimes. But really, everyone was having a good time.

And then they started setting up for Atreyu.

And the hoard of Atreyu fans began to descend. In little groups, like fan-tanks, burrowing through the pit. As if a few 100-pound waify chicks in Atreyu t-shirts with their bony little elbows are going to move 250 pounds of me when I've got my feet planted. Ha.

Yes, we did make a girl cry, after she spent the better part of what felt like half an hour digging her elbow into my bicep to try and muscle in front of me. And then there was the drunk guy with his girlfriend on his shoulders, who kept breathing his beer-breath down my neck. I can muster an extreme amount of patience if it means pissing off assholes.

Oh, and then there was the guy who got through the crowd by coming up behind people and just informing them that they were to move aside. Nearly came to blows with the guy beside us.

Plus, to win the award of "Worst Suggestion Ever," the band encouraged the entire pit to form a big mosh circle. I could be totally smoking crack on this, but I thought moshing was one of those consentual things. If you want to, fine. If not, stay the hell away from those who do. I'd have been really pissed if I'd been one of the LP fans caught up in the hurricane of Atreyu fans that, indeed, managed to get the whole middle of the pit moving in a circle. Or so I assume from the way we got pulled around down front. Thankfully, we managed to hold our spots, but it wasn't easy.

And frankly, the band sucked copious amounts of ass. I just don't even get it. But I was having fun being a bitch in the pit. Turns out that despite what I've been saying for the past few months, I am not too old for the pit. I do have a bit of an uber-bitch confrontational side. It used to only come to the surface when dealing with tech support operators on the phone, but it was in full force in the pit that night, too.

Unfortunately, by the last song in Atreyu's set, Kourt had had enough and wanted out. So we bailed and sat on the grass for Linkin Park. Frankly, if I'd realized we were going to do that, I'd have suggested we leave three hours later so I could have slept.

The concert was good, though. And in retrospect, I was bordering on real dehydration by the time we left the crowd behind, so who knows if I'd have stayed conscious through LPs set anyway. Next time I'll remember to hydrate myself in the morning. But it should be noted that a) the asshole factor in the crowd seemed to drop dramatically after Atreyu left the stage and b) at one point Chester came down off stage, right where we'd been standing.

Anyway, yeah, concert was good, Chester's voice held up well live, and we had a pretty good view even from the lawn. And then we headed back. I got us back on 71, and told Jerry to just let me know where the turn-off for his little shortcut was. Kourt sacked out in the back seat (she hadn't really slept at all the night before). Somewhere around Rich Hill, I think, we suddenly spotted something strange in the road in front of us. I swerved as far as I could to the left without rolling us into the ditch, but still clipped the HUGE PIECE OF LUMBER with the front passenger tire. HUGE hole. Had to stop and change the tire, and all I can say is thank god for a full-size spare.

We got back on the road without too much hassle, though. I was freakin' exhausted. I figured since we left KC at a bit before midnight, we'd be home by three or three thirty, even with the tire malfunction. Except we weren't. And it didn't occur to me until after we went through the "shortcut" that we'd gone all the way down almost to Carthage!!! No wonder it took more gas than we'd budgeted for. My plan had been to go up 13 to 7 to 71. You know, because the quickest route is usually the one that's the closest to a straight line. I REALLY wish I'd paid more attention on the ride up.

Sigh.

So much for getting to bed way early (well, early for us third shift workers) the night after the concert to make up for the sleep we didn't get the night before. I think we rolled into the Kum and Go at around 4:30. And so much for having t-shirt money for NIN this week, because I'll have to scrounge more money to cover the gas to St. Louis and back since Kourt's pretty much out of cash now. Well, maybe I'll still be able to do it, since my parents generously stepped in and got a new tire for Kourt's car -- hers gets better gas mileage so we don't have to take mine, and now we don't have to worry about scraping up the cash for a new tire ourselves. And I still have one more plasma donation I can squeeze in before Wednesday. Still, I think we'll have to pack bologna sandwiches or something to eat on the way instead of stopping for fast food, and just hope for no major catastrophies.

For a little while I was a little disappointed that we have seats for NIN instead of being on the floor, 'cause now that I've survived the Atreyu pit, I'm DYING to be down on the floor for Trent. But hey, he just announced yesterday that they're adding another leg to the tour and are swinging through Columbia in November. And if the crowd doesn't look to be full of assholes on Wednesday night Kourt might be game to hit the floor with me then. If not, it's cool. But I'm kinda hooked on the rush. By my reasoning, Nine Inch Nails fans should be a bit, you know, more mature about the whole thing. Smaller percentage of those "hey, I'm cool because I'm into the same flavor-of-the-moment band that all my friends like, and even though I'm really too much of a wimpy girl to survive by myself in the pit, and didn't get there early enough to be down front because I took too long to do my hair and pick out some really awesomely dangerous hoop earrings to wear, I'm okay because I've got my drunken frat-ape of a boyfriend to protect me and back me up while I piss off everybody else" girls.

Or at least that's my hypothesis.

And shouldn't crowd surfing have died off in, oh, 1999 or so? Seriously. Taking a crowd surfer limb to the head isn't my idea of fun, and I don't know about everyone else, but lifting people over my head all night does not add to my enjoyment of the show. Might be fun for the surfer, but everyone underneath just gets pissed off.

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