Celebrity News Donkey Donkey Donkey Donkey

One of Houseboy's manifold and myriad and splendiforous offerings to our household is keeping up on the world of celebrity gossip so that I don't ever have to come in contact with the E!! network or Bestest Weak Ever or any of those other shows that make me want to Google "pipe bomb" and "teeming darkness chatroom" at the same time. He just jets in with little tidbits of nonsense that he finds and lets me consume them like those bite-sized almond Snickers bars: not quite what I'd pick out for myself, but they're in the candy dish one cubicle over from mine, and I'll forget I've eaten them or even that they existed as soon as I've swallowed. Today's Almond Snickers bar was This Article about Some Actress in "Gossip Girl", which we only watched one time because the voiceover was done by Kristen Bell of "Veronica Mars" fame, and everything she does is the Most Awesome Thing Ever. Except Gossip Girl, which sucks.

So the article was entertaining enough on its own, I suppose, with the prison and the drugs and the white ladies getting off with only 16 months on smuggling like an elephant of pot into the country. But what was WAY MORE FUN was that I then Googled her mother and "screen writer" because I wanted to see these so-called screen-writing credits. And I found This Way More Awesome Article, which I hypothesize is actually THE SAME article translated into Japanese and then back into English.

My favorite parts include:

• Referring to pregnancy as being "already profound with Leighton" and having the baby as "gave being innate." These parts might actually be translated from Latin.
• That Leighton "has clever relations" with her parents and "plays a single of a womanlike leads." Dirrrrty!
  
• That the only completely grammatically correct sentence is "It turns out she was born in jail!" At least they know what to focus on.
  

But my very most favorite quote, that I'm definitely having tattooed in large letters on my back, because it's now my life motto, is this:

"And we consider it usually creates me conclude a things which we have right away."

Think about it.

I am badly in need of Viagra

Another possible title for this post: don't click on things in your junk mail folder, even if they are from admin@ or say re: or you're really really tweaked on meth and having a hard time focusing on your work or complete words. It appears that admin@viagra.com and I are becoming bosom buddies, if the number of times he's responded to e-mails I supposedly sent him in the last week is any indication. As a matter of fact it's really something I should put on my list of growths and accomplishments for the year that I have someone with whom I communicate so regularly. Before the administrator of Viagra.com I only had Houseboy, who is legally required to interact with me on a daily basis and can't even break his legally binding agreement on account of the Great and Powerful OZ, or the Da Vinci Code or something along those lines.

Oh, I have other friends, but generally I'm pretty shitty to them and try to avoid their phone calls, and when they invite me places I stand them up or I tell them I have quilting to do that weekend and then actually spend the time on the floor of the shower, speaking to the silverfish. So mostly they don't e-mail me every day with updates on what's going on in their lives and business like this new associate of mine, and certainly they don't hear from me every day, like it appears has been going on in this case.

Now, since I don't actually remember writing any of the e-mails that Mr. Administrator is replying to I have to say that our friendship is probably largely based on a mutual admiration of pharmaceuticals and/or sleepwalking, but as long as Houseboy doesn't notice me slipping off in the middle of the night, I'd say this friendship has potential. It involves no conscious work on my end, as far as I know I've never had to leave the house, and there's no larger circle of friends that I have to pretend to like or pay tribute to in the form of dinner parties or infant souls.

I think I'll go ahead and add him to my address book.

Life is about discoveries

So, there's this great art store just a few blocks away from where I work in the crushing salt mines for the soulless government boogie man, and I have this whole thing where once upon a time I considered myself creative. Well, anyway, I thought I'd resurrect that impulse and see if maybe it could tame the gnawing rage, or at least keep me up past 8 o'clock at night.

So I went in and I bought these pretty colored pens for to draw with, because I already have oil paints and last time I used those the cats got involved and their painting on the carpet has lasted longer and gotten more compliments than anything I ever did with them. And the plan with these colored pens was to make some fancy cartoony illustrations for this story I wrote way back when I was young and industrious and creative-like and originally had collages that went with it that I made out of fashion magazines and photos I got off the internet, but turns out that's not so much legal if you ever want to actually call it your own work.

So anyway, I hit a hitch. Turns out I suck at drawing. My illustrations turned out something like this:
And somehow I don't think that's really ADDING to the awesomeness of my story, much as I love the gumby arms that guy seems to be sporting. At this point I'm taking refuge in the old collage idea and assuming that cutting up lots of crappy illustrations will have a cool effect something like this:
Thus terrifying small children and not just making them wonder why Stretch Armstrong is sitting on a pile of doo doo.

Dressing your reality doesn't make it true

This weekend was one of those ones where I spent good portions of time out of the house, interacting with other people and pretending to be a contributing member of society and an adult and whatnot. I'm sleepy now.

On Saturday Houseboy was Workboy and I was Housegirl--I did laundry and dusted and cleaned things and even brushed the fat cat until he screamed and hissed at me and chased me around the house with his fangs out.

Sunday was the first day of youth formation and the start of a new curriculum called "Godly Play," so I got to sit in a circle on the floor with a bunch of highly-educated Hyde Park parents and pretend I know what I'm talking about while actually deferring to the kindergartner across from me who had had a similar program in her pre-K Sunday School class. "So, um... then we sort of do, like 'Wonderings'.... which is, like, where we think about the story. Right Tegan?" Tegan nods and then rolls her eyes at me.

After that, I braved the apocalyptic rainstorms to head to downtown with Houseboy, our friend the Hedgehog and her as-yet-to-be nicknamed soon-to-be-husband, where we got our first ever massages in our almost 30 years and then bought pants and v-necked sweaters at Old Navy and drank tea at Elephant and Castle.

I wore the pants (green) and sweater (yellow) and a collared shirt (also from Old Navy) this morning, thinking I'd extend my streak of being all growned-up-like, but as soon as I got into work I noticed that the white shirt was covered in Fat Cat's hair. Once I'd removed the hair, I started to make some tea, but as I was walking to the water cooler with my newly-filled tea ball in my cup, I looked down and noticed that the cup had a nice film of brown, moldy goo all over the bottom, which was now splishing prettily all over the fresh tea leaves. So, I washed out the tea cup and tea ball and got new leaves and new tea and got back to my desk and finally opened my e-mail and saw that I have two meetings this morning, both of which I'd forgotten all about.

Welcome back to the reality of who you are. I'll be taking a nap in the conference room.

I cleaned out my camera

My digital camera is now totally empty of photos. If you go to the part where you're supposed to look at the photos you took, it says "No Image." I thought about taking a picture of that with Houseboy's camera and then posting it here, but I thought that might be too postmodern, even for me. Because we all know I'm the postest of all post-moderns.

Anyway, now that I have all those photos on my computer, I thought I'd put some of them up here on the interwebs to share with the people who don't read my blog. Here is one of risotto with basil and roasted corn and cherry tomatoes that Houseboy made for me. He let me pick out the corn, because I'm from Minnesota, and that means that I'm born knowing good corn, even when it's being sold on 53rd street in Chicago.


Here's one of black beans with mangoes and red bell peppers that Houseboy also cooked for me. I didn't get to pick out any of this meal, but I got to help sprinkle the mangoes on top. It looked prettier before I started eating it, but I forgot to take a picture until I'd halfway destroyed it. I was hungry!


Here's one of the fat cat saying "I'd rather lick my fist!" That's his new favorite saying. I'm going to get one of those cute t-shirts with a picture of him on it that people have, and then I'm going to put that underneath.


And here's a picture of when I went to a conference on educational policy in New York City! Boobies!