Author: maggeh

Four Things (For Heather)

As you may know, I rarely do this stuff. For some reason, it makes me feel cagey. But Heather so rarely asks for anything. When she does, you kind of have to do what she says. So, this is for you, sweets.

Four jobs I’ve had:

Bead store clerk

Silkscreen shop owner

Dance instructor

Volunteer coordinator, Kerry Campaign, DNC

Four Movies I can watch over and over:

Amelie

Godfather II

Gilda

Say Anything

Four Places I’ve Lived:

California my whole life, except for a month each in:

Costa Rica

London

Boston

Four TV shows I love:

Veronica Mars

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I Shouldn’t Be Alive

Myth Busters

Four places I’ve vacationed:

Jamaica

Malaysia

The Phillipines

Australia

Four of my favorite dishes:

Steak

Lemon blueberry pancakes

Fried potatoes with bacon and wilted spinach

Creme Brulee

Four sites I visit daily:

Defective Yeti

Dooce

Finslippy

CNN

Four places I would rather be right now:

On the Giant Dipper at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk

In a dark room with a Christmas tree that has white, blinking lights.

Tucking in to breakfast at Zazie.

Swimming.

Four bloggers I’m tagging/slightly alienating:

Bryan who has to love me by law.

Sarah deserves a healthy prompting.

Andrea who is good at introspection.

Lori who is always game.

Ideas, be Free!

Products I want, but can’t find.

– Evany had an idea for a bracelet that looks like an ID bracelet, but has a window where the inscription would ordinarily be. The window would be perfectly sized to fit a cookie fortune, and you’d just slide in your favorite one.

– Old-school bunny slippers that are cute, but Martha Stewart cute, not Precious Moments cute. Like these, only with eyes and a nose, and in a size that fits real people.

-A large jewelry box that has a modernist, sleek exterior, maybe it’s even lacquered on the outside, but when you open it, a little ballerina pops up and begins rotating to a music box rendition of “Son of a Preacher Man.” Also, it is lined in quilted pink silk.

San Francisco

-Open containers aren’t a big deal, smoking pot isn’t really a problem, no one gets upset about prostituion. Is anything actually illegal here?

-Violence.

-Parking.

Good Idea

Salvor Kiosk is a store that’s entirely stocked by the merchants travels. Right now, everything in the store is from Japan, but from the end of February to the end of May, it will contain only objects from Sweden.

Their about page says, We opened Salvor Kiosk to offer an antidote to over-design. We consider the objects we stock to be humble, straight forward and beautiful for their simplicity and directness. Often they are traditional goods that have been developed over generations or anonymous design found in general stores, DIYs and kiosks: products designed not around one personality but the result of local aesthetics and needs. Their beauty is sometimes hard to see in today’s over-saturated / over-hyped market; our motivation to start Salvor Kiosk was to shed some light on their quiet perfection.

Neat, huh? I thought so too.

Donuts Aren’t the Same Here

Lessons learned on Impromptu Los Angeles Roadtrip, 2006:

– You’re not as cute in L.A.

– Some people buy matching white sweat suits, with their names in bedazzled scroll script down the sleeves, and wear them to brunch.

– Once seated at a restaurant, everyone should overtly check surrounding tables for possible celebrities.

– Possible celebrities include people like Mickey Rooney’s son.

– Once you see Mickey Rooney’s son, you are required to mention having seen him in approximately 50 percent of your conversations from that moment forward.

I also learned that you should not eat the questionably cooked eggs before a seven-hour road trip in a two-seater, 1974 Volkswagon. Seriously, that’s one to grow on.

Don’t

To the woman in the locker room who is standing in front of the mirror, completely nude, slowly rubbing gym-supplied hand cream on her breasts:

Weird. Would you stop that? It couldn’t be more disturbing if you were taking fistfuls of the hand cream and shoving them in your mouth. The rest of us are unsure of your objective. Is this sexual? Ritualistic? An excessive devotion to silky-soft skin?

Even the women who are into other women are freaked out. We think it’s the way your eyes look a little dead, though we can’t be sure, because none of us can bring ourselves to look directly at you. All of us are looking near you, above you, next to you, trying to ascertain if you are, in fact, doing what we think you’re doing.

Yes. It seems that you are.

Hm… Well… Are you still doing it?

Yep.

Kay. That’s weird… What about now…?

Yes. Even now, you are still doing it.

We are all pretty sure that this if it’s something you enjoy is something that you should enjoy in the comfort of your own home. Please go there so the rest of us can blow dry our hair. Thank you.

The Wonders of the Human Brain

In the shower, I realized that I remember the entire theme song from Fight Back with David Horowitz.

FIGHT BACK! Don’t let anyone push you around

FIGHT BACK! Stand up and hold your ground.

And so on.

This got me thinking about other useless things that take up space in my brain, and I started humming theme song to Small Wonder, the witless 80s sitcom about a girl-robot, Vicki, whose family tries to keep her robot identity top secret.

Then I wondered if there was any useful stuff up there, which led me to what I remember from an entire year of high school geometry classes:

If a=b, and b=c, then a=c.

If a+b=c, then c-a=b.

Then I thought, Aveda soap smells just like Fruit Loops.

Smell and Envy

By Douglas Goetsch

You nature poets think you’ve got it, hostaged

somewhere in Vermont or Oregon,

so it blooms and withers only for you,

so all you have to do is name it: primrose

and now you’re writing poetry, and now

you ship it off to us, to smell and envy.

But we are made of newspaper and smoke

and we dunk your roses in vats of blue.

Birds don’t call, our pigeons play it close

to the vest. When the moon is full

we hear it in the sirens. The Pleiades

you could probably buy downtown. Gravity

is the receiver on the hook. Mortality

we smell on certain people as they pass.

(via Writer’s Almanac)