Archive for the 'holidays' Category

And lo, I have returned, with the startling news that there is asshaberdashery on the internets.

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Really EPIC asshaberdashery, though. Srsly. And it happened at WisCon, my first and favorite con, by way of a miserable self-hating gamer girl named Rachel Moss, who as it happens is also a graduate student at my own institution.

You may want to take a moment to catch up with the Angry Black Woman’s comprehensive explanation of what happened. (And skip to the bottom if you have no idea what WisCon is.)

I use the term “gamer girl” above with a healthy dose of irony–Moss does seem to indicate herself that her primary fannish interest is in game, and she is female, but in general I try to take care with my application of the label “girl.”* Here, I mostly want to highlight something that I see as a problem: many people who have reported on the Incident and/or discussed its ramifications have identified her as “young” or “very young,” often in an attempt to render her in some way pitiable–not excused; very few people are on board for that, but somehow slightly less responsible, or at least that’s how it reads to me.

Moss is 25 years old. She’s a year younger than me. She’s a graduate student at UW-Madison, just like me. Unlike me, she apparently struggles with an eating disorder** and has for many years. Like other posters on the subject I hasten to clarify that I think it is very sad that she has an eating disorder, and should never be grounds for attacking her–or, conversely, seen as an insult when I note that she has one; she has spoken about it publicly and it is, if I may say so, profoundly fucked up to act like saying “eating disorder” is equivalent to “her mother’s a whore.”

However, having an eating disorder and being an asshole are not the same problem. They do seem to be at least peripherally related; Moss hates other women, and what she hates in them seems to be all the things she most fears to see in herself: fat, “inadequate” or somehow unconvincing gender performance (as I’d interpret her transphobia), disability, etc. Claire Light puts it beautifully, and acknowledges some unpleasant similarities inside her own head that I would bet almost all women in this culture have experienced:

But watching fat people get smacked down makes me want to cry because while most of me is an ally, a small part of me still tugs me towards the smack-down crew, and how can we fight this when I’m also the enemy?

There’s still a little voice in my head that agrees with such awful people as Rachel Moss when they say awful things about fat people. I’ve come close many times to stomping that little voice out, but it’s a tough one. It’s the same voice that tells me I’m fat, but it’s okay as long as other people are fatter. I know a lot of you out there know that voice, even if you won’t admit it.

Rachel Moss knows that voice, only she has completely failed–if she ever tried–to stomp it out. She’s let that voice take over, and it’s a monster’s voice. That’s what she’s turned into for the time being: a monster, who’s projected her hatred of her own body onto the bodies of others, to get some relief. Who can really doubt that that’s what’s happening with women who hate on fat women?

I definitely know that voice. I have done the “fatter than me” count in a room more than once. But the thing is, I don’t agree with it. I know the voice is fucked up and wrong. Even if–especially if–I start feeling like I believe it. Recently, I was discussing weight and body image issues with one of my favorite WisCon goers, and I noted that the big problem I have in entering discussions like that is that people often assume that because I am a small woman with a fairly intense workout schedule, I am judging them for lacking my “discipline” or however you want to term it. I’m not. I do sometimes get a little nuts about a couple of pounds of personal weight gain, mainly because I put on about 40 in my first two years of grad school and I recall that it starts with two or three, and also I prefer it when my clothes fit. And I like being strong, and knowing that I can bike 50 miles, etc. But this is my personal standard. It takes a lot of work. When other people are not as fit as me, I don’t think they are lazy slobs; I figure they have other stuff to do, because, eschewing false modesty, most people are not as athletic as I am.*** Most people don’t spend the time on it that I do, most people don’t bike 100+ miles a week, most people don’t do weight training ~3 times a week. Why the hell would they? Keeping in top shape is kind of like chasing storms or keeping a log of all the trains that come through town: important to some individuals, mind-bogglingly boring and/or insane to most.

So I don’t have an eating disorder, but I can get a little hyperfocused sometimes. On myself, not other people. And other people do have eating disorders–a depressingly large number of them, in fact. So far, only ONE person has come to WisCon two years in a row with the express purpose, on her second visit, of taking photos without permission and posting them online to mock people for being fat, disabled, trans, not white… In her original post, from what I saw, Moss was mostly focused on misogyny and fatphobia, but she didn’t shy away from asserting her authority to racially categorize all participants and thereby delegitimize their identities, and the racism that followed from the SASS crowd is, to a sheltered white academic, truly staggering.

I think Claire is absolutely right, both in her assertion of the psychological motivation behind Moss’s acts and also in her implication that Moss is very different from most women, who hear the voice but who do not develop a full-blown case of demonic possession by the patriarchy. For fucksakes.

A number of people have reposted and analyzed Moss’s opening remarks about the con–the con that she, remember, paid registration fees to attend not once but twice, although as a Madison resident she probably didn’t pay for lodging:

[WisCon] is like any other sci-fi con, except that well over half of the attendees are female, about a third of the panels are political, there is no gaming, and absolutely everybody is a huge bitch.

LiveJournal user hederahelix noted that contrary to her third assertion, Moss was sitting next to a gamer at one panel at least–since she sat next to hederahelix, and hederahelix is a gamer. I was on a panel about gender swapping in gaming during which there was a great deal of discussion about both MMOGs and table-top RPGs. At that panel, we also discussed the sexism and misogyny inherent in gamer culture on a number of levels: the automatic equation of healers with women, the reaction of a mostly male player base to the hiring of a female community manager at NCSoft, the way that male players often attempt to roleplay women (and absolutely refuse to hear “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG” from actual women)…

I said that Moss is not particularly young, and I don’t think she is, at least not in any way that excuses or even explains anything. But she reminds me of an angrier and more poisonous version of 14-year-old me in the sense that she is obviously looking for an environment where she has no competition for male attention, and I think what she hates most about WisCon is that it both fails to provide much in the way of that commodity AND fails to acknowledge that commodity as inherently valuable.

When I was 14, I was the only female member of the RPG club at my high school. I was a sophomore, and for an entire year it was me and a bunch of role-playing guys. The next year, four or five other female students joined, and at the time I would have preferred it if they hadn’t. I was younger than everyone else, I was funny-looking, and I wanted the gamer guys to myself. And even then, I didn’t try to chase anyone away, I didn’t give up on it myself, I didn’t turn around and attack the other women in the environment. I thought a lot of crazy things at age 14, and I made a lot of bad decisions. But even then I realized that other women were not the automatic enemy. And I was not a complete asshole.****

On a more positive note: the thing that I love most about WisCon is the way that its attendees celebrate ourselves. It is, I suspect, this very quality at which Moss grits her teeth like the Grinch looking down on Whoville.

Many people have commented that the photos held up for mockery by Moss and others show people who appear to be having a wonderful time. Many of them are photos of my friends: hilarious, kind, wonderful, brave people. People who are not afraid to BE. WisCon is one of the few places where I never feel like I am Too Much: too smart, too weird, too flamboyant, too chattery…

Not that I make much effort to tone these qualities down in Real Life; I have pink hair for godsakes. But at WisCon, I feel like people GET it. Instead of mere wide eyes and the occasional burst of helpless laughter, my ensembles garner heartfelt appreciation. No one wonders WHY I am wearing a lovingly restored lime green go-go dress with hot pink fringe dangling big plastic flowers. They just marvel at the matching go-go boots. They appreciate my nerd/folk mix CDs (speaking of, I met my goal of distributing 100 of them this year).

So on the one hand, I’m not much moved by people pushing pity for Rachel Moss, who set out to deliberately humiliate and harm a number of people whose happiness I value highly, and who is DEFINITELY not sorry about anything other than possibly getting caught. But on the other… okay, yes. I do pity her. I pity anyone who can stand two years running in the middle of all that exuberance and Not Get It, like Kay with a chip of ice mirror in his heart. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but then why come back? There’s got to be something there that she wants, and she hates everyone who has figured out how to let themselves have it.

I love WisCon. I am extremely bummed that I missed almost half the con laid up with the Wischolera (and how awesome is a group of people that collectively comes up with the term “Wischolera”?) but I am already looking forward to next year, when I’ll be living right by the conference hotel again. I just don’t have much time to spare for people whose lives are governed by fear.

ETA: It occurs to me that many people may be totally confused about what WisCon IS. It’s a feminist science fiction/fantasy convention held in Madison, WI over Memorial Day Weekend every year. It attracts a lot of academic types, enough that there is an academic programming track; I presented a paper on gender-swapping in MMOGs there a couple of years ago, and it was really nice to be talking to an audience that didn’t need a 15-minute primer on “What is a virtual world” before I could get to the substantive content of my paper. A lot of very cool people attend from all over the country and even outside the US, and of course they (and the late night parties at which we get to hang out and drink ever night) are really the best part of the con. Some of us are, I suppose, “huge bitches”; others of us are really fairly small bitches with tall shoes to compensate.

*Not quite as much as I do with the term “lady”; if you hear me use this word or its plural, you may assume that I am mocking some misguided person’s ideals of “modern chivalry.” This is pretty easy to cue into given how much I tend to extend the “a” when I say it.

**I am certainly not without body issues, but sadly no more than most women in their 20s in the US, and fewer than many.

***And let me just take another moment to reflect that if you’d told 8th grade me that I would one day say this, I would have laughed bitterly until I pulled something.

****At age 14, I admit, no one is a complete NON-asshole either.

On Cabell Day, it is also customary to buy me some shoes.

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

So today I was buying candy for my classes in honor of V-Day–an endeavor which led to me phoning my father from the Walgreen’s candy aisle to ask him if sodium lactate (Jolly Ranchers) is an animal product, which it apparently is probably not if it’s in commercial food products (they use bacteria to get it out of carbs) but we’re still not sure about calcium stearate (Sweet Tarts–I have some vegan students, okay? and it might be derived from hydrogenated vegetable oil but it might not)–and I probably went a little overboard because, you know, I love holiday candy and I love Valentine’s candy more than most, and if I feed it to my students it will not cause me to gain weight.

Anyway, so I was hauling my candy (in addition to vegan options, I got Dove Promises, Reeses peanut butter cups, and Butterfinger and Nestle Crunch hearts for the misguided milk chocolate lovers–peanut butter cups are exempt from this criticism because PEANUT BUTTER) back to the office, and suddenly, I had a Valentine’s epiphany.

Valentine’s Day has not been an awesome milestone in my life ever. When not actively and crushingly disappointing, it has been uneventful and vaguely depressing in an annoying way. But today, carrying a giant bag of shiny pink hearts* and shit, I realized something.

Valentine’s Day is based around:

  • Candy
  • Hearts
  • Stuffed animals
  • Stationery
  • The color pink

That’s right. That romance/couples/enduring love crap is INCIDENTAL. It is basically CABELL DAY. It’s practically my second birthday.

The students seemed to enjoy this revelation, although possibly they were just happy about the candy. Now if only they’d do the reading.

*The one thing I don’t like about Dove Promises is that the heart-shaped Valentine’s version are wrapped in red and gold for the dark chocolate, and pink and silver for the milk. I dislike milk chocolate. But I want pink and silver wrappers! Thus far I have not actually switched to buying a kind of chocolate I don’t actually like to achieve this. But it causes me emotional distress.

My new life’s ambition: to get into the SF Pride parade as some kind of drag queen’s lady-in-waiting

Monday, June 25th, 2007

Like this one, say:

Pink drag queen waves to her public

(I’m pretty sure the one on the right is biologically female, anyway.)

Me & the pinkest drag queen ever

But obviously not as fabulous. As my father remarks, she makes me look kind of pale by comparison.

Leopard man close-up

This guy kind of looks like he raided my room.

Rainbow peacock in vinyl boots

And to think, Kristin once called ME a peacock.

Naked flag-twirling guy

I was actually trying to get a full-frontal shot of this guy, but this is probably better.

Another Rainbow Brite type

Rainbow socks were VERY popular. I guess they’re easy to come by and can be worn on occasions other than Pride.

Yay for pink drag queens

Of course, this dress bears some similarity to the one that I wore to Greg and Anna’s wedding…

Attendee with wings

I got a lot of pictures of people’s backs, but I just like how this one turned out.

Unfortunately, I got to the parade pretty late yesterday (probably around 1:30), and most of the super-good stuff happens early–it starts at 10:30. There are so many fabulous costumes everywhere, though, that I felt pretty satisfied. I don’t think I’ve been to a Pride event since I was 16 and went to the one in St. Louis, and SF raises the bar a smidge anyway. I love costumes–as my colleague Bob remarked, a large number of Pride attendees really seem like they’re cos-playing Second Life or something. Virtual avatars made flesh. Crazy wigs all over the place, which always makes me consider shaving my head and just starting a massive wig collection for everyday use. I already have plenty of rainbow-striped socks.

More verbal content coming at some point. I have been scouring the interwebs for vegetable lasagna recipes, because I am having dinner guests on Wednesday–lasagna is a dish that exists in infinite variations, even when you’re only looking at the vegetarian ones. Also, I really want to spell it “lasagne” but American English apparently does not agree with me. Perhaps if I use goat cheese it will be suave and European. I’ll let you know how it comes out.

Valentine’s Day profits massacre

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

(I’m back-dating because it IS a Valentine’s Day post, and I have other ideas for today anyway.)

So somebody lost Facebook a LOT of money this Valentine’s Day.

The Facebook gift shop has apparently been manifest in some form for awhile, but it was only within the past week that it was added to users’ home pages, on the right sidebar–in fact, is has now disappeared again from that location, but if you go to a person’s profile page and scroll down, you’ll find a “gift box” just above their “wall,” with the option of giving them a gift.

The “gift,” in case you don’t already know, is a brightly colored graphic, less than an inch square on my resolution anyway, designed by Susan Kare, who did the original Mac icons. They’re cute. They cost $1 each.*

They are, of course, totally noncorporeal. Some people might wonder why anyone would pay $1 for some pixels, but the issue here is the nature of gifts, which have never really been about what they are. Or they are other than they seem. Whatever.

Gifts aren’t about necessity, which is why, for instance, bath products are so popular.** Gifts are not about permanence, either–a real flower is much more transient than a digital one. Gifts are generally about reciprocity; it’s embarrassing to get a Christmas gift from someone for whom you have no reciprocal present. And gifts are about giving and getting–giving and getting as social actions, which means that in general, they’re enhanced by an audience.

The major point of flowers on Valentine’s Day is not the flowers themselves. It’s the knowledge that someone loves you and gave you flowers–a knowledge that is even better shared, that is, when all your co-workers can SEE that someone loves you and gave you flowers. What better place to put a gift than Facebook, where the audience is not limited to the recipient’s dorm or office? Where the audience, in fact, is everyone on the site whom the recipient has designated as an Other of some degree of some signifance? And where the newsfeed makes it fairly likely that they’ll see the fact of the gift?

The smartest thing that Facebook did with these gifts was give everyone one free token. One gift to give at no cost–but only one. Unlike MySpace, Facebook does not order friends. You don’t have a Top Eight (and MySpace’s top friends lists are statically ordered, so that even within the Top Eight or Twelve or whatever, you can only ever have ONE Best Friend).

But if you have one gift, and you give it, you’re making a pretty major statement about the recipient you singled out. Unless you give it to a boyfriend/girlfriend-type Significant Other, chances are there are going to be people who thought they were just as important.

The obvious strategy here would be to give NO gifts, but the lure of the free is likely to draw people into giving one that has no cost–and then they’re much more likely to buy more gifts in order to maintain the peace by not overly favoring a single relationship.

Valentine’s Day is obviously a prime occasion for all this gift-giving, and in fact the Facebook giftshop provided seven V-Day only gifts. However, for AT LEAST five hours on Valentine’s Day, the giftshop was inoperable, clearly overloaded by too much traffic.

Most people were probably giving gifts pretty impulsively. If the giftshop wasn’t there when the mood struck them, they probably didn’t keep reloading to see if it was up and running again.** Those five hours of downtime, I suspect, cost Facebook a HUGE potential profit, although they may have coincidentally driven up the social value of those limited edition gifts.

I’m not sure why they took the giftshop link off the home page after V-Day, either. It didn’t take up a lot of room–depending on how many system messages you have in that column, there’s very little in it. Maintaining a link above individual profile’s walls is a good idea, and maybe that’s how people prefer to give a gift anyway, rather than going to the gift shop and having to mentally scroll through one’s friends list to think of whose name to enter.

I’m interested to see what holidays they do this for. Will Easter rate? God, I love Easter crap.

Speaking of which, today being the day after V-Day, I have a strong instinct to search CVS for discounted V-Day stuffies. Oh, pink fluffy imaginary animals, how I love you.

*Actually, at least for the moment, when you buy one for a dollar you get the option of buying 4 additional gift credits for $2, so that you end up paying $3 for 5 gifts. But I don’t know if that’s a special promotion or what.

**I personally like Lush. I like citrusy scents, massage bars, and bath melts. I do not like things that will coat me with glitter. In case you wondered.

***I am a special obsessive case.

Because I am SUCH a big nerd that I have two different active blogs…

Saturday, January 13th, 2007

Just in case you’re interested, I’ve been liveblogging panels at Arisia, the Cambridge sci fi/fantasy con, over on my LiveJournal (LJ is very big in fandom, which is kind of funny since fandom is still considered pretty male-dominated, but as others have pointed out, the overall makeup of the LJ hive site is not always a good guide for particular networks of people within it). I’ll be continuing to do so through early tomorrow afternoon, after which I will stumble home and take a shower before flitting off to Alice’s birthday party.

And in other tech news: MySpace welcomes French friends

big damn Christmas picture post

Sunday, December 31st, 2006

As previously mentioned, I have a lot of photos from the holiday. A sampling:

I hold up my gaudy ornament, purchased on clearance last year

I got this ornament on post-Christmas clearance last year. It has stars. I like stars.

Hannah & Megan got each other near-identical engraved bracelets

Hannah and her friend Megan got each other near-identical engraved bracelets for Christmas. It was pretty funny.

Dad looks at the top of the Christmas tree

Dad sits atop his rickety ladder, decorating the top of the (tiny) Christmas tree.

Sophie decorates the Christmas tree while plagued by the papparazzi

People are always making a big fuss about my photography. They’ll change their tune in 50 years, godammit.

Nate & Hannah, not wanting to be photographed

Hannah and her boyfriend Nate, Hannah objecting to being photographed.

Mom, Don, & Sophie on Christmas Eve

Mom, Don, and Sophie on Christmas Eve. I have NO IDEA what is going on here.

Don, Sophie, & Dad on Christmas Eve

Don, Sophie, and Dad. There was a lot of revelry that I don’t remember, apparently.

Sophie objects to being photographed

Sophie complained about my photography.

Hannah giggles into her wine at Christmas Eve dinner

Hannah had a lot to drink on Christmas Eve.

Sophie & Dad at Christmas Eve dinner

Sophie and Dad at Christmas Eve dinner.

Sisters with new sock slippers

My sisters and I all got slipper socks in our stockings.

Dad picking out a round of presents

We do presents in rounds. This was Dad’s turn to pick out a gift for each family member.

Me & Sophie on Christmas morning

Me and Sophie on Christmas morning.

Sophie models the back of her reversible dragon robe

I got Chinese robes for Sophie, Hannah, and Mom. Sophie’s was a reversible dragon robe; here she models the dark blue side.

Sophie in her new robe

And from Hannah’s perspective…

Sophie models the dark blue side of her reversible dragon robe

Sophie’s haircut is very cute.

Dad standing in front of his new stationery bike stand

Dad in the wreckage. Note the miniscule Christmas tree in the background.

Dad models an action shot of his new bicycle jersey

Dad models his new bicycle jersey IN ACTION.

Sophie acts out a charade some more

Sophie plays charades on Christmas.

Sophie tries to guess Mom's charade

Sophie tries to figure out Mom’s charade.

Hannah acts out a charade?

Hannah has a hard time acting out a charade. She wears her pajamas at all times when she isn’t actually about to leave the house.

Mom watches Dad use his new wine opener

Dad got an amazing new wine opening SYSTEM for Christmas. It’s very complicated. He is shown here opening one of the bottles of wine that I got Sophie.

Mom, Hannah (weird), & Dad at Christmas dinner

Mom, Hannah, and Dad at Christmas dinner. I don’t know why she’s making that face, but I should note that on Christmas, everyone stayed in their pajamas all day. It wasn’t just Hannah.

Sophie & me at Christmas dinner

Sophie and me at dinner. In our pajamas. Drinking. Times are good.

My parents have TiVo. It’s hypnotic.

Saturday, December 30th, 2006

I know I haven’t posted for over a week. What you have to realize is that last night, I made level 40 on City of Heroes.

It’s not the max level. It’s not even the level at which you get the Epic Power Pool (that’s 41). But it is the level I really wanted to make over the winter break, and marks Andromeda Sparks’s* return to her traditional pink and yellow costume after several months in the greyscale tragic antihero ensemble. Of course, now I need to fix her bio to reflect this.

In other news:

  1. I have many new photos on Flickr. And more coming soon, I’m sure.
  2. My sister Hannah hit a deer with her car, but everyone is okay. Really, the deer hit her. It hurled itself into the front passenger side. Probably things were not going well in the forest.
  3. I finally found a pair of black ankle boots that I don’t hate, which is good, because I needed some.
  4. I also got grey snakeskin ballet flats. They are uber fucking cute.
  5. I got my parents to watch Firefly, and they like it. V. exciting.
  6. I have now maintained my goal weight for over a year (the anniversary was December 15). I am considering canceling my online WW membership, since I can pretty much track it myself on a spreadsheet if I want; I don’t need to pay them $17 a month to use their website to do it. Incidentally, if you’re interested in trying online WW, you can get a week free if you sign up now. I guess they’re cashing in on the New Year’s resolution market.
  7. I had a very nice Christmas. I got jewelry, and books, and knives, among other things.
  8. Last month, according to the big sign by the hospital, someone named their poor baby “Alivia.” Discuss: Who is worse off? Alivia or that other kid named “Orville,” which may be spelled correctly but, I think we can all agree, is a terrible name with which to saddle a child?
  9. And finally: In just about a week, I’m moving to Boston. With three cats. I’d better call the vet about those tranquilizers.

*I hear that it is technically correct to elide the second S in singular possessives that themselves end with the letter “S,” e.g. “James’ book,” but I personally find it distressing.

of microscopic Christmas trees

Thursday, December 21st, 2006

So apparently my father is feeling too elderly to produce a real Christmas tree this year.

Traditionally, we get a tree that fills the available space (as you can see from the photo in Dad’s entry). Since we have 12 foot ceilings at my parents’ house, this means a 10 or 11-foot tree. Otherwise it just looks tiny, and also we can’t use all of our many, many ornaments. But SOMEONE’S back hurts, and apparently this justifies getting an eight foot tree, barely visible to the naked eye.

He could have rented a couple of strapping high school boys or something to do the heavy lifting. Mom has lots of them.

Admittedly, he is driving to Wisconsin tomorrow to come get me and my various remaining possessions. Maybe we can put the tree on top of a stack of books or something.

I’ll be pretty busy, though, since I originally planned to be back in Missouri by the 16th, and consequently did not wrap ANY Christmas presents before I left. I will, in fact, be returning on the 23rd. Maybe Hannah will help me. She’s good at wrapping.

The long-awaited picture post, or, you don’t even KNOW how many photos I actually TOOK

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

Pre-Thanksgiving dinner:

Pre-Thanksgiving dinner

Thanksgiving dinner, or, once you teach the kids to pose it’s hard to get them to stop:

Thanksgiving dinner

This is my favorite photo from the whole weekend, taken during post-Thanksgiving dinner:

Dad & Gerry looking upwards mysteriously

I have no clue what Dad and Aunt Gerry were doing when this photo was taken. We hadn’t even had that much wine yet. Or maybe we had. Without timestamps it’s hard to say for sure.

I can say that in this photo, we had had a lot of wine:

Dad & Gerry talking to Hannah at post-Thanksgiving dinner

We’re on the phone with Hannah, demanding to know if her new boyfriend’s family was mean to her at Thanksgiving, and refusing to take “no” for an answer. The conversation went like this a lot, “Well, we really need to go, so–” “NO! NO! Just a minute! AHAHAHAHAHA!”

She will probably be getting us all those breathalyzer-anti-drunk-dialing cell phones for Christmas.

My cousin was there with his kids, who are just adorable. Libby is a total ham:

Me & Libby before turkey frying

Me & Libby close-up

Possibly it runs in the family. Libby never once commented on my hair that I recall, but when we were setting the table for Thanksgiving, she did ask me what was on my nose. I explained that I had a ring in it, and about five minutes later I heard her exclaiming in the kitchen, “Did you know that SOME people can have RINGS in their NOSES?” I didn’t show her the tongue stud; I find that children her age (5) often find tongue piercings sort of upsetting in a world-gone-mad kind of way.

Libby, Carnes, & Pumpkin playing ball

My cousin’s family has a miniature dachshund. She is extremely cute and hardly barks at all.

We also deep fried a turkey.

Scott, Dad, & the fried turkey

I always thought this sounded highly suspect, but I was wrong. It was DELICIOUS.

I told Uncle Ralph that he is inconvenient to photograph because he is a foot taller than everyone else, making it difficult to crop photos effectively; he announced that he could be “self-cropping”:

Ralph is self-cropping

Next: I will devote an entire entry to Uncle Ralph, who wanted to know all about this “blogging” thing.

Son, there’s this little thing called “assortative mating.”

Monday, November 27th, 2006

I am back from Thanksgiving in Louisiana (yes, I finally made it out of Vegas). I ate everything in the world.

I also went on two 20-mile bike rides in three days, so it sort of evens out, except my abs are a little flabby from not doing weights for a week and a half. Anyway, I have a lot of photos. A lot. I’m about a third of the way through naming and tagging them on Flickr; I’ll make a nice big picture entry when I’m done.

In the meantime, I am spending the week at my parents’ house in Missouri before going back up to Wisconsin to clear out my apartment and hopefully find someone to take over the lease. All the boxes of crap I shipped from California to my parents’ house have arrived–except for the one box that had all my pills and work-out underwear in it. Isn’t it always the way. FedEx assures me that it will be delivered tomorrow.

I somehow managed not to ship myself ANY warm pajamas. This is a problem when you sleep in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows and Missouri temperatures are rapidly dropping, and you don’t have a space heater. So we went to Wal-Mart on Sunday and I found a cute set of fleece ones, resisting mightily the temptation to buy yet more pink clothes, although now that I think about it my pajama collection overall is not that heavily pink anyway.

The check-out guy was super creepy. He opened a dialogue with me by announcing that my hair was “interesting,” a conversational gambit to which I always respond AS IF it were a compliment, but in case you were wondering, I can tell it is in fact not. Then he started babbling about how the way HE dresses always SCARES people, because he wears BLACK, and CHAINS, and HANDCUFFS, because he is a TERRIFYING WILD DARK ANIMAL OF A MAN.

Okay, he didn’t say that last part. But he was strongly implying it. I wanted to ask him if he had ever heard of assortative mating.*

One might have thought that the fact that I was buying the first season of 90210 on DVD** would communicate to him that our Savage Dark Love was not meant to be, but I guess I can understand how my animal magnetism might blind a person.

Today at the grocery store a much less awkward young man told me that I had “awesome” hair, and then tonight at Barnes & Noble a young woman came up to me and asked breathlessly where I got my (awesome) hot pink sneaker boots. You may remember them.

People did still comment on my hair in California, but in southeast Missouri, I am lucky not to be pursued by news crews.

*Basically, people tend to hook up with people to whom they are socioeconomically–and educationally–similar. When there is a disjunct, let’s just say it doesn’t typically favor the female member of the partnership. Wal-Mart-employed goth wannabes do not usually make it with future PhDs, even pink-haired ones. And he wasn’t cute or socially adept enough to hire to manage the pool.

**Yes! It’s out! Apparently everyone knew but me! I’m not happy about this; you’d think the least Amazon could do for someone who probably accounts for a full percent of their annual revenues would be to send me a heads up email or something. However, I did learn that I was totally right about what took them the fuck so long: the box had a little warning on it that said “Music has been changed for this home entertainment version.” Copyright issues, I TOLD YOU.

Of course, you’d think that the artists whose work was showcased on 90210 in 1990 would be about ready for some renewed exposure right now, but what do I know.


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