same as it ever was

BOYFR.: What did you have for dinner?
ME: Burrito.
Pause.
M: What did you have for dinner?
B: Burrito.
Fin.

twiddle twiddle

How many fucking Interpols does the world need? I'll tell you. Just one. The one with the cute boys. Which is not this one.

Nine Black Alps are playing at Soho on May 11th. Isn't that incredibly odd? Okay, here's where they fall on my continuum of Live Acts To See. If I lived in L.A. and they were coming to L.A., I would probably not go to see them. I definitely would not drive to L.A. to see them. But I might drive across Santa Barbara to see them at the Old Folks' Live Music Venue. Who's with me? It's a Thursday.

liveblogging my boredom

I can't tell if Richard Butler's new solo stuff is actually pretty good, or if I just like it because I find his voice so affecting. If it's the latter, that seems unfair somehow. Although I'm not really sure to whom I think this is unfair. I guess to me?

huh

Are Echo and the Bunnymen British? Holy crap, how did I not know that until just now?

They have a new album out, you know. I have it. It's more than ok, but so far it isn't grabbing me too hard. It took me several months to realize I loved the last one, though, so I'm just gonna let it sink in for a little while.

hey

That burrito was pretty good.

let's have some fun

Hello, babies. It's S, a, tur, day, night, and I'm at work doing data entry. Getting paid an ungodly amount to do overtime data entry. Which doesn't sound bad when I put it like that, but trust me, it's fucking torture. Which is why I'm pleading for anyone else who isn't actually having a life at this moment to give me something interesting to do while I type little numbers and clicky the mousey. Shosh is very kindly IMing with me even though she's trying to paint her walls right now, but the rest of you are going to have to pitch in too. Know any indie bands I might enjoy but haven't heard of because I'm not as cool as you? I want to hear them! Funny web comics? Who's the new Natalie Dee, guys? Anything good on YouTube? Christ almighty, anything.

I just went out to get a burrito and a hideously balding man helping his young, hot, drunk date climb into his Audi gave me the ol' stinkeye. Because I walked through the parking lot behind his car. That is to say, I walked through my company's parking lot, which he is not actually supposed to park in while he proves to his date at the swanky restaurant next door that he's really awfully well-to-do.

This is my Saturday night. I'm crying for help.

that pesky woman problem

I was just writing an email to the Idler featuring a somewhat over-the-top feminist rant (not directed at him, just sort of over his shoulder), and Gmail's ad banner kindly pointed out this article (as well as an ad for typing jobs) as something I might be interested in. Thanks, Gmail, you're a really good listener.

The article is about a survey done by the Discovery Home and Health TV website, which apparently determined that 60% of women find housework empowering. Take a look and tell me if this is not the stupidest, most blatantly patriarchy-reinforcing spooge you've ever read. Actually, let's just take a quick look right now at the opening paragraph:

There was a time when the modern woman insisted her partner did 50 per cent of the housework — or iron his own shirts at least. But the postmodern female has more than made peace with doing the domestic chores, and has embraced housework as "mentally therapeutic", according to a survey.

So glad we got through that "modern" time when us women were so tragically deluding ourselves about the benefits of housework. You know, I can't even remember that crazy time when "modern women" everywhere managed to successfully insist that housework be divided fairly! I must have blocked it out from the horror! But that's OK, because apparently, now we are in the bizarro postmodern times, and at least 59% of us have seen the light: cleaning is beneficial to a woman's mental health, because it helps us to feel in control of our lives. And it should not be at all worrisome that the only way 59% of women are able to feel like we control our own fucking lives is through the soothing activity of rearranging knicknacks.

I also love how they compare the time women spend on cleaning to the time we spend on personal grooming, as if those were the two most important activities a woman engages in. No comparison to, say, time spent watching TV, or eating dinner, or driving to and from work.

And, of course:

One-third of all women claimed "cleaning gives them more satisfaction than sex".

So why should a man bother trying to please his woman in bed at all when, clearly, the kindest thing is just to get his rocks off, hand the little lady a dust rag, and push her out of bed so she can get on to what she really enjoys?

* * *

I thought I was done for a minute, but oh boy, am I not. Once my rage pump was primed good and proper, I went to look at the Discovery Home & Health website, in search of information about the survey. No dice, but I did find sections of the site on "Men's Health" and "Women's Health." You will note that the Men's Health page addresses the following topics: contraception, depression, infertility, prostate problems, stop smoking, stroke, and testicular cancer. You will likewise note that the Women's Health page addresses: breast cancer, breast discomfort, cervical cancer, contraception, cystitis, heavy periods, IBS, menopause, osteoporosis, ovarian cancer, painful periods, and PMS.

A couple of things I'd like to point out here:

• Ten of twelve items on the women's page are related directly or indirectly to the female reproductive system; three out of seven on the men's page are related to the male reproductive system. That's 83% compared to 43%.
  
• Ten out of twelve topics on the women's page are issues that exclusively affect women (and one of the remaining two so disproportionately affects women that it might as well be a woman's disease). Only two out of seven on the men's page are issues that exclusively affect men. 83% (or 92%, if you prefer) vs. 29%.
  
• There's only one duplication between the men's page and the women's page (contraception).

So why does Discovery Health think that the most important health issues women have to deal with are related to reproductive function? Why are depression, infertility, smoking, and stroke important issues to be addressed for men but not for women? Stroke is the third largest cause of death in America, and strokes are significantly more common for women than they are for men — even more common for women who smoke. Nearly twice as many women as men develop depression-related disorders. And wouldn't you think infertility would affect both genders at least equally? Well, I'll tell you why these are important topics to be addressed from the male but not the female point of view: it's because women are sex objects and baby-making machines, and that's all. The important parts of our bodies, the parts we should really be taking care of, are our tits and our pussies. It doesn't matter if a woman is depressed; just make another baby in her or tell her to clean the kitchen and it'll be all better — or if not, who really cares? And it certainly doesn't matter if a woman gets a stroke, because by the time that happens, she'll probably be past her sexually attractive, baby-making years and will therefore be completely irrelevant.

Oh, and a man's infertility is super important because in order to prove beyond any doubt that he is a man, he must be able to impregnate a woman. A woman's infertility is unimportant, because there are so many of us out there who won't perversely reject his seed — so a man looking to prove his masculinity can just move on to the next one. We are pretty much interchangeable anyway.


Okay, so I've gone off the rails a little bit here, or at least my rhetoric has. But if you think it's petty of me to get so upset and read so much into something as trivial as a website that I'm not going to read anyway, please remember that this website is owned by a fairly large, well-respected TV network, and that real women are going to try to get real health information from this site. And instead they'll get the message that the health issues that affect women are exclusively reproductive and do not include any of the health issues that also affect real, non-female people. Would you have noticed anything odd about these two pages if I hadn't pointed it out to you? Neither would I, a year ago. That's why this kind of thing is dangerous — it's not even out of the ordinary.


I'm going to go now, because I've given myself a splitting migraine. Yet another health problem which disproportionately affects women, often severely restricting normal life activities, but which Discovery Health feels shouldn't be as important to me as whether or not my breasts are comfortable. Which they are at the moment, thanks for asking!

and that's as funny as real love

I can't stop listening to this song.

Neko Case - Hold On Hold On

I know you all have access to this song anytime you want it. But listen to it now, just listen to it. Listen to it again, and listen to it one more time. Listen to it until you get dizzy and have to stop.

so foursquare!

Okay, so I'm going a little nuts tonight. I don't have to do math for an entire two months and I'm so excited that I'm staying up late and pouring my heart and soul into poorly-written but enthusiastic blog posts. Think of the bounty you'll receive when I'm done with the math class!

So anyway, this one is super important. I hope Shosh doesn't mind me posting a photo, but she made me the most k-rad night shirt ever and I am way too excited to keep it to myself:

So ornate, so casually allusive*, so (as she points out) freaking emo! And what's more, so purple! I love it so much! The last item of clothing anyone made for me was a t-shirt that my friend from 7th grade, Aruna Inversin, sent me shortly after I moved to Virginia, 14 years ago (sharp intake of breath). I still have it. It has a superhero screenprinted on it, in flying super-action pose, fist in the air. I think it has lightning bolts on it too or something. I suspect it was actually made as an art class project and Aruna didn't know what to do with it, so he sent it to me. I love it, too. But this one, this one was made on purpose specially for me, and I love it even more, and I will wear it until it falls apart, and then I will call Shosh in tears and demand that she make me a new one.


*Hey! There are two allusions on this shirt — see if you can spot the other one!

titillating tchotchkes

For the viewing pleasure of my fantastic readership, I took some photos this weekend at the scariest little shop in Santa Barbara (also known as Pacific Cove Doodads and Houseplants or something like that, I don't know — it's next to Chaucer's). Boyfriend and I were there on Saturday, and I could not stop freaking out about all the crazy shit they had. The place is a (casually raunchy) 8 year old's fantasy world. There were 50 different varieties of novelty pencil erasers. There were small plastic parachuting ninjas. There were small plastic parachuting aliens. There were keychains with rubber severed fingers on them. There were various figurines, animal and human, presenting their little tushes to the viewer in a very seductive fashion. And, most awesome of all, there was a pineapple plant. I ended up carrying several items around the store looking for a place out of the cashier's sight line to take pictures with my cell phone.

Let's start here:

Flower Arranging Frogs. Also, I don't know if you can read the top sign, but apparently you have to ask the cashier if you want Frog Fixers.

Dino stapler. Which I was totally going to buy until I realized it was broken. Then I was inconsolable. Look at the little tail, isn't it sweet? And just the tiniest bit obscene?

I swear these are positions from the Kama Sutra. Pigs Present Posteriors Provocatively.

Pull n' Learn / Pull n' Pray Jewish Knowledge Pen.

And I saved the best for last: this is a photo, if you can believe it, of an anatomically correct plastic baby, in full-on Britney Spears Giving Birth pose. I regret that I don't have a picture of the anatomical bits. I actually, to my everlasting chagrin, did not realize in the store that these babies even had naughty parts; boyfriend told me after I got home. I just thought the baby presenting in such a suggestive way was reason enough to be scandalized. Anyway, you'll have to use your imaginations. I'm sure that won't be a problem for some of you.

* * *

On the same trip, I also caught a new book-jacket adjective at Chaucer's: pacy. As in "Witty, pacy, and immediately engaging." I'm not linking to the book this describes, because I don't link to chick lit. It's not quite as good as "so foursquare," but we can't all be supermodels, can we?

fuck i'm glad i passed my math test

Well, I passed that motherfucker. I passed it with a vengeance. I passed it so hard. And I am now officially a College Student. So the tricky part is done now, right?

My student ID features my disembodied head floating over a harbor, bloodless and fixed. (I wanted to use the word "eidolon" here somehow, but its second definition is far, far from being appropriate.)

I showed it to a friend at work and the first thing he said was, "You have a really, really long neck."

no fucking way

This dude has totally stolen Boyfriend's schtick. I am contacting a lawyer.

[from here, #1, yo!]

This is the last time I will ever need to talk about what search terms are bringing people to my blog. In fact, this may be a sign that it's time to hang up my blogging hat altogether.

Yesterday. Someone from the South Australian Independent Schools Board Inc. in Adelaide, Australia searched Google for the phrase (in quotes, mind you) "fuck you! fuck you! fuck your mother!" The results, as you will see if you follow the link, include sites which follow this stately outburst with such phrases as, "He sat down in a puddle and began listlessly playing with himself," and, "You are a shiteater, cocksucker monkey!!!" Ignoring these options, the scholastic Aussie clicky-clicked his or her way to my happy little puppy-lovin' blog — which, incidentally, followed the phrase with something about eating a bag of you-know-whats(!!). Whoever you are, my friend, I do hope you got what you came for. Was it insults?

In other news: I've been slacking off with the Pete Doherty updates lately. It was just getting so monotonous. But you know how sometimes, when you've heard a joke repeated like a hundred times and it long ago passed the point of being at all amusing, if the joke-teller is persistent enough to just keep on telling it no matter what, it eventually starts to seem funnier than ever?

Today, a 23-year-old told me that my new haircut makes me look 30. Then he guessed my actual age at 25. Tell me, what kind of devil tells a person she looks 30 when he knows she's still in her twenties? He also complained that he had to drive his wife's white Jetta today, which apparently is such a girly car that driving it for a single day just positively made his penis shrivel up and die. I threw him a pity party.

So, in honor of how I look 30 now, I give you this little piece of childish happiness. This is my favorite of the old pictures I scanned tonight. It's me and my best friend Elizabeth Winkler and we're like eight and we're totally on our way to Girl Scout Camp. The picture quality is awful, but don't I just look serenely happy? Do you peep the incipient bunny ears? When I die I hope the only part of my life I see flashing before my eyes is the exact moment this picture was taken.


Sigh.

just think about the term "auto-desiccator" for a minute. seriously.

I saw my dermatologist this morning, a blonde woman with a hungry, oblique smile and a distressing tendency to anthropomorphize my moles. I asked her to remove one (too much information? sorry); this ended up being a 60-second process involving an injection, some unspeakable slicing, and the use of a device which I swear she referred to as an "auto-desiccator." I am officially creeped out by the medical profession.

So, I gave my desk to Shosh last week (which is why the Idler ended up with the desk chair); I'd been using it primarily as a place to pile clothing ever since I got ye olde wirelesse internete. Moving one piece of furniture awakened some kind of primal organizing frenzy, and I spent all weekend travelling to and from Ikea, assembling Ikea furniture, and frantically winnowing my posessions — separating the worth-keeping from the Goodwill donations from the pure trash. I shouldn't be, but I am fucking amazed at how much detritus I've managed to accumulate over the course of what has, after all, been a relatively short life. Also at how heavy a dresser made out of balsa wood can be.

As the boyfriend points out (not that I wouldn't have figured it out for myself), this whole production was probably in large part just a math-avoidance strategy. I have to take a math placement test this week, and over the past two weeks I have done, oh, about 3/8 of the studying necessary. (Seriously, it took me a couple of false starts to come up with that fraction, and that just involved counting the pages of the study guide on my fingers. So, things are not looking good for algebra.) Have I mentioned to everyone out there how much I hate math? Math, you suck. Math, eat a bag of dicks. Actually, that's rude. It's not that I hate math; it's that math requires a mental commitment I'm absolutely unprepared to give to anything that doesn't in any way involve either (a) words or (b) the boys from Interpol taking off their pants (always excepting the one with the herpes, natch). In action, this feels a lot like boredom, but at root I think it's a very different thing. A question for the rest of you out there who also dislike the mathematics: is it the same for you? Or when you search the depths of your soul, do you just really hate being forced to pointlessly manipulate numbers that may or may not even exist in the real world?

I'm off now to do a little quick shopping and then probably not do math. Perhappies, through the magic of Shosh having given me her scanner, I will spend the evening posting photos of me as a child to my blog. Ha ha, I'm just kidding, there are no photos of me as a child.

a request

Boyfriend, please start a blog. It's not like you have to say interesting things in order to get people to read it or anything. If my experience is any indication, you can pretty much just post a picture of a puppy once a week and caption it with some permutation of the word "fuck."

If you started a blog, you could be my friendicle.

If the rest of you wanted to help me apply peer pressure here, it couldn't hurt.

one-liners: friday fumarole fear edition

• Today's word is fumarole. Today's fear is: Death By Fumarole.
• My blog is worth $1,693.62. How much is your blog worth? Also, do you want to buy my blog?
  
• The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' new album is Album of the Month at Radio Indie Pop (which means you can listen to the whole thing for freeeee). I can't really get into the YYYs, but I love the song "Phenomena." Maybe because it makes me think about "White Lines."
  
• Speaking of which... if you had to name the worst album of all time ever, what would you say? I'm guessing something by Michael Bolton, right? If you could think of the name of a Michael Bolton album? Well, check out what Q Magazine picked.
• I have to learn two years' worth of high school math within the next 3-4 weeks. Which sucks, and let me tell you why. It's because in the precise moment that I walked out the doors of my high school on the last school day of my 11th grade year (formerly known as the fucking last year I would ever have to take a math class), I forgot all the math I had ever learned. I am not kidding. I had to re-learn basic mathematical skills the first time I wanted to buy a soda at the convenience store. Anyway, if I can cram learning two years' worth of crap I didn't understand the first time I tried to learn it into the next month of evenings and weekends, I think my latest plan for getting into a real college before I turn 30 just might work out. Three classes this summer, while working full time; 5 classes in the fall while working part-time. One of my fall classes has to be taken at Santa Monica College because it's only offered at SBCC in the spring and I have to have it by the end of this fall. So, I get to drive to Santa Monica once a week for however long a semester is. But it's better than spending an extra year in insurance, isn't it? Yes.

• I forgot the part where I get to take P.E. classes to get my GPA up, too. Someone, anyone, everyone: Take Karate With Me! You'll be able to legitimately say you got an A in Kicking Ass. I mean, if you get an A. I'll print you up a wallet card that says: "[Your Name] / Friend to Piehat Extraordinaire / Ass Kicking Mofo." Laminated. I'll do it up with a nice font and everything.
  
• That's it for now. I have to go buy math study guides. Sacrifice a baby for me or something, ok?

who will be my friend?

First person to buy me this t-shirt (from here) gets a wallet card pronouncing him or her a Most Excellent Friend of Piehat. I will even laminate it for you. Or, actually, maybe I'll just get the cartoon tattooed on my stomach. Do you think I would have to pay a licensing fee for that or anything?

I'm listening to Baby Dayliner right now. CD Baby fixed me right up, awesome.

MiniFun update

The email I just received, presented word for word, font for font, clip art for clip art. My guess is that the "fabulous little treats and prizes" will be fun things like rusty nails, poisonous snakes, or smallpox.
---------------------------------

The Ministry of Fun is pleased to announce the first of many fun monthly events!!

On Friday April 14th from 11 till noon

we will be having simultaneous Easter egg hunts at all offices before we close for the holiday!!

Of course the eggs will contain fabulous little treats and prizes!!

We will allot 4 eggs per person in each office.

We are looking for a volunteer to hide eggs in the Thousand Oaks and Oxnard offices respectively.

The volunteers will be compensated with 4 randomly chosen eggs each since this duty would

likely take some of the fun out of the hunt :-)

Possible additional details to follow....

Have A Fun Day!!

~The ministry

contrition, blah blah blah, navel-gazing, blah, awesome music!

Oh, dear. I am sorry about that last outburst. I was... er, angry. It had to do with work, and physical malaise (I'm bringing back "malaise," by the way), and you know, life in general or whatever. It passed.

I feel like one half of my posts here are inchoate bile (or sometimes, if you're lucky, relentlessly specific kvetching), and the other half are all, "I'm better now here's some puppies eeeeeee!" I see this happening, and I can't stop it. Oh uh, and I left out the parts where I talk about my blog and what I'm writing on my blog and what I think about my blog. You are staring into the mise en fucking abime here, people. Anyway, uhhh. Sorry. I'm probably an interesting person when I'm not distracted by my own navel.

As a reward for putting up with me, I present you with some good music. Unfortunately, these links will take you to MySpace, so, you know, dress accordingly.

Metal Hearts: Best song: "Gentleman's Spell"
Voxtrot: Best song: "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives"
Slowlands: Best song: "One More Fire"
Red Pony Clock: Best song: "Hayward Gurlzz" (n.b.: This band is looking for a tuba/sousaphone player. So!)

And last but ever-so not least, the freakishly compelling Baby Dayliner. Best song: "Go On Baby" (but "Critics Pass Away" is a close second). However, none of it is quite as good without the dances. Two words: jazz hands. You can also listen to quite long clips of every song from his first album on CD Baby here.

Enjooooooooy.