Monthly Archives: December 2011

Hat Finished Before Year Ends!

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I told you I was going to finish that hat I’d been working on before the year ended… and whoa… I have NEVER finished off a project with so little yarn to spare. There were 11 inches left of the ball of yarn when I finished grafting off the top of the hat. For all you non-knitters, that’s barely any yarn left. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, but I did!

Apparently one hank of Manos Silk Blend is the perfect amount to make Zissou for a Sailor.

It didn’t come out perfectly… I made a couple of mistakes, but they aren’t super noticeable and I had some laddering issues because I worked the pattern on DPNs but it looks great when it’s on, so that’s all that matters.

IMG 3605

Just a Day After Work in Times Square

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My latest work gig has me working in unfortunate proximity to Times Square. As in, if I want to take one train home instead of two, I have to walk right through the god forsaken mess…. oh, and it’s even more of a mess two days before the big ball drops.

There are people everywhere.

People that don’t understand that it’s really impolite to just stop walking in the middle of the sidewalk randomly because you don’t know where you want to go.

People who don’t understand that it’s really not okay to just stand in the middle of the sidewalk talking to your friend.

People who don’t understand that the only goddamned thing they’re stopping to take pictures of is gigantic ads.

GIGANTIC ADS! Is that what you want to show your kids? I went to NYC and I saw some really fucking GINORMOUS ADS!

No, no. I’m not bitter at all about having to work in Times Square.

It least for me, this is temporary. Poor James has to do it all the time.

So, I get out of work and I’m walking across 42nd Street towards 6th Avenue through the gigantic mob of people that just seems to get thicker the closer I get to 7th Avenue.

Now, normally in such situations the best thing to do is to just hop out into the street and walk around the crowd, but I’d gotten caught on the building side of the sidewalk so I was stuck just pushing onward. I get shoved by someone, probably by accident and probably by another New Yorker because only another New Yorker would do the bob and weave like that but I make sure to mutter obscenities loud enough for people around me to hear.

Remember, New Yorkers are supposed to be rude.

Or at least that’s what everyone who doesn’t live in New York City tells me.

I manage to make it across 7th Avenue and Broadway without killing anyone…. and finally, the crowd thins out, and I make my play to pass a dwaddling couple picking up the pace by about three times.

Out of the corner of my eye I catch a businessy looking woman with a suitcase who’s keeping pace with me. She says, “Oh whew, when you picked up the pace I figured I’d tail you because obviously you know what you’re doing.”

I laughed and said, “Well, I work down here. Otherwise I’d avoid it.”

She said, “I don’t know what I was thinking by booking a hotel around here at this time of year…” and then asked if I knew where it was and if she was going the right direction. I assured her, and then parted ways at 6th Avenue to get on the train.

Moral of the story? We’re not assholes if you can keep pace, fuckers.

Because Sometimes Doing a Meme Seems Like A Good Idea. Shut up.

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Ummm…. because Aunt Becky said so… and I needed a distraction from doing work on something that doesn’t want to work for me.

1. What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?

I performed in a burlesque show.

2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Considering I don’t do this, nope…. and nope.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

I think some of my Facebook friends did…

4. Did anyone close to you die?

James died in my imagination like a billion times, does that count?

5. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?

More chutzpah.

6. What countries did you visit?

Does Chicago count as another country?

7. What date from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why:

August 3. The day that Roxy Bourbon debuted on the Coney Island Sideshow stage.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Becoming Roxy Bourbon the burlesque dancer, duh.

Also, I learned to cook hot dogs.

9. What was your biggest failure?

The failure to pay rent on time for the month of December.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

I had a bad ear infection at the end of January. The best part was seeing how James squirmed when I tried to tell him about how awful it was.

I also got black out drunk and fell down the stairs to the bathroom at Risottoria and gave myself a black eye, an a bruised forearm and gash in the other arm. You can still kinda see the scar if you’re really looking for it.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Sennheiser HD280 Pro headphones.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

My awesome friend Phil. He graduated from college, don’t ya know?

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

His name does not rhyme with Thames.

14. Where did most of your money go?

I’m still trying to figure that one out.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Sex.

16. What song will always remind you of 2011?

Oh, pretty much anything by Adele.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

i. happier or sadder? Happier.

ii. thinner or fatter? Thinner.

iii. richer or poorer? Poorer.

Okay, Meme, let me take a stab at that:

i) more or less like Justin Beaver – Snerk.

ii) more or less likely to decide inanimate objects looked like boobs – More. Duh. Boobs are awesome.

iii) more or less likely to watch Glee – Considering that I never watched it in the first place…

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Eating at home and saving money.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Drinking.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

Umm… That’s like almost a whole year away now.

21. There was no #21. I don’t know why there was no 21.

Too bad.

22. Did you fall in love in 2011?

Not exactly.

23. How many one-night stands?

Two? Maybe three? I kinda gave up doing that.

24. What was your favorite TV program?

30 Rock.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

Nope.

26. What was the best book you read?

Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century or The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Why I didn’t like metal music. You can read about that here.

28. What did you want and get?

A keyboard. I got myself a used Kurzweil PC88. That thing’s a beast.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?

That new Muppet movie that I don’t actually know the title of.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I turned 27…. and I don’t remember which means it probably involved drinking.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

It would have been nice to have worked more over the fall.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?

See? I can dress like a girl.

34. What kept you sane?

More like, who. Phil and Anna.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Johnny Depp. Especially when he does the Hunter S. Thompson voice.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

Occupy!

37. Who did you miss?

I missed James for the whole month I didn’t talk to him.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

The guy who tries to get me to speak Spanish at the bodega across the street is pretty cool.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011:

Breathe.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

“I lost my mind long ago, down that yellow brick road.” – Angus & Julia Stone, “Yellow Brick Road”

WEverb #22: Finish Knitting a Hat

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What is one thing you want to do before you bid adieu to 2011? How will you make it happen?

When I read this question, I thought to myself “Oh great, another question that I don’t have answer for and there’s only three days left in 2011 because you know, I’m running behind in this whole WEverb11 thing. At this point what could I have possibly left to complete?”

And then I remembered the hat I’ve been knitting on.

IMG 3580

I’ve been working on this Zissou for a Sailor hat for probably about two months now but I’m not really sure because I never ended up posting it up on Ravelry that I started the project. On Christmas, I finally got to the home stretch, the decreases… but then started messing it up and putting them in the wrong place because knitting + whiskey = disaster. Thankfully, I caught it after about two rounds so I don’t have that much to undo.

I’m so close to finishing that it would be a shame not to finish the hat before the New Year.

WEverb11 #21: My Butterfly, Jen Lee

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The butterfly effect posits that a small change can ripple across whole ecosystems. Who do you credit for the small action that made all the difference in your life this year?

One of the reasons that I feel so strongly called to blogging, writing, storytelling is because you never know who you’re going to affect by doing so. In the spring, I managed to trip across the blog of a storyteller named Jen Lee. Around the time I started reading her blog, she had just released the first of what looks now to be the first a series of courses about finding your voice and storytelling, Finding Your Voice.

When I saw her video, Content and Containers: The Making of “Finding Your Voice” I just fell in love. She talks about how writers these days are faced with more choices on what sort of container their writing belongs in because the way we interact with media and create media is different than it was in times previous. I hadn’t much thought about it that way, but it resonated with me. Also, if you hadn’t noticed, I like to be a supporter of people who self-publish, and when she says at the end of the video that she knows she likely won’t be able to do this forever, and the choices she’s made in the delivery of the content might not be the most profitable but she’s more interested in what’s gained rather than lost… Well, as soon as I finished that video, I ordered it.

At the time when I bought and received “Finding Your Voice” I was in the midst of a bit of an emotional crisis. James and I had a fight which resulted in us not speaking to each other at all for a month. I was frantically trying to figure out what to do with all of these painful emotions that I so desperately needed an outlet for but was feeling far too self-conscious to bring to my blog. I was pondering how to most effectively express myself… Through blogging? Through fiction? Through some other multimedia-ish means?

When Jen responded, she brought up a point that stuck with me. Sometimes it’s wise to wait to publish things because it takes time to process things, sometimes much longer than we realize, especially in the case of losses.

That sentiment really left a mark on me and thoroughly changed my thoughts about how to approach writing about my life in a public forum such as my blog.

Throughout my early blogging history, I was a rather reactionary writer. My blog was a space to process the here and now. While I sometimes wrote about the past, it was fairly rare. When the event occurred that damaged my blogging voice, it was because I was publicly processing something that was probably better to process privately, and while I hadn’t meant anyone any harm, I did hurt somebody’s feelings and while I do believe what was said to me in response was an inappropriate way to respond, the point still stands… Sometimes there are things that should be written about privately and should only be published after careful consideration.

I suppose I always knew that at some level, but for some reason reading Jen’s words in response to me really hit home the fact that blogging doesn’t have to necessarily be about your everyday life all the time. It gave me permission to consider other things to write about. It gave me permission to write those reactionary posts, but then just make them private instead of public…. Sit on them, maybe post them in the future, maybe not. But not everything has to be for public consumption.

And that’s why Jen Lee is my butterfly.

WEverb11 #20: Kindle, Blogging and Phone

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How has technology affected your life (positively or negatively) in 2011? Do you want this to continue for 2012?

I’ve been an Internet junkie for fifteen years. I’ve been a professional front end web developer for six years. At this point, technology tends to be one of those things that I live, breathe, eat and sleep. It’s part of my job. It’s part of my hobby. It’s just a part of my life, for better or for worse.

This year’s notable technological stuff…

One. The Kindle. After being pretty uncertain about this whole ebook phenomenon, I asked for a Kindle last Christmas and my mother obliged. That little device has transformed my reading habits by like a million. Prior to getting the device, I barely ever read books. Books are heavy. Turning pages on books were a pain in the ass when you were stuck standing on the subway. Books were something I bought to make shelves look pretty.

Once I got the Kindle, I started reading like a fiend. Suddenly, I could have new books on demand. I wanted to read something? I just immediately downloaded it and started reading. Oh and the page turning thing… I COULD READ WHILE STANDING! ON THE SUBWAY! WITHOUT HAVING TO LET GO OF THE POLE, PEOPLE!

In 2011, I read a total of twenty-four books. Twenty of which were on the Kindle.

Okay, so maybe it didn’t TRANSFORM my reading habits… I read sixteen books in 2010 and only one of those was on the Kindle which I read between Christmas and the new year… but I swear, it would have been a much bigger number if I hadn’t spent the tail end of 2011 sitting at home and not riding the subway. (Being on the subway is prime reading time for a city girl, you know.)

Two. Blogging. Certainly not a new thing in my life… I started “blogging” in 1997, several years before the term was even coined (oh, how I love saying that) but post-college my blogging habit really started to drop off. Work took a higher precedent. I was dealing with some irrational fears of negative backlash, Facebook and Twitter took over my life… and well, blogging became less of a priority.

About midway through this year, I decided to start dedicating more of my time to it. I relaunched my blog from scratch in June with WordPress and couldn’t be happier. I’ve blogged more consistently since June of this year than several years prior. Proud of myself, I am.

Three. The lost phone. In April, I did a dumb thing and got drunk and left my lovely G2 Android phone in a cab. Because I have an irrational fear of the phone, I ended up putting off calling the insurance company that was supposed to replace my phone who tried to deny my claim until it was too late to claim my phone was missing, so it never got replaced. I just slinked back to my old G1 which is still barely working and annoying the piss out of my friends because it randomly sends old text messages when I turn the phone off and on.

Having such an old smartphone made me stop using it half as much though. You don’t want to play with apps and things when you’re phone’s complaining it doesn’t have enough memory. So, that phone addition that so many people complain of? I don’t have it. My phone also lasts forever because I have a huge battery for it, even if the stupid thing is the size of a brick.

For the new year, I want to continue reading. I want to continue blogging. And if I don’t get a new smartphone soon, I think my friends are going to kill me.

WEverb #19: The Year of Stand-up and Why I Love Louie CK

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Tell us about your biggest belly laugh in 2011.

See, the problem with these questions is they’re looking for the biggest and the best, and well… every time I answer a question I find myself saying, “I’m not sure if this is the biggest and best, but this is what pops into my mind when you as about ______!” So, that’s what we’re going to go with here.

2011 was a year of watching a shit ton of standup comedy.

I’ve always liked standup comedy but considering my compulsion to watch television alone is pretty much none, I never really got into watching that much of it on my own. Plus the whole “I don’t want to bother because I don’t know who’s good” thing. I got into it this year because standup is one of James’ favorite things.

So many people we watched… Patton Oswalt, Brian Regan, Katt Williams, Joe Rogan, Mike Birbigila, Adam Ferrera, Mitch Hebderg, Bill Hicks, Doug Stanhope, Louie CK and probably a hell of a lot more people that I’ve forgotten names of…

I feel like I ought to give Louie CK a little extra recognition though. Namely because the dude utterly impressed me with self-releasing his latest special on his website, for $5 you get a DRM-free download of the special.

Though, I have to say one of my favorite part was the message at the end of the buy form:

To those who might wish to “torrent” this video: look, I don’t really get the whole “torrent” thing. I don’t know enough about it to judge either way. But I’d just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without “corporate” restrictions.

Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.

Sincerely,
Louis C.K.

Turns out it wasn’t a bad idea. People apparently will gladly spend $5 for a DRM-free download on an asshole comedian. If you take a look at his news section he details what his plans are for the money, gives a vague budget of what the thing cost to make, and well… He didn’t need to share all that information with the world, but I’m really impressed when people who make self-produced, self-released content share what goes into the work they do because it makes it more transparent as to what kind of work goes into things, plus… I dunno… just made the dude on the TV seem a little more like a normal human being that wants to do cool shit without a corporation being involved and calling the artistic shots.

People doing cool shit makes me happy. Go buy his special, it’s pretty damn funny (if you like asshole comedians, that is).

Merry Christmas, Muppet Family Style

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Growing up, my favorite Christmas movie was an hour long Muppet TV special called A Muppet Family Christmas which originally aired on ABC in 1987. My mother taped it off the television, and I watched it every year.

When I happened to notice that someone posted it up on YouTube…. I figured, hey… What the hell, let’s have an unauthorized screening of the film right here on on my blog. Merry Christmas!

WEverb11 #18: Letting Go of Shame

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What lesson or advice were you able to pass on to others this year? Why was it important to share this information? (Or… what lesson would you like to pass on to others that read this?)

I know I’ve mentioned this lecture at least once in the WEverb11 series that I’ve been doing, but I think it’s appropriate to bring up again. Brene Brown’s TED talk, The Power of Vulnerability. This talk seriously rocked up my world this year… and resulted in me gobbling up her blog and her two books, I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Telling the Truth About Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power and The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are which of course have awfully long self-helpy sort of titles that seem to make this entire paragraph look ugly, but they are indeed very good books. (I had a preference for her second book, The Gifts of Imperfection). Through reading her various work, I started becoming a lot more cognizant of how shame affects how I have viewed myself, especially in light of all my various anxieties.

I mean, it’s one thing to be anxious… but when you’re anxious and then ashamed that your anxious on top of that? That’s about twice as much stress as one really ought to bear. Figuring out that the healthiest thing to do sometimes is just say “Fuck it!” and have a good cry because you feel like it and stop giving a shit about whether or not someone’s going to say you’re weak for it? Yep. That’s pretty liberating. It’s not always easy, but it’s liberating.

WEverb11 #17: Why I Didn’t Like Metal

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What did you discover (big or small) in 2011?

The major discovery of 2011? The reason why I didn’t like metal… as in the music.

One of the benefits of hanging out with James is that hanging out with him ends up being like enrolled in your own private history of rock ‘n roll class with a heavy dose of critical listening. For the most part, I considered this a really fun way to spend an evening… until the night he got on a tangent of metal music.

With the noted exceptions of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” (which was played at the beginning of every football and hockey game when I was in high school) and Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” I could not stand metal.

I think he had put on Megadeth when I found myself squirming in my seat and my heart racing like a bat out of hell and resisting the urge to just jump across him and steal the trackball from his hands and shut the blasted thing off.

For me, metal == anxiety.

For some friends, saying that I didn’t like it would be enough and they’d drop it, but not James. His curiosity was piqued and he just HAD to unravel the mystery of why metal music caused me to become a writhing ball of anguish.

And you know what? The asshole figured it out, too.

The first thing we discovered was that here was a frequency range (high to mid), essentially the lead guitar, which was the trigger for my heart to start feeling like it was going to leap out of my chest and kill me at any given moment. Just fiddle with the equalizer and pull that frequency range out of the picture, and suddenly I don’t feel like I’m going to die anymore.

Of course, when you take out that frequency the song kinda loses it’s bite and it sorta doesn’t feel like anything anymore either…. so at that point, what’s the point in listening?

Then there was the matter of the lyrics. I’m a lyric driven person, and well… the thing about metal is that sometimes the lyrics aren’t exactly the most decipherable part of the song… or at least, not to me they aren’t.

Knowing this, James went through a period of maybe a week or two where he just fed me links to metal songs that he was listening to so I could read them. I read a lot of metal as poetry, usually following up the read by playing about 30 seconds of the song to catch the mood the artist was trying to portray.

It was becoming much easier to appreciate metal after breaking it down into parts.

I also realized something… When you’re listening (or reading the lyrics) to a song, you have a choice as to who to identify with. You can either identify with the emotion that the band is putting forth as if you were one of them, or you can identify with the person that the song is being aimed toward.

Music is a sonic snapshot of emotion. It just so happens that with metal, the emotion that’s tends to be predominant is anger. It so happens, anger is one of those emotions that I don’t really do.

When you present me with an angry song where say… the lyrics suggest that the singer wants to murder his ex-girlfriend who fucked around with him or some such (not that I’m thinking of any specific song or anything, it just seemed like something appropriate to write a metal song about) the character that I’m most likely going to identify with is the ex-girlfriend who’s going to get murdered.

Worst I ever have wanted to do to an ex-lover is give them a knuckle sandwich over something dumb they might have done, but to feel that torturous “I want to murder you if you’re not mine so I’m going to write a song about it instead of actually doing it?” Not something I really relate to, it never even occurred to me to put myself in their shoes.

So, when it came to metal… I always just saw myself on the receiving end of the gun. That’s not exactly the end you want to be on, so that’s why my anxiety runs rampant around metal.

While metal isn’t a genre that I’d say I turn to with any degree of frequency, unraveling the mystery of why it made me anxious helped me be able to listen to it and appreciate it for what it is, rather than cowering in fear every time someone turned it on.