Was That A Dare?
My friend Amanda has a dog named Laddie. She has 3 legs***. Not Amanda (that'd be weird). Laddie.
She told me about a trip she and Laddie took to the vet a few weeks ago. Laddie had had a tooth removed and would be experiencing some discomfort over the next few days. Amanda was collecting her things and putting the leash on Laddie while the vet was writing out the prescription for some painkillers for the dog.
As he handed the doggie prescription to Amanda he looked over his glasses and overdramatically stated: "You should
know that these are
no stronger than extra strength ibuprofen or Advil or something along those lines." and then turned on his heal and left the room. "Okay" she got out, but then realized: did he just tell me that so that I wouldn't eat my dog's medicine? What the hell is he trying to imply? DO I LOOK LIKE SOMEONE THAT WOULD EAT DOG MEDICINE? Was that a DARE?
So much for rhetorical questions. Amanda went home, ate the doggie Advil, and waited for something anything maybe even something really fun and trippy and psychedelic to happen.
And it never did. The vet was right. Damn.
That time.
But then there was the OTHER time...
Laddie had just had a very serious operation. (Refer to "***") She had been given a morphine patch to wear for 5 days. The vet tech strongly advised Amanda to "wear rubber latex gloves when handling or removing the patch and whatever you do don't let the patch touch your skin directly" during Laddie's recovery. Yeah. Right.
At Day 6.0 And 0.0 Seconds, Amanda slapped that worn out doggie drug patch on her naked non-latex covered arm. Then, she waited for something anything maybe even something really fun and trippy and psychedelic to happen. And "it kinda did, just a little, but nothing to write home about".
I guess they teach you that in vet school. You know. How to spot them: The People That Would Eat Dog Medecine.
TPTWEDM: Speak out. You are not alone.
As The Crow Flies, The Idiots Drive
There is a lot water in these parts. Bodies of water everywhere. Lakes, bays, sounds, rivers, streams, puddles. Big and small, these bodies of water are fucking everywhere I tell you. And to deal with these many bodies of water, may The Force be with you.
On this Great Day of Indecision and Arbitrary Let's Take This Exit Because It Just Feels Right, the first fork in the road to Stupidty-ville was just around the bend. Just past
Tacoma.
The Party:
The goal was to get our mainland asses over to Elliotfest 2005 before sundown. Actually before 2 pm and then that turned into 4 pm. (Matt and Phedra, you guys rock and so does your golf course caliber lawn, finger lickin' good Colonels-ass-kickin' award winning bbq chicken, and the strong as shit g and t's (
in giant blue plastic party cups! I like how you don't fuck around with the drinky drink!) that kept on flowing all night long until I couldn't see straight)
The Plan:
"Let's just drive or no maybe we should take the ferry but wait what ferry? the Kingston or Bainbridge or maybe just driving for 1.5 hours would be easier because then we are in control and don't have to wait in the ferry line but the ferry could be better because it
is part of the fun! and we can get out of the car and wait. shit. we don't even have the directions so even if we wanted to drive we really don't know where we are going exactly. I mean we have a general idea ah who needs directions screw it let's just drive. "
Do you see?!?! THERE WAS NO FUCKING PLAN!
The Way It Went Down:
Stupidity-ville, we're coming!. Narrowly avoiding getting stuck in the Gay Pride Parade behind dudes in buttless chaps (a quilting bee compared to LA's gpp) we made it out of the city but oh wait, not until after realizing the freeway was closed down to one lane. Great. The directions I have mapquested are not from Seattle to our party. They are from like 20 minutes away from the party to the party, thus leaving us all Helen Keller'ed for the first 80% of the trip. Great. Later, the wood pulp induced stench of Seattle's ugly and smelly and I-have-a-wart-on-my-nose-with-hair-poking-out-of-it stepsister, "The Aroma of Tacoma" filled our car and we all started feeling nauseous and headachey (a la
the blueberry pie Barf-A-Rama.) Great.
Then we hit Bremerton and things got royally fucked up. We got off the highway because you know because it just
feels right, admiring the huge and not too rusty hulls of aircraft carriers thinking..."is this right? Matt would have told us if he lived in an actual aircraft carrier, right?"
We try to ask directions. Thrice.
1) Young caucasion male runs yes RUNS from the car with a look of terror in his eyes as I roll down my window to ask for help then
2) Two definitely over 18 years of age youth (erroneous assumption #237 was that hey, they're 18ish, they d r i v e and they might just might know where the one major highway would be. WRONG.) look at us like we are
the alien who put on the farmers skin in Men In Black when we ask for help AND simultaneously we are flipped off by a very small woman in a very large SUV and finally finally finally
3) A carwash crew of 10 twelve year olds and one glaring pissed off overweight soccer mom who thought we were pedophiles or potential carwash carjackers or something said to just keep going keep going reeeaaaall far. Reeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaall far.
I was never so happy to see a blue plastic party cup full of gin in my life.
Go the way the crow flies...and NOT the way the idiots drive. You've been notified.
Wash My Mouth Out With Soap
My
perfume bottle leaked into the ziploc baggie that held my toothbrush that I just used to brush my teeth but realized TOO DAMN LATE that the toothbrush bristles were not wet from water but wet from spilled perfume. May no one else experience this grossness that I just -and currently still AM - experiencing 2 hours post-brush.
Voyeuristic Friday
I work in downtown Seattle on the 16th floor of an office building. The views are nice. Some days they are nicer than others.
To the north I see the Cascade Mountains. To the west is Alki beyond Elliott Bay. To the south lies a bunch of office buildings with Mt. Rainer tucked behind. And today, to the east, I saw people having sex in a hotel room.
People have sex in hotel rooms all the time, right? Right. But I don't need to
see it. At
9 am. From my
office. Surrounded by a herd of (
male) coworkers who swarmed to the window like a pack of hungry dogs after a hamburger that rolled off the grill.
There's a very simple and fairly obvious lesson in all this: if you can see OUT the window, other people can see IN.
Duh.
TGIF.
Sometimes I Rhyme Slow
Dylan Clinton Joplin and Bjork. JFK MLK KLF NWA. IceT IceCube LL and Madonna. Snoop Tori Ani Bree. GWBI and GWBII. Oprah. Shakespeare. The Farrelly Brothers. And oh yes,
Nice & Smooth.Sometimes the insight, idiocity, and (non) relevancy of things I hear every day strikes me. It's so easy to tune it all out - especially from those people we all know who have nothing to say but say it anyway. Over. And over. And over. (One might argue that I am doing that very thing right
here! What a hypocrit.)
Good news: the rhymes were ON at
The Mirabeau Room's Tuesday night
poetry slam. Despite the overwhelming sense that I was sitting in a giant salad bowl due to the stench of VINEGAR (I don't want to know
what it was used to disenfect), I forgot how much I love the raw words and the timber and intonation of sound that comes out of the poets mouths in spoken word poetry.
I was picked to be a judge. Heckling was minimal, although I might have gotten a pissy stare at one point or another. (Discovery: I underestimated the power of the 0.0 to 10.0 scale. Plastic numbers stuck to a wooden paddle never felt so important. I felt like I was watching ice skating, not on TV but at the actual rink at the actual Olympics, and
I was that pain-in-the-ass, hard to impress, poker-faced Russion judge sitting on the end of the row.)
Poets included pieces about:
1) The Wet Spot
2) The Taco Truck (No relation to The Wet Spot)
3) Rails of Crushed Hummingbird Wings (I didn't get it)
4) Hitler, Nationalist Fevor (Iraq), and German-American Guilt, Shame, and Perspective
5) Being Jewish At Jesus Camp. And Being Sent There By Mistake By Your Mom
6) "Not A Political Rant" About Our Absurd Government
7) If Sodomy Is Unnatural, Than So Is Organized Religion, Jerry Springer, Airplanes and Limos
8) The Dubious Sanitary Napkin Belt and The Evils of "...With Wings" Technology
and lastly but not leastly,
9) Ostrich Eggs...(Apparently they are symbolic of a whole lotta stuff I never thought of)
"If you want to quiche me, put your big ostrich egg in my mouth. PUT YOUR BIG OSTRICH EGG IN MY MOUTH."
(emphasis is the poet's, not mine)
I wish that I had a program booklet to credit the poets properly. They rocked. I will be going back next week.
Uninsured Walker
I have a shitty walking record. I am clumsy. Extremely clumsy. I trip and fall and walk into things and often times give the appearance of being a little bit inebriated when in fact I am not (or I am). This is the hand I have been dealt in life. I played and lost on Saturday.
Details: Freemont, Solstice parade, noonish… talking to 2 people at the same time whose combined height was around 14 feet (read: TALL) so I was looking up while walking/talking while having just had a mimosa(s) while simultaneously craning my neck to watch naked people on bicycles…. while stepping off a curb that I HAD NO IDEA WAS THERE.….and falling…on my face. Actually, my face is fine, but my knee is not. It’s all bruised and swollen and gnarly and skinned. It's 5th grade, all over again.
That
Mary Hart (Entertainment Tonight. Collagen injected lips. Big hair. Familiar?) may be onto something when she insured her legs. I'm calling Allstate now.
Look! People
NOT falling down at the parade:
The New York Times Go By Fast
My grandfather, Stephen Hills, is 91 years old and is one of the most interesting people I know. He has lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn his entire life and still resides in the same apartment he has lived in for the last 50 plus years that overlooks Owls Head Park and has a view of the Statue of Liberty.
He believes in cocktail hour 7 days a week, dressing WELL (In case you weren't aware, mixing plaids and stripes is OK when you are as cool as he is), he truly -- i KNOW what you are about to say so just don't, Surgeon Generals -- makes smoking a cigarette look debonnaire and delicious in that 1950's Sinatra/Rat Pack way, and he tells a story better than
anyone I know.
He is the only person who calls me Kate.
He was interviewed by The New York Times today with 3 other gentlemen on the 50th anniversary of the closing of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. It was founded in 1841 and closed it's doors in 1955. My grandfather joined The Eagle in 1937 as a reporter, having worked at The Brooklyn Times-Union as a clerk, and eventually became the Eagle's Sunday editor.
Excerpt from the article:The Eagle's coverage included the Civil War, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge and the consolidation in 1898 of Brooklyn, along with other boroughs,into the city that is now New York. The paper won four Pulitzer Prizes and even had Walt Whitman for an editor in the 1840's. In 1941, an Eagle headline immortalized a credo of Dodger fans, "Wait 'til Next Year."
The men recalled that in the Eagle's newsroom at 24 Johnson Street, the first edition would go out at 10:30 each morning, full of overnight news. The day's final edition would be finished around dinnertime, shortly after the horse racing results were telegraphed in from the local tracks.
"We'd look over the morass of wire copy and daily stories, and when we saw a spark of Brooklyn in any of them, we'd jump on it," Mr. Frigand recalled. "Then we'd write the stories on the fly and hopefully beat The World-Telegram and The Journal American to the punch. After you wrote the first part, a copy boy would pull it out of your typewriter and bring it back printed on a page proof before you even finished the rest of the story."
They recalled daily lunch hours that doubled as drinking sessions.
"Drink was part of a man's diet in those days," Mr. Hochman said. "We had a copy editor who always hid his raises from his wife so he could spend the money at the bar."
They pulled out old copies of The Eagle, the broadsheet pages yellowed and crumbling. A banner headline across the top of the front of the Dec. 11, 1941, paper declared: "Yank Bombers Sink 3 Jap Warships." The paper of Sept. 1, 1939 - the "8 Star Sports Complete Edition" - had a huge "WAR!" headline, each letter as big as a dinner plate.
"That was woodblock type," Mr. Hills recalled. "We didn't have any iron type that big."
As I look around
where I work right now, I wonder: in 61 years, who will I be sitting next to while I get interviewed about the old days? What will I say?
Love you Papa. - Kate.
Purse-alicious
I was in LA this weekend with Amanda. She had to buy clothes for her new boutique Paperdoll and I needed to get outta Seattle and feel the sun on my skin. We stayed at
The Standard in Downtown LA but despite being in the heart of such verdant and lush famous-personville, our lone celebrity siting of the weekend occurred at SeaTac.
As we dragged our pathetic coach class asses past the leather seated royalty in the first class section (I've sat in first class once on my life. ONCE.), I caught eye with a pasty pale, cleft-chinned, sunglasses wearin' wannabe and thought: that's the soon-to-be (former-Paris-Hilton-sidekick-now-a-tragic-little-waif-who-needs-a-sandwich)
Mr. Nicole Ritchie. He was spinning at
Element Friday night and apparently wanted to get the hell out of Seattle as soon as possible (it was a 6:30 a.m. flight) because he must have missed his lil'
lady.
Saturday night was a great night. We went to Adam's apartment in West Hollywood where he insisted on being the host with the most and treated us like royalty: cocktails and dinner. Thank you Adam. Chris Dryer the Writer, Sarah With a Cup Full o Stoli, and Eric "Art Bar" from Vegas arrived ... and thus began the walking and wandering and total sensory overload of a night in LA during
Gay Pride Weekend.
The cherry on top of this night went down in a club called GirlBar (yes, all girls all the time) when Adam
insisted that Amanda and I just
shouldn't even consider trying to dance while holding our handbags. Ever the gentleman, he graciously stepped in and removed our bags from our shoulders then promptly dissappeared into the crowded dance floor leaving us to shake our groove thangs unencumbered.
Much much later later later, the thought occured to us: "Where are our purses?". We squirmed our way through the all girls all the time crowd. I look up in shock and awe of His Utter Amazingness. Off in the distance, Adam is shaking his moneymaker on a raised stage overlooking the entire club, strobe lights strobing, shirtless, sweating, and dancing like his life depended on it with A PURSE ON EACH SHOULDER. He had the routine, the moves, the vibe. He was on fire. Check out the fire. Careful, don't get burned.
Hold my handbag and you have my heart baby.
Yurt The Best
Bridgette and Dave flew in from St. Louis on Thursday for their second visit to Seattle. Due to popular demand, we headed back to the San Juan Islands,
Orcas Island to be specific, for a weekend of relaxation
out in the wilderness....and trepidation.
Trepidation because:
.....I never know if I will end a weekend of camping a million times more tired than I started due to total and complete sleep deprivation.
.....I may wake up with a searing old-lady pain in my neck or my back or my leg in the middle of the night due to a root or rock that prevents me from returning to even the briefest spell of REM sleep before sunrise.
.....It might pour rain or blow a gale at the very instant I have to a) set up the tent or b) go pee or c) fall asleep or d) actually stand upright and not be crouched down in a 7 foot by 5 foot by 4 foot nylon coffin.
I do like camping. I really do. It's just that there are a lot of unknowns with camping and I like to know my knowns. So I've struggled, specifically with the issue of sleep and not getting any. Until now. It's all changed because I have met
YURT .
Let me introduce you to
YURT : he has a floor made of wood, a door made of wood and metal, and walls made of a wooden lattice-work support with a tarp thing stretched around it. He has a little skylight, he has windows (actually plastic flaps that velcro up or down) and he has a lock on aforementioned door. But MOST IMPORTANTLY,
YURT has a bed. With sheets. And pillows. And an actual blanket(s)!!
Restful, comfortable, uninterupted, lower-back-supported sleep actually happens while one is surrounded by the beauty and solitude of nature.
Where have you been all my life?
YURT, yurt the best.
(No, he does not have running water or a toilet. Don't get greedy. Book a HoJo.)
VAIN
So I went to
VAIN yesterday for a haircut and left with an uninspired cut which is 100% due to my lackluster direction. I get so indecisive and wishy washy in that damn chair.
Of note are the exciting prospects for the future of my follicles! I may get extensions. Yes,
extensions. Those fake hair things that were previously a part of someone else's head (unless you go synthetic, which um..you just DON'T do --roll of eyes here-- according to Kelly), and somehow get stuck/braided/glued into YOUR head and look like they were always there. At least that's how it's supposed to go.
Kelly, my stylist, is learning how to do extensions. She needs hair
dummies.
I think I'm up for the challenge...and potential humiliation.
