overheard, 3:30 pm

Student (indignantly):

"Oh, uhn uhn! Looka dis! It was bad enough last week when they left dey period blood all on the chair!

Now they's a *turd* back up hyere!"

Me (worriedly walking to the back of the class):

"Ok, ok. Calm down now. See, it's just a big Raisinet.

But I can't blame you for being alarmed."

how I'm feeling right about now.

Maybe eleven.

overheard, 3 pm

"Whuhss wrong wit huh?"

"Whatchu mean?"

"Dat voice. You hear huh? Girl, she sound like my gramPAW!"

"Yeeeah, I know.
But, you know, it ain't like she can do nuthin 'bout it."

"Shiiiih...If I sounded like dat, I'd punch myself in de throat til I sounded like a
girl."

paper cuts

Back when I was a kid, I used to love doing origami. I was weird like that. Nowadays I can't remember how to make a crane to save my life. Hell, I can barely fold a letter to fit an envelope. Pathetic.

Anyway, it's still one of my pet interests. Here are a few new projects I've lined up for myself, you know, to loosen the fingers up a bit:







Of course, my origami Chuck Norris will be floatting in a dollar bill toilet.

and he'll have this perfect paper cleavage.

Heck, I might just skip the rest and go straight to the cleavage.

ding dong, the witch is dead!

The (second) best thing to happen this past new years eve is that my most colorful neighbor, the howler, moved away. No more bone chilling caterwauling for 48 straight hours.
Yes!

Ever since, however, I'm ashamed to admit, I kind of miss her.
Yes.
It's true. I find myself howling under my breath sometimes. Such is life, I suppose.

One thing I definitely miss about her is, however, is how she used to maniacally keep the place clean. The place is constantly dirty now. The cleaning duty has fallen, by default, upon me, it seems. And I am a very poor substitute for her mania. (But no more god-damned Renuzit, that much I can tell you for sure)

When she vacated, I felt liberated! I could finally go out into the back garden without fear of trespassing. She had long treated the back as her personal haven. I was always too intimidated to venture out there. For a few weeks it was mine, all mine!

Once I was sure the coast was clear (it took a while to be completely certain she wasn't just hiding under the house waiting to pounce from behind the ferns), I decided to decorate the place a bit.

I planted a few seed packet herbs from the dollar store here and there. I stole some pots from my mother. The basil has thrived, the lavender and the cilantro, not so much.

Poverty is the mother of invention....or something like that....so I've had to be resourceful. I bought some 15 dollar chairs, and a few strings of deeply discounted paper lanterns, an outdoor mat (for another 15 dollars), made a bench and a little table, from things found in my neighbor's garbage, did a bit of painting with leftover paint...and here it is.

Of course, the sad thing is I haven't been out there at all since. It's too hot and, well, just too lonely to enjoy alone. To be honest, I get kind of sad sitting out there by myself.

I'd thought of having some people over, but again, it's still way too hot for that, and, you know, I'm still half afraid the howler is under the house waiting to pounce. You never can be too safe.

a few craigslist prince charmings

ten random things done today while not teaching

1. 7:20 am - Directing traffic

2. 7:40 am - Sweeping three tumble weeds of weave off the floor.

3. 7:50 am - Fetching anti-West Nile mosquito spray for student use. Swamp outside is swarming.

4. 9:00 am - explanation to confused 15 year old that the sun rises in the East.

5. 11:10 am - Halting burgeoning fist fight.

6. 12:00 am - amateur psychological counseling (in lieu of lunch)

7. 1:00 pm - ninety text books carried 300 feet

8. 2:00 pm - furniture assembly (bookcase)

9. 3:30 pm - cleaning smears of menstrual blood left on desk chairs...from two separate students.

10. 4:00 pm - Dishing up money-raising nachos after school.

black...uh...beauty.

Strangest thing I've seen tonight. Well, one of them.



by way of you know you dead azz wrong and thanks to the ever wonderful joe

how I'm feeling right about now.

Yeah, it's been that kind of day.
I'm going to bed.

(Oh, and I still blame Kanye)

three hottest non-nude pictures I've seen today

because I'm a hopeless sap....

and this is pretty damned cute.

(And, yeah, ok, so this boy's pretty cute too. )

Stuff I kind of need right now

That chair, this room, hell, maybe even that chandelier. What the hell.


Eastern European old style cardboard luggage.

Year book wrapping paper.


A tree house. Natch.

how I'm feeling right about now.

jealous?

food network humor

I found this by way of Food Network Humor, one of my favorite sites. Only someone (like me) who watches too much Food Network for his own good will probably get this...and as they write there at FNH, "it has to be an impersonator, because in real life, Marc is corny, tells stupid jokes, and talks about pickles a lot", it's still funny.

a single man

So my ridiculous interest lust in Tom Ford continues unabated. I can't help it.

I can't wait to see this, his directorial debut "A Single Man" But who knows if it will even show up here in this po dunk town.
Just to make things even more painful, my friend Mark tells me that he has a ticket to the premiere in Toronto "if the velvet mafia doesn't stop me from entering the theatre."

He's already seen Peter Saarsgard, Penelope Cruz, and Oprah already. If he sees Tom, I'll just die of envy.

the last days of 1998

Prompted by a post a while back by Frontier Psychiatrist I decided to put "The Last Days of Disco" on my netflix queue. I'd only seen it once, as usual, in the theater. I remembered finding it kind of talky but wonderful. It left me kind of spellbound, especially Kate Beckinsale's bitchiness. I hope it withstands the test of time when I re see it.

Anyway, even if there isn't, there's still Matt Keeslar to gaze at, right?
I loved his character in the film.
I remember a few years after the film came out, going on one of my interminable blind dates. The guy was cute enough, but nothing like Matt here.

He'd told me before we'd met that his friends had nicknamed him after Matt's character in the film, that they'd allegedly shared some sort of traits (uptightness, manic depressiveness?).

He was a newly minted professor, I remember...and pathologically closeted. He nearly had an aneurysm when I mentioned that I was friends with one of his fellow PhD candidates.
Him: "Oh my God. Promise me you won't tell him!"
Me: "Uh....ok. Of course not, don't worry." (Thinking to myself, "sheesh, I can't think of anything he'd care about less")

Anyway, somewhere along the way, in the week before our second date, he gave me the proverbial "gee, I'm sorry I met someone else" and I never got to see him again.
I think that his "I met someone else", however, actually was the truth.
Who knows.

He claimed he'd met the love of his life in the tomato aisle of the supermarket. How a pathologically closeted man finds love in an tomato aisle of a very conservative city I don't know, but I guess anything is possible, right? Silver linings and all that.

Whatever.
On to the eye candy:

skyy

Mix by the legendary Larry Levan.
Near perfect disco!

neighborhood

Just to get out of the house and try to cheer myself up a bit, I took my little 99 dollar camera for coffee today. I figured we both could use the exercise. We walked to the coffeehouse, and I took some bad pictures on the way.


This place is on the bayou, near me. It's an old, small plantation.

The Hare Krishna temple, in a 19th century Swissesque chalet! How often do you see that? Anyway, they have free vegetarian meals there each week.

One of the cornstalk fences in the city. This place is up for sale now, in fact.

Across from the coffee house. My friend Ben used to live in an apartment here. A few years later Vincent moved into his apartment. Now I see two very large lesbians live there. Nice.

My favorite of these places, a bit off the beaten track. It seems a bit lost and lovelorn (you know, like me). It's also big and white and falling apart (shut up!). Anyway, in my mind it looks vaguely Dutch colonial somehow, like it belongs in South Africa or something. I don't think anyone lives there now.

Kinda garish, yes, but it works.

It's all about the windows here.


Walking home...

you don't bring me flowers anymore

When I first went up to NYC, one of the things that struck me was the flower sellers on what seemed like every other corner, huge bunches of roses and peonies and carnations and hydrangeas everywhere. I'd see people stop impulsively to buy a bunch and then walk off with them down the street, carry them on the subway.

It all looked so romantic and cosmopolitan. Ever since, it's been a silly fantasy of mine. So the other day I decided I'd buy myself some flowers.

(I told a friend later that day that I'd bought myself some flowers, and he rolled his eyes and laughed. "Did you get yourself a card too?" I told him I had, but that "it might take a while to arrive in the mail." A stupid joke, yes...but, now that I'm thinking of it, hell, maybe I should have. )

Anyway, this ain't NYC.
The only thing you can find on the street corner around here is a pothole...or maybe a crack whore....or maybe a crack whore in a pothole.

For flowers, you have to get in a car. I first tried braving the bougie masses at Whole Foods, but the prices there were too steep. So I found myself at the local supermarket. I picked out a dozen roses and a diet coke and got in line behind the woman buying three Vitamin Waters and package of beef jerky with food stamps.

The cashier was near narcoleptic, with hair that looked like Buckwheat's. She could barely even mumble the price to me. She dropped a nickel of change on the conveyor and her lids started to fall. She left me to collect my roses from the conveyor belt and shuffled out, as fast as a narcoleptic can manage, mumbling to the bag boy, "hey, take over for me. I gotta go shit."

Totally romantic and cosmopolitan.

why the f*** do you have a kid?

From this horrifying and all too accurate site found by way of the ever-wonderful the other andrew.

lego house

How cool is this? Or maybe just to lego nerds like me.

"James May, the UK television host of Toy Stories is working with over 2 million bricks and 1,200 volunteers to build a life-size LEGO house in Surrey, England. Scheduled to be completed today, these pics are from the past few weeks."

More here at apartment therapy

paolo

The other night Marshall, Carlos and I saw Paolo Nutini in concert. It was on a school night, so I was a bit leary of going. It's hell being old, let me tell you.

But I'm glad I went.

Marshall had tried to recruit more folks to go, but hadn't succeeded. Someone at his office, it seems, had thought he was going to see Pablo Neruda. (I wish!)

I don't know how being in a (supposedly) smokefree environment and only having drunk one (3 dollar!) bottle of water could make me feel hungover the day after, but it did.

The girl opening for him, Anya Marina, was cute as could be, and really genial. She came up a few feet behind us after her set and signed autographs and such for fans.
I'm afraid I didn't much like her music, however. It wasn't bad, it was just sort of dull to me.



Paolo himself seemed a bit drunk, or high, the whole time, but he and his band were great. Marshall seemed upset at the shortness of the concert, but it worked out well for me, since his laziness or whatever got me in bed earlier. It's a shame that he kept his head hung through most of the concert, since he's so pretty and everything.
Marshall, graciously made me a cd, so now I can maybe hear some of the lyrics to the songs I didn't know. Why is it impossible to make out a single lyric at a concert nowadays, or is it just me?

Anyway, more interesting than anything onstage was what was going on a few feet in front of us, a mid thirties woman with a potbelly and a dress so short I think her chair must have been giving her a pap smear.
Her short bleached blond hair was brushed up jauntily in the front, and she was dancing like some kind of manic cockatoo in heels. I half expected her to sharpen her nails on the balcony rail.
That alone was worth the ticket price.

just parce que...

flirting with dispassion

I had a lovely bit of unexpected flirtation today at a very boring seminar....
with a very cute, witty photographer, a transplant from NYC....lots of arm touching, laughing at my bad jokes, compliments, eye contact. Perfect! I'm talking
Rom-Com quality banter here.


She's got beautiful brown hair and blue eyes.

(uh. yeah.)

how I'm feeling right about now.