Please Help my Kitty!

Ed ebjoying the sunshine

I’ve got a secondary blog going temporarily, describing the trials and trauma of Edward Kitty’s recent health scare and life-saving surgery. You can check out the details here: http://www.thecarie.chipin.com/edwards-vet-bills as well as participate in the online fundraiser to help pay for his surgery and ongoing care in recovery.

Even if you can’t help financially – please pass on the link! Love & Kittens! – Me & Ed.

cake now (wordle wordcloud of previous post)

as just mentioned in the previous post, the word cloud there-for is rather interesting:

(and heavy on the “cake”)

lately

apparently haven’t been posting on my blog lately, as the whole wordpress dashboard interface has been updated since i was last here.

it’s too much for me to handle going anywhere on the internet beyond engrish, twitter and facebook anymore. all the internet manages to tell me is that i have more bills than there is money in my bank account. tragic.

in recent good news, however, i got my GRE subject test (literature in english) practice book, which is reassuring in that right there on the 2nd page is an excerpt from “rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead” which i already have mostly memorized (the whole play, mostly, that excerpt, maybe 80%). this is reassuring.

my lack of knowledge about how to read old english (damned not having priest (was is priest?) who made everyone read beowulf and canterbury in the original before handing over the modern english version) is dissappointing; my complete amnesia regarding the familial relations of the greek/roman deities and friends (aka who was sleeping with who in the iliad and beyond) is troubling, especially in light of the number of questions thereon with which the practice book taunts me.

so i have ordered $30 worth of study guide books from amazon, all to take this damned GRE subject test more than 4 months after turning in my PhD applications, and likely several weeks after the PhD programs have already made their selections, all because the GRE subject test is only offered 3 times a year, and the UA english dept is nice enough to review my application “pending” my score, because i didn’t take the GRE in august, which was far before i ever considered applying to their program. arrrrgh!

the $130 (test fee) + $30 (books from amazon) + $55 (taking time off work to take the damned test) had better darn well get me into the PhD program. or, they had better give me $200 or so. plus five hours of my life back. but you can’t just tack it on at the end. i’d like a good 5 hours of a saturday while i’m 25 years old. that would be useful. 5 hours tacked on at the very end, not nearly as much fun, i would think.

 

but then again, tomorrow is my grandmother’s 90th birthday, and i am baking her a cake.

more precisely, i have already baked the cake, and it is in cooling stage 2 (out of the pan, bottom layer already trimmed) waiting for the pre-bedtime icing extravaganza. i am supposed to cover it completely in chocolate chips, like i did for my dad’s birthday cake in december. i need to remember not to set precedents for myself, especially in regard to cake-decorating or other time-consuming tasks, lest i be asked to repeat the feat.

but, i don’t begrudge g-ma her cake. and i got 9 eggs out of it. well, my mom paid for the cake-ing supplies, which included a carton of eggs, of which i only needed 3. so now, 9 free eggs!

not a bad payment for my cake-cake-ing skills.

now i’m just rambling about cake. i wonder what my word cloud looks like now. possibly involving more cake and eggs than politics or squirrels. too bad it isn’t a politically squirrelly cake. featuring eggs. :)

now featuring mini-blogging – live from the bus!

so now i’m on twitter, which i seem to update way more than the real blog, mostly because now i have something to do during my heinous bus commute. combining my 1000 free text messages/month with my need to do SOMETHING on the bus, and the desire to document the bizarre bus-happenings, i’ve got a twitter page.

www.twitter.com/thecarie

i really need to get my bus-related zine together (bought printer ink! first step!) but i’m not sure if i can even pay the rent this month, let alone the utility bills, and photocopying is a luxury at this point.

should apply for government grants for my bus-related performance art project featuring readings from my bus-musings (to be published in aforementioned yet-to-exist zine) (sample: “the man with the bucket has no teeth”); twitter page could be a part somehow?

my evening-length show i’m planning in my head would be a meditation on voyeurism, featuring the above and:

-dead people’s home movies (bought at estate sales) (it’s a weird collection, i know, but i wanted to see if my 8mm projector worked, and so i bought some 8mm films, and then….)

- dance piece about the bus (with projection of bus-window-video in 10x speed?)

- some choreography that “violates” the proscenium and enters the audience

- lots of video cameras/projectors so that intermission involves video of intermission (questions of watching/being watched)

- text from the bus diaries

somehow need to involve blogging / twitter – it’s a strange voyeurism, keeping track of the moment-to-moment status of various strangers.

apparently rachel maddow has a sore throat.

someone i went to high school with is hungry.

it’s weird. but you’re invited to participate in technology-assisted voyeurism. “follow” me. and i’ll try to post more on the real-blog here.

for now, cleaning house, pie cooking, such.

Sea Tangle

sea tangle and vegetable meat

Sea Tangle and Vegetable Meat

(as seen at the 17th st market)

Ingredients: Sea-tangle, Xianggu Mushnom, Vegelable, Soysauce, Spices.

Cooking Directions: Ready to Eat

it seemed to have been a combination of tofu, seaweed, and mushroom, for stir-fry. personally i’m just fond of the linguistic uniqueness of “sea tangle” . . that and Vegelable. :)

a moment in history

yes we can – YES WE DID!

hell fuckin’ yeah america. i’m so incredibly happy and relieved and _____ everything right now. we did it. waiting for the final numbers to see if pima county (good ol 520) pulled enough weight to defeat mccain in his home state…. gonna open the german champagne and drink to the people filling out their early ballots on the bus tonight – i really do love you, route 16…

but here’s also a little rant dedicated to you, arizona. it’s lifted from my facebook page, but i think it deserves a wider audience.

and yes, i feel bad for not making this seldom-read blog my political soapbox earlier, to prevent this from having to happen, but here goes:

i can’t overstate how relieved and happy and (insert positive adjective here) i am at this moment in history. but i’m also hoping some late-to-be-counted numbers mean prop 102 doesn’t pass. or it gets challenged in court and tossed out. because if alex and i ever do get married, it had damn better be with a certificate that says “spouse A” and “spouse B” – and preferably in a world, in a state, where every couple who wants to get married can, because it’s an ECONOMIC CONTRACT for goodness sakes, and there ought never be a law, in a true and free democracy, that prevents any consenting adults from entering into an economic or legal contract with one another. because that’s BULLSHIT and BIGOTRY and …. WTF arizona? i love you, well, i love pima county at least, but this, this is hard to swallow. our precious consitution? putting this prop 102 shit in our consitution? oh geeze.

here’s hoping for thousands of provisional ballots to be accepted that vote you down, prop 102.

but in the big picture, here’s to you, america. to us. to not being afraid to tell people where i’m from the next time i’m travelling in europe. to being proud, to being free, to piecing our constitution together again after being shot in the face by cheney and friends. here’s to actually being able to believe in the dream that generations have been trying to dream since long before my time. here’s to a new new deal. here’s to making it happen. here’s to a velvet revolution, to unity, to progress, to not having to move to canada.

especially to not having to move to canada. no offense to canada, but i like it warm. :)

i love you all. i’m gonna go get that champagne now.

Biden’s squirrels

I asked the amazing wordle (www.wordle.net) to make a pretty word cloud for my blog. apparently the bus is often on my mind:

i especially like looking at the smaller words in there, and the amusing juxtapositions. hence the title of this post.
thanks to jesse for turning me on to wordle. now i kinda want to wordle my whole damn MA thesis.

wordpress makes my title box too big. i think it’s IE8beta. not that you care.

i want to make my cat wear a halloween costume.

i think he’d be less than happy with me. especially considering he won’t even wear his collar. or his leash-harness, to which alex asked “why’d you get an S&M harness for the cat?” … needless to say ed never got leash-trained. he’d be so cute walking the neighborhood! but i think he’d probably try to hump a cactus or something dangerous, so it’s best he’s kept inside.

anyway, the best cat halloween costume just came in the mail! of course, ed will only wear it for about 10 seconds, then it falls off, but i think that’s what would happen to any cat costume we got him. here’s the new awesome cat costume:

it

it’s packing material cat!

yes, it’s amazing! i can make edward wear the pactiv air thingy. that’s the box it came in.

it’s far too amusing to watch him walk around with that on him. he doesn’t shake it off, really. it just falls off eventually when it gets caught on something, like when he walks under the chair.

i think it’s a good halloween costume.

well, at least, it’s the only costume i’ll ever get ed to wear. :)

my word cloud needs help

it seems that politics has finally outgrown “badgers” and “squirrels” in my word cloud of tags. but then, when i tag this post, maybe they will catch up? but i will likely have to also tag it “politics”, in which case the poor badgers and squirrels will still be outnumbered.

i need a real word cloud that aggregates actual post text, not just tags. but there’d be a lot of “i” and “a” in there. not nearly as amusing i think.

there was a trout involved

so, recently i’ve not been posting.

this is likely the way i should start every post. maybe i should just change the title of my blog entirely to reflect this constant.

anyway. recently:

1. they’re changing the garbage pickup days for all of tucson! this is silly. i’m not sure why it matters or how it helps anyone. it included an absolutely ridiculous chart about the holiday-week-pickup schedule that is so confusing i can’t figure out when they will get my trash after president’s day 2009. but i’m not sure why i care.

2. i was in 2 nights of dance performance which i failed to aggressively advertise but which nonetheless was attended by attendees. on friday, there was a trout involved. and roller skates, legwarmers, an umbrella with a light in the handle, and a crab swim ring. among other things. it was amusing, and i realized how much i missed performing. last night was the “serious” “choreographer’s showcase” night, in which i performed my “real” piece, which i felt was rather lacking, but which did not meet any major criticism (ok anything at all) in the feedback session, which was i guess a good sign? i think i had my hopes up that i’d be re-noticed by tucson’s dance community and invited to be in a company again. not that anyone was there to do such a thing. but the other dancers said i rocked, and then we went on a bike caravan to the spontaneous cast party in which we took over karaoke night at bumstead’s (of all places) and actually had a damn good time.

i am telling you this, i suppose, because the moral of the story is, i suppose, that i missed being a dancer? or something.

3. i forgot what the third thing was, but there’s always a third thing, right? perhaps not about the trash collection map. i’m considering calling people in pennsylvania for obama from home but i wonder if that’s annoying? i really want to save the world but i don’t want to annoy anyone while doing so. i’m also considering starting a vegetable garden.

4. i’m going to take a nap.