This Squa-virrell.

The best part of "Grizzly Man" is listening to Werner Herzog bungle the word "squirrel" about three times. This squa-virrell was drawn by me today. It's knitting, natch.


Updated to add: HALLELUJAH! Someone on the internets thought to upload this. This squa-virrell will live forever. Play to see Timothy Treadwell's pet squa-virrell, and to hear ... well, "squa-virrell."

Haus.

Here's something I drew last night while watching "House":


Wow. That's deep.

I really should draw more often. I like it, and such. I just end up not doing it more than doing it, which I guess makes sense, because I wouldn't draw for, like, more than 12 hours a day. Or would I? Anyway, here's some shit I found in my sketchbook that I don't think I've shown you.

Apparently, I like drawing houses.



Oh, and Elliot. Inexplicably.



Oh, and yes, that first picture shows Elliot with a cigarette. Because Elliot smokes, which freaks out my mom, but COME ON. I don't smoke. Elliot is a whole other person. It's not like he's some kind of anthropomorphized extension of my psyche, or something. I mean, that would just be weird.

Now here's Charlie, half-drawn, and something that I copied from somewhere, but can't remember where or what it is.



The End.

What I wore today.

I've worn this outfit before and posted it here. It's actually my favorite work outfit: James Perse t-shirt, J. Crew shorts, crappy but lovable ballet slippers. I really should find a decent replacement for these shoes before school starts. But then again, why should I? I go to a school where "vintage" and "crap" is highly valued.

The purpose of this post is more to compare what my hair looks like the day after I have straightened it. Gnomes take curling irons to my locks during the night, you see.

Nitpicky.

I try, but it's hard for me not to be bothered by silly little mistakes on television. I can suspend my disbelief enough to believe that people's lives could actually be so dramatic ... that EVERYONE in a particular office/school/hospital could be outstandingly stunning and/or fashionable and/or witty all the time ... and that co-workers hook up on more than a rare and extremely hushed-up basis. Hey, it's television. For whatever reasons, TV executives have decided that no one wants to watch a bunch of ugly, undramatic people not have sex with each other. They're probably right, so fine.

What bothers me are the details, especially stupid details, especially when a show is so smart otherwise. Like, "House." "House" is ridiculous because no hospital gets so many weird-ass medical cases all the time, particularly not ones that all follow the same curious HE'S DYING! - HE'S CURED! - HE'S DYING! - HE'S CURED! pattern. Also, because there's no way that in real life a doctor who looks like Hugh Laurie would have problems getting laid. The fact that he's an asshole would probably get him more dates in real life.

But "House" is also a medical show, and while its makers are as free to stretch the boundaries of disbelief with the supermodel-hotness of ALL of their characters, I expect them to keep their stupid medical facts straight.

In the episode I watched last night, "Ugly," a teenage boy with a facial deformity comes to St. No Uglies Allowed Hospital or whatever it's called in order to get a surgery, blah blah blah ... in any case (and stop reading here if you don't want spoilers) he ends up having Lyme disease, which the doctors didn't catch before because the rash was hidden under his hair. One of the contestants in House's Next Top Model suggested Lyme disease as the cause of the patient's symptoms earlier in the episode, but that diagnosis was thrown out because the boy didn't have a rash.

What?

Despite working in a hospital, I have no official medical training. But even I can tell you that ...

1. Not everyone who gets Lyme disease develops a rash. I know this is true because I've had Lyme disease five times, and I didn't have a rash every time.

2. Lyme disease is diagnosed with a blood test, so it wouldn't be hard to test for it at all. In fact, if the doctors were doing any blood tests on the patient at all (which they probably were), they could have easily tested for Lyme.

This makes me angry. It seems like something that the show's writers probably knew, but decided to fudge for the sake of the story. They probably assumed that none of their viewers would realize the mistake or care about it if they did.

A nit to pick I have with another show - "Monk" - has less to do with a "mistake" per se. In this season's first episode, "Mr. Monk Buys a House," Monk's therapist Dr. Kroeger has died (as a result of the recent death of Stanley Kamel, the actor who portrayed him). Monk is therefore shopping around for a new therapist, and he and his assistant are going through a list of possibilities. Several names of potential therapists are mentioned, and only one (the one he ends up choosing) is shown on-screen. I immediately noticed that everyone in the list was male. This confused me a lot. We are left to assume the reason as to why Monk would not be considering a therapist who was a woman. Are there no female therapists in San Francisco? Or does Monk have a problem with seeing a therapist who is of the opposite sex?

Obviously, the show's makers have cast a man as Monk's new therapist. That's fine, although I think adding a female cast member to "Monk" (which currently only has one main female character) could have enhanced the show. But since only one therapist was ever shown, what difference would it have made for the writers of this episode to put a female name or two on the list of Monk's potential therapists? Or if not that, a line or two explaining why Monk preferred to see a therapist who was male?

I can't say whether this is evidence of sexism on some writer's part, or it's just odd, or if I'm missing some detail from a past episode that would help explain it (I don't watch "Monk" consistently). But it did stand out to me, as clearly as the Lyme disease blunder in "House."

Pink and gray.

Nothing special with this outfit; it's just what I wore to work yesterday. My boss keeps telling me to "dress down," but frankly I don't really dress any more down than this unless I'm vegetating on my couch blogging while wearing the crap I slept in last night. When I posed for these pictures I thought maybe they would be too boring, so I put on the knit hat that I recently removed from my Etsy shop because I like it too much. Also, I framed the first picture wide enough that you can see the HUGE sand dollars that I bought in Maine and recently hung on my wall.




The main reason for posting these, of course, is to comemmorate the excellent job I did straightening my hair this morning. When I was in high school I straightened my hair every day, which was a chore. Nowadays I straighten it every other day (the days when I wash my hair) and let it do what it wants on the non-straightening days. The reason I don't seem to care as much anymore, I think, has to do with going to college. Everyone's so laid back at my school, and their laid-backedness extends to their hair care. I'm not saying we're a bunch of greasy-haired slobs (well, not all of us), but people care less about making their hair look perfect. They also explore "alternative"* hair styles, like dreads (on white people! Which I used to think should be illegal but I changed my mind when I saw a few people who pulled it off) and shaved heads (on girls).

I feel like it's not really a college thing so much as it is a particular "thing" of my college (artsy, small, liberal). Maybe it's different at Harvard or Yale or religious schools. But who knows? Does anyone have any reflections on that?

Or maybe it is a college thing, because people in college are busy and don't have the time to deal with their hair anymore.

*God, I hate the word "alternative." If anyone can think of a better way of describing it, let me know.

Good Cat.

M'Schweet looked particularly comfortable the other day. I loves him.

Old Stuff.

Today I asked my mother what she thought the oldest things we owned were. I thought maybe it was the tea set that belonged to my great-great-great-great grandmother, Eliza Thomas (1806-1889). She received the tea set as a wedding present in 1830, but it was probably not new at the time. My mom said she thought that the child's tea set that belonged to my great-grandmother, who inherited it from someone (maybe her father). Both would be incredibly old. We saw a similar version of the big tea set in Nathaniel Hawthorne's house in Salem (the House of the Seven Gables) and in a Revolutionary Era tavern in Lexington, MA. We still don't know exactly how old either set is or where they came from. I'm going to write a letter to the House of Seven Gables soon and see if they can tell me anything more about it.

Anyway, I thought I'd take some pictures for you so you can see it, and possibly (maybe!) one of you out there will recognize the tea sets and know something about them.


This is the entire china cabinet, which holds both tea sets and a few other thingies. Eliza Thomas's tea set is the pinkish one that takes up the top two shelves.


Here's the teapot. None of the pieces have any markings on them to indicate the person who made them or where they are from, except for an "820" which appears on the bottom of most of the pieces.


Here's the sugar bowl, which is a little stained. It's in the worst shape of all of the pieces. The others are in very good condition, with few marks and no chips whatsoever.


Here's the milk pitcher.


And here's one of the two plates.


Here's the child's tea set. The teapot is very unusual. It has some sort of bird on the top, a bird as its spout, and a man's face at the base of the spout.

LOLCloset.

I can haz closet rainbow?

I'm sorry. I know the LOLCats thing is overdone, but I'm one of those people who thinks a joke is funny way longer than anyone else does. If you don't like old jokes and pictures of my closet, you should probably read some other blog. Here is closet rainbow. I hope you appreciate it because it was a painstaking process. Not really, though. I took everything out of my closet and then I put it back in rainbow order. It was pretty easy, plus now I can be all, "Where's my GREEN sweater? Hey, it's in the GREEN SECTION!" and feel all special. Until I get to the gray section, which is inordinately large. I couldn't find my gray cat in the gray section of my closet.



Oh, and yes, those are dolls at the top of my closet. This IS the same closet I had in elementary school, which was less than a decade ago (cripes). I swear I'm not that person. You know ... that person who has dolls.

They're both American Girl Dolls, in case you were wondering. I have Molly and Kaya. It makes sense because some of my ancestors were Native American, and, um ... my grandma grew up in the 1940s. I was always very interested in World War II. As Katie can attest, I enjoyed getting myself blown up in a bomb shelter many, many times when I was eight. I also died on the Titanic more times than I could count. I was a sick kid.

The Gourd.

Great. So now every post ever says "Click Here to Read More," instead of just the one that I want to. Whatever. But on a related note, I'd like to thank Katie and Chris for offering their thoughts about the chapter I posted. Thank you! Katie, you've always been one of my best supporters, as far as writing goes ... Hell, you are my best supporter. And you write awesomely yourself ("awesomely" - good God. We is both good writerz lolz), which makes it even better, for some reason. I'm glad to have lived up to my "Venus Pentacle" days (those were good days).

And Chris, you're right on target with your advice for me. At least, every English teacher I've ever had and my dad (who has worked as an editor) would agree with you. They always call me out on my tendency toward extra, extra long sentences. It's something I've learned to recognize and correct by myself over the years, but a few of them get away from me and I don't see them. Another bad writing habit of mine: using words that don't exist. I always tell people, BUT JAMES JOYCE DID IT. And they tell me, "You're not James Joyce."

Anyway, the real subject of this post is the third flying machine that I've drawn, which is weirder than the other two (and was photographed in far inferior light, so it doesn't look as nice). This one is called the Gourd. I tried to make it look like ... well, a gourd, but interestingly enough it came out looking like an Ohmu from "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind." Below is the drawing, and below that is an Ohmu.

Fiona Apple, Again.

Fiona Apple is one of those musicians - like Liz Phair - whom I'm surprised to be discovering only now. She's been around for years, and I'd heard of her, but I never actually listened to any of her songs. Then I came across the music video for "Criminal" a few weeks ago, and was a little bit captivated. THEN, as if it were some sort of freaking sign, I found her latest album "Extraordinary Machine" at my local library. I thought I might like it, so I brought it home. I listened to it, and I didn't like it.


This is where you expect me to say, " ... I LOVED it." No, I actually didn't like it OR love it the first time I listened to it, and that's pretty much typical for most of my favorite albums. My first reaction: "Blergh. Mmm. Hrr." It takes me at least three or four listenings to realize that I like maybe one or two of the songs. Then I start to like them all, a little bit, and from then on I like the whole thing a little more very time I listen to it, until I love it. Interestingly enough, this pattern holds true for pretty much all of the guys I have ever liked. First time meeting them? Blergh. Fourth or fifth time? Hey, wait ...

Now, I love "Extraordinary Machine." Additionally, I love Fiona. She's the singer/ songwriter I would want to be if I had become a singer/songwriter. I like "Extraordinary Machine" so much that I don't even mind that most of the songs in it are "slow" songs. For me (the trained musician that I am not), all of music is divided into "slow songs" and "fast songs." I'm not sure how to define either, but I know whether a song is fast or slow from hearing it. Eh, it's probably less complicated than I think it is.

But, whatever. Generally, even if I think a certain "slow song" is really beautiful, I can't be bothered with it because it's just too damn slow. But with Fiona Apple, I couldn't give a crap. Slow, fast, completely nonsensical, I can't help but love everything she creates.

AND YOU CAN TOO! Watch this:

The Nostalgic Harp.

Isn't it strange how not being in middle school anymore makes you forget how much middle school sucked? The only way I can remember how much I hated being in middle school is when I think about what Steve Carrell says in "Little Miss Sunshine" about high school (in my case middle school) being your "prime suffering years," and Proust having appreciated his suffering when he reflected upon it later, etc. Well, relative to the rest of my life, I suffered a lot during middle school, and damn it I've never been so prolific since. Every day I'd get home from school, do my homework, and write maybe 5-10 pages in one of my novels. I only properly finished two or three novels during that time, but I wrote a hell of a lot more. Additionally, I wrote about 1,000 pages in my diary (in Microsoft Word) a year. No. Freaking. Joke. I never had writer's block, ever.

I was inspired to write about this when I found this teeny, tiny picture of me at the age of 13 on my old computer. My expression pretty much sums it up.


Now I'm lucky if I write as much as I used to in a day in the course of a week. What the hell? I guess you could argue that what I write now is "better." But I miss the days when writing was my absolute favorite thing to do because I hadn't developed an internal editor/critic to remind me of all those "necessary" things like "plot," "grammar," and "the use of words that actually exist in the English language." It was a hell of a lot of fun.

Also fun (and I'm sure a lot of writers who are reading this can identify with me): middle school teachers who would gush over absolutely everything I wrote, and the fact that I wrote so much. To them I was extremely "creative." But I was twelve. When are you ever going to be as creative as you were when you were twelve? You're young enough to be thinking about imaginary worlds all of the time and old enough to take everything you imagine and work it into a cohesive story. Now the only time I get to seriously imagine and brainstorm is when I'm about to go to sleep. Maybe that's why my dreams have been getting progressively more elaborate as I've gotten older. My mind has stored up all of my imagination in a place where it knows it will be safe and I'll still pay attention to it.

I still got a lot of my inspiration from dreams "back in the day," but I'd say I spent much more time actively, consciously thinking about all the random shit I was going to put in my stories. Now ... well, if my dreams are going to do the work for me (and frankly, do it better than I ever could), why should I? But dude. Seriously. My dreams are one of the best parts of my life, and the other parts of my life are not lame.

Now that I've said that, I'll probably develop fatal familial insomnia and die. Oh well. My legacy will live on in this blog and the 4609822 half-written novels I'll leave behind.

Edited to add: Would you bitches want to read something I've written lately? I haven't gotten proper feedback on my creative writing in eighty billion years. I promise it will be short and maybe even interesting.

Boden.

It's mid-July, which means it's just about time for all the clothing stores in the Western world to start pretending like fall starts tomorrow. It used to piss me off when I was younger and didn't want to be reminded that vacation was going to end, but now I don't really mind it. The fall stuff gives me hope that it won't be this hot forever and that I'll be going back to college someday. Not, for like, 350983 days, but someday. Fall might be my favorite season. Today I've been eyeing the Boden fall crap. Here's some of it:


Merino stripy scarf, $48.

Nearly fifty dollars is kind of a lot for a scarf, but I can dream, right? This scarf looks really soft and warm, and I love the pattern. It's a type that I can't knit myself. That being said, though, I have 46984 knitted scarves already.


Knitted ruffle dress, $98.

Gorge. I love sweater dresses, and this one has incredible, sweet, subtle detailing. I would encourage anyone who doesn't own a sweater dress to buy this one or a similar one immediately. Yes, even guys (they're that good).They are the best. I would wear mine every day from fall through spring if I could. Last year, I kind of did.


Long cosy cardigan, $138.

You know how I love big sweaters. This is a particularly fine specimen. The collar looks like it would keep you warm but isn't restrictive, like those goddamn turtlenecks. And plus, pockets. All items of clothing should have pockets, including socks and such. They just improve everything.


Essential shirt, $68.

The pattern makes this gorge shirt. And I love how it's described on the website: "The hierarchy of human needs is arranged like a ladder. After food, water, and shelter comes this season's Essential Shirt." That's one of the best things about these crazy British shirt-makers: they drink their own Kool-Aid. And they LIKE it.


Washed velvet trousers, $78.

I have a pair of pants like this that are all velvety and lovely. They're amazing. They're almost as soft as TetoCat. It's hard to tell from the picture, but I think these are a leeeetle high-waisted. I got a pair of pants from Boden once, only to discover what seemed like a foot long zipper! I suppose that's what's in style now, though.

Blue Dress.

Today it was 90 degrees outside, and I decided to wear my blue dress with black leggings. It was so freaking comfortable, man. The dress is made out of t-shirt, and the leggings are made out of t-shirt, too - you know, the sort of stretchy, t-shirt-y material that is so incredibly comfortable. I felt like a three year old wearing Hanna Anderson or some shit. My parents, some family friends, and I went out to lunch today, and my MoMA bag came along with us.





I don't know what that spot is on me in the third picture. I'm pretty sure it was on the camera.

The dress is from a local store, the leggings are from Target, and the shoes are Minnetonka Moccasin.

Birds to stars.

Jeebus, Basho comes through again. I just received this incredible dress from them today. The print is called "birds to stars," and it's on a black t-shirt dress. T-shirt dresses are the best. A t-shirt is awesome, so what could be more awesome than to make a t-shirt you don't have to wear with anything else? I freaking love this thing. You can wear it in so many ways. I took about 3059834 pictures featuring different ways of wearing the dress, and narrowed them down to three that were acceptable.




The first picture shows the dress dressed up with my shiny high-heeled shoes; the second shows the dress dressed down for school, with Minnetona Moccasins and four of the best books I've read this summer. Lastly, the third picture shows the dress dressed down for school but up for winter with a Gap shirt and Boden sneakers. The end.

I'm famous.

Did you bitches see me mentioned in the New York Times today?

No?

Oh.

Well, did you see the name of someone who holds a fragment of my DNA mentioned in the New York Times today?

YES YOU DID! Behold, on page B7:


Wolfert Van Couwenhoven was my great-to-some-degree-grandfather. That's right; I am directly descended from him. Therefore, a small part of my DNA was mentioned in the NYT today. The awesome part, of course. In case you can't read the picture, it says:

"Wolfert Van Couwenhoven visited New Amsterdam in 1625 but apparently was unimpressed. He left town and went home to the Netherlands, only to return five years later and purchase a large tract of land on Long Island [That's right. My great-something-grandfather had HUUUGE ... tracts of land]. He probably never imagined that his odyssey would be immortalized, but there it is, nearly 400 years later, at the New York Public Library."

Field trip! Who wants to come look at old stuff with me? Oh, and bitch: of COURSE my great-something-grandfather imagined that his odyssey would be immortalized. HE WAS RELATED TO ME, WASN'T HE. Dumb NYT writer.

So, that's it. In case you wanted to know what happened to Wolfert after he settled on his HUGE tracts of land, he had all these kids and those kids had kids that became Conovers instead of Couwenhovens (or Covenhovens), and they had kids and more kids and more kids until one of those kids became the Messiah*, I mean me.

The End.

*May be slight exaggeration.

Flying machines.

When I dream, I dream about these things. I would say about ... 30% of the time. That's a lot - almost one out of three of my dreams features these things. They're a mixture between a spaceship, a zeppelin, and a fish, just about. I'm not sure, because I didn't invent them; my dreams did. They're super-fast and super-cool. They're made of some sort of metal, I guess. I sketched these up over the past few days. They're fun to draw but they make my right hand super black (rubbing again and again over the pencil gunk). If only there was a pencil that didn't smudge ... unless you wanted it to. When and if you wanted it to. Because sometimes, you want it to.



I don't want to tell you much more. Frankly they seem so cool in my head that I don't want to make them sound lame by trying to put their coolness into words. I guess I can tell you that the first one is named the Star and the second one is named the Light and if you don't like those names, don't blame me because I didn't make them up; I just dreamed them. Also, there's a third one that I haven't drawn yet called the Gourd. There's actually a whole fleet of them, but I've only dreamed about the three. The Star is my favorite, but you gotta appreciate the hemlines on the Light. Yeah, I don't know if "hemlines" is the right word, but I do know that Tim Gunn would approve. He loves that shit.

I want to write more about this, though, so I guess I'll share some of the things that might have been my subconscious inspiration for these shits. First, of course, are the zeppelins. I actually don't like the photographs of real zeppelins as much as I like the sketches of imaginary ones. Even sketches that are based on real zeppelins have a fantastical quality to them, as if the artist was so overtaken by awe that he couldn't help but imbue his drawing with a little bit of the emotion he felt.


Then there are the Da Vinci flying machine drawings. I have to wonder if he dreamt about these too.



The designs for the first three ships (airships? machines?) came from my dreams. For the next ones, I'd like to try to use my own (conscious) imagination, and draw from inspirations that I choose myself (as opposed to the ones that ... my brain chose? It's strange to talk about my brain as if it were a different person than I am). I'd like to design machines that are less sleek-looking and more rough and mechanical, like the Da Vinci drawings ... where you can actually see the machinery at work. Then again, I do like the fact that these machines don't seem like they could actually fly using any sort of technology that we currently know of. I like to think that they run on something strange and figurative, like love or evil or John Lennon's ghost. Which brings me to my last inspiration ...

The Yellow Submarine. When I dream about being inside one of the machines and looking out the window, what I see is exactly what happens here at 2:22.