Saturday, December 23, 2006 It's the subject line and first sentence or so of the first post of every month this year. Behold, 2006:
January:
Ring in the new
For 2006, I would like newer, better lungs and an end to the too-tenacious-to-be-a-cold, too-mild-to-be-much-else plague that I've had for the past three weeks.
February:
The living room is cheering for Seattle
except for Lisa, who favors the Steelers.
March:
The rich inner life of the mind
The other day I was in the guitar store for some reason, and I felt like getting ignored, so I bought some headphones.
April:
In this I believe
It is adorable when people wearing hands-free cell phones gesture wildly and jerk their heads around out in public.
May:
Your satisfaction is very important to us
It's been a little over a week since the bout.
June:
Your satisfaction is very important to us
It's been a little over a week since the bout.
July:
My alien baby
The day before yesterday, I went on the internet and convinced a stranger in Newport News, VA to send me live kombucha culture.
August:
Time and space are meaningless...in Baltimore!
It's always two years ago, it seems.
September:
Time and space are meaningless...in Baltimore!
It's always two years ago, it seems.
October:
This is just to say
Today at the farmer's market, I saw a man pushing an enclosed cart full of tiny dogs.
November:
Gothic Beauty
In April or March, I started bugging the editor of Gothic Beauty to feature the Night Terrors, and today, I hold a copy of the magazine in my hands (not just now, though, because I am typing, but it is nearby), including the article and photo.
December:
Say what you see
The trash men didn't take the backyard with them when they took the broken down Ikea furniture, but your Uncle Frenzy was drunk the night before the trash pickup, so she hauled the broken dresser itself to the curb, but forgot all the dresser drawers! posted by Frenz | 12/23/2006 01:29:00 PM
1 comments
Friday, December 22, 2006 I need a sheep dip, and a word about Style
I just typed that thing about sheep dip to a friend over instant messenger, and I stand by it. I think I have weevils. Mice, maybe, or squirrels. Damn, you second-day hair! I am drinking kombucha to ward off the evil within, but today I am not so hot on the outside.
I went shopping the other day, and there were no pants at the inn. Or at least in Fells Point. I decided to spend my lunch break trying on expensive clothes, and that is what I did. I went to three different stores, and none had jeans that would fit over my mighty thighs.
I'm not trying to be like ZOMG oppression: go figure: snooty boutiques (or supposedly non-snooty "charming" boutiques that are secretly snooty as shit) have clothes for mice and elves, and I should know better than to set a trembling hoof over the threshhold. It's just weird to me. It seems like hooved mammals outnumber elves, body type wise, and our money is as green as elf money.
Maybe it's not. Maybe there's a shadow economy based on elf money and cobwebs. Diet Coke figures in somewhere. You can only spend elf-money at secret clubs with very narrow doorways. It's some Harry Potter shit. Anarex Alley.
I keed. I am actually, a petite, perky blonde like the nice lady in the sponsor logo. I've only been masquerading as a heapingly average size awkward thing for comedic purposes all these years. Blog fraud!
I kid again. The sponsor logo lady and I do not resemble each other, but If you click her, you'll get taken to a site called Stylefeeder.com that's a great resource for those who enjoy shopping, screwing around online, and having opinions.
If you sign up for the site, the kind people at the company will be very pleased with me. Check it out. Only sign up if you want to use the service, obviously, but if you think it's something you might enjoy and you do sign up, you will help a nice filthy hooved mammal afford pants that will fit. posted by Frenz | 12/22/2006 12:21:00 PM
1 comments
Tuesday, December 12, 2006 Treat yourself to a day of beauty
Well, I have to say, so far I never did end up running off to Tahiti, with a sexy panhandler or otherwise, but I did tell you I was going to talk more about Laura Ingalls Wilder and Uncle Wiggily, so I'm going to tell you quickly, because I am so effing bored with this convention.
When Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote herself into a corner like this, all she had to do was skip ahead to the plague of locusts, or mention Ma's horrible bigotry.
The writer of Uncle Wiggily, Howard Garis, had no such luxury. He was a ghostwriter, and so was his wife, Lilian, and later, so were their children. They were Tom Swift, and the Bobbsey Twins and a bunch of others I confess I've never heard of, but probably would've loved if I'd found them in like, 1912. Some site I clicked on claimed that they (the Garis family, not the Bobbsey twins) wrote thousands of books between them.
I can't imagine, cranking out book after book, week after week. I have only ever written a few books, and only one of them made it to print, and that's because I handwrote and illustrated it. It was ghostwritten, actually. I was the ghostwriter. My housemate Josh came up with the plot and concept, which was about a little sheep who heard voices.
In this way, Josh is similar to Albert Stratemeyer, who started the ominously-named Stratemeyer syndicate, a publishing company that was the first to mass-produce serialized childrens fiction. Babies after babies grew up on this stuff. The syndicate owned the series concepts and the names of the authors. They supplied basic plots. Ghostwriters all over the place turned them out, and kids' chapter books became a consumer product.
What this has to do with me is how much my childhood household scorned formulaic kids' books, and how much it revered "quality" kids books like the ouevre (gross) of Laura Ingalls Wilder, even though without the army of Stratemeyer Syndicate and the precedent they set, Laura Ingalls Wilder would have died broke in the Ozarks.
Funny, too, is how much debate there is about the role of Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter in the Little House books. The three-clicks-worth-of-internet consensus is that it was a collaboration between the Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, but how boring! Some Little House on the Prairie conspiracy-theorists hold that Laura Ingalls Wilder was a shill, a figurehead, and Rose all but guided the pen in her mother's hand.
The point is, the point, it doesn't matter if I can produce much of much when it comes to books or anything like that. Some of us our ghostwriters and some of us are plucky pioneer girls. Right now I'm not writing, but that's OK, because I'm out fording streams and riding wild ponies.
J/K. This is all made-up rationalization. Maybe I can be both. (Ghost) writer and pioneer girl, I mean. Not both wild ponies.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I'm going to update more. I hope it's not all going to be this long-winded, or dragged over so many days. But, if the cats don't fight so loudly they shake the walls off the house, I guess I'll see you soon, internet. posted by Frenz | 12/12/2006 08:02:00 PM
2 comments
Sunday, December 10, 2006 Weekend update
When all I ever did was work a fun dead-end job and ride the bus, you could read this blog and think I lived an interesting life. In contrast, now it looks like I never do anything except maybe ruminate on the life of Laura Ingall's Wilder and throw away furniture.
So, here's a little taste of one thing I did this weekend.
posted by Frenz |
12/10/2006 10:17:00 AM
3 comments
Friday, December 08, 2006 Say what you see
The trash men didn't take the backyard with them when they took the broken down Ikea furniture, but your Uncle Frenzy was drunk the night before the trash pickup, so she hauled the broken dresser itself to the curb, but forgot all the dresser drawers!
Laura Ingalls Wilder would have doubtless found a million uses for these: she was dirt poor for the first 63 years of her life, and, oh! the amusing and resourceful poor have so many cute craft ideas. She probably would have raised suckling pigs in them, or had Almanzo whittle them into crude dolls for Christmas.
63! She lived to be 90 (according to my patented three-click research process, she expressed a wish to live to 90 "because Almanzo had."), so that's 27 years of relative fame and goodwill from strangers. That's still longer than I've been alive.
I was going to tell you what all this had to do with Uncle Wiggily, but today I didn't even go to work. I was going to go late, but then I found a pair of friendly dogs wandering down my street. One of them was wearing a holiday sweater. The tried to follow me, so I couldn't cross the street to get to the subway station, because lots of times, cars nearly hit me when I cross big streets in Baltimore, and I don't even usually wear a holiday sweater.
So, I spent a good while playing with dogs today. The one in the sweater accepted my invitation to come in the house, and put his face down and thumped his tail, but the other one was warier.
Finally, I pawned the nice dogs off on a friendly art school student, because I live with two little animals who show emotional distress by applying their excretions to my stuff, and they don't like dogs. Neither do the cats.
Later, someone called me in response to the post I'd made on the neighborhood bulletin board. Evidently, he and his girlfriend had found the dogs the day before, wandering, and had placed them in collars and the one in a holiday sweater, but they'd broken out of the yard.
Those dogs! I met so many neighbors, and the mail lady. Wish I could've kept them. The dogs, not the neighbors.
Later, if I don't run away with to Tahiti with someone who's asking me for change for the bus, I'll tell you more about Laura Ingalls Wilder. posted by Frenz | 12/08/2006 08:21:00 PM
1 comments
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