tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8715092764107405152024-03-12T21:01:37.247-07:00You Can Sell This When I'm FamousJohannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-73321608725655835172009-06-27T20:55:00.000-07:002010-08-04T19:38:32.514-07:00Where Everybody Knows I'm Cool<span style="font-style: italic;">"I'm sick of summer and this waiting around.</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Man, it's September and I'm skipping this town.</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Hey, it's no mystery;</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">there's nothing her for me now!"</span><br />
<br />
It's that kind of day.<br />
<br />
I've been pondering that little, secret knowledge that we all have, that secret fear that the people around us who claim to like us couldn't possibly if they actually knew all of us, the good parts and those ugly, dark shadows that lurk deep in the locked boudoir of our souls.<br />
<br />
Deep down, everyone just knows that the dark parts are our True Selves, that if anyone glimpsed those bits they'd run screaming. We can never fully open our insides because we are all certain that our insides are ugly, twisted monsters, whereas everyone else is lined with lovely pink satin. We can't get too close to anyone because we're afraid that they'll See us on accident.<br />
<br />
I remember making a comment to a boy I was seeing, and realizing in the split second afterward that I had revealed too much of my hand too soon. I scrambled to close up again, but even if it worked for him I couldn't escape what I was sure had happened myself and this fear that he had seen too much of me too close and too fast grew until the only way to recover myself was to cut my losses.<br />
<br />
But why should I have recovered myself at all? What was to recover? The great illusion of this True Selves thing is that idea that we are the only people who are ugly on the inside and, even more so, that we are hiding it at all. We feel like the one monster walking disguised among humans and we believe that if we can keep it up long enough someday it will be true and we really will deserve everything we want. We don't try as hard as we should; we don't go for what we really want; we stay with the people who hurt us because deep, deep down inside of us we <span style="font-style: italic;">know</span> that we don't deserve any better, that we're not as good as everyone else, that the reason we are unhappy is because we don't <span style="font-style: italic;">deserve</span> to be happy.<br />
<br />
But the truth is that the parts we think we're hiding, the parts that want more than they should and hate anyone else to have nice things if we can't, the parts that get jealous of our friends' successes and cheer at their failures, the parts that are spiteful and cruel, the parts that come out late at night when you've had too much red wine and feel like calling your ex-boyfriend, again; these things are in everyone, and none of us are hiding them very well. The people who really, truly love you can see it all, and they love you just the same, and the parts of you that aren't ugly, the goodness in you and the imagination and love, those things are just as you as the ugly bits. It's just hard to see them sometimes when you're focusing too hard on the shadows.<br />
<br />
And that's the word.Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-37424194339685385492009-06-10T09:38:00.001-07:002009-06-10T09:41:55.916-07:00Just a typical day in my life...<span style="font-weight: bold;">Mom:</span> (Running around to get her stuff together for school) I left a cookie lying around here somewhere but now I don't know where it is... so if you see a cookie...<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Me:</span> Okay.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Mom:</span> (Spots something) AHA! I found it, nevermind.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dad:</span> MY COOKIE!<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Mom:</span> (With cookie in her mouth) COOKIE!<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Me:</span> ...Ohmygod.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Mom:</span> (Her mouth still full of cookie as she leaves) The future is BLEAK!<br /><br />It is 11:40 and I have been awake for 7 hours.Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-44593559481957529522009-05-08T18:58:00.000-07:002010-08-04T18:59:45.764-07:00Holy Fandom, Guys!I guess I took April off.<br />
<br />
Apparently while I was gone, I acquired two new followers. Awesome! Hello, new followers!<br />
<br />
I want to write a little bit about fandom.<br />
<br />
I was geeking out about Harry Potter with my friend Taylor yesterday. She's writing a fanfiction and I was helping her pick out names for some original characters, and it made me start thinking about my own dabblings in that fandom and others, and why we get so attached to these worlds that don't exist and why that's important, because I feel like it is, even though I still haven't figured out why, exactly.<br />
<br />
I was deeply entrenched in the Harry Potter fandom from the release of Book 5 to the release of Book 6 so... *checking Wikipedia* from June 2003 to July 2005. Though, in memory, it seems like it was longer.<br />
<br />
I joined livejournal communites and roleplay forums, and was briefly a mod in one. I drew pictures. I read and reviewed fanfiction. I dressed up for book and movie releases alike and Wizard Rock concerts. I even started a very inconsistently drawn webcomic. A real life friend of mine who was similarly obsessed spent an entire day with me trying to figure out an anagram for a contest whose prize was a <span style="font-style: italic;">picture of a trophy</span>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v77/FuchsiaNicole/Life%20Death%20and%20Limbo/Episode%20Five/page5_text.jpg?t=1241843324" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v77/FuchsiaNicole/Life%20Death%20and%20Limbo/Episode%20Five/page5_text.jpg?t=1241843324" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 301px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 217px;" /></a><span style="font-size: 85%; font-style: italic;">A page from my inconsistently drawn webcomic.<br />
(Click to enlarge.)</span></div><br />
Mostly, however, what I did was write a lot of very, very bad fanfiction. My magnum opus was a <span class="gray">93,944 word long Draco/Hermione story called "A Perfect Day to Elope" that makes me throw up in my mouth a little every time I look at it, now.<br />
</span><br />
<span class="gray"> I remember starting the first chapter sitting in athletic study hall my fre</span><span class="gray">shman year (I wasn't athletic in the least but I did have walking pneumonia which apparently was incompatible with gym). It was supposed to be a four chapter farce around England featuring those crazy Harry Potter kids. Then it sort of... exploded. Somehow, I was still writing it two years and thirty-five chapters later and by that point, in Chapter 35, I could barely even remember what had happened seven chapters earlier let alone at the beginning of the story.</span> There was a lot of inconsistency, a lot of slapstick comedy, and so many flashbacks that it sometimes seemed more like a collection of disconnected short stories than a cohesive<i> thing</i>.<br />
<br />
In Chapter One, a twenty-three-year-old Hermione receives a necklace as a birthday present from Ron, and in Chapter Twenty-Four we are told she hasn't seen or heard from him in five years. There is a whole scene revolving around a joke about Hermione's make-up. This scene took TWO CHAPTERS of set up to wedge in. There was an entire chapter devoted to Ginny dancing around in the kitchen singing Britney Spears. Seriously.<br />
<br />
When I look back at the me who spent her freshman, sophomore and (part of her) junior years of high school writing a hugely overlong story and didn't even bother to have it make sense most of the time, I wonder where her friends came from. Who hung out with that person? Why did anyone like her? There is no denying, however, that the freedom of a chapter-by-chapter story, burdened as it was with a bloated kraken of a plot, and written over several very different years, allowed me a lot of freedom to experiment with what worked in my writing. I now know, for instance, that physical comedy is probably a form of humor best left for television and that there is such a thing as too many metaphors.<br />
<br />
Half-Blood Prince killed my interest in fanfiction. When I saw JK Rowling portraying Malfoy as a complex character in his own right but a character deeply different from the Malfoy of my story (who was a card carrying <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DracoInLeatherPants">Draco in Leather Pants</a> if ever one existed), I had no interest in having anything to do with my Draco anymore. He hadn't ever existed and I felt, for some reason, that it was rude to treat Jo Rowling's characters the way I had been.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://photos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-sf2p/v140/82/106/504961536/n504961536_372239_7874.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-sf2p/v140/82/106/504961536/n504961536_372239_7874.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 246px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 327px;" /></a><span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Me + Friends on Deathly Hallows release night.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">That is me sitting in the front in the purple shirt wearing what I was pathetically calling a Ginny costume.</span></span></div><br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">But since then I have had other encounters with fandom and I have to admit I sort of love it, as an entity. Last summer I was briefly but passionately sucked into the Twilight fandom, largely fueled by my fury that Jacob would not be bursting into Edward and Bella's wedding and sweeping her away on a motorcycle, as I had hoped. (In fact, I arrived in that fandom pretty much just in time for the <a href="http://cleoland.pbworks.com/Twilight#TheSparkledammerung">Sparkledammerung</a> drama, which was fun.) and recently I've come to wish that the True Blood/Sookie Stackhouse fandom was less terrifying as I would certainly like to throw my hat into <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span> arena (but they are still fueled by hormones and nightmares so I still can't. Woe.).<br />
<br />
What is it that makes us get sucked into these things? As<a href="http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/"> Fandom Wank</a> will prove, while fandoms may start off as places where people come together to talk about a shared love of a book/movie/band/person/vampire, what they grow into over time can have nothing to do with that original shared interested. The ingroup lingo that grows up in one fandom and then moves over to another as if by mitosis, the fighting, the squealing, oh God, the <span style="font-style: italic;">drama</span>. Why does anyone do it? Why are we not content to like what we like in lonely peace?<br />
<br />
The answer probably has something to do with the power of fiction, but I'm just gonna say this about screaming: in any series (and they are mostly series) there are going to be things that make you want to scream, and I suppose we all feel a little less crazy screaming with someone else, loudly and in all capital letters.<br />
<br />
And there's also the fanfic.<br />
<br />
(tl;dr: Fandom is crazy, but I love it.)<br />
</span><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></div></div>Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-56481060241670109112009-02-24T23:40:00.001-08:002009-02-24T23:44:26.499-08:00Can you tell......that I've quit the 20 for 20?<br /><br /><b>"The feature is dead, Angela! Don't bring it up again!"</b><br /><br />In its stead, Eartha Kitt:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/tQ5VaBgXzuM&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x234900&color2=0x4e9e00"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/tQ5VaBgXzuM&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x234900&color2=0x4e9e00" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-86531254292865696182009-02-19T20:40:00.000-08:002009-02-20T11:32:41.339-08:00And speaking of Jezebel...By chance I found the art blog of <a href="http://mscorley.blogspot.com/">M.S. Corley</a> this evening, which is worth checking out for sure. He's recently been drawing pictures of famous villains and re-imagining current bestsellers as what they will look like as Penguin Classics. I especially like the <a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Eq_p8mAURWo/SZTp2hkaNvI/AAAAAAAAAgo/1H7B5PSb-zo/s1600-h/6_the+half-blood+prince.jpg">Half-Blood Prince</a> and <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Eq_p8mAURWo/SY5TORyuL7I/AAAAAAAAAcc/imZECy3-Qro/s1600-h/6_the+ersatz+elevator+copy.jpg">Ersatz Elevator</a> covers, though as to EE I may be biased because it was my favorite of the Lemony Snicket books. There's also a really adorable walrus card further down the page.<br /><br />I especially like his<a href="http://mscorley.blogspot.com/2008/09/bible-stories_15.html"> entry of bible stories</a>, including that one that is of particular interest to me, which looks like this:<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Eq_p8mAURWo/SRsR3EpKiuI/AAAAAAAAATo/gW1yxek4QyQ/s400/jezebel.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 309px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Eq_p8mAURWo/SRsR3EpKiuI/AAAAAAAAATo/gW1yxek4QyQ/s400/jezebel.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Dudes, I am in love.Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-59736278180580311922009-02-18T20:03:00.000-08:002009-02-20T15:00:49.311-08:00A Brief History of "Jezebel"<span style="font-weight: bold;">Note from the future: </span><span>Now that I've written this post, I can safely tell you that there is NOTHING brief about it. Oh, well.</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />7 - A Brief History of "Jezebel</span>"<br /><br />Now that I think about it, I can't really remember what sparked it at the start. It happened last year at around this time, but I couldn't say exactly where it started... I guess it was sort of a perfect storm.<br /><br />To start, I was a really frustrated person putting a lot of that frustration into being a very militant atheist (that was not something that started last February, that was most of the second half of 2007 and 2008. The internet is a really good place for a mild-mannered person to get quite angry if left to her own devices, as I was.)<br /><br />Second, I have always been a huge name nerd. I didn't know "name nerd" was a thing to be until last year, but I always have been. I love names. I love thinking about them; why we have them, why we are given the ones that we are, what our names say about our history, how they affect our lives, etc. I just love it. One of my favorite things I learned in Child Development in high school was something very philosophical, that a name is a symbol, like these words are symbols for the sounds in your head which are in their own symbols for what they mean, I am not my name. My name is a symbol for me. When someone says my name the sound is a symbol to the speaker of me, and they are showing that symbol to someone else to indicate ME.<br /><br />If that makes any sense. Anyway, about February last year I discovered the message boards at <a href="http://www.behindthename.com/bb/list.php?board=baby">behindthename.com</a>, a place that is teeming with people who similarly care Way Too Much about names. Anyways, I hung out there for awhile, and for some reason at that time one of the hot names that everyone was tossing around and arguing about was Jezebel.<br /><br />Now, I'd never even HEARD of the biblical Jezebel (the "whore of ba'al"), so the amount of ire and strife that the name was causing on the boards really surprised me. Besides, to paraphrase someone else who commented at BtN: It sounds spunky. Jezebel sounds, to me, like a woman who can take charge, a little quirky, able to laugh at herself, but professional when she needs to be. It sounds vital and strong and beautiful. I sort of fell in love with it.<br /><br />So, instead of mourning the fact that if I saddled a child with my favorite name I would be setting her up for a life of dark looks even from people who are my own relatives, I decided to do something about it. I decided to single-handedly redeem "Jezebel".<br /><br />It was a much larger project than I initially suspected. I mean, what can I do against 2000 years of history?<br /><br />I can blog with "Jezebel" tacked onto my own name. I can talk about it until everyone is annoyed at me. I can write novels and over saturate the market with women named "Jezebel". The type of women you'd want to name your children after, maybe.<br /><br />My big idea was a collaborative art project called "100 Jezebels", a website I still haven't opened but which would be a sort of gallery of submitted pieces of writing, music, and art featuring women named Jezebel. "100 Jezebels" was my favorite because a) it wouldn't just be me invested in it and b) it could, eventually, turn into a statement about femininity and how many different women can live under the same name, the common ties that bind them together and what separates us. I really liked the idea of a statement.<br /><br />I wrote poems. I didn't talk to anyone for, like, two weeks while I worked on that thing. I never put it up because I am poor and can't afford hosting, but man it was pretty. The header looked like this:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wo_9QCes0Y8/SZznNmhrmkI/AAAAAAAAACA/hOZrusHL5qo/s1600-h/jezebels2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 180px; height: 47px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wo_9QCes0Y8/SZznNmhrmkI/AAAAAAAAACA/hOZrusHL5qo/s200/jezebels2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304368682001734210" border="0" /></a><br />Beautiful, right? I still work on it sort of, but without hosting I can't work too hard.<br /><br />I also found people sympathetic to the cause (whatever the cause was from day-to-day). Like this fellow:<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wo_9QCes0Y8/SZzodF6h73I/AAAAAAAAACI/b21asv0YoRY/s1600-h/Jezebels.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 206px; height: 121px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wo_9QCes0Y8/SZzodF6h73I/AAAAAAAAACI/b21asv0YoRY/s200/Jezebels.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304370047637122930" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">"In the 1930 US census, there were 18 women named Jezebel. In 1910 there were 21. 61 Jezebels were born in California between 1905 and 1995. 29 were born in Texas between 1903 and 1997. There appear to be over 100 Jezebels living in America today. There is even a records of a black male, Jezebel Williams, who registered for the draft in WWII."</span></span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Neat, right?<br /><br />Two Hours Traffic has this song:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/qLZHamTXys0&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/qLZHamTXys0&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />Iron and Wine has this one:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Wu-uyozEjqQ&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Wu-uyozEjqQ&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />Sade also has one, and Dizzee Rascal and some band I don't like much called The Drones. <a href="http://jezebel.com/">Jezebel.com is a hugely awesome feminist blog.</a> I took <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Jezebel-Untold-Story-Bibles-Harlot/dp/0385516150/ref=pd_bbs_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235020407&sr=8-3">this book</a> out of the library and read it in two days. Hazelton is obviously biased, but can't the truth be somewhere between the story she patched together and that written by misogynistic sheep farmers a couple thousand years ago? No one is entirely bad, and whoever she was, "Jezebel" probably wasn't even her name. "Jezebel" comes from the Hebrew "Izevel", meaning "not exalted", but Jezebel was Phoenician. Her name was more likely something close to Iyesebel, or "Where is the prince?" The prince being Baal, the top dog God of the Phoenicians. The similar-sounding Isabelle is coming back into style and yet...<br /><br />I have spoken to very few people in real life who are under the age of 40 and know who Jezebel was (in the bible <span style="font-style: italic;">or</span> in history), or even <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Jezebel">what her name can mean today</a>. Jude is a name which is coming back into style, and no one would deny that it is derived from "Judas", which is now synonymous with "traitor". Biblically speaking, Eve was the originator of sin and yet in 2006 her name was the 589th most popular for newborn baby girls. Why on Earth can't Jezebel recover?<br /></div></div><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:85%;">" Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled<br />essence of our past behavior."<br />~Logan Pearsall Smith</span><br /></span></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wo_9QCes0Y8/SZztf3k6QGI/AAAAAAAAACQ/Y3GhH4Cirtg/s1600-h/Jezebel.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 183px; height: 189px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wo_9QCes0Y8/SZztf3k6QGI/AAAAAAAAACQ/Y3GhH4Cirtg/s200/Jezebel.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304375592886091874" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">The death of Jezebel</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">(thought bubble by me)</span></span><br /></div>Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-46155487368049007752009-02-17T00:20:00.000-08:002009-02-17T00:26:19.571-08:00Decision time!I have made a decision.<br />I don't know what it is about blogs that makes me want to overshare, but starting tomorrow I'm going to start thinking of memories that are actually, like, interesting, like the week I set up a lot of profiles on dating sites, or the time a robot tried to chat me up on facebook (but I figured him out, no worries!), or the time a mob of children chased me through the zoo shouting "Foreigner! Foreigner!"<br /><br />Or maybe I'll explain "Jezebel".<br />Or talk about the time I turned my back in China and my tour group got sucked into a black hole and I had to wander around a silk worm factory by myself until they found me.<br />Or the many times my skirt has fallen off on-stage (it was twice, but still).<br />Or how I used to use tricks my dad taught me to trick him with fake progress reports in high school!<br />Or the time a homeless man tried to convince me he knew where twenty-thousand dollars was hidden (and I sort of believed him).<br /><br />Man, I could be so much more interesting.Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-78285327872799637232009-01-28T12:47:00.000-08:002009-01-28T13:01:44.265-08:00Wednesday MemedayWhen I first started this blog I think I wanted to have a theme for every day of the week. I suppose that goes along with regular posting.<br /><br />I'm thinking about London, today, but I'm always thinking about somewhere other than where I am. It's gotten so misty outside I can't see a thing and in this sort of weather everything seems more insulated, like even crazy ideas aren't so crazy, after all.<br /><br />Lost some weight, I think.<br /><br />New theme song:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/F-jFR6qaf18&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/F-jFR6qaf18&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-5594704368409916452009-01-24T19:52:00.000-08:002009-01-24T20:14:34.273-08:00St. Adelaide was a cool ladyI am not being a very good dieter, but the thing about diets is that if you do badly one day you have to try again the next day. Go me!<br /><br />I am not being a very good writer, either. I picked up my brand new idea book today, snuggled up with my pillow to do some awesome brainstorming, and promptly spent about an hour trying to decide the name of the CHURCH where one of the MC's GRANDPARENTS were married.<br /><br />Even when I make myself think about the characters I procrastinate! AGH!<br /><br />And it was St. Adelaide of Burgundy Catholic Church, just in case you're interested.<br /><br />St. Adelaide is the patron saint of brides and also had the sort of shrewd longevity that lead her to not only outlive her first husband, which was not a terribly impressive feat as he was poisoned, but parlay that survival into a second marriage with Otto the Great, who was at the time Holy Roman Emperor and who, surprisingly, crowned her Empress at their wedding. She outlived him, as well, and was actually quite powerful in the court until her daughter-in-law, Theophano, had her exiled. Apparently Theophano didn't know that Adelaide would get her revenge not by any kind of scheming but just by <span style="font-style: italic;">waiting</span>. She outlived Theophano, too, and came back to be regent in her grandson's stead until he was old enough to rule, making her effectively head of the entire Roman Empire, though I don't actually know if the Roman Empire was that large at the time. After he did grow up and take his place, she left and devoted her life to charity, which was what lead to her canonization.<br /><br />This is the exact sort of awesome slow-motion power climb that my character's grandmother would approve of, so it seemed appropriate. Whether or not I will actually include the name of the church is... to be decided, but now that I've written it all out I am sort of glad I know that. It's interesting.<br /><br />On the other hand, I got very little done today. I spent a good long time transferring my hand-drawn family trees to the computer, but that doesn't actually seem that important. I really love this book, but it's got to the point where it's so big I don't even know where to start. It's twisty and layered and beautiful, but it doesn't really have a "beginning". We're sort of jumping into the middle, right, and when you have a whole pool to jump into how do you choose where to land? Stupid, stupid.<br /><br />Back to New York on Monday. Excited.Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-15287401455939105122009-01-21T21:02:00.000-08:002009-01-21T21:08:09.073-08:00How I Spent My Summer Vacation (last year)I made this video and it's really good and you should watch it and YAY!<br /><a href="http://vimeo.com/2840039">Paper Airplane Pilots - The Way It Goes</a><br /><br />That was a really exciting thing I did last August and now it is out for all to see! So, um... watch it and join Vimeo, which is something I had been meaning to do for a while because the Vimeo community seems much nicer than Youtube, and have a nice day!<br /><br />In blog news, I'm planning something called "20 for 20" which I plan to start 20 days before my 20th birthday and which will consist of posting a story from my life every day until that day. I may start it early, though, since you can't have too many memories!Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-4750517393448917202009-01-15T17:40:00.001-08:002010-08-04T19:08:10.037-07:0025 pounds by JuneI weighed 145 lbs. from the time I was 15 to the day I left for college.<br />
<br />
Dear reader, I gained EXACTLY fifteen pounds at school. What is that? I'm a stereotype!<br />
I'd never been over 150 in my life, and now I'm 160 and, according to my BMI, just barely overweight. I need to start doing things again. And no more comfort eating!<br />
<br />
I'm not saying I'm a horribly blimpy thing to look at. I think I look fine, but it's a very slippery slope this weight-gain thing, so I'm going to nip it in the bud.<br />
<br />
140 by June. Now, I know that pounds don't actually mean that much, so we'll be more specific: I want to be a size 6. I was always trying to push off those last 5 lbs in highschool, so I'll get them, too. I don't think losing weight will make me happier, but I do think it will make me healthier, and I'd really like to not be embarrassed by my bikini.<br />
<br />
So... size 6 by June. That's about 5 pounds a month, which is totally manageable, and do-able if I treat it like a project which I must finish in accordance with my New Year's resolution: "Finish Something."<br />
<br />
Projects I've started today:<br />
- 25 Pounds by June<br />
- A short story to submit to Seventeen magazine (maybe)<br />
- Get a job at school<br />
<br />
These are going well. For now.<br />
<br />
Also, from io9: <a href="http://io9.com/5129951/the-star-wars-portion-of-the-internet-can-close-down-now">"Space is in trouble! Now's your chance!"</a>Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-84174483912378964262009-01-08T13:57:00.000-08:002009-01-08T14:08:57.822-08:00AbandonmentI am not abandoning this blog. I am not abandoning this blog. I am not abandoning this blog.<br /><br />It explains a lot about me to say that my defining behavioral trait is an inability to finish anything. Not an exercise plan, not a short story, not a novel, not a relationship. My follow-through in life is as poor as mine in golf.<br /><br />Christmas was fun. Low-key. I learned to make mousse, then I went to a really stellar Christmas party a couple days later and caught up with some people I'd been missing. New Years I had a head-ache and also an acute case of follow-through anxiety so I stayed home and watched Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffith. We used our Tivo to rewatch <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsR8DVGS9bM">this</a> a couple times.<br /><br />She went to my high school. Actually, OPRF alums were all over New Years in Times Square. Ludacris was playing on a different channel. You just can't hold back a Huskie, I guess.<br /><br />Later on in the night I regretted not going to a party, but I'm glad I stayed home with my parents in the end. They usually do the exact same thing every year and they were really happy to have me there to make things just that little bit different.Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-3746433927175855552008-12-14T13:48:00.000-08:002008-12-14T14:47:08.189-08:00This is Really Important<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: georgia;font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;" >The article on MSN's lifestyle page today, entitled: "<a href="http://lifestyle.msn.com/relationships/articleghmatch.aspx?cp-documentid=14163239&page=1">Let Your Heart Break</a>", is sending one of the most important messages that, in my opinion, women (and men, too) need to hear in one of the most articulate voices that could have said it.<br /><br />I try to tell people this all the time, but even sometimes find myself falling into this mentality: "I'll go to the beach when I'm skinnier," "I'll really go after that guy when I don't have this zit," "When I'm published I'll really start to live." All this "When X I will Y," making excuses for not making the most of every moment of my life. The idea that if I was different I could control my life or be any happier than I am now. It's crazy! As it says in the article: "when you are as thin as you can ever imagine, the people who didn't love you before will still not love you, and the people who did love you before will love you still. People will come, go, leave, and die, no matter how much you weigh."<br /><br />I can't say it better than the article, so just go read it. If there's something you want to do, do it now. If you wait until X, it may never come. You don't have that kind of time.</span>Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-75639790885952098612008-12-10T21:48:00.000-08:002008-12-15T18:51:46.720-08:00Things You Find in Central Park<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >Picture this: Getting off of the 1 train at Lincoln Center, walking, walking, walking, past the Starbuckses and opera-goers and fancy apartments and hotels you will never be able to afford, to the edge of Central Park. It is freezing cold, but it's been so freezing cold all day that your fingertips have almost stopped complaining. It's dark and sort of foggy on the edge of the park, and almost c</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >ompletely deserted. Just the s</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >ort of place to get mugged, but you're almost sure it's too cold for muggers. You walk under a yellow streetlight and there's a low hill you can see in the park, and over the hill the top of an<span style="font-family:georgia;">other yellow streetlight. Over the hill is Strawberry Fields, you're told, and a mosaic in memorial of John Lennon. Something resonant, a sound not really heard, but felt, maybe imagined, cuts over the hill. "Do you hear music?" "I'm humming..." "No, I hear music!" There it is again, as you get closer, something harmonic and happy and bea</span>utiful. Not a trained chorus, but the combined voices of people made beautiful by shared love. "Is it... no..."<br /><br />So I can't say that I've ever been that hugely attached to John Lennon (I'm more of a George girl, honestly). He's not a Bowie to me, or even really as up there as Bob Dylan. In fact, when I</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" > think about him I mostly think about when Andy, Kate and I were filming our first mockumentary, the title of which I've now forgotten, in which I was playing a sort of Yoko-figure (or what I thought was a Yoko figure at the time). "This wall, while it may look to you just like a wall in my living room, really represents, I feel, the o</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >neness and conformity of the modern world, all beige and singular. It's a real statement that I was making, you know? Also, it matches the couch." Weirdly enough, I think Andy was playing Ringo, so I'm not sure why we were trying to channel Yoko, but it doesn't really matter.<br /><br />However, I do love music and peace and people and singing, so stumbling upon a memorial sing-along for John Lennon in Central Park on Monday evening (after a day of freezing my toes off in Greenwich Village and SoHo and finding more ways to say "I'm cold" than I'd ever thought I'd need to, but still being ecstatically happy) was more than magical enough to make up for not actually knowing that much about the guy to begin with. I know The Beatles, of course. I love The Beatles. And I know Imagine. Who d</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >oesn't know Imagine? Still, I couldn't have predicted that coming to Strawberry Fields on the </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >night of December 8th would find over a hundred people gathered around in a tight circle, strumming guitars and singing his songs. It was, of course, the memorial of his assassination.<br /><br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c26/Link_Loves_Zelda/The%20Beatles/imagine.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 285px; height: 187px;" src="http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c26/Link_Loves_Zelda/The%20Beatles/imagine.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >We'd intended to go in and take our pictures with the mosaic. We ended up staying for three-and-a-half hours. There were a lot of things going on there that might be worth mentioning (The two old men in golf hats who looked like they belonged in Waking Ned Devine and sang every song with their mouths wide open and their eyes full of tears; the man who repeatedly requested "My Gentle Guitar Weeps"; the really excited frat guy who shouted out songs like taunts at a baseball game and headbanged to "Hey Jude"; the man with the mustache and funny glasses who was apparently in charge of time itself.), but what I really noticed, at 11:15 while we took a moment of silence at the time of his death and I looked around at faces lowered in thought, was the diversity. The people there fit no mold. They were young and old, in every color of the rainbow. A man behind me had come all the way from Florida. Another was from Philadelphia. I was told Yoko was watching from her apartment. Some people knew the words to every song. Some knew the chorus to "I Want to Hold Your Hand". I cannot bring myself to think that any one of those people deserved to be the</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >re any more than another.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" ><br />I could not cry for John Lennon's death. As a person born in 1989 my world has always been one in which he has been as gone as JFK or Martin Luther King. As if I am viewing his life backwards through a tunnel, I have never been able to see it disconnected from its end, but that does not discount the profound effect that he has had on my world just by being John Lennon. If you loved him, if you liked him, if you barely know him even now, if you kiss his picture every night before you go to sleep and wailed for days after December 8, 1980, </span><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >whatever</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >, John Lennon has touched your life, just by the footprint his </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >life left on your history. In fifth grade I could barely have told you the names of all The Beatles, but I knew Give Peace a Chance. I have seen Imagine sung in churches and on street cor</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >ners by soloists and stadiums. You may not know the words, but you know the message and you know you want to sing it; loudly, off-key and for hours on end.<br /><br />Peace.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/music/John_Lennon_2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 232px; height: 273px;" src="http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/music/John_Lennon_2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >ALSO:<a href="http://chernobylgrows.blogspot.com/2008/12/gift-of-beauty.html"> Tamlyn's take on the evening</a></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></div>Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-38330657138177248032008-12-05T22:22:00.001-08:002008-12-05T22:39:15.047-08:00Death: The Great Equalizer<span style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >One of my brother's friend's parents died very unexpectedly last week. 2008 strikes again. RIP, of course, but I just have to hope that 2009 will be less death-filled. Jesus. Everybody stay safe. The year's almost over. You just have to survive December!<br /><br />There's this paragraph in </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >Looking for Alaska </span><span style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >that says: "I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them, or would I forget a little of Alaska every day for the rest of my life?" I've thought about that paragraph at every funeral this year, and I don't know the answer, but it helps me feel a little more normal to realize that death is as constant as life, possibly more constant, and there is literally no life without it. As long as you know people, you will know people who die. Some deaths will be harder than others, and you can never really know how any individual one will affect you, but it is still a part of life. Death is impartial and unstoppable and just </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >there</span><span style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" >. It is neither unfair nor fair. You can spend your entire life running from it, but it's not going to chase you. Someday you'll run so far you've gone straight around the world and Death is waiting. It'll always catch you one way or another. You can't win, but it's not really a contest, either.<br /><br />In the meantime, it is maybe best to live with Death like an indifferent neighbor. You don't like or dislike them, and every once in a while they may get on your nerves by playing their music too loud, but they're not going anywhere and mostly you just try not to bump elbows too often. When you do have to talk (at neighborhood watch meetings, for instance, or when your mail is accidentally switched) it's awkward, but not unsurvivable, and the conversation does eventually end. You won't ever invite them to your parties, but they wouldn't want to come, anyway.<br /><br />It's also probably a good idea to stay off their lawn.</span>Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-871509276410740515.post-29891300892483704762008-12-04T22:06:00.000-08:002010-08-04T19:19:17.591-07:00This post took me nearly two hours to write<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 85%;"><br />
</span><br />
<div id="100" style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #d73306; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 85%; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"><b>glamrocksupergrl</b><aim:timestamp style="display: inline; font-size: 11px;"> (1:03:34 AM)</aim:timestamp>:</span><span style="font-size: 85%;"> </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 85%;">what should i blog about?</span></div><div id="101" style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #0f0595; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 85%; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"><b>ibi137</b><aim:timestamp style="display: inline; font-size: 11px;"> (1:03:58 AM)</aim:timestamp>:</span><span style="font-size: 85%;"> </span><span absz="12" style="color: black; font-size: 85%;">temporary tattoos</span></div><div id="102" style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #d73306; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 85%; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"><b>glamrocksupergrl</b><aim:timestamp style="display: inline; font-size: 11px;"> (1:04:18 AM)</aim:timestamp>:</span><span style="font-size: 85%;"> </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 85%;">hmmm</span></div><div id="103" style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #d73306; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 85%; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"><b>glamrocksupergrl</b><aim:timestamp style="display: inline; font-size: 11px;"> (1:04:24 AM)</aim:timestamp>:</span><span style="font-size: 85%;"> </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 85%;">what can i say about temporary tattoos?</span></div><div id="105" style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #0f0595; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 85%; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"><b>ibi137</b><aim:timestamp style="display: inline; font-size: 11px;"> (1:06:05 AM)</aim:timestamp>:</span><span style="font-size: 85%;"> </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 85%;">the fact that your friend is considering getting a "mister sofftee" tramp stamp<br />
<br />
I forgot I had this blog. I guess I must be registered at every blog site on the internet, by now, so it shouldn't really surprise me. I must start one at least twice a year, before always returning faithfully to my much-ignored livejournal. which is still not updated <span style="font-style: italic;">too</span> often because of the stigma of having a livejournal. As I said in a post last month: "I only seem to write here when I want to talk about writing." Which is true, and a little meta, but whatever. Nobody wants to listen to me talking about writing as often as I want to.<br />
<br />
I am, apparently, one of those people who opens a new blog by pointing out it is a new blog. Though, in fact, I suppose this is an "old" blog, just an empty one. Oh well, that is what we do. Stretching out to measure our little inch of the internet, like in Kindergarten when they make you flap your arms and spin around before you do anything in P.E. Everybody ends up with enough space except for the kid against the wall, who keeps hitting his elbow.<br />
<br />
There are only three weeks until Christmas. This will be the second year in a row that I am not in Chicago, or even in Oak Park (to be more specific) or Illinois (to be more broad), for the build-up, which is a little... I don't know. It won't be as weird as the Christmas season in Japan. Japanese people have been convinced by American ad execs that Colonel Sanders is the same person as Santa Claus (That said with absolutely no exaggeration. They are literally lead to believe that the jovial, bearded man in the red suit likes to wear a vaguely confederate white suit and sell mass-produced fried chicken for the rest of the year.) and that everyone in American goes to KFC and lines up for their Christmas bucket on the eve. Also, Japan has invented this thing called a "Christmas cake", which they order weeks in advance. Christmas in Japan is a little like Chinese food in America. That is, all the parts the consumers like about it were completely invented somewhere in transit.<br />
<br />
The Christmas season in New York should be a little more normal. My chances of visiting a Buddhist temple or nearly getting run over by a very fast-moving tractor in the middle of a fish market on Christmas eve morning are greatly lowered, but my chances of eating gingerbread cookies go up quite a bit. I'm not going to miss putting up the tree this year, at least, though I may miss lunch at the Walnut Room in Marshall Field's, lights at Brookfield Zoo, seeing the silly lamp-post decorations on Lake street, ice skating in Millenium Park, the Christkindlmarket on Daley Plaza, etc. Good Christmas-y Chicago stuff, and my own traditions, too, like making molded chocolates. I didn't get to do that last year, either. I feel my chocolate molds are probably getting dusty.<br />
<br />
My haul used to grow larger every year. I think when I was a senior in high school I made over 400 pieces. Little chocolate stockings and santas and candy canes. It was relaxing, and it felt good to walk around with enough that I could see any random person in the hallway and shout "Hey! You want a Christmas present?" Of course, these days I wouldn't see enough people to give out so many, but it was still fun experimenting with different mix-ins. My favorite was white chocolate with broken up candy canes in it. It was a little like the peppermint ice at Fannie Mae, which makes me wonder why Fannie Mae charges so much, as the recipe is apparently so simple<br />
<br />
When I was fourteen we spent Christmas in Paris, where my mom's best friend was living at the time, in this great apartment right near the Eiffel tower. This was also the Christmas that I spent in tears on the bathroom floor while my mom tried to bribe me away from mental breakdown with a shiny new iPod. That was memorable. I think I may have eaten turtle stew for dinner. But I would remember something like that if it had happened, right? I hope so. I think it was salty.<br />
<br />
In short: I am no good at being away from home for Christmas.<br />
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This story was about Paris, though, and also about chocolate. This is what tied it all together. Christmas, Paris, Chocolate and Le Bon Marche's cake lady.<br />
<br />
She was amazing and pervasive. This skinny, pale woman with shiny, red strawberry lips and a short, dark bob coiffed so perfectly that it looked almost like a wig made of chocolate fondant. She had wide-set, sadly French eyes and good cheekbones, but most of all she was extraordinary in two ways:<br />
<br />
1) She was holding a chocolate cake the approximate size and shape of a Nintendo Gamecube, imprinted over and over again with the French word for cake: "gateau gateau gateau" ("What's a gate-ow?" I asked my dad), on a white plate beside her face. And<br />
<br />
2) she had freckles.<br />
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As a pale, skinny kid with, admittedly, less fabulous hair but many, many more freckles, spotting a model so glamorous holding something so obviously delicious in a metro ad was one thing in the first, but I am not sure that before then I had ever noticed someone else's freckles so keenly, or been so proud of my own. And the woman was <span style="font-style: italic;">everywhere. </span>I could count on spotting her stony face at least three times in any given metro stop, and she was plastered on walls, too, and billboards. My family played a game of pointing her out whenever we saw her, and I played even after my brother and parents had grown bored of it. My dad had given me his old camcorder to record the trip, I having just recently declared my new dream of being the First Woman to Win An Oscar for Best Director and so obviously needing to start practicing on a Sony Handycam ASAP. I don't think he or I realized I was doing it, but when he got home and looked at the footage it contained three things: one shot of the outside of the Louvre, one shot from the Arc de Triomphe, and shot after shot of Le Bon Marche's cake lady each time I had spotted her: larger than life, gorgeous, and freckled.<br />
<br />
My mom eventually went to Le Bon Marche and brought back a palm-sized version of the cake for me. It wasn't as delicious as its advertisement made it look, but that's always the case. I hadn't really wanted to eat it, anyway. It was enough to be holding what I could view as a little piece of that photograph.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I went home and forgot about Le Bon Marche's cake lady. That is, until I was nineteen and I cut off all my hair, inspired by my love of Audrey Tautou's <span style="font-style: italic;">Amelie </span>and a stated desire to "cut off the dead ends of my life." (As an aside, it apparently takes more than a haircut to completely cut off one "dead ends". Mine keep coming back, but I do sort of love them, now, so I guess it's good I didn't cut them out too completely.) A few days after the cut, when I was used to it but no one else was, I was getting out of the shower, with my hair and bangs slicked down with water. I passed my mom in the hall and she stopped. "You know," she said, "You kind of look like that...cake lady. You know, that woman in the ads in Paris." I had to think back further than usual to remember, but then I did, and I couldn't stop smiling for the rest of the day. Possibly the rest of the week. I briefly entertained the idea that I had subconsciously chosen the bob cut because of my young fascination with that ad, but if I believed that I would have to doubt my own sanity. Suffice to say, perhaps the cut was a long time coming.<br />
<br />
My mom is, of course, insane for thinking I look anything like Le Bon Marche's cake lady, but it was nice, anyway. It's a weird feeling when someone tells you you've accomplished exactly what you meant to, even more so when you'd forgotten that you meant it at all.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-size: 85%;"> <br />
Now that I think about it, that might not have been the Christmas trip at all. It was probably the 2001 summer trip. Ah, well, it doesn't matter. I'll always have a soft spot for that twiggy woman and her disproportionately large cake.<br />
<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 85%;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wo_9QCes0Y8/STjVCqk2GzI/AAAAAAAAABI/pQRrG1Fh8D0/s1600-h/gateau.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276201205229820722" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wo_9QCes0Y8/STjVCqk2GzI/AAAAAAAAABI/pQRrG1Fh8D0/s320/gateau.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 224px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Fin.<br />
<br />
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">(I promise I will never write an entry this long again. Jesus Christ.)<br />
</span></div></div></div>Johannahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11339206453049002449noreply@blogger.com1