So I Guess it’s Still a Secret

The Grumpy Owl/Crooked Antenna household has made a giant leap in online communications this week:

We have a video camera and we know how to use it.

Last night, we made a video that consisted of Janky Panky and me imitating the Grumpy Owl.  I’ve never really seen myself on video before.  As it turns out, I laugh a lot, and am prone to changing the subject over to my cat without warning, which is something I try hard not to do while writing a blog.  No one cares about what my cat is doing, and I try to be sensitive to that.  Unless I’m being video taped, and have run out of things to say.

I was also stoned in the video, after having sat around smoking pot and watching The Office with my friend all evening.

And where, you might ask, can this particular work of art be found, as you are all chomping the bit to see what I act like in real/digital/unscripted life?  I don’t know.  I think it’s been erased.

Don’t worry, there will be more where that came from.

R.I.P. Mary Scott

The last of my great grandparents, she made it to ninety five.

I don’t know very much about her, other than that she raised my father, and made a mean quilt.  From her, I inherited my teeth, my brown eyes, and my distaste for pussyfooting.

I’ll raise a drink to you tonight, Nanny Scott.

Post Post

Leiferoni Harmsini as interpretive dancer. I look fat.

So that’s me, reading from my blog – this one – at the Gladstone this past Wednesday at Granny Boots, hosted by Christabel.  I had an interpretive dancer for my piece, and I wasn’t wearing what I’d planned on wearing.

I had a dress that mysteriously no longer fits (at least I thought it no longer fit, apparently it always did that thing to my tits), and sparkly tights.  The combination made me look like a modern day Janeane Garofalo, if her boobs were mashed up into her spine.  Which is why I’m wearing cords and a pink cardigan on stage.

My performance was well received.  I recited from The Greatest Story Ever Told, and some lesser piece that I was too drunk to properly portray.  I just wanted to get back to my beer and my friends.

As per usual.

Organ Failure, Too

Oh this wretched hangover.

I woke up early this morning, and after writing a few still-drunk emails, tried to go back to bed.  It worked eventually, but before I was able to fall asleep, I was plagued with the goriest of images.  People burning to death, skin melting, wondering what it would feel like to have your blood reach the boiling temperature.  Would you even still be alive at that point?

Death always haunts me when I’m hungover.  The act of dying, not whatever comes after; that part’s easy.  No more loneliness, no more restlessness, no more worrying about bill payments, no more hangovers where I suffer from these horrible panic attacks, just nothing.

But it’s that particular act of dying that grips me so tightly when I’m hungover.  How will it happen?  Is it going to hurt a lot?  Will I be lucid or addled with drugs in a hospital?  Will I have seen all my friends and loved ones go before me, or will I be the first?  Will it be from an act of heroism, or will some stupid asshole forget to look both ways before driving their car around a corner?  Will I be alone, or with a bunch of people, all of whom got up that morning in different beds, with different thoughts occupying their different minds?

And then the hangover turns to thoughts of horny.  Oh sweet relief.  For now.

Camping on Mars

Fucking Sunday Nights.

My Sunday is the Friday of the normal world.  I have the next two days off, so by all logical reasoning, I should be out blowing off my pent up steam.

But I’m not.

This Sunday, like many Sundays past, I’m sitting at home alone, like a sucker, baking cookies, like a sucker, and checking my email like someone who qualifies for disability via OCD, like a sucker.  And this pisses me off.

Why am I not going out?  Why am I lonely?  Why did I not mete out my Little House on the Prairie episodes more effectively?  Why do I have to subject myself to the ridiculous world of online dating, like a boring/fat/unpleasant person in order to get a little action?  Why do television shows make it look so easy to get this action that I have to work so hard at, only to fail in achieving?  Like how does Jackie from Roseanne get laid all the time when she lives in Lanford Illinois, and I can’t catch even a meager bone in an actual city, beta or otherwise?  How does a horsefaced blogger like SJP get laid(by hot guys, nonetheless?), in NYC on SaTC?

Why am I too skanky for the prissy men and too prissy for the skanky men?  Why is there no happy medium for fantastic me?  Why doesn’t anyone strike up conversations with me about the potential for time travel now that we have a presently non-functioning Large Hadron Collider/Wormhole Creator/World Ender?  At what point in the past year did every single one of my friends convert to Puritan Quakerism?

Why am I not getting any love letters, either in paper or electronic format?

Why do you all have to disappoint me so incessantly?

Why can I not satisfy my nicotine craving with four cigarettes in less than two hours?  Why do I not have kahlua in my coffee?

Okay, that last one got fixed quickly enough, but why did I spend so much time writing this crap at the expense of one pan of cookies?  Still edible, but overdone?

And whatever happened to box socials?  Why can’t I attend one?

Fucking Sunday Nights.

Amie Media

Last night, I taught myself video editing.  Here is the result, a video made from other videos:

Just you wait until I get a video camera, that’s when the awesome really starts.

I’m a Hub!

When I started writing this blog all those years ago, it never occurred to me that there would be tangible perks involved.

I figured that this thing was pretty much useless.  I mean really, it’s just me blathering on about my tedious life.  I do that in person to my friends, and they sure aren’t grateful for it, so why should this medium be any different?  In fact, my ramblings are way better in real life because they aren’t censored for privacy.  And I flail my arms a lot.  And I swear even more than you could possibly imagine.

Which actually throws me way off course from what I had been planning on writing about.  What I should be telling you now is that I’m going to be doing a spoken word performance, using excerpts from my blog.  I know, spoken word is fucking retarded.  But remember, I flail a lot, and swear even more.  I’m quite vibrant in real life, and I’m too shameless for stage fright, so it’ll probably be kickass.

What I was going to mention, before I blew way off in the wrong direction, is that I also got invited to participate in a vodka sampling event in some fancy bar in some fancy part of town next week.  I, my friends, am a “lifestyle blogger”, and thusly, get to drink fine spirits for free, in the hopes that I’ll write about it.  Which I’m kind of doing right now, just not in the way they want me to write about it.

Attempting to Stand Up

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions.  They seem to be all duty and no deep meaning, therefore I never actually take them seriously.  But if I were the type of person to make a New Year’s resolution, I think it would be what I am about to embark on starting this week.

I’m going back to school.

I hate school.  I hate having to go somewhere far away to sit in a classroom and learn boring crap week after week.  I hate taking tiny steps in order to achieve some mediocre accomplishment years down the road.  I hate that I feel like some sort of sell-out, admitting defeat in fashion design.  Knowing that I’ll never make a viable income off my art, and giving it the new title of “hobby”, while I pursue a more practical avenue.

But I can’t wait tables forever.  The years of verbal abuse and having to rely on the kindness of strangers in order to pay my rent are taking their toll.  Waitressing is like being in a bad relationship; people are unpredictable at the best of times and predictably cruel at the worst of times.

So I’m doing what needs to be done.  I’m taking responsibility for my own life, and in doing so, I’m admitting to myself that I’m worth the sacrifice of spending a few hours a week doing something I hate so that I don’t have to spend the rest of my life under the thumb of the general public.

I hope I can do this.

Safety Pinned to My Heart

For the past couple weeks, Roommate and I have been attempting to recompile our music library.  Actually, I haven’t done anything other than try (and fail) to load some songs from a cd onto the computer.  I don’t even know if I was trying to upload or download.  Suffice it to say, my computer skills are nil.  It’s okay though, because I’m cute and fun, so I don’t need to be smart.

Anyhoo, I’ve had the chance to get reacquainted with music I no longer listen to on a regular basis: Punk.  Old seventies punk to be specific.  We have this huge compilation called No Thanks, which features about a billion old bands singing one hundred songs on four albums.  And it’s kind of awesome.

I’m not going to pretend that I’ve even heard of all the bands on the compilation, but I will weed through a little to give you a heads up on what’s good.  We’ll skip the primary bands, like The Ramones, The Clash, Blondie, and The Cure, because you already know all their music.  We’ll also skip Siouxsie and the Banshees, The New York Dolls, Joy Division and Elvis Costello, because who cares about them anyway (other than their mothers, and even that’s debatable)?  Actually, the New York Dolls are okay, I just don’t feel like talking about them.

And we’ll skip the crap.

Here’s some of the awesome:

Ah yes, Stiff Little Fingers, fantastic.

Also:

The Buzzcocks.  Scary name, ugly singer, perfect punk.

Oh, and this, too:

Motherfuckin’ Sham 69.  Nothing more needs to be said about them.  Sigh, be still my beating heart.

Overall, it’s a fun compilation, with only a few bands missing from the mix: Crass, The Pogues, The Specials and The Cramps.  But whatever, we already know about their music, too, don’t we?

And one last thing, the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain does some great covers of some of those bands, in case you’re interested:

Two Thousand and Fine

I have to apologize about the privacy settings from the past few days.  No explanation, just an apology; sorry!  Fixed up.

I suppose that this will be my obligatory New Year’s post, albeit a few days late.  I have spent the entire new year in a hungover stupor, watching Little House on the Prairie in my pyjamas, marvelling that I was too hungover to even cry when Laura Ingalls’ dog died.

My past year wasn’t as eventful as the two prior.  Which was wonderful.  Except for the last month of 2008, where I wrecked a computer, accidentally flashed my bush to a sold out burlesque show at the Gladstone, had a lunatic yell at me about nachos, and woke up New Year’s Day in someone else’s socks.

And due to that computer virus, my ipod was stuck with the same songs for one month straight.  If I never again have to listen to Liliput or the Violent Femmes, I will be utterly thankful.

So my forecast for 2009 is to continue with all the fun stuff, to learn editing and video making, and to get back into making t-shirts for profit.  And maybe try to go out more.  I’ve been hibernating since August, and it’s getting kind of boring.