For Your Review, novenelope,

at first, i was resistant to this- hoighty LA store for some hoighty now appearing from NY to LA glass company that kerry just had had to go to. i have to say the smile booth made it for me, oh and the free mimosas. i was dressed like a complete slob- because i was finally helping kerry sort her apartment [a year later iou]. she did not inform me of the small intimacy of the opening or all the fashionistas there. i stealed myself, my stained sweatshirt, and my hairy legs to suck it up and toss it all down. i have to say this was our 4th attempt. we rocked it and the 3rd one too but that digital copy got eaten. 

i mean, if i wore glasses...

smiling kitty crocodile.

the things you do for friends really. amber had all these pies she needed to hand out to seniors- costco run and then there they came off the bus. we found out that they found out where we got them and one lady who looked well like she could afford to waste or eat or give away pie went to try and take hers back to costco. all $6 of it? we refused to give her a label and concluded "we just didn't like her attitude"... i swear i'll respect my elders in korea.

divine.

hour and a half at the county clerks office. way to go van nuys. mostly nice people though but no visa? really? and a $1.75 charge fee. could you just say next time- cash only? ps. with only 12 people ahead of me this thing was going like molasses on a winters day.

i am the lion. BE THE LION.

[at the ronald reagan state dept bldg]

mmm organization.

cath says i'm so 80's right here.

what i've been having for breakfast lately.

and some other indulgences.

pre holiday wander with matt, who, though he lived in LA and was maybe 5 minutes from this exact spot, had no idea it was here. oh, hidden LA, you slay me. also this is our "river"... quite a lot of bird life actually.

on the day of, my uncle tries to explain to me how expensive a turkey dinner in 1931 was in silver $1.25. Compared to the cost of it today $25. He started talking about financial things and the gold standard, and then my eyes glazed over. [yes he does carry those things in his wallet as a reminder].

he got me back with this. honey is magical. has healing properties and is apparently highly nuanced. super tasty. of course they lost me again when they started talking about surface tension in boiling water from a microwave.

and this is me leaving the gated community. they're house is in the middle. the community arcs around in a bowl basically. something was suppose to be built in the middle here but wasn't... also i had to slow down bcs of the constantly freshly resurfaced speed bumps... and of course throw my printed guest pass away.

and yes, inexplicably... midnight sale... me and the two contrasting aries types.

their hair got melted in the attic...

and of course this photo is moms. she loves persimmins and apparently weird faces that appear after you're done eating them. no i'm melting.... [note also the bucket of shells i've saved, and no didn't part with- who knows what i managed to get rid of if it wasn't this. but they look so pretty in their glass jars now].

anyway, hope you enjoyed. all and all based on these it was a pretty decent november. no plagues. still direly broke. still with the anxiety and purposeless pacing and money borrowing and the physical listlessness but otherwise- yah, decent. ok, shrug, yah. what else yah got?
** oh yes AND i did get the gold starbucks card. ah yah, bright spot.

Tuesday Thoughts: regarding the rest of the week, by M

Apparently the week was not quite done with me.

Friday: The girl knew her check was coming late, so went out into the wide world for a respite. She hopped in her car and as she drove out of the garage, her breath was knocked from her by a large muscle on the left side of her back, and it's iron-fisted grip. She hunched forward, holyfuckingwhat, escaping her lips. She breathed out with wide eyes as her nerves now being stuck by pins spread across her back, her breath coming in deep sighs, felt tight and constricted as her back muscles fought the movement. Every breath uncomfortable. She pressed her back against the seat. FUCK, she thought, as she now could no longer turn her head to the left or tip it to the right. This was good times. But the girl did eventually go to the gym and jumped into the jacuzzi, then the pool, then the steam room, and shoveled some advil into her mouth, lathering herself in icy/hot and going to bed even as the headache spread and hovered at the base of her neck. Blissful sleep.

Saturday: The girl woke, not quite well but vowed to venture downtown to the fabric district. It was uncommon hot, and her friend had brought friends and they manically went from store to store to store until the girl grew dizzy from fabric options and wanted to just stand still and think. And as time tore from her at the 11th hour she found a different direction and spent $30 on 20yards. Gold. Mine. And although she fell further behind against the clock, things were going well, just ok, until the friend and the friend's friend started talking about religion. I suppose the girl had started it, fed it, when the friend said, this girl is all RELIGIOUS, despite the fact the girl sat there as a known church goer, she asked why? What do you mean? To which they said, we know you're not like that BUT, religion is brainwashing, religion is a republican fear-mongering tactic, religion is pathetic and pointless, and have it however you want as long as you don't PUSH IT ON ME. And the girl furrowed her brow and could not find the words, as she felt smashed against the pane of THEIR BELIEFS, and then she said, well religion is different than Jesus, to which her friend said, yah, but. And the girl said, so you don't believe in Jesus anymore? To which her friend went, eh.... And the girl turned her head to the window, and was very glad to have sunglasses on, as it seemed she'd just been told that her friend of 18 years didn't love HER anymore. And she found her heart just a little bit broken. And saw that her friend glanced over, but still could find nothing to say.

Sunday: She got a call from a friend who wanted to see her. So the girl saw her, and the girl stared with disdain at the Obama/Biden button, and wanted a McCain/Palin Button of her own to wear as they sat over their lunch salads and iced tea. But she didn't say anything but sat slumped and melancholy. They talked but the girl was not very good company. And then they went to leave, her beloved car lolly, went SCRUNCH against the pylon on the left. And the friend said, I saw that. THEN WHY THE FUCK DIDN"T YOU SAY SOMETHING. I thought, for sure you saw it. The girl said, PLEASE stop saying shit like that. When I ran the stoplight and you said, Are you sure? What the fuck was that suppose to mean. If you're not going to help, stop saying you could've helped but just refused to SAY SOMETHING. FUCK... Do you want to get out and look at it, asked the friend. NO I DO NOT, said the girl, who in all of her years of driving had NEVER done that particular maneuver, on any more or less important cars. She stared straight ahead and tried to make it home, and when her father suggested the friend stay for dinner she said NO, and when they suggested dinner next week, the girl said she'd have to check her schedule, because the girl no longer thought it right that the father could talk better to the friend than to her. And later, the girl read Dracula to her mother, and they watched Clue, and she had an allergic reaction to wheat cereal and felt, very, very sorry for herself.

Monday: The girl woke with a vow to not go to work, but found herself driving there anyway, and managed to vote (proud as she googled each proposition), and write a little something, and harass people about the prayer ministry meeting from last wednesday....and not do her french homework, but went to class anyway, only to feel her whole body humming and screeching and wanting to lay down. She thought, it could've been the cookie, brownie and ricekrispie treat I had earlier, but the girl thought it more likely was her back. And then as they sat talking about subjunctive clauses her left hand throbbed, and she turned it palm up and went to rub a sore spot on the pad of her palm, but it hurt more when she did it, and she could see a vien bulging up and turning purple with a swath of pink around it, but the girl didn't know why. She only hoped that, after spending 5 minutes resting her eyes in a bathroom stall that she would be able to make it home without further incident. She could only hope Tuesday would prove better. And the twinge in her eye indicated that she herself couldn't believe it.

Weekend Notes

*N.Lo spit up on my head TWICE.

*Had ten tons of leftover lemon ice paint from kitchen, which was most unfortunate, as it cost a lot of money. Turned lemon ice into LEMONADE and painted the backyard playhouse.

*Brought the WHITE paint inside the house and began touching up spots on the kitchen trim that are chipped. Found that touch-up job makes moldings look wonderful and un-touched-up moldings look even more horrible. Have not stopped touching up trim. Found even more white paint in the laundry room, foresee myself painting trim forever.

*K.Lo and N.Lo (dare I speak it out loud) had two very good nights of sleep. Consecutively. As did I. Sort of.

*I've hidden all the candy so my daughter won't ask for chocolate all day long. Or at least so I can answer, "We don't have any" and effectively pretend that's the truth. The candy is now conveniently located in a drawer right next to where I keep the computer in the kitchen. Don't anyone tell her.

*The new Smartini blog is super-cool and you should visit and comment a lot. I personally am a comment whore.

*Two very cool things I read recently are here and here. One is about Neville Longbottom and the other features several favorite movie/TV/book characters including Barney Stinson and Dwight K. Schrute. And Mose. They made me laugh out loud, like genuinely laugh, which startled me.

*The peas and cucumbers and the marigolds in the garden have sprouted. I have yet to grow anything else.

*My To-Do List for this week (prepping for N.Lo's Baptism Sunday) is approximately 10 miles long.

*My hair is falling out, which happens sometimes after being pregnant. Usually (I would imagine) only if your hair grew a bunch while you were pregnant. Which mine did. When I was pregnant with N.Lo.

*J.Lo has been making this ice coffee that is crazy-good. But I'm not really a coffee drinker? Because I get buzzed from one cup? So I've been super-productive the past few days and my toes are really tingly. That is all.

News in Brief

*For the yard sale tomorrow, I'm trying some reverse-psychology tactics on the weather. I'm preparing for rain. I'm borrowing a canopy (thanks, erinhjones!), J.Lo's rigging up a tarp. In my mind's eye, I picture us all standing there, soaked and miserable. But really, I'm determined that we will pull this thing off, sell lots of stuff, and our efforts will totally be worth it.

*Library Book Sale this weekend!

*Claire deserved to go home this week on ANTM, but can we get rid of Dominique already? Chickie's got such an ego on her, and she's just... she's a hot tranny mess. I see Anya, Whitney, Stacy Ann, and Katarzyna as the final four.

*NKOTB was on the Today Show this morning, and even though they didn't sing (yet! coming up in May!), and even though I am old and they are old, and I can plainly see how totally ridiculous it was to worship them as a sixth and seventh grader, I still got a little chill. Like all time and age and reason filters just dropped away. I heart them.

*I didn't realize until Wednesday that The Office isn't new until NEXT week. Man. Also, I'm bummed because once again, the DVR and its limited recording abilities strike, and right now we are unable to keep up with Miss Guided. I hope they move the time slot. I heart Judy Greer.

*I cannot wait until next week's Survivor, seeing Eliza wave her little stick arms about the fake Immunity Idol. She's so smart. Annoying, but at this point in an almost endearing way.

*Lesson learned this week: One of my bad habits or character flaws is that I can't just let lost causes remain lost? I have to try to find a solution, work it out, because in my head the solution is just so obvious. Note to self: Don't do that. In the meantime, I feel pretty stupid for even trying to facilitate these hopeless situations. I'll be in the corner, licking my wounds.

findings, by pen

Hello BlogNation,

We're back. We missed you! I might have missed you more than mendacious, I can't be sure. My compulsion to share all the boring details of my life only increased over the past month, whereas mendacious still seems hesitant? But this yin-yang-i-ness is typical of what we found while kickstarting our book project(s). Rest assured that in a month's time, I won't be able to think of something to blog about for the life of me, and mendacious will be all about it.

What we did during our hiatus: mendacious compiled all of our brilliant blog posts from the past 3+ years and whittled them down to something readable. Which means she read it all and was able to get a sense of our progression, and note themes, threads, and startling facts such as my apparent absence during 2005. It's really not that startling to me, because I know where I was and what I was doing, mainly puking my green guts out while pregnant with K.Lo and working at the evil corporation of VZW. And buying a house, moving into that house, and not blogging. After initial edits, mendacious passed along the blog copy to me, so I can read it, and I'm still reading. I know, it's sad, but we're talking about nearly 600 pages here, and I'm a slow reader, and hello, I have an infant and a toddler and a husband to tend to. Excuses, excuses.

Here is what we have accomplished: I think there are a few long narrative projects hidden in our blog, and this year it is our goal to develop them. My personal opinion (please weigh in) is that mendacious' job saga in particular is worth persuing, and she needs to pluck all job posts, dump them in a Word document, and take a good look. Also, mendacious and I will be working on a project together, as we have always dreamed of doing (like for real), by creating sitcom-like episodics from our blog matter. Because we are TV junkies, this project truly matches with our sensibilities, and will in fact be an homage to our favorite show forms. Does that sound all full of hot air? But no, seriously, picture it: a book featuring the characters of mendacious and penelope, with their (mis)adventures presented like a TV show, a three-act structure, and then End Scene. The blog-matter will provide the material for these episodes. You're so jealous.

You can think it's stupid if you want to, or overly ambitious, or still lacking a hook. But really, it's going to be a lot of fun, in the way that it will play with form and also (most importantly) celebrate us and our lives and our friendship, and also you, our BlogNation.

Here's what else we found:

-In the old days, mendacious and I struggled a lot to find our blog voice. Many times, and still to this day, we wrote a lot of stream-of-consciousness mumbo-jumbo, oftentimes in all lowercase. We're going to try to quit that. For the masses' sake.

-We also struggled very much in the beginning, in our Post Grad-School Purgatory-Like Existence, with the legitimacy of blogging, and whether it really "counted" as writing. Or at least I struggled. By now we (I) know it does, at least the way we do it.

-Mendacious and I used to blog back and forth a lot, each with a different spin on the same topic, and/or like we were having a conversation. We'd like to try and do more of that, from here on out, because it's fun, and because we are co-bloggers, after all.

-Some of our early blog posts could have been written yesterday, and some of them seem 10 lifetimes ago. This realization was shocking, and kind of sad, and kind of comforting all at once.

-Especially in the beginning, but still to this day, hardly anyone comments, and we both find this frustrating, mainly because we are complete narcissists and attention whores. This lack of readership and appreciation is really beyond our control, however, and we realize we need to get over ourselves. To some extent. Not really.

There are more blanks to be filled in regarding our absence, what we did, where we went, what we learned, and where we are now. But I will leave those blanks to mendacious for her return post--mainly because it is late, and my mind is mushy. See how that works, though, setting up the perfect lead-in for m?

For now, we are back, we are refreshed, we are ready to go.

Now, who wants to talk about the Gauntlet? Yeeeow!

Day by Day

The perfect crystalization of thought and time are not coalescing... hence the long absence. There are things to tell you about like my absolute irritation of working all last week. And the perfect week after Christmas- If I were going by the tradtional calendar, Christmas started the day of and just ended yesterday on the day of Epiphany- crossing the new year. It was 2 wks of opposites.

I will recount it in shorthand for you now, but maybe just pick a few days you're interested in bcs my obsessive need to recount each day should not interfere with your need to not be here all day:

Dec. 24th- dad asleep on the couch: my aunt, mom and i do a whirlwind marathon game of pictionary. they are most impressed with my ability to draw upside down. the world begins to look a little brighter.

Dec.25th- (partridges) fresh squeezed oj: a day of full-tilt excess, heaps of fudge and 4 hours of television. a true day of celebration. except for my aunt apparently, who upon learning her car was dented, quarreled, told my other aunt to shut up, threw her presents on the ground, explained that "her christmas had been ruined!", and stormed out of the house. and all before dinner. the world is clarified.

Dec. 26th- (turtle doves) i'm at work: there is nothing to be said about this except we thought anyone out shopping was 'sick' and we looked forward to not being there. but there was enough fudge in my system that the world was still holding steady.

Dec. 27th- (french hens) kidnapped: my friend from his house. we had breakfast and he came back and we had dinner. his mom called at one point and said that she missed him, and that he should come back to the house... but we didn't relent and we hiked to the bronson caves, and tried see the lake in hollywood, but it was closed, and the sun set and the sausage i ate was turning against me. rapidly. and he went home. the world is perilous and full of adventure.

Dec. 28th- (calling birds) today and after: i took my cousin sean out for his birthday. we talked about that side of the family being sheeple. a word i am endlessly amused by. i am glad i am friends with my cousin. i went to my director's house for his birthday... it was strange. he said, he was glad i came. i told them about a dream i had where i was heading down a mountain on a bus with people i went to k-12 with- i said, if i have to die i'm glad it's with you guys. later after we'd escaped, a man i know, was going to give a sermon in the embassy. he said, you can escape your captors but you can't escape the mountains maw... i had to look up the word maw. the world is a curious place.

Dec. 29th- (golden rings) visits continue: i watched shadow of a doubt, talked to a friend i hadn't seen in nearly 8 months. the world is pleasant by a warm fire around a hearth, around the dogs around the living room, around the house, which is around the dark.

Dec. 30th- (geese a'layin') perfect vacation: a japanese soup involving wheat noodles, fried tofu, fishcakes, carrtos, and mushrooms. a dessert involving actual real chunks of aloe soaked in leeche nut juice, mangos and a generous squeeze of lime. Followed by Edward Scissorhands the BALLET... sure it's drawing the teen crowds. But as I slouched down in our balcony seats I thought- 2 hours without talking. OH GOD. The dancing was great sure, I knew what was going to happen but I think I'd rather have seen a musical- i mean if choices had to be made, or a play but then you know it's by the same guy who did the all male version of swan lake and that was HOT! anyway after watching a hip and jazzy edward scissorhands with the leading lady dressed in jeans and unflattering plaid top- makes me wonder if it has anything to do with the director being gay that the lady was so unflattering fitted which i know is an UnPC thing to say but you had to be there along with the hot all male version of swan lake which in his more controversial days he said stanislovsky would've done bcs he was gay- so apparently we're both making similar judgements. anyway after that my friend bought a couple pieces of my art. the world is an artistic and surprising place.

Dec. 31st- (swans a'swim'in) among company: i went to church and spent the day among my new friends- it was perfect. though we were hunched over and freezing outside. it was like family. that night i went to my friend's house who i kidnapped a few days before. his sister is all grown up, the food was delicious though just needing a little dash of seasoning... i then strained a vocal chord and was in bed by 12:30. It was a fun time but I'm sure the strained vocal chord might be a warning for excess in the new year but I can't help but hope that though tempered the year will be beautiful. the world is full.

Jan.1- (maids a'milkin) working: a feeling of being slightly hungover... and thinking anyone shopping today is sick and i looked forward to not bein g there.

Jan.2- (ladies dancing) working: even more pissed off that i'm at work.
Jan.3- (lords a leaping) working: the first half went fine, it then became a chore to count the hours by. the first half went fine, it then became a chore to count the hours by.
Jan.4- (pipers piping) ... working: the first half went fine, it then became a chore to count the hours by. the first half went fine, it then became a chore to count the hours by.
Jan.5- (drummers drumming) working: a friend came by, so glad to see, went out went up and over, to eat, to buy socks... and possibly some hairdye. by then the world was brighter again...
Jan.6- (EPIPHANY)- it was great to be with family and friends again- working in the garden, having tea and all the little things that make life worth living.

the END.