Father & Daughter

They sleep in late and heat up leftover spaghetti and meatballs for breakfast, her favorite. In their pajamas, they head out to buy stuff like fertilizer, windshield wiper fluid, and choo choo trains. After doing yard work and car maintenance, they spend the rest of the afternoon shirtless in front of the television, watching basketball games and The Little Mermaid. At bedtime, they cuddle and laugh together at the conversations between her princess doll, Mr. Dino, and Saurus. When she crawls into our bed at 3 am, he takes her little hand and lulls her back to sleep with his snores.

* * * * *




This was written for Lance's 100 Word Song challenge. This week's song was Ok Go's "This Too Will Pass." I was inspired by the car and dominos at the start of the video; those are two of my two-year-old's favorite toys right now. And the title of the song seems to refer to the fact that our daughter is going to grow up and she and my husband eventually won't have these kinds of moments together anymore :(

Road Trip

Spent Mother's Day weekend driving through Nevada, Arizona, and Utah to reach our camping destination; and stopped all along the way to visit oddity shops, gawk at the views, and delight in some roadside attractions.

Me and my daughter

(Haha. Fucking douche bag. Me, not her.)

Yup.

"Virgin Goods"

Haha

A tree being attacked by people's old ass shoes.

(Looks like it's fighting off a swarm of killer insects.)

Stylish people don't seem to participate in this.

Momento my hubby and daughter left behind at our campsite :)

Going Camping

Time to get drunk, admire the scenery, and let my mind wander.

Along for the trip:

* the iPad, so I can re-watch "Exit Thru the Gift Shop", a documentary directed by Banksy about street art

* my short story collection notebook

* my Kindle, on which I'm currently reading "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf; "Karaoke Culture", a book of essays on how amateurs are ruling our creative culture nowadays with "text message novels" and "Twitterature" and how we need to stop letting them get away with it - it has fantastic insights and the most outrageous examples (I got the book cuz I wrote something recently about how people need to shut up in public places); and re-reading "The Yellow Wallpaper"

* "Nausea" by Jean Paul Sartre, which I haven't started reading yet; I'm bracing myself before I do cuz I feel it's going to inspire/influence me immensely

* wallet of vandalism stickers

* a booklet of "Sex Scratchers", which contains about 100 sexual lottery tickets

Hope y'all have a nice Mother's Day weekend too.

Visit Me at Random Girl's Place

I did a guest post at Random Girl's blog today. It's about boobs and how girls feel about their boobs growing up and stuff to that effect. Aside from all the times I say "boobs" in it, the post is, dare I say, kinda poignant. If you're into that. But I could be wrong. Anyway, I'm sure y'all read Random Girl's blog anyway, but I will say you should if you don't. I've actually gotten to hang out with her in person here in Vegas over a few beers and she is amazingly sweet and down-to-earth, but she writes about naughty things and I like that juxtaposition. So go check out our joining of forces. 

A Husband and Wife at Midnight

{notes written on my phone last night at 12 a.m. as I was turning another year older}

We're talking about how my husband used to work at Chuck E. Cheese when he was 16 and had to dress up as Chuck E. Cheese now and then but couldn't live up to the other Chuck E. Cheese dresser-upper who used to be able to do flips and cartwheels while in character


But rest assured my husband could've beat that guy in arm-wrestling or a fist fight, he says (I believe him)


The Black Keys are on No Reservations and one of them said they used to work in a restaurant where the owner did a lot of coke/ carried around a briefcase with a gun in it/ always went out back to shoot at a toaster

Me, my husband, and Anthony Bourdain think there is nothing wrong with the above sentence

Hubby keeps saying I'm 30 but I keep saying I'm 24

Really I'm 29 and on the brink of another midlife crisis about almost not being young anymore



We're drinking Alaskan Ales, my new favorite beer

My husband has chosen this moment to tell me that North Korea said they will demolish something to the effect of all their adversaries (my words not his)

Cuz that's what I care about on my birthday babe


On your birthday I'm going to read you transcripts from episodes of Project Runway

I know I should care but I'm on the brink of a midlife crisis

Husband wonders what I'll be like at 40

I say worse

He says great

I say I want the book The Futurist Cookbook for my birthday - it costs $96, which both of us think is outrageous, but just when I thought he was gonna order it for me right here and now, he looked at me with his stupid crooked grin and said, "Wouldn't it be more touching if I made up my own absurd recipes and put em in a book for you?"


My husband's a foodie


I tell him that for his birthday I won't buy him tickets for a Cowboys vs Chargers game like he wants - instead he can watch me, our daughter, and our dog play with a rubber ball in our backyard

He thinks he's as charming as Whoever Dracher (or whatever) from Mad Men.

Said Dracher Guy is on Jimmy Fallon right now giving me Happy Birthday winks and playing some card game with said host Jimmy Fallon in which whoever flips over the higher card gets to throw a cup of water in the other person's face !!! and we are seriously considering playing this fucking genius ass game for my birthday right now !!!!! 

Yes yes and yes yes! 

We are going outside with water fucking guns and we're gonna flip over cards and whoever has the highest card gets to shoot the loser with water!!!

Not only do i get to shoot my husband in the face with water but loser always gives winner head in our house, so let's hope god is on my side on my birthday! 

It's the least you can do, god, for making me turn 29



{I didn't win. Happy birthday to him.}

Philosophizing Lately

I'm starting to think that some sort of, like, restrictions need to be put on people speaking in public. I'm not talking about speaking in public at rallies, or through graffiti, or whatnot. I'm talking about people who sit next to me in public places shouldn't be free to speak out loud about whatever's on their minds. Women with gloriously talented musical children who perform live (and for free, mind you) in grocery stores and restaurants are given annoyed looks from people without children (who are obviously without children because they are unattractive and probably say stupid things in public and are therefore unfuckable), yet we're supposed to be tolerant of the unbearable bullshit that people around us choose to espouse. Like when my daughter and I were having lunch the other day, one bitch to our left was talking about her stripper job loud enough for my toddler to hear and the bitch to our right was talking to her boyfriend about: "I've decided I'm gonna do it; I'm gonna legally change my name. I've been Jessica for too long. I want a more interesting name. I haven't decided what I'm gonna change it to yet, though." Now, if I weren't in Vegas and she weren't talking in a painstakingly practiced Kardashianesque voice and it weren't obvious that a new name was code for breast implants, then the fact that she has been Jessica for too long might have sounded intriguing to me. But she wasn't intriguing at all and I don't think that changing her name to Mijxisndnnn or some other fucking smattering of letters that people like to put together and pretend is cool isn't gonna fix that. Her boyfriend asked no relevant questions or made any worthwhile statements about her decision. Meanwhile my daughter and I are sitting between the stripper and the girl soon-to-be-formerly-known-as-Jessica saying our ABCs. And I've started wondering if societies should start to, like, test people when they graduate high school and college to determine if they are intelligent enough or interesting enough to speak out loud in public (but I guess that would leave teenagers as the only ones totally free to talk, which is no good at all, but I'm still just brainstorming here; I will work out this kink when my plan actually goes into the development phase; feel free to add your own two cents - I guess maybe there should be a test every year starting from age... twelve? maybe; thirteen? I guess that would also mean there'd have to be some sort of class teaching conversationalist skills and stuff - you know, as a primer for the test - that could be cool). And then there should be a law enforcement agency (not very much dissimilar to the Thought Police) devoted solely to shutting up those who do not pass the speak/don't-fucking-speak test. I don't know the punishments yet either (there'd have to be a wide range of em with differing levels of severity) but this post was started simply as a quick frantic record of this wide-scale censoring idea I came up with. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I am really on to something here.

I've Been Interviewed by Someone Legit

I don't know if I've mentioned before that I've been on an almost decade long strike against present-day literary fiction novels. Compared to books by William S. Burroughs, Virginia Woolf, or Emily Bronte, everything written nowadays seems amateurish and forced (my own novel included, mind you). But I read a very new novel titled Today & Tomorrow by Ofelia Hunt after seeing a blurb about it in a magazine and I was blown away. The blurb mentioned that the female protagonist has two boyfriends, "Aaron, whom she just met, and Erik, whose name is actually Todd." The fact that she has two boyfriends is not the point of the novel - the point is the fragility of her mental stability and how we can't be certain if she's ever actually telling the truth as her favorite pastime is making up tall tales with her grandfather - but the fact that she calls one of them whatever the fuck she feels like calling him appealed to me because the female protagonist in my own novel has a neighbor named Aubrey, whom she doesn't much care for, and she refuses to call Aubrey anything but Bob. Today & Tomorrow, I believe, is highly stylistic and the main character makes genius observations about people's "eye-shaped eyes" and "People-flocks" that "move together and apart and each person, whether together or apart, is probably the same person." And there's more to it than all of that, too, of course, but anyway, Ofelia Hunt said on her blog that she was going to start interviewing people and I sent an email asking if I could be considered for such a thing. By some strange stroke of luck I got an email back saying yes. And so my interview is up today at ofeliahunt.com. In it I give synopses about novels I wrote in junior high, racial stuff, how annoying I was as a kid, vandalism, child molesters, why London is better than any city in America, and way too many other personal things. So read it and leave a comment to tell me whatcha think...