due to issues with the roommate, some friends have graciously offered to host my going-away party! note that this is a change both in date & location!
details to follow in a friends-only post. if you can't see it and think you should, please let me know.
You must watch DESAR's new "GIRL WITH HALF MOON EYES" video.
The music is dark and sultry (just the way i know you like it), much of the period wardrobe is styled by yours truly...and I have a feeling you'll see a few familiar faces, too! (hint hint ;)
I helped organize a new independent Grand Tournament that took place in Philadelphia this past weekend. Myself and seven other guys came up with the rules format, judged army lists, and made the missions / scenarios for the players. I basically came up with the missions, and the sportsmanship guidelines, and the others all helped refine them. The feedback on the tournament was overwhelmingly positive, people especially liked the scenarios that I came up with. I'm very glad to be part of such a successful event, next year I may actually attend as well.
Friday night started with me leaving my keys at work, and not discovering this until I was at Davis Sq (almost all the way home). Back to work, back home again, and over to Photiq's for Batman movies. There was a quality crowd of people attending, and I was inspired to host my own movie night soon: a Paul Verhoven double feature of RoboCop and Starship Troopers. I thought about adding Showgirls to the list, but my roommate threatened to kill me. No joke! Total Recall may be another alternative.
I got a ninja parking spot for Xmortis, then had to wait at the door because the club was filled to capacity. Twenty minutes later I made it in, played some pool, and ran into a bunch of friends from Spin Jam. We all drove back to my place for an after party, and I learned a new appreciation for the Power of Science! Sometime around five thirty, we crashed.
Saturday I woke up late, did my Crossfit training, then played a few Warhammer games at a friend's. I was due to go to a housecooling party, but received a surprise text for a birthday dinner and drinks night in Davis. Good times were had yet again, including amusing conversations about $5,000 dresses, ridiculous encounters on the T, and the correct way to say "Sookie".
Sunday: Clean up, work out, be pirates (DND game, we hijacked another ship!), play Mahjong, SLEEP.
The weekend more than made up for the poopstain that is today. Collecting hugs from some spinners should help immeasurably too.
This is without a doubt the shittiest day at work I have had in a long time. I'm sore and tired from my work out this morning, I get a lot of very random issues (keyboards not working, computers misrecognizing printers through usb connections, sites trying to find information about phone lines and services, phantom antivirus scans). On a good day this would be trying, today I just want to tell every one to sod off and let me alone. Thank God I have a rest day tomorrow.
Today I went clothes shopping- clothes shopping often makes me feel drained and vaguely wistful- wistful because I know that people of my gender are supposed to have a flock of lady friends to go clothes shopping with and this is supposed to be an enjoyable thing to do. But for me I want to be finished with clothes shopping as soon as possible, I only enjoy *finding* the clothes so I can leave rather than enjoying the process of shopping. Most of the times I've gone clothes shopping with a friend, I get impatient because it takes much longer and I get bored. And whether or not I'm with a friend, not finding anything I like or can afford during a clothes shopping excursion makes me feel defeated and as if I've wasted a lot of time. Sometimes I can be fun while doing other things, but don't go clothes shopping with me- I'm a real stick in the mud.
However, there is one part of clothes shopping that I really enjoy- the mannequins. I love mannequins or most any automatons. I love anything that is the same size and has roughly the same form as a human, but is not alive and not a human. The last time I went clothes shopping at the Cambridge side Galleria I found this at Macy's:
I wasn't the one who pants-ed her, but I wish I was. Also odd that somebody bothered to put shoes on her but neglected her pants.
That day in Chile when Jon and I still had no luggage and had been wearing the same clothes for three days we finally ended up going to the mall for clothes and found these:
Since they're naked they're obviously not showcasing any of the clothes at their store and so they must be trying to sell bagpipes to the Chilean teenagers. I wish I had plaid skin.
I liked her, the happiest mannequin in all Greece-
I've heard that the Thai mannequins have the same expression as she does. I think it's commendable! Why do people in the US think that mannequins have to look so ticked off all the time, anyway? I've been searching on craigslist and eBay for many months now, off and on, for a mannequin of my very own, but I haven't had much luck because so many mannequins seem so standoffish and resemble the sort of girls I would never be friends with. If I'm going to adopt a mannequin, she needs to look like she and I could be compatible.
Today at Macy's, while clothes shopping and hoping I would be done with it soon, I found these mannequins-
I would never buy one of these- they have no heads! Not only that, but there's something else wrong with their basic anatomy. They look like the Padaung Hill Tribe women visiting a western shopping mall for the first time after their brass neck coils have been removed. Though maybe these wouldn't be such a bad choice for me. I could make heads for them! I could make them as friendly and approachable as I wanted to! Or if I was feeling lazy, I could just take the giant eyeball Residents heads I made for Jon and myself for Halloween. How lucky would I be to have my own Residents mannequins?
To cheer myself up after clothes shopping, we went to the zoo. Today was the day that they were unveiling some shaggy French mammoth donkeys, which I hear are >800 lbs and aren't terribly amenable to moving out of their shipping carts and will be jackasses about it for hours on end. Nevertheless, they were very friendly to us, the zoo visitors.
What I never noticed about the zoo before was that at some point somebody decided it would be fun to pepper a series of CLUES all over the zoo. I love finding clues! My favorite clue was this one- look in the tree:
I thought this was a surprisingly macabre clue for a family zoo and I fully approved. Using this clue, you were supposed to deduce that a leopard had dragged his prey up into a tree to keep it away from competitors.
when i first head about michael jackon's passing, i was really annoyed. the fact that there was this morbid death watch going on that crashed twitter, crashed facebook, that pretty much slowed down the internet was appalling to me. the fact that every single news station was focused on his death, hypothesizing about cardiac arrest, all of it made me very uncomfortable and very angry. the fact that he was suddenly being talked about as this great artist by the same media outlets that mocked him for the past decade really pissed me off. plus, honestly, he was potentially not the best person in the world. none of us can ever know what things he was accused of really happened, and no one seems to accept his being found not guilty by the court system. mishak wrote about the concept of viewing him as a pedophile really well i think. like many people, i assumed his guilt and assumed the not guilty verdict was another example of faults in our legal system that relies on the general population which is not immune to idolatry.
when i was little, i loved michael jackson. i used to stare at the liner notes from the LPs i had for Off the Wall, Victory, and Thriller. i'd dance around my living room to them, i had a michael jackson doll, notebook, all the little kid michael jackson things that existed. my interest in him had started to wane, but i was still kind of bummed that i hadn't gotten to see captain eo when i went to epcot (i think it was either not open or the lines were hours long; there was some specific reason we couldn't go that i can't remember) and even more so that i'd bailed on an orion field trip to DC where my classmates ended up literally running into him and a giant mob of fans at the Smithsonian. I sat through the magic returns special to see the world premiere of the Bad video, and that's sort of when it really went downhill for me. the music wasn't really what i was listening to any more (though in hindsight I think Bad was one of the weaker songs on the album), the video seemed bloated and self indulgent, michael jackson was totally -not- badass, why was he grabbing his crotch all the time, and what the fuck happened to his face???? by the time Dangerous came out, it just felt like he was trying too hard (i mean, slash? a song about hetero sex called "keep it in the closet?") and from that point on i just sort of felt bad for him, watching as he struggled to stay relevant while making these pop songs that sounded dated, out of touch, and very light.
it was total train wreck entertainment, and it's horrible to say that, but that was what he was becoming. no one wanted him to be relevant, it seemed like it was more fun to make fun of him, more fun to watch him fail. then things got really bad with the molestation allegations, marrying lisa marie presley, marrying his nurse, naming his kid blanket, no seriously wtf is going on with his face?, it just got sadder and stranger and more out of touch...and being out of touch with reality is one thing, but it's even stranger and sadder when it is being played out in the public (even more so when you learn that a few of the early stories trumpeting his weirdness were actually leaked by his camp to stir up interest and press...something that would seriously hurt him later on when he kicked up the weirdness by more than a few notches)
i remember when the bashir documentary came out, i had my parents tape it and i watched it with heatray and tiny_chicken and aside from being incredibly fascinating to see inside his home and see how he lived his life, it quickly slid into uncomfortable territory when he admitted to sleeping in bed with kids, adamantly stating he'd only had 2 surgeries, and spending $1MM in Vegas in an hour...that was sort of it. (oh and more of the WHAT IS GOING ON WITH HIS FACE?") but aside from that, the train wrecky entertainment element was gone. it was -sad-. regardless of whether or not he acted inappropriately with children, he was obviously very ill. i remember watching it wondering where the hell were this guys friends? does he have any? he seemed alone, ill, eccentric, isolated, surrounded by yes men and money, all things that just fed into his eccentricity with no foreseeable limits. i didn't pay attention to the 2nd molestation trial because it was too horrible really...and i think that's because i assumed his guilt and wanted no part of it, even though that part would be that of an obviously super distant and removed observer. i just assumed he was guilty, maybe mentally 10 years old, and ignored it.
he kind of seemed to fade away from the public conscious after that. he was the incredibly weird dude who would make tabloid news for dressing and behaving oddly, carting his super caucasian kids around in halloween costumes, making everyone feel uncomfortable and making them wonder why we cared. he didn't even look human any more, whether it was his super frail physique, treating the vitiligo by depigmenting his skin and turning his skin exceptionally pale/the rumored skin bleaching he did out of shame for being black and not actually having vitilligo, the horrible tattooed eyeliner, the extensive (and denied) plastic surgery, (honestly it was the combination of those things) he was just strange to see. then he died and suddenly everyone apparently remembered that the dude could fucking sing and he could dance. all the creepiness got swept under the rug as all the news stations eulogized him while using file footage dating before 1993 or so... it's like he ceased to exist around that time, or at least that's how we'd all like to remember it now.
i watched the memorial service yesterday, as it was on, i was home, and it was really weird and really sad and strange. again, all the footage of him seemed to be from before the mid nineties, and what was sad was that when he was younger, at times he looked happy. he may never have really been happy, i don't know how you could be happy or well adjusted when you're turned into a pop culture drafthorse by your folks at the age of 5, but...you know, he at least looked happier than he did later on in life. but it was so strange to see this huge memorial service in a stadium with people cheering and twittering and taking pictures. then his family got on stage and his little daughter, who'd rarely been seen in public without a mask, was prompted by his family to say a few words. how the fuck is that normal? putting 3 little children who've been isolated from the world almost their entire lives on a stage in front of 20k people while they are in the midst of grieving the death of their father? seriously, wtf? was anyone around him in touch with reality? how could that be ok? honestly how could any of this be ok? he was a sickly, sad man who died alone, and then suddenly everyone loved him and forgot about how fucking strange he was.
in death it seems like michael jackson will be exonerated to some degree. he's the king of pop again, his albums are all top ten, his singles are topping itunes, so much of the press is positive...and i guess it sort of makes me cross eyed how the press that vilified him for so long, that hung on to and made up salacious details, that invaded his life at unwelcome times, feels bad about it. maybe this is how the press pays its penance, sort of like in the same way anna nicole smith was suddenly sympathetic after she died. because no one was saying much that was positive about michael jackson at all for the past 15 years or so...and i'm not saying it caused him to get weirder and more isolated, but it couldn't have helped.
so yeah...michael jackson died almost 2 weeks ago, but it sort of feels like he stopped existing a lot more long ago than that.
The morning exercise routine is going well, but my energy crashes are also increasing. It's becomign clear that I really need my protein in the morning, or the cereal will just leave my body crashing hard between 10 and 11. That's the biggest contributor to bleak moods. In social news, I didn't look before I leapt and am now left feeling pretty stupid. My blood sugar crash is only making things worse.
*scarfs down some pistachios, starts drinking tea*
I miss the days of Victorian manors,where you could read a damn book and have clear, unmissable signs of interest of lack of interest, and fewer mistakes. Also, much cooler clothing for guys back then.
EDIT: Never underestimate the healing power of tea and protein!
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