Jacket Days

You know, the day before yesterday, I had put away all my bulky winter coats because I thought, hey, finally! spring has arrived. I was so excited and I took out all my spring jackets and stuffed them into the hall closet. I love jackets because I love the whole layered look. Layered. Listen to me. I'm gaaaaay.

Some people are shoe-aholics, I am a jacket-aholic. I have so many jackets, that I can't wear them all more than once in short time in spring when it is between 38 to 50 degrees, when I can wear a jacket without sweating my smooth, hairless balls off.

Sometimes, I wear them inside the house even though I am not going anywhere.

Sometimes, I am jealous of homeless people because they get to wear a jacket everyday, sometimes two at a time. I could never pull off that look though. The homeless look, I mean. Too baggy.


So yesterday, I put on a new Converse One Star Poplin Hoodie Jacket that I had bought from Tar-zhay, along with my distressed jeans, white shirt and preppy tie and was feelin' really totally stylish and then bam! whadayaknow: fucking heavy, wet snow starts to fall and suddenly it was frickin 20 degrees. I froze my ass off. I had prematurely put away my winter jackets.

Don't you hate that? When you put something away, you don't expect to have it make a comeback. The last time this happened, my great-aunt Sophie woke up after we thought she had passed away. It was totally unexpected because we had just smothered her with a pillow. We needed her bedroom because we had just bought a pinball machine and needed somewhere to put it.

Anyway, I dug one of the winter coats out back out last night, just in case this freeze lingered on. But I am not putting it on unless it's like zero degrees or something. Time's running out before it's too warm to wear a jacket and then I have to start wearing something more appropriate to warm weather: a thong.

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Rule of One Hotter - I've always wanted to be hotter than I am. Don't you?

Open Thread #1

Blaine Fridley over at Diary of Fools had the balls to say what most people only think: The New Yorker cartoons suck and are "consistently lame." Interestingly enough, that's what my BF also thinks about them.

This open thread asks you:

1. What do you really think of The New Yorker cartoons?

2. Optionally, how would you describe the people who read The New Yorker?

Go ahead, put in your two cents.

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Cartoons - Check these out to refresh your memory of all the years of pointless The New Yorker cartoons here at No Milk Please.

BONUS: Try your hand at captioning a cartoon at TNY. See if you are funnier than they are.

Lo Siento

Hey.

I'm sorry.

I heard that something I wrote hurt and embarrassed you. I read it again and honestly, I never thought that it would cause anybody consternation. I thought I was being careful by changing your name.

Yes, I used a quote directly from you. It was the jumping off point, but it's there, that point. Because this person I wrote about used your words, it sounded like I was talking about you. It sounded like everything I made this person think or say afterwards, were things you thought or said.

I read it and re-read it and I can see how it sounds like that. That second line hangs heavy, like a judgment. But it was about me, when I was in that situation. If you substituted my name in there, maybe you can see that I was speaking of myself.

In Spanish, lo siento which is commonly used to say "I'm sorry," literally translates to "I feel it." It seems appropriate here. My feelings and your feelings entwined.

Gomen na.

Starbucks

(c) 2008 The New Yorker

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Related posts:

Cartoons - The New Yorker cartoons slay me. These are ones which have appeared in this site over the years.

My Writing Life - Starbucks is the only place I can write. God help me.

My Writing Life

Writing a novel has got to be one of the hardest things I've ever had to do in my life, harder than the time I had to take off a pair of tight rubber pants I had bought to go clubbing.

They never tell you, but rubber pants are a bitch to take off and I got rubber burns all over my thighs. It also makes you sweat like a motherfucker. I danced all night in that outfit. I was dressed to kill, especially those who were close enough to smell my b.o. Seriously, by the time I got home, I smelled like my armpits, crotch and Amy Winehouse's hair went to hang out at a homeless shelter. I still got laid though.

Anyway, since the January, after I went to the Writing The Unthinkable workshop, I had started writing a novel. This is the first novel I have started writing since I was in college. That last one was a Harlequin Romance-type novel because I thought that I could easily make some money churning out book after book of the same story, just changing a few things here and there, along with a new title. Wrong. I got totally bored after chapter three and the heroine had twelve orgasms the first time she had sex with the hero and his nine-inch throbbing manhood.

It was really hard to sustain interest in that kind of fiction writing for me because there really wasn't that much drama I could muster, especially since I couldn't possibly give the heroine gonnorhea. No publisher would've touched that.

But writing this new novel, has brought back a lot of the anxieties of writing and creating fiction, mostly because I have a tendency to use real life events as a basis and I worry about how my friends would react if they read about it. Would they think I really thought the way I did about a certain event? Would they understand that writing fiction is like trying on different points of view in an event and just because I may have a character react one way, doesn't mean that I would do that myself? But I thought it, therefore it must be true.

The other problem is that writing is such an intense activity that my daily life just interferes with this process. The last thing I want to do after making dinner and doing dishes is to sit down and write. I would much rather do something less stressful and intense like mixing music or writing blogs or crank calling my grandmother.

I have an almost physical need to go somewhere else to write, like Starbucks, except I hate the fucking pretentiousness of writing a novel at Starbucks. It's like so fucking cliché, you know. There I am, with my laptop, looking so fucking smug, typing away, as if I were so much better than everyone else. But I brush it off. Besides, nobody would think that of me, especially since I am going to be wearing my beret. I pack my shit up and head over there.

I am totally productive when I am at Starbucks. I don't know what it is about the place, but I am able to get a lot of writing done there. It's just amazing that I could sit there, elbow to elbow with fifty other hacks, working on our novels that will never be published. I feel a sense of camaraderie in our shared experience. Soon, all our efforts will end up in a publisher's recycle bin. It's sort of comforting to think that I'm not alone in world in this.

It's crazy I know, but the urge to write and create something is stronger than this knowledge of the futility of it all. Even if nobody ever reads my novel, I can take heart in the fact that somehow, somewhere, I can pay $2 at an open mike night and inflict my writing on people.

How Many More?

How many children have to die before stupid lawmakers like Sally Kern (R-Oklahoma) realizes that attitudes like hers is what creates violence against gay people. Kern was quoted saying "the homosexual agenda is just destroying this nation" and poses a bigger threat to the U.S. than terrorism or Islam. Then, she refused to apologize for her offensive remarks.

In recent news, Larry King, a fifteen year-old kid in California, was shot to death by another 14 year-old kid allegedly because of flirting with him; Simmie Williams, a transgendered 17 year-old, was shot down by a group of young men; gay teens in Iraq are being executed.

In my mind, these people justify their beliefs by saying "gay people brought this on themselves" which is so disingenuous to me because it is clearly the actions of others that cause these violent acts.

Kern is supposedly not against individuals, but of the "homosexual agenda." Oh right, our agenda of wanting to live without people encroaching on our rights.

Yes lady, we have an agenda. Our agenda is "STOP KILLING US." Your words and actions might as well put the gun into the hands of the next person who kills a gay teen.


WATCH THIS: Sally Kern's hate speech.

WATCH THIS: A tearful Ellen DeGeneres discusses the shooting of Larry King.

UPDATE:

CONTACT SALLY KERN
Capitol Address:
2300 N. Lincoln Blvd.
Room 332
Oklahoma City, OK 73105
(405) 557-7348

District Address:
2713 Sterling Ave.
Oklahoma City, OK 73127

By E-mail:
sallykern@okhouse.gov
srkern@cox.net

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Turnabout - Harriet interviews No Milk about Gay Rights and blogging. Why Change? - Tortured homos find their way back to heterosexuality.

Lucky - I was lucky to survive my tumultous teen years. Bill wasn't. The Gay Experience - Gay rights are fabulous and hard to contain.

Hacking Up a Lung

Sorry people, but I am sick today and I don't have the energy to be witty or funny or do anything other than just sit here and numbly take whatever concoction Rachael Ray is bludgeoning me with on TV, screeching "yum-o, yum-o, yum-oooo!"

Have you ever noticed that despite the humongous amounts of EVOO (extra virgin olive oil) she uses in her food, she still calls every dish "figure-friendly"? I am assuming that she means the figure of a manatee. There are 120 calories in one tablespoon of EVOO and 14 grams of it are FAT. When I work out on the treadmill for 30 minutes, I only burn off 450 calories. I am sure she uses more than one tablespoon when she puts in "a few turns" in the pan.

I am hungry and not hungry at the same time, how is that possible?

I am hacking up a lung. Gross.

If I were in the Philippines, I could hack up a lung, chop it up, sautee it with onions and make it into a dish called bopis. Curious? Check this out.

That Just Happened to Me

Has this ever happened to you?

You are stark naked in your closet, balancing on one foot, trying to put on your underwear, when instead of going through the leg hole, your foot gets stuck in the crotch and you fall down on your knees, bringing down a row of clothes with you as you tried to grab on to something?

That just happened to me. I had to blog about it.

Thank you. You may proceed with your day.

High

You know, I am truly envious of these people at the gym who run on the treadmill and they look like they are enjoying it. There's even some sort of peace in their faces which is almost beatific, this look, as if they are in some sort of high, or they are in some otherworldly plane, or they've just given their ex gonorrhea. I wish I could have that.

The only time I even come close to this kind of feeling is when I am eating an Otis Spunkmeyer double chocolate chip muffin and bag of potato chips. The marijuana helps just a teensy weensy bit too.

But on the treadmill, I am all blood and lungs. My head's detached from the rest of my body, my arms are dead branches, my legs are unruly children in the backseat whining, "are we there yet?"

I have to fight through every second as if it's a world war. It bugs me that after two months of running thirty minutes on the treadmill every day, I still can't seem to get that 'high.'

I feel like if I don't, I will never be able to keep this up and Otis Spunkmeyer will settle permanently on my ass...

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Tribes - My observations of the denizens of the gym.