Say Hello, Part II!

About a month ago, I bought myself an early birthday present. However, it took me three weeks to name her, & four weeks to shell out the bucks to outfit her. She's not quite pimped out yet, but hey, we got time, it'll happen.

Without further ado, then...this is Clara Bow!



And here is Clara, not quite so lovingly lit, but clad in the jewelry which I purchased for her the other day - flashing head & tail lights; Kryptonite lock; front basket (essential, as Clara's primary function is to transport me to & fro my favorite grocery stores); & helmet (Oregon has no helmet law, but given my propensity to fall down whilst merely walking, the province of April has enacted its own helmet law):



Isn't she delicious? Granted, I'm mildly concerned because she is a single-speed cruiser with a coaster brake, but I knew none of this when I saw her shining at me from a bicycle shop in NW Portland. All I saw was her gleaming iridescent pearly ladypart pinkness. I even coordinated my helmet & headlight choices to mirror the grey accents on the frame. Yes. I am an anal little aesthete. (NB: Bicycle helmets, as I discovered to my chagrin, do not come in "cute". I did my best - pewter with blue & pink bubbles.)

My bicycle lust has been sated! I love Clara. Now I just need to start riding her.

Cats Playing Jazz

No, seriously.

CATS

PLAYING

MOTHERFUCKING

JAZZ

I am in love, love, LOVE with The Aristocats.

So much so that I can almost actually forgive Disney for ruining The Little Mermaid for ten-year-old Me with its fake happy ending. Because frankly Me didn't see what, exactly, was so terribly unhappy about the main character not only not getting the guy, but sacrificing her own happiness for the sake of his & dying because of it; & having her very selflessness allow her to enter heaven rather than becoming mere foam on the sea like her mer-brethren. It's Hans Christian Andersen, for fuck's sake.

I mean, compared to my all-time favorite Andersen tale The Travelling Companion's macabre S&M beatings & my second favorite tale The Red Shoes' gruesome body-part cost of avarice (not to mention The Little Freakin' Poor, Cold, Motherless & Oh Yeah, Dead Match Girl), the mermaid's demise is positively sunny!

But I became burdened with a gravity ill-suited to my years at an early age, which it then took me several subsequent years to learn to leaven with equal parts sparkles'n'sunshine.

And behold! Sparkles'n'sunshine made cartoon:


Aaaahhhh. On a less-than-stellar day of painful cornea sunburn, ten-percent-jacked-up apartment rent notice, & being so temporarily choked with bile that I spent several minutes really, really trying to think of a way to make the horn-playing men outside the French bakery cry, this fully restored my spirits. Now, I can't promise that you'll like it; but it hits every one of my cute-buttons.

Full-on HURRAH!

Hurraher! & Hurrahest!

Sorry. Life is good.

1) ABBA's Voulez-Vous is the perfect 73 degree Friday morning drive to work soundtrack. A-HA! I freakin' love ABBA. So very much. Their Swedish pop genius is a joy to behold. Behear? Eh. Why is there no sincere optimism in pop music anymore? Am I missing something? Tell me. Is there a contemporary equivalent to the sincere refrain of "I believe in angels/Something good in everything I see"?

2) I'm wearing sandals for the first time this year - & they're my lovely gold sparkly cork wedge sandals, to boot. Er, no pun intended.

(Lengthy parenthetical aside revealing my etymological dorkiness & alarming passion for punctuation:

("The boot in [the phrase 'to boot'] is pretty much the only surviving sense of a once prominent word. Some archaic or obsolete senses are 'advantage; profit; use' ('O spare they happy daies, and them apply/To better boot'--Spenser, Faerie Queen); 'something given in a sale or exchange to equalize the value of the exchange' (now only used in dialect, in America found chiefly in the south); and 'deliverance from evil or danger' (often in the phrase boot of bale 'relief from woe').

("The phrase ['to boot'] uses [the word 'boot'], in a sense like 'to the good; to advantage', and hence 'in addition; besides; moreover'. This particular boot is from Old English, and is related to better."

(The above explanation can be found in full, & with fewer parentheses/brackets, here.)

3) On Wednesday I made a decision which makes me molto contenta. I ain't tellin'. The action won't happen until 2011 anyway. Let's just say that I hope in three years the dollar/euro exchange rate is a bit more in my favor.

4) Said decision involved the more immediate decision to look for a part-time job. That same day, I found a listing for a part-time video store job, 12 - 14 hours a week, in NW Portland. I dropped my resume off that night, interviewed yesterday, & start working on Saturday. Yeah, I rock. Y'know, my favorite job ever was at a video store. This new one has the benefit of not being in rural Oregon, which gives me relative confidence that the following exchange is highly unlikely to occur:

Customer returning The Talented Mr. Ripley, which I had recommended to him the night before: I didn't like this movie.
Me: Oh, I'm sorry.
Him: It was about faggots.
Me: Well, yes, I suppose that's true.
Him: That's sick.
Me: Some people think so.
Him: You don't?
Me: No, I don't.
Him: Are you a dyke?

Yes indeedy. You can't make this stuff up, people. So...I'm going to get paid to talk about movies & clean & organize shelves stuffed with movies. It makes my movie-loving, compulsively clean & systematic self well-nigh giddy. Oh, yeah, plus I get free movies. I mean, I could probably get a better-paying part-time job. But the way I look at it, I already have one job for which I don't much care. If I'm gonna have a second job, I better damn well like it. And this is...perfect.

5) Also, this is entirely politically irresponsible of me, because I know absolutely nothing about his governorship, but goddamn. Whenever I remember that we live in a world where Arnold motherfuckin' Schwarzenegger is the GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA, things get just a little more...sparkly. I love it, I do, I confess. I don't think you could dream up something more deliciously absurd. Hee hee! Related: the commentary track for Conan the Barbarian is the single most fantastic commentary I've ever heard. Easily as good as the movie proper. (Governator: "She's so hot. I'm so hot in this scene" John Milius: "She's like a...Valkyrie." Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Surely they were both drunk. Schwarzenegger is a total chauvinist, which I inexplicably love.)

Hurrah!

These are some things that I particularly love today:

1) Peppermint tea

2) The Criterion transfer of Naked. It even looks good on my old TV set.

3) Dinosaur L (I said NO, thank yooouuuu....)

4) Mmmmmangoes!

5) Feelin' like a fourth grader. Yep, in my quest to prove that April Model 1978 is in fact completely obsolete, my newest fascination is book making. See, it occurred to me recently that at present I seem to be drawn toward the tactile. Rather than subvert these fascinations into something more ephemeral, I thought well why not just make things I can touch? I ain't a writer, & my drawing skillz are stuck in stick-figure land (tho' it be a mean stick figure indeed), but I see no reason whatsoever to let that stop me. I made a book last night! With velcro & wiggly eyes & o-rings & junk mail! (I successfully fought the urge to add glitter.) Here's a small detail of one page:


As usual, my grand plans exceed my technical capability by a wide margin. Sheesh. We'll see. You don't know how much I want to catch one of these flitting momentary obsessions & pin it down, already. How is it possible that the older I get, the less attention span I have?

6) Portland Maps. I often bemoan the fact that everybody in my neighborhood looks like me. What do I mean by this? While Buckman ain't quite an army of April clones, it is a 739-acre area with 7,923 people who:

• Are most likely between the ages of 22 & 39 (52%)
• Are whiter than an arctic glacier on a sunny day (81%)
• Have yet to breed &/or are not overly keen on cohabitation (52% one-person households)
• Got no strings to hold them down (84% are not home-owners)
• Stand a solid chance of being male (52%) or female (48%)
  

I am a 29-year-old child-free white girl who lives alone in a rented apartment. Thanks, Portland Maps, for proving me right!

7) Spring. Not this spring, this year, this here. But in general. And SUNSHINE. Glorious rich yellow sunshine that is both absorbed & reflected by the green of the trees & the grass.

8) Making the soundtrack for the wedding I will never have. See, it all started with Kid Creole's version of "If You Want to be Happy". If you don't know the song, click the link. You'll understand. The vision of playing this as the first song at my unwedding made me gigle giggle (no semiconductor, I) madly for endless minutes (the looks on people's faces would be freakin' priceless), so I thought, why stop there? This project is saving me from an increasingly bilious resentment toward other people's weddings; therefore, it makes me happy.

9) And actually, I kind of love everything. Probably in theory - I wouldn't test me with, say, a puddle of puppies or a basket of babies. But I am, how you say, a happy camper.

These Shoes Sing To My Soul

This is the present I awarded myself after I managed to select a pair of boring plain brown flats (for comfortable non-sneakered city walking) without crying or throwing up:


Lots more views are available here. I wish Zappos weren't so expensive (for ince, I picked these up on clearance at DSW for $42 less than what they're charging), because I would dearly love to support their shoe pornography on a financial basis.

And yes. This post's title is an accurate recount of the exact words that came into my mind when I saw these. What can I say? They were made just for me.

Also, let the record show that I indulged in mad shopping this weekend past & purchased not one single sparkly thing. Marvel at my self-restraint. Bow down before my greatness.

Finally, speaking of sparkly...I spasmed when I saw these. If I ever see them on sale I will buy them, but they are waaaayyy too impractical for me to throw $100 at 'em.

Bringing You Down, Down, Down On Your Brazen Knees

I want a boy who will dress up like this for me! I s'pose I'd be willing to forego the socks & shoes (although they are utterly adorable). The sparkly shirt, however, would be non-negotiable.

*Sigh*. My dear Patrick Wolf. I want to make out with your songs. I would enter into matrimony with "Augustine". I would pop out "Accident & Emergency"'s babies like so many ping-pong balls in Asian sex clubs. And my, er, rather derogatory feelings toward marriage & babies both are secrets ill-kept. (Not to digress, but I suppose I feel that those ever so noble social conventions are not negative so much as they're pervasively useless, at least insofar as concerns your humble narrator.)

No joke, The Magic Position is easily one of my favorite albums ever. I haven't so single-mindedly listened to an album since 2000. But of course, it makes complete sense. The album itself is stuffed with joy & gloom in like amounts. It's completely cinematic, my definition of which includes both lushly orchestrated, whirling soundscapes & lyrics laden with imagery. Anyway, I can't explain it any better than I put it in a recent email: The album entire sings in the key of me.

"And now come the tears, heavy and hot/As it becomes clear, this is all we got/As I hold you to my bed/Like a cancer or a curse/Be my loving nurse/As we fall back into the impossible dream"

"Now deep in a forest/Losing all thought of spring/And nothing can help me remember/And I'm going nowhere fast/A darker day has holed at last/Deep in a dream I set the calmness to spinning"

"'Cause out of all the people I've known/The places I've been/The songs I have sung/The wonders I've seen/Now that the dreams are all coming true/Who is the one that leads me on through/It's you/Who puts me in the magic position, darling now/You put me in the magic position/To live, to learn, to love in the major key"

"We could go to the cinema/Big effects and big name stars/And we can go to that private view/But darling these days my favorite view is you"

Oh!