Sarcomical

Sarcomical Blogmarks 07.15.09...Yummy Things

• SoulPancake | Chew On Life's Big Questions
  

  founded in part by Rainn Wilson (a.k.a. Dwight from The Office), this site challenges us to participate in open, non-judgmental discussion about religion in order to get us back to actively thinking in today's world about what our spirituality means to us.

  (tags: religion modern conversation soul spirituality contemporary)


• Inside Out
  

  this one's a very new discovery for me, and i like to look through the blog section especially. their description says it best: "Part literary publication, part therapeutic expression, our aim is to promote creativity for self-development through the publication of a diverse mix of artistic work, all with a focus on self-awareness and self-help. Why? Because we believe that sometimes simply owning something on the page is all it takes to move past it and move on, for both reader and creator."

  (tags: literary art creativity writing arts)


• Esther Havens Photography
  

  Esther's work is beautiful and compelling. This is one thing I would absolutely love to be doing. Spend some time browsing through her site...you'll be better for it.

  (tags: photography documentary societies cultures cultural art travel humanity)


• the SCOOP
  

  GORGEOUSNESS in all forms of design (paper, clothing, home, art, etc.), and a multitude of scrumptiousness in food, place, and more are collected and scoured and lovingly set before you here, on this pretty little site.

  (tags: art design shopping pretty stationery Etcetera)


• highlighted life | the personal tumblelog of james nord
  

  a slice of New York life in the delicious tidbits of a man's tumblelog. one of the rare tumblelogs i actually enjoy looking through. a very new find.

  (tags: "new york" tumblelog photography personal Etcetera life)


• Tea for Me
  

  i'm loving this sweet blog full of beautiful things. from food to interiors to photography to writing to music to all sorts of other delights, this little spot on the internet is a place you can get lost in.

  (tags: blog blogs art photography food Etcetera)

I will put the hurt on you (a bedtime nightmare)...

The other night, as we were getting to bed and the dogs were assuming their regular positions (Lucy & Ricky on top of the bed, Shiloh under it), I crossed the room from my closet and saw something that troubled me greatly. One of the middle support casters under the bed was leaning crooked.

There is a good chance you are possibly already saying, So what? What a stupid thing to worry about. It's not like they are actually bearing the brunt of holding up your bed or anything; it's not like the entire unit is going to collapse; it's not like your bed will split in two...your bed sits on a wooden frame, those frakking wheels might as well be ornamental.

This is basically what my husband was trying to tell me.

However, what I heard was, That caster is the only thing keeping this bed one piece; it is the only thing standing between you and wood-splintered carnage. This bed is going to crr-reak in the middle of the night, and before you realize what is happening you will crush your dog with the very weight of your own selfish, too-busy-to-stop-and-fix-the-vitally-important-caster lumps of flesh. You will crush him and he will die and also you will have to move because how could you continue to live in a house where you killed your dog with your stupidity and carelessness and OH also your body weight? Now, GET UNDER THERE AND FIX IT YOU LOSER!

And so, because I could not be swayed with reason OR cookie bribes, I got down on the floor, sat facing the errant metal leg, braced myself on the carpet, and pushed it back into place with my foot. Aha, sweet safety.

EXCEPT.

Being down on the floor allowed me the opportunity to see the more precarious and more threatening BACK caster. It was practically making a right triangle with the floor. This was unacceptable. THE HORROR MUST BE PREVENTED! Of course, this meant I got down on my stomach and shimmied toward the middle of the underbelly. Now, mind you our bed is quite heavy, being an oversized King, and I could not get myself enough leverage to pull or push this leg back into place. Could you go lift that side of the bed up a little? I implored from under my one-foot prison.

This did not help.

And now, I was battling not only the goddamned caster but also my inner Freakoutometer, which was threatening to bubble and smoke as the floor seemed to begin pushing me tighter and tighter against the roof of my tiny compartment. Be cool, I thought. Just be cool. And I WAS cool. I managed to spin myself around underneath the bed and get myself in a position where I could brace my feet and puuuullllll. Voila! Straight as an arrow. And now...to simply get out. I started to wiggle backward and try to un-twist half-inch by half-inch, like some rewinding earthworm.

This was where my husband for some reason decided it would be a good time to ask over and over Can you get out? Can you get out? Can you get out? and I consequently told him to shut up!!! shut up!!! are you kidding me shut up!!! before I lost all memory of how to breathe correctly.

Yet somehow, as I clawed my way toward light and life, I was able to form this thought:
When I get out of here I am going to kick you in the kneecaps.

A Salute to the Culture of Oversharing...

We love to see the bloopers.

When I get a DVD, which - come on, what with DVR? - is pretty rare these days except in the case of my favorite television sitcoms, I look most forward to seeing the outtakes - the bloopers. I like the idea of knowing how a character is supposed to respond, then being let into those moments when it all goes to hell and an actor breaks character. I like seeing how that person really laughs, how they naturally react after they've made a mistake.

We love to see the bloopers. We enjoy the imperfections.

Sometimes I ask myself why I slowed down my writing here so drastically in the past year or so. I ask myself why I stopped blogging regularly about the mundanities of my life, even though I was able to make you laugh through much of them. The truth is, you aren't the only one subjected to my self-imposed cut-off. Let's just say I developed a distrust of the safety of sharing and of embracing others into my "world", and that's something that I have been wrestling with a lot over this time. 

Accompanying this depression-slash-hermitage-slash-intense level of MEH-ness, grew a general crabbiness each time I tried to sit down to write. The truth was, all that was really going through my head was the mishmash of how I was trying to unravel my own confusion and gain some deeper understanding of my life events, my purpose, my direction, my my MY ME ME ME blahblahblahblech. I really grew exhausted of subjecting this space to what I felt was merely becoming a virtual spewing of self-therapy. And I thought, after FIVE years here, is this all I have to put 'out there' again? I'd really rather be be making you all insanely jealous with some kick-ass project I was taking on or bragging about my clumsy yet successful completion of some marathon or at the very least come off as the Über Sexy Confident Mastermind Take Charge of the World Creative Genius I wish I felt like.

In all fairness, I bet some of you would have really liked if I had borne the discomfort and written it all out anyway. Not that I haven't read about someone's struggle or heartache and felt intensely grateful for their ability to share, their adeptness at putting into words something that I myself had felt yet been unable to clarify so well. The fact is that some of those moments deeply define and even cement our relationships online; that's part of the inescapable nature of this culture of virtual friendships and stranger adoration.

We love to see the bloopers.

If I had been writing more during this time, I would have probably told you about feeling abandoned and betrayed by people close to me, about our dealing with my husband's diagnosis as a diabetic, about feeling inadequate in my talents, about turning into a vapid lump for long periods of time, about compartmentalizing to the point of numbness, about our first concerns regarding the possibility of children in our future, about reawakening, about making new friends, about almost auditioning for a musical, about INSOMNIA DEAR GOD, about yoga's amazing and strange healing, about a quest for mindfulness, about having to induce a little brown chihuahua to...er...regurgitate the ear of a plastic teddy bear and crying guiltily the entire time, about taking on special photographic projects, about learning to say the word "photographer" without a self-deprecating shoulder shrug and a ready dismissal of my abilities, about my hair finally growing to bra-strap length and the trip to the stylist who ripped out about a 1/4 pound of it with her fingernails, about our desire to move ANYWHERE but here, about new dreams of writing and creating...

As I grow past this shedding of skin, yet another stage of life that I suppose I have had to go through as part of my experience...my desire is to make myself Write It Out whether I feel the muse slap me against the head or not. I want to be more wildly open with you again, if only to be more wildly open with myself. Perhaps I'll even tell you the next time I crack open the door of a theater, peek around the velvet curtain just inside it blocking out the sun, barely view some young beauty in a sweatshirt reminiscent of Fame chatting up some guys, and turn & run like hell back to my car with my Singer's Anthology to drive away and get a giant self-loathing Oreo Blizzard from the Dairy Queen drive through.

After all...we love to see the bloopers. We enjoy the imperfections.

Perfectly Acceptable Excuses for Being Absent from Your Blog for Four Weeks...

*feel free to use these if you ever find yourself in a similar position in the future

• I was trapped in David Blaine's clear box
• My fingers were temporarily rendered useless in a freak dryer lint trap accident 
• The aliens didn't understand how much my readers needed me
• I was rearranging my Netflix queue
• That concerto wasn't going to write itself
• I was peeling a thick-skinned navel orange 
• My dogs ate my keyboard
• My dogs ate my brainstorm post-its
• My dogs ate my will to get up in the morning
• I went a little whacknut trying to figure out that whole Jacob business on LOST. I mean, honestly, WHAT THE HELL.
  
• I was filling in for Oprah
• That "weekend" in Cabo got a little...hazy
• I couldn't think in plus-140 character concepts (thanks, Twitter)
  
• I was cataloging everything in the house for possible sale on Ebay
• I was an emergency alternate for I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here
• I was in an extended food coma
• I was swimming across the Atlantic
• Apple desperately needed my services in order to finish that new iPhone

But I'm back now.

Beeeep beep-be-beep...

This is an announcement from the Non-Emergency SarcomiCast System:  An update is being concocted at this very moment. Please stand by. You can use that chair, if you want. You look a little tired. Not that you aren't pretty; it's just your lazy eye is starting to pull a bit.

11 Years Old...

We celebrated our anniversary of being married 11 years and dating about 14 1/2 downtown this year, and after a shockingly ravenous meal of multiple varieties of meats (scurried about via 'Meat Gauchos' carrying giant skewers of sizzling non-veggie-ness), at Brazilian Steakhouse Fogo de Chao, we paused to pretend with The Sexy. It was dangerous for all who passed by our radius. As you can clearly tell.

(More photos and awesomeness to come from the past few days...*including MY BIRTHDAY ahem ahem*. Oh, I assure you.)

Texty Voyeurism: How to handle yourself in a storm

*at approximately 1:30am last week while The Husband was out of town

Me:  (local weatherman) just came on live to say maybe hail. winds up to 50mph.
Him:  Be careful
Me:  uh...careful doing what?
Him:  Whatever you do when it hails and winds at fifty
Me:  oh you mean stand out in the front yard and dance on the lightpole?
Him:  Exactly
Me: okay well, maybe won't wear sequined bikini then

Does this mean we can finally shut off the gas to the freaking fireplace?

 

Vintage Sarcomical: Barbie & Ken Reception AND the Inebriated Throwdown Afterward

*This is the first of the Vintage Sarcomical posts from the original blog. I'll occasionally be posting some of my old favorites here for your SUPER COLOSSAL ENJOYMENT. This post was originally published November 7, 2007.

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Sooo.......

We went to my niece's birthday party this past weekend. This was definitely a Barbie year. She turned 5, so she is all of the sudden in desperate need of many, many dolls. And apparently, my sister and I (31 and 26 years old, respectively) and my husband (only a slightly resisting participant) needed to express ourselves through the art of Doll Manipulation. It was graceful. It was beautiful. It was moving.

It was...disgustingly hilarious.

It all started out nicely enough. Very "Just the Way You Look Tonight"-ish. Aw.

They seemed to be enjoying the festivities.

Then Barbie got a little, um, over-the-top...

...so Ken decided he needed to take it up a notch.

This is when Barbie started letting her competitive obsession take over.

After that, it was just a sad display of showboating. It was not attractive, and truthfully was a little embarrassing to watch.

Oh, the Ugliness that ensued:

She got all up in his face talking about how he never could cut his mother's apron strings and didn't know how to please a woman because he was so selfish.

...Then she passed out.

Ken then got up, feathered his hair, went home and watched Baywatch while cutting up Barbie's favorite shirts into tiny, tiny pieces.

Some Things Friday #74: Magic, potatoes & curry

Some Things I Love:

1. Cool floors on hot days
2. Tearing paper apart at the perforation
3. Open windows and crickets at night
4. The Husband is learning magic card tricks - he is very cute and serious when he does them.
5. The scent of very old books

Some Things I Hate:

1. Scarlett Johansson being in the next Iron Man movie...Blech
2. That after 10 years, The Husband had to tell me that there is a 'Potato' button on the microwave...just think of all the potatoes I could have been eating! Russet, Sweet, Red...dear God, so much time lost...
3. Dasani water
4. Raking dog hair
5. Knowing very well that I'm procrastinating, but deciding I'll do something about it later

Some Things I Just Don't Get:

1. How anyone could not LOVE the smell of curry
2. Why the number of barking neighbor dogs has this year multiplied by at least 23,000. I mean, it has to have - do you HEAR that? I feel like Elaine in the Seinfeld episode where she had one particular yipper "kidnapped". Not that I would do that, of course. Or have even fantasized about it. At all.
3. Blip.fm, and why I should care what anyone else is listening to on it
4. Rodents as pets
5. Joggers who think they look "awesome" enough to run barely clothed, when...in fact...NO...