Hamblog

Recent moments at yoga class:

• A lady of indeterminate age and nationality, a modern-day Zsa Zsa, begged off from doing a headstand because her “head, it’s noomb.” The teacher, alarmed, asked why could that be? “Oh, it’s just from my faceleeft!” Later in the class, she farted vigorously. She just smiled and said “OOPsie!”
• After pulling on my yoga pants and going into class, I noticed that, post-laundry, the drawstring had sucked its way into the waistband. I stood on my mat and started massaging the drawstring in that laborious and peculiar way that one must do. I suddenly realized that the whole class had stopped everything and was hypnotized, watching the process. Everyone gave a gentle “yay” when the pants were tied; class began.
• Often we chant three oms at the end of class. The instructor sets the note; I have to stifle my un-zen mirth when some one belts out their om but is completely off-key. Can they hear how off it is when they do it, or is that what being tone deaf is all about?
• Recent interruptions to class: a ringing cell phone, owned by the deeply mortified instructor; a lady, with a little kid doing a white-hot pee pee dance in tow, asking for the facilities (the request was granted in the nick of time); and a rhythmic pock, pock sound against the back wall during our chavasana (final rest) phase. A brave yogi carefully picked his barefoot way to the back of the building to see. It was a human, ostensibly practicing his tennis stroke against our building. The pock-ing happens quite a bit, though, which leads me to believe this person is fucking with the studio. What could possibly be grounds for this vendetta? Too many good vibes?

Photo: Cookie yoga pose… by simplycute becka. Thanks for letting me use it!

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Summer festival season approaches, and I greet it with equal parts twittering anticipation and cringing dread. I adore county and state fairs with a passion equal to my loathing for Burning Man and Renaissance Faires. Civil War Reenactments? Love. A circle of humans, drumming? Haaaate.

I will let other, more deft people articulate my bad feelings.

Evany’s comments about Burning Man are spot on. Witness:

The “vacation individuality” thing that Burning Man represents to me, the sort of binge approach to personal expression, just kind of freaks me out. It comes off feeling too forced, too self-conscious, and even a little frantic, like, We have to jam a whole year’s work of naked bike riding and polyamory into just one week? Fuck! Where’s the hell is my silver makeup??? My nippleless vegan-leather bra? My car lovingly modified into a gigantic COCK? Because we need to MOTOR! Stat! The clock is TICKING!

Reid over at something awful really really dislikes the Renaissance Faire:

The one thing that is most abundant at a Renaissance festival is unbridled sass. Every hired drama student/sandwich engineer that works at the festival belts out personal insults at the passerby so they feel like they are really living in the Renaissance. I know if I spend $10 to get in, I expect a thorough sassing and will demand a refund unless I get called a “scrawny freckled rapscallion” at least 5 times during the course of the day. Words were harsher in those times, and it toughened your hide so you could withstand arrows and vampire bites. Feelings are for 21st century wimps.

And Hey Skinny dishes out a short and breathtaking dish of vitriol about BM:

What else do you call a highly organized ‘happening’ but a catastrophuck.

Of course, with my eternal terror of being abandoned and/or rejected, I now backpedal furiously and say Hey! Live and let live, man! I mean, I do short-form improv, for pity’s sake.

You go! Go over there! Let your cah-razy self run free! I’ll sit over here and eat funnel cakes and ogle carnies at the Ventura County Fair. Different sides, same oversized novelty coin.

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HOT DOGS

Hot dogs are hot or warm
Hot dogs are dead pigs or turkeys
Hot dogs are healthy for you
Hot dogs are red
Some hot dogs are red with white spots
Hot dogs are great for dinner or lunch

You could eat the red part by itself with no bun
or you could eat it with the bun
You could have mustard with the hot dog on the bun
and you could have ketchup on the bun

I love the bun with the red part by itself
No mustard
No ketchup
Hot dogs are wonderful
Hot dogs are good with water, milk or juice
or…
it could go good with popcorn and a movie!!!

The End

Photo: Mr. Hot Dog, by The Rocketeer. Thanks for letting me use it!

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Last night I dreamt that a friend of mine exhibited behavior very much unlike his real self (real friend: healthy-living grownup; dream friend: crazed coke fiend.) I then dreamt that I woke up, went to work, and described the dream to a workmate.

Then I really woke up and went to work. The above-mentioned workmake bounded into my cubicle to tell me about the dream he had last night about me (apparently in dreams I wear headbands and do not follow along in dance aerobic classes.) I then told the workmate about my dream in which I told him about the dream.

Meta-tastic! (Metacized?) In other news: dreams are really uninteresting when you relate them to others, except when you’re in them. Huh.

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That’s me in the middle and that’s my mom right behind. It was my seventh birthday party. Thanks for throwing one hell of a party, mumsy. I miss you.

More pictures of the Unsinkable Maggie:

Related momlinks:

• why do you flip and give me a skip each time
• grave-y
• undead again
• thank you mudda thank you fadda
• warning: spoiled alert.
• the blood in my veins
• the mod lady with the impossibly hip kids
• maggie will always know best

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Thanks for your birthday wishes, your gifts, your treats, and your overall awesomeness. Yesterday was a fine fine day and there are more fun times to come, though in the future I might consider the radical concept of my special day lasting just 24 hours.

My birthday is a loaded time, mostly due to the fact that Mother’s Day comes right on its heels — a happy-to-sad downshift that messes with my head. But I’m learning to just sit back and absorb the love that is so readily handed to me by my incredible friends and family — people who are willing to toast, fete, drink and cake me until this cow waddles home and curls up in bed with some Pepcid AC.

As a gift to myself (and as a gift to you, too, really) I reinvested in America itself by spending the snot out of my Economic Stimulus Package. I almost went for the hooker-cocaine combo (another stimulus package entirely), but decided at the last minute to purchase a Mac Mini. You’re welcome! I also bought a wireless keyboard using the one and only payment from my 93003.net blogging gig, which is all over now — more accurately, they’re all over now. Pop!

Image: I has too much birfday from ihasahotdog.com. Thanks, Violet, for sending me this apropropopro photo.

Related (birthday-wise) hamblinks:

• here and
• here and
• here and
• here.

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I am over Hello Kitty. Explicitly, I am over the “Look at the newest, nuttiest Hello Kitty product from Japan!” articles and posts. I feel my horizontally-positioned hand rising up to my neck, my forehead, then a good foot above my head as I illustrate to the world to where I’ve had it up. Hypocrite alert: Why, Becky, what’s that in your purse? Hello Kitty checks? I see.

11/24/07, 4:14pm: It was at this very moment that I “got” the joke inherent in Lowly Worm’s name. Huh. I guess I have to admit now that I was 16 before I figured out why “Kanga” and “Roo” had their names.

I dislike slipcovers.

Sometimes a mere two glasses of Shiraz can unhinge my jaw (and my mind) and suddenly way too much sex-toy and fetish talk come out while way too much cheese and bread platter go in, and I chalk it up to being amped over my birthday week, even though I am turning forty-fuck years old and I really should think about turning it down a couple clicks.

I love baby elephants to the point of insanity.

Aaaand … break! Mental break!!!1!

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Molly and I went to brunch in San Francisco on Sunday. Citizen Cake has very spicy Bloody Marys, delectable donut balls, and an annoying website with Flash and auto-loading audio. The new floor plan of the restaurant, while airier than before, does kind of pack in the Citizens — not a tragedy if one likes to eavesdrop on people.

We have a table next to a good-looking couple. As we sit down, the gent is making a big production of being dramatically, humorously pouty at his lady friend.

Man: I just feel so far away from you! I’ll have to, like, call you to talk to you!

Woman: Ah. Ha ha.

They beam at each other. He reaches across the table and takes her hand. They chitchat, unmonitored by Molly and me, as we place our drink orders. But we tune back in soon enough.

Man: We should get married! We’ll need an extra room for an office! And a TV! A flat screen TV!

Woman: Wow.

He leans forward, touching his knees to hers.

Woman: I have to go back to Italy as soon as possible.

Man: And we’ll buy a fish! We’ll name him Sparky!

The woman’s smile looks frozen.

Man [to us]: Wow! Those donuts look awesome!

Becky: Ah. Ha ha.

[Molly actually overheard the marriage-talk part — I was too busy weighing the merits of brisket hash vs. omelette with peas and nettles. I’ve transcribed her description as best I could. And I made up the part about the fish, but that’s totally what he was thinking. I wish them luck on their new life together.]

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So I’m still at Web 2.0 Expo — tired of hearing that yet? My panel went very well yesterday. As for the Expo, I have a lot of short, Twitter-like bursts of impressions. The impressions are about as exciting as Twitter, as well. Fleeting, sometimes interesting, mostly just … impressions.

As weeks are wont to do, this week has not gone the way I expected it. Especially today!

I was geeking my way through a morning session (on a laptop and only half-listening to the actually-quite-entertaining guy going on about “Failure of the Web”,) and ha ha, get this, I get a message from Bank of America telling me that there’s been some unusual activity on my checking account! Yes, smack in the middle of a conference very abuzz about the best methods of mining/gathering/logging/exploiting user data, some asshole gets ahold of my personal numerals and goes on a spending spree! She/she/it cut a swath though stores and restaurants in Las Vegas, and .. a Wal-Mart in Maryland?

And there’s nothing I can do, apart from (the total inconvenience of) closing down my debit card (mid-vacation) and waiting for all the charges to clear before I can get reimbursed for the bogus ones. Hooray!

Here’s where the unlikely endorsements come in. Boy, am I glad I withheld the shit out of my paycheck, my sad paycheck, so that I got a tax refund this year. And boy, am I glad I filed my taxes on time, so that my refunds hit my checking account before Mr/s. Las Vegas (and Maryland?) Big Spender started big spending. Otherwise, I would’ve been a-boing-boing bouncing my legitimate expenditures, and I’d bet you B of A would’ve been loath to reimburse those. Not to mention being in this spendy spendy city without a farthing to my name.

So, our lessons for today:

• Appreciate irony
• Pay the government
• File your taxes on time
• Marvel at how blase you and the rest of the world has become about identity fraud
• Drink a large beer at lunch

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This past week, I had a minor Crisis of Confidence — Career Version! Something about my job stress and having to get a website designed and this impending panel discussion at Web 2.0 Expo (at which I’m to discuss my internet habits) made me feel in over my head, a little.

I was feeling outrun, ability-wise, by all those developers and programmers and languages and buzzwords out there. The technological playing field is getting wider and more crowded and I was feeling fully in the slow lane and kind of irrelevant.

What I needed was a pep talk. And I got it from my sister Annie, who sent the following to me, and told me to “write this on your hand” so that I would have confidence on the panel at the Expo.

[by the way, she means “geeks” at the programmers and other technical humans I work with to bring a website to life, and means it in the kindest way]

The geeks need you. They are nothing without you. You are the informed user, a cultural functionary whose work it is to create an interactive visual communication that must be aligned with both your client’s goals and their audience’s technological comfort zone. Your work is to translate not merely information as such, but values and priorities and aesthetics, in a way that makes meaningful connection — and gets the business done simply. Technology is the tool. The tool is only as good as it is useful for executing a piece of communication or resource or art. Technology can shape culture, sure. But culture is a human function, and technology is a servant to that. Respect must be earned. Can a geek speak meaningfully to you? Can a geek offer something to the cause?

[the photo is from our very first iChat this past weekend, and she is recreating a thing we used to do when I was little. that made me feel a lot better, too. this has been a weird week.]

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