Coming up: The wires spark and crepitate in absence of sternly jesting consumption. Will our heroine remain strong to her word and fealty to her lindt ball pledge? Our wide-eyed couple stumble into the Amazons, intoxicated with promises of sonorous socks and annular athletic antics. The click click of a spinning roller and heave of bodies against tracks. What hazards and haps of roller-doom await them? Will the clock tick on, or hover in abeyance as warriors fall and stars are swapped? Holy Hamentash, Haman! Burlesque betties bop to Klezmer. The Jewish Beauty overcomes the Beast and foils perilous Persian plots once more.Will pastry be consumed? And what will the gluten content of said pastry reveal? And will Andrew, having tasted the sweet tri-cornered hats of childhood, be able to hop back on that bike once more before the micturating feather stabbers laud the holidaze with a gush of green and more blarney than in all of Emerald Isle?
Lace up your skates, adjust your garters, and peradventure the golden answers will sparkle at the end of your reading rainbow!
It was a Dark and Stormy Moon Glass Tiara Prepared to be Unprepared
I have had sunglasses atop my pulchrous pate since roughly around the time that our weather got grumpy. To my surprise, I even realized I had worn them to the gym, where they obediently stayed quiet through an entire run-walk and uber-bouncy-ball jeu d'enfant. Had I known about this, I may have actually used them on the briefly bright walk back to the office.
But the otiosity of my lovely ocular tiara, is fairly typical. I am the sort of girl who reliably keeps sunglasses perched on head through dark and rainy nights, but who blearily nictitates in full dearth of eyewear in the erumpent sunlight. Always be prepared for the inconceivable, but the easily anticipated is far too pedestrian for consideration. Sunglasses are great to have on hand indoors too, of course. Those bright nasty fluorescents are migraine mongers.
Still I like to think I'm just channeling my 80's sunglasses at night cool in a revamped and rebooted 20-teens kinda way. You know how luxury cars got all goth and started renaming their sun roofs as moon roofs? These are just my moon glasses (lunettes, after all). Primed to matte the gleam and glisten of scabrous neons; gently foisting the flickers of dying street lights; cooly ambivalent to the lure of billboard displays. A portable sensory deprivation. I'll go with that. I'm so modern and like minimalist and stuff.
Speaking of actual (minor) deprivations, I've figured out how to permanently block all notifications on my phone. For incoming purposes my phone got dumb, but it still allows me the outgoing access of a wireless device. Which handles one immediate concern about being constantly wired. I am highly sensitive and highly reactive to stimuli. If I see a blinking light across a room, my nervous system kicks into fight or flight mode. Same with those little chat notifications. No matter what else I'm doing, part of me remains stressed until I can handle it. Especially when I know that it's somebody reaching out to me on the other end. And a simple glance at the phone for some minor matter may reveal all the hordes of demands from the outside world piercing whatever minor veil of solitude this sensitive little introvert quivers 'neath.
Of course the other issue is constant access, and that is more of a will-power issue. The temptation to idly and habitually pull up the phone, and maunder about my apps instead of entertaining myself or sitting with boredom is omnipresent. That may become more of an issue between books.The obsessive mode I get into when I'm reading, of course, blots any of that out to the point I can barely feed myself and am likely as not to go spilling down stairs if I attempt to move. However, I have a modern multi-tasker's habit of always watching tv with the imdb open and ready for reference (probably several additional tabs just to keep checking my mail and my various streams). In addition to my 'unwired' hour directly after work, I'm trying to mostly just leave my phone in a central location on the table. The extension in battery life is quite amazing!
At any rate, as the sun may or may rise to the challenge of my moon-glasses, it is FRIDAY! Mom-boss will be home soon, so lets pile up those allusive red cups and clean off the beer foam from the ceiling.
Rock 'em Sock 'Em Rita and The Roller Rink of Doom
Succumbing to the undeniable link 'twixt socks, burlesque and Roller Derby, I caved to the siren call of Roller Derby... spectator only. Playing? Hell no. I can't walk through my own kitchen without looking like the cabinets jumped me in a back alley! No way I'm actually putting my ecstatically endued extremities out for literal beating and possible wheel marks. I also have no particular draw to burlesque, although I my circles (the swing dance, the dress-up aspect, the occasional pin-up vintage modelling projects I did way back in the sepia days of yore) were often asymptotic. But I note there's s a crossover, because, well, there is a cross over.
Andrew had his own little connections: mainly the fact that it is a wheeled sport that goes "around-and-around-and-around-and-around" a track and involves funny outfits. Spoiler alert: despite sharing a mutual fascination through the derby, he was ultimately disappointed that the track wasn't bigger, the girls didn't try to skate faster, and (well, this was tacit but understood) nobody was actually riding a bike.
Those of you not up on your roller derby, you obviously don't live around here. Or anywhere. Roller Derby (donning the patched tweed jacket and professorial bubble pipe, here) evolved from full day roller skate races back in the 1920s. Back then, people just raced really fast, and there were the usual wipe outs. It turned into a contact sport in the 1930's-40's developing all the rules that would be familiar to fans today. The sport was even televised through the 60's.
In the face of declining tv ratings, Jerry Seltzer basically turned roller derby into a mobile WWE (co-ed crazy, and pies in the face type dramatic brilliance); it got crazier in the 80s with a figure-eight track and elaborate wrestlemania storylines. Then all the sudden in the early 2000s, women amateur teams popped up en masse, starting in Texas and spreading throughout the world like a gorgeous grease fire. It's pretty huge now. The players are damned tough, and - in the spirit of third wave feminism/punk aesthetic/vintage burlesque - still play with a little bit of sexy and a whole lot of camp theatrics. Which adds brio.
I'd explain the sport, but others will do it better. There are jammers (fast girls who wear a star on their helmets and race the jammer from the opposing team to lap the "field" for points), and blockers (most of the rest of the group, who try to stop the other team's jammer from passing them). And there are rules that refs of both gender in equally snappy little shorts enforcing those rules. There was, of course, a beer garden, but we sat in the kiddy section. It's not nearly as chaotic as I would have expected, and it was fairly easy to follow. The game moves a bit more slowly - with several 2 minute or shorter periods of play and many time outs in between.
Our horizons widened to a gaping gusty maw, we snuck out for a proper dinner and a little Twin Peaks mid-way through the first match. Those matches are long! Two sessions of thirty minutes of game time can stretch out a lot with time outs and the like. We were getting peckish, and the concessions were uninspiring. I want to like Girl Scout cookies. They're a great organization and I have many fond memories of Girl Scouts and even the cookies themselves, but I just don't care for them. And Andrew had never seen Twin Peaks before, so this needs to be addressed pronto. That said, it was a blast to go and watch. I may have even enjoyed the warm ups more than the matches.
And today is Sunday! The mom-boss is presumably home zonked out after a late flight. Andrew has a long rainy ride planned. And we may or may not crash a Purim Festival. Let the good times roll.
Howl of the Epcot Holidazerie Merry Moldy Beer Day!
My oh my is March chalk and granite full of holidazing. There was Zaftig Tuesday and its subsequent onrush of lindt ball askesis. And we're all down with that continuing on well into April, but not to the detriment or disrespect of other holidays. Today, of course is the biggie for my scantly intact heritage. Many celebrations in the US are, I grant, an excuse for Americans to drink theme drinks and party on a weekday. But it should also be noted, that in this country, it is a celebration of being an Irish-American, and has played its own role in the eventual blend of nationalism against a common enemy (darned Brits) arising in a very interesting period of American history that never seems to get covered in high school classes. Always a reminder that although Irish-Americans have largely assimilated into the amorphous morass of "white" and/or "American", they used to be a minority group subject to obloquy and opprobrium. Which I remember because, little known fact, it's actually Irish American Heritage Month as well (since 1991, apparently!). So, of course, we celebrate by drinking green beer, the perfect symbol of the Emerald Island and its concinnous unity with American whole scale industrial food dyes.
But lest we forget, there was pi day a few days back. And anyone who has used the internet in the last ten days/years hardly could forget this. Incidentally, since I studied ancient greek when I was younger, I still pronounce that symbol as "peee" in my head. So as far as I'm concerned March 14th is super gross.
But Pi day is special for getting in the sugary sybaritics in pie form instead of foamy fermented liquid form. I noticed that the grocery stores have finally gotten "hip" to the young people's interwebs lulz and are heavily marketing pie related accoutrements on "pi day" (or, as I have called it, micturition day). I guess technically Andrew and I "celebrated" a little bit by watching Twin Peaks, which has its own pie obsession motif. But ... I have to admit I didn't repost a single meme.
And then, of course directly following the pi thing, we had the Ides of March. Which we all must celebrate by stabbing our best friends repeatedly (with feathers of course!) and drinking a good red from Tuscany. Maybe a pizza. Romans like pizza, right?
Then yesterday was Purim! Purim - to quote Andrew quoting Seinfeld - is. like all major Jewish holidays. summarized as "they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat!" The local congregation was holding a Purim carnival out at one of the local parks. Since I've dragged Andrew to more than my share of childhood hauntings, weird church events, Harvest Festivals, Great Books College Cult reunions, etc. I thought it was time I dragged him to a blooming relic of his cultural memory. Besides, they have pastry! Since this is Bellingham, they didn't just have hamantashen, they had gluten free hamantashen! We got both the normal and GF variety and I have to say that Haman's defeat tastes a lot nummier with a little of the gluten daimon baked in.
It was a really fun little festival, with lots of children in super-creative costumery, great klezmer music, games and... well... pastry of course. Andrew and I didn't stay too long, since Andrew was merely on break between absurdly long and punishing trainer sessions, but we did manage to dance a little east coast to What the Chelm!
Enough of this defeating Syrians and stabbing Caesar while gorging on cherry pie stuff. We're all Irishish today! And, despite the fact that my roots are protestant Irish and thus I should be a prick about it all endued entirely in orange, I've got cute green socks. With green beer! And shamrocks! And a green shirt! I am in no mood to be pinched, gosh darnit. Besides orange is so Andrew's color.
Anyhoo, top o' the mornin' to ya! And let's break out the potatoes and gussy up that coffee! Happy St. Patty's Day!!
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