ATQ project #2 – carbonbased goodness
ed note: early due to holiday
1. What’s an embarrassing story that your family or friends could tell about you?
“Embarrassing”, in my particular microcosm, is a relative concept, especially when one considers that it is perfectly normal to walk into cabbage pickling operations performed by pajama-clad fathers on my very own balcony on any given winter day. That said, there was a certain incident hilariously gauche even by my robust south-eastern european standards having to do with a certain wooden outhouse, an autumn day in 1992, math class jitters, a pair of white cotton underpants, and the river Danube.
2. Tell me about a time where you cried so hard you thought you were coming apart at the seams.
Peep this: You’ve just spent the summer all alone (work home work home work home), its a beautiful august day outside, you havent talked to your long-distance soulmate in a good week, your best friend is far away – and not only far away but in your dream place – hanging out with your long-distance soulmate, before you. Effectively it seems to you like she now knows him better then you do by the virtue of having met him out there in the “real” world. You desperately need him to dash these ridiculous thoughts from your head.You’re sick, you have killer first-day cramps, you’re chemically pms vulnerable. You’re about to go away on a 14-day trip in the opposite direction of where you want to go. You’ve done nothing but think about him and check your empty inbox 500 times a day like a total loser. You remember how strong and cool you used to be once. Finally at the 11th hour, he calls and you talk for 5 minutes – strained weird conversation – you need to talk to him, you need to hear great words, sweet words, – but there is only curtness, too many people around. He cuts you off because he has to go pick up your best friend at the train station. Then you hang up. Go to your bathtub, open the tap, and scream. The crying comes like an afterthought.
3. What or where is the most inappropriate situation or place you’ve ever been turned on? Extra points if it involves famous people or religious institutions!
Four words: Captain Jean Luc Picard.
4. Tell me about your relationship with your parents or parent figures.
My nuclear family is an island. Here, all we really have is each other, so we are extremely close – to the point where I believe it will take moving across the world to convince them that I’m not 5 years old anymore. My parents have taught me that true love, happy marriage, gender equality, grace, decency and human goodness are not myths. My parents prove to me the existance of that “happily ever after” thing.
5. Recall a moment in your past that you remember as being absolutely perfect harmony in your life.
Standing around in my kitchen with my family and best friend eating my mother’s homemade ajvar, talking star trek and laughing. Also: Eggplant-colored Buick crusing, hilarious conversation, and mp3 player tunes jacked into faux-wood dashboard.
carbonbased likes italian men and “fuck lukewarm!”
new crush or yes, i realize this is my third post in an hour, shut up and listen because i’m feeling chatty, aight?
i’ve spent the past twenty minutes reading andrew the poor man and snickering at my desk. as an example of why you should also read andrew and snicker at his biting wit on current affairs, i present you with the perfect attack of noam chomsky:
“Also interviewed [by Robert Kaplan] is Noam Chomsky, who shows his usual passionate intellectual commitment to changing the subject, and offering up the blindingly obvious as something only he has the moral courage to understand (wait, we didn’t invade Afghanistan to make life better for foreigners? – do tell!) although he does manage to stop himself short of actually christening the studio “Golgotha North” and nailing himself to the lighting scaffold. Another fine performance by America’s most prominant public intellectual. He also accuses Kaplan of being an “ultra right wing jingoist,” and Kaplan calls him a big baby. Meow.” – from november 23rd
after three years of reading the man’s work, i was always reduced to flapping my hands, madeleine-kahn-like, when asked what i “thought” of chomsky. from now on, i’ll just imagine him nailed to a studio stage and still blathering about consent and laugh, laugh, laugh. thanks, andrew.
PSA, pH style
we interrupt the prior earnest sincere post with the following two public service announcements. the following are two googled phrases that brought readers to pH in the last two days.
dear mr/ms “fool around with her sister”:
i understand you must be seeking advice on this complicated matter. we offer the simple solution. DON’T.
yours in christ,
pH
and even more disturbing -
dear mr/ms “i fool around with my little daughter”:
YOU SICK FUCK.
jesus loves you,
pH
girl, you’ll be a ..
i stepped from the sidewalk into the revolving door of my building and caught a glimpse of my own reflection in the smooth approaching glass to my left. on most days, i see a girl, playing dress-up as an adult. usually there’s a droop in the eyes from too much computer-staring by day, late-nighting by night. usually, the hair is tousled [as described by others] and shapeless [described by me]. usually, a sweater of some kind, khakis or jeans or a skirt, a dark wool coat, perhaps a chirpily-colored scarf. usually when i catch this sliding reflection she’s a girl.
today she surprised me. today she looked like someone completely unknown to me. today, in the nanosecond before my brain registered it’s sense of self, i thought, who’s that woman? perhaps its the red lipstick and the flushed cheeks. perhaps it’s that my hair suddenly looks stylish and carefree as opposed to the usual helmet of stubborn waves. perhaps it’s my mother’s pearls around my neck, or the fur collar on my black coat. whatever prompts it, i’m suddenly struck by the fact that i’m a woman. a woman that the girl-krissa might have looked at, six years ago, and thought beautiful.
i struggle, often, with the fact that my self-perception caught a snag at seventeen and stayed there. some days, i almost don’t recognize myself in the mirror, expecting instead a fresh faced, wide-eyed, innocent girl. i always feel a seedling of disappointment when friends look at pictures of that seventeen year old girl and say, oh my god you looked different then. i know they’re not seeing physical differences – i have the same colored hair, if shorter and curlier, the same big eyes, the same mouth and give or take twenty pounds, the same curvy petite frame. it’s not that, then, that we see in those pictures. it’s a youth, a carefree childishness and innocence, that mocks me from the past.
i’ve grown up so much since then that while my smile remains the same, the knowledge in my eyes is different. and perhaps because of that, it’s sometimes difficult to face what i see in the mirror, or in current photographs. sometimes i see sadness flicker across my eyes. my smile isn’t always as wide as it once was, my joy and vigor no longer quite on the sleeve but more reserved, saved for real moments of happiness. so sometimes, the current-me doesn’t even look like my own ideas of who i am, lodged stubbornly at seventeen and constantly comparing backwards.
but what is self-perception, anyway, except a projection of who you think you are, mirrored back at you? do i really think of myself as a less-happy shadow of my former innocent self? am i doomed to spend life wishing i still had that carefree perfection? is ignorance bliss?
but then, for no reason at all, there was that beautiful woman in the passing reflection of a revolving door. when i’m feeling strong, when i’m feeling proud, i don’t see a grown-up seventeen year-old girl in the mirror, unsure how to compose her face, unsure of her place here. sometimes, like today, i catch my reflection and in it, i catch my strength and i catch my breath and think, i’m a woman.
or maybe it’s just the pearls and the lipstick.
photographers get to be narcissists too
ain’t she a beauty? i may not have taken that picture [my photographic other half did] but i know a gorgeous photograph of a gorgeous face when i see one.
shivery – charming the pants off new york city. next stop? the world!
spring cleaning in autumn
i don’t know what came over me on saturday night. there i was, watching the telly, munching on a cookie, and suddenly.
zzzzzzip!
like something flew into my subconscience and scolded [probably in my mother's voice], “this place is an unholy flap of a mess, you lazy slobbering git, now get up off that couch and clean like your life depends on it.” on second thought, my mother’s much nicer about her scoldings. picture, instead, carol burnett of annie fame.
with threats about hot/cold mush and chrysler buildings batting around my frazzled mind, i suddenly started cleaning. putting on a cleaning-appropriate record [cleaning music includes but is not limited to elvis, josie and the pussycats, squirrel nut zippers, ben folds five and louis armstrong], i pushed up my shirt sleeves and:
reorganized my music cabinet/photo equiptment.
dusted and cleaned music/photo cabinet.
removed books/movies from book/movie shelf.
cleaned book/movie shelf.
reorganized books/movies.
cleaned wall-hangings [including all glass in photographs].
cleaned coffee tables/end tables.
reorganized coffee table Drawer of Doom.
vaccuumed floor/rug.
mopped hardwood floors.
scrubbed and cleaned baseboard molding.
vaccuumed upholstery chairs.
cleaned walls with disinfectant.
and that was just the living room. the kitchen required:
washed twenty dishes.
reorganized china cabinet.
cleaned all silverware, not just dirty silverware.
emptied out fridge of moldy produce.
emptied fridge.
cleaned fridge.
reorganized fridge.
cleaned stovetop.
cleaned counters.
toaster.
yep, blender.
bored yet?
floors.
cleaned and reorganized cooking-book cabinet.
varnished dining room table.
cleaned dining room window.
dusted vases and glassware.
although tendrils of realization re: my madness were starting to waft into my nose, i assumed this was simply a bi-product of the four different cleansing agents i was using, and the toxic fumes thereof. i mean, sure, i’d cleaned the resevoir of my coffee pot by percolating vinegar water in it [half a cup of white vinegar to 1.5 cups water, kids, let it run through the machine and then run two or three cycles of pure water - it takes all the clogged residue out of the pipes for a fresher, purer cup of coffee], i mean, sure, that seems like madness, but i needed delicious-tasting coffee, right?
but soon after, i stopped myself, because i realized at some point in my frenzied mad cleaning, i’d actually started windexing the spice bottles in my pantry cabinet. windex on the spice bottles. the worst part was, i had a good reason. growing increasingly loony, i actually said it aloud in the middle of my empty kitchen at four in the morning.
“well, you use the spices while you’re cooking. cooking grease gets on the plastic bottles and makes them smell funny. then the inside of the cabinet smells funny, and that’s where i keep my coffee and sugar, i don’t want those smelling funny.”
i’m off my head, kids. but when i simply collapse from the weight of lunacy and am found singing to the mommy dearest voices in my head, make sure you mop up the drool from the sparkling kitchen floor. hollander house floor-washing liquid does the trick nicely but make sure you use a white cotton help me.
the Answer the Question project
we’re getting dodderingly repetitive or community-buildingly interesting here at pH, depending on your perspective. every friday, the following five questions will be posted as different bloggers from the blogiverse answer them in their own unique ways. what i’m hoping, dear bloggers, is that you will read the questions and my introductory responses to them and decide to email me your five answers as well as a small picture of yourself to use as a blurb photo. you will do this because of three reasons:
1. you like me and you don’t want my little experiment to fail.
2. you’re a blogger and thus naturally self-revelatory and hopefully you find my questions interesting.
3. you secretly like having pictures of yourself on the internet, because you’re all beautiful people.
in turn, i will promise to:
1. print your answers completely unedited [please keep them at comparable lengths to mine, dan, mark, i'm looking at you.]
2. read your blog if i don’t already.
3. link to you both on the day of your post and in the sidebar referring to the ATQ project.
aren’t those good reasons? now read my answers and start thinking about your own. without further ado?
ATQ project – subject #1 – krissa, of petit hiboux:
1. What’s an embarrassing story that your family or friends could tell about you?
there are so many, it’s frightening. most of them could be told by my best friend erin, since they mostly happened in eighth grade. the one that’s her absolute favorite, however, that she never fails to tell newcomers to my life, is that in eighth grade, when my then-boyfriend david endelman went away to vail for a measly six days, I actually broke his answering machine by leaving so many messages. that’s like four hours of tape. jesus, was I lame.
2. Tell me about a time where you cried so hard you thought you were coming apart at the seams.
well, I cry a lot. but the time that stands out in recent memory as being the absolute worst crying fit I’ve had was when I was lying in my bed, talking to my mother with intense stomach cramps, and she told me to get myself to an emergency room because it sounded like appendicitis. there I was, alone with my carefully-guarded independent life, and suddenly there was no one to take me to the hospital, make sure I didn’t fall down the stairs, rub my back, or hold my hand. for ten minutes, I couldn’t do anything by lie in bed, clutch my tummy and wail like a starving hiccuping newborn. it was one of the loneliest moments of my life.
3. What or where is the most inappropriate situation or place you’ve ever been turned on? Extra points if it involves famous people or religious institutions!
This actually happens to me quite a bit – unfortunately. I get singularly turned on when I’m having an intellectual debate with someone and they’re actually trampling my logic with a 2×4. assuming they’re male and straight, of course. as egotistical as this sounds, even when I’m wrong I can usually run rhetorical circles around a lot of people, so when I meet someone that knows how to argue better than I do, it’s seriously turns me on. this doesn’t bode well for my future as a trial lawyer.
4. Tell me about your relationship with your parents or parent figures.
They say you can hurt the hardest those you know the best – that certainly holds true with my parents. but since I got over my spoiled bullheadedness of adolescence and college and realized my parents are and always will be my first and last line of defense in this world, and accepted them for the flawed but wonderful human beings they are, I’ve struck a fair balance with them. when I was a little girl, my mother was a shining goddess and my father was affectionate but often absent. now they’re both my best friends.
5. Recall a moment in your past that you remember as being absolutely perfect harmony in your life.
in may, I went to dallas to visit my brother. after a long delicious sunday brunch, my brother was doing some dishes in the kitchen. erin and I were having a smoke on the balcony, while raychul was sitting with her husband matt and chatting with us about how the three of us – erin, raychul and I – are all going to law school in sept 04. I caught my brother’s eye in the kitchen and he winked at me. I looked at the two friends I’ve had the longest – raychul’s harmonious marriage and erin’s growth into a woman I can be proud to call my best friend, and luiz’s amazing constancy as a brother. I remembered all my friends back in new york, too and I thought, friends and family really are nature’s antidote to the ills of the world. I smiled and joined back into the conversation. it was perfect.
RED ALERT
i feel bad for men sometimes. no matter how uber-sensitive, ultra-feminist a man can be thanks to social conditioning, i still see command center in a man’s brain as essentially believing itself to be engaged in friendly daily warfare with women, and they’re losing.
i mean, think about it.
scene – int., living room, evening.
Woman: “I’m thinking of cutting my hair – do you like it short?”
flash to Man’s brain command center:
scene – int., command room, flashy lights and LED screens everywhere, guys in ties and coffee stains on their shirts wandering about aimlessly
operator grunt [may resemble screetch]: did you hear that, guys? HEY! snap to! we were asked about the HAIR!
general mayhem ensues
commander [may resemble ed begley jr.]: where is that FILE? where is our STANDARD RESPONSE? quick, we’re faltering! she suspects misfiring in the command station! HURRY, men, DAMNIT, bring me that FILE!
rebellious field officer [may resemble bruce willis] runs over, in grease-soaked undershirt: calm down, man, it’s right here. don’t blow a gasket. cooly lights cigarette. several rooms explode in the distance.
Man: “Hey, honey, your hair looks great no matter what you do to it.”
Woman suspicious of rabid-blinking 10-seconds of hesitation, lets it slide: “Thanks. You always know what to say.”
end scene
but as all good Man brain operatives know, that’s just skirmish compared to the big guns. observe:
Woman: “Why didn’t you kiss me hello in front of your mother and why didn’t you even introduce me to your roommates?”
Man Brain Command Center -
suddenly computers are starting to spontaneously combust. telegrams from various experts and talking heads and self-help books are feeding in through the monitors, spewing bits of information onto the cluttered floor of command center.
commander: HELP! i’m bleeding profusely from the arm! what is the appropriate response here? we’ve taken a direct hit, i repeat, direct hit!
gruntling: sir, perhaps the correct answer is “because i’m afraid of letting my mother know she’s being usurped as the main woman in my life, and my roommates think i’m a pussy for settling down with one girl!”
commander: GET IT TOGETHER MAN, you want to tell her the TRUTH? GO BACK TO TRAINING, son, there’s a rule around these questions – gasps as arm falls off – always give the STANDARD RESPONSE.
gruntling passes out from shock.
commander: field op! field op! my men are dying! the mission is failing, i repeat, FAILING, can you save us? nose falls off
flash to Man/Woman exterior -
Woman: “Honey, why is your head twitching? Honey? Hello?”
back in Command Center -
bruce willis character of field op comes wading through the carnage and fritzing computer systems, yelling. things explode behind him, as always.
field op: damnit, you scum-sucking beaurocratic asshole, don’t you ever LEARN the drill? follow my lead, you vile bag of catshit, and tell the girl that your roommates are jerky neandrathals who don’t know how to treat a woman and that your mother is so excited about the girlfriend that if she sees them kissing, she’ll want to plan the entire wedding and she’ll make it all pink. SEE? it’s not HARD, motherfucker. lights cigarette as commander delivers last message and passes out from blood loss.
Ext -
Woman: “oh, honey, i’m so glad you can be honest with me. you’re right, a pink wedding run by your mother would be a disaster. and oh…. does this dress make me look fat?”
massive explosions ensue.
support your local crooners!
in addition to the brand-spanking-new web-outfit, petit hiboux has made a brand-spanking-new friend… one benjamin wagner. stopping by his swell apartment last night to listen to music and meet his friends was one of my more enjoyable total-stranger experiences in a long time. two qualifiers in my new person lexicon are firm handshake and cool friends – wagner’s got both.
and now he’s heading out to croon for the masses, and possibly coming to a town near you. check out the tour page and if he’s playing in a town near you, do as he says and don’t be a stranger. thus spake petit hiboux!
