hip hood

Bill & I's neighborhood made the New York Times! We are so totally cool (if too poor to eat at the restaurants featured... but we walk by them all the time!)...

In Culver City, Calif., Art and Food Turn a Nowhere Into a Somewhere

$52 feminism

California NOW, why do you make your awesome feminist hoodie so expensive??? It's so much cuter than any other hoodie I have ever seen. I have wanted you for over a year now, but at $52 the chance of me ever buying you is slim to none.

I know that a reasonably crafty person could buy some fuzzy letters and brown hoodies and construct a near-identical sweatshirt, but I am not reasonably crafty.

$52 is the equivalent to half a day's work, roughly 1/25 of my rent. Obviously, not something I can part with lightly. But that's not even the real issue, which is, why a hoodie would cost $52 in the first place! Sweatshop-free & USA-made, OK, but come on! This is totally a for-profit hoodie. I mean, American Apparel's retail of their basic men's hoodie is $41. However, I have determined that their wholesale price is roughly 25% of their retail price, making the approximate cost $10. I appreciate that there are printing, administrative, etc costs and that NOW also likely uses the sale of their products to raise money. However, $30-40 is surely fair. My $30/annual donation should surely get me a hoodie-hookup...


Note: Friends, family, gift-givers-- don't take this as a buy-me plea. I scorn $52 hoodies.

oh, the sickness!

i have the flu.

i had to go home sick from work, which would be cool, except i don't have sick leave yet. and my lame boyfriend is going to be at school until like midnight, so no one is here to take care of me!

and i had to go to the grocery store all by myself to get popsicles and seven-up. and, now that i'm home, all i want is sourdough bread.

wah wah wah.

update: i also want cheez-its.

lost the touch

so, i just sat down to draw you the most picture-worthy of things... but i couldn't do it. i fear that i've lost my touch, after probably a year or so of not drawing any pictures for my blog. perspective totally baffled me, and i felt sad about my inability to render the world as i see it, and yet, unwilling to produce the charmingly simplistic vignette i no doubt would have come up with.

i suppose this serves as a useful metaphor for lack of event in my daily life of... get this: going to work, cooking food, watching gilmore girls season six on dvd (finally! blockbuster online had totally been holding out on me), and reading about sex. the reading about sex is a relatively new development, enabled by a christmas gift i received, sex & single girls, a collection of essays written by a number of individuals very inclusively defined as 'girl' and 'single.' fascinating stuff, to be sure.

but, back to what i wished to render for you in visual form.

on my way to work today, i had the great fortune of witnessing a man drag a body from the back seat of his car in the middle of an intersection and begin either life-saving measures or unspeakable violence. obviously, traffic slowed as this atrocity went on, so, being stuck in my car, i had the opportunity to rubberneck. as i slowly drove past (the police and an ambulance had since arrived), it became apparent that this man had pulled the mother of his child out of the car and began beating her in the middle of an 8-lane intersection! I was able to ascertain the facts of this scene as he was being handcuffed and yelling "you're a liar! you can't do this to me or my child! you're going to jail."

i know. it is so awesome that they have a child.

anyway, i know violence against women is a terrible terrible thing (unless, of course, it's consensual, and, i don't know, approved by whatever governing body bdsm has. but sometimes, it's just too absurd not to entertain. just so you know, the victim was standing and more or less ok when I saw this fascinating tableau unfold before my very eyes.

finally, this is actually the third scene i've witnessed in los angeles of a man being handcuffed by the police. i don't think i'd ever seen that before.

well, i have returned from a lovely trip to kansas city, where sadly i got no snow. this may very well be my first totally snow-free winter, which i find pretty disappointing. hopefully, bill and i will get to take a mountain vacation, but no guarantees.

i must say, i thoroughly enjoyed the lack of waiting in traffic, in line, for a table, etc, that came with my kansas city visit. there is surely something to be said for relative tranquility. i also enjoyed drinking copious amounts of booze with friends. i did not enjoy flight delays, etc.

while bill was suffering with the denver fiasco, i frequently thanked the powers that be that i would be flying through balmy dallas. the powers that be, no doubt peevish about my usual lack of attention, saw fit to bring tornadoes through dallas, cancelling my own flights. so, that was a bit of a bummer.

a bit bigger of a bummer, of course, as the 3,000 us soldiers dead in iraq. a tragic headlines day when i hoped to be reading feature-y predictions about the year to come. let's hope that 2007 brings less violence.