...and then I stop eating.

Sometimes, when my kitchen gets really messy, I just look for already-prepared or just-heat-me-up sort of foods. When I eat all of those, I sometimes more or less stop eating.
I cleaned my kitchen the other day. A clean kitchen just begs to be used. I used it to make bread. Mmmmmm....

and a video.

Labor Day Vlog: OK Cupid Fail

Most of the messages I receive on OKCupid qualify for Epic Fail status. For some reason, no one understands that you need to have some respect for the English language and at least a 12th grade writing level for me to respond.



Ally: are those Juggalo tattoos, or just painful ones?

50 Book Challenge

Let's say at the turn of 2009, somebody challenged you to read 50 books before 2010. How would you be doing on that front?

I've compiled my list, including (but excluding from the numbers) the books I listened to during my roadtrip.

1. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things - Michael Braungart
2. Wake Up and Smell the Planet - Grist Magazine
3. Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir - Graham Roumieu
4. Bigfoot: I Not Dead - Graham Roumieu
5. General Ignorance - John Lloyd
6. Che: A Graphic Biography - Spain Rodriguez
7. How We Are Hungry - Dave Eggers
8. You Shall Know Our Velocity! - Dave Eggers
9. Lyrical Life -Casey Jones
10. What is the What - Dave Eggers
11. Mother, Come Home - Paul Hornschemeier (this was really sad and beautiful. I'd recommend it to Graphic Novel Nerdfighters)
12. Urban Homestead - Kelly Coyne
13. City of Glass: The Graphic Novel - Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, David Mazzucchelli
14. My Most Secret Desire - Julie Doucet
15. A Primer of Happenings & Time / Space Art - Al Hansen
16. La Perdida - Jessica Abel
17. Savage Inequalities - Jonathan Kozol
18. Steal This Book - Abbie Hoffman
19. The Complete Handbook of Sewing Machine Repair - Howard Hutchison
20. Things I have learned in my life so far - Stefan Sagmeister
21. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art - Suzanne Lacy
22. Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works - Erik Spiekermann
23. But Is It Art? - Nina Felshin
24. The Pleasures of Slow Food - Corby Kummer
25. Slow Food Nation - Carlo Petrini
26. Letters to a Young Artist - Shelly Bancroft
27. Made from Scratch - Jenna Woginrich
28. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic - Alison Bechdel
29. Unlikely - Jeffrey Brown
30. Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende (this is a really good, interesting and easy read)
30 a. (Audio Book) The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
30 b. (AB) Downtown Owl - Chuck Klosterman
30 c. (AB) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
30 d. (AB) The World Without Us - Alan Weisman
30 e. (AB) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
30 f. (AB) Oil! - Upton Sinclair
31. Reenchantment of Art - Suzi Gablik
32. White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness - Maurice Berger
33. Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? - Beverly Daniel Tatum
34. Looking for Alaska - John Green


I'm pretty sure I can and will read 16 or more books over the next 3.5 months.

What have you read this year?

Health Care Reform Thought Bubble

Visual by thoughtbubble.org, Audio by John Green

New Safari Gives Away Secrets

I updated my mac. They've redone Safari to feel more...I don't know, media friendly? (Not the media, media like it might as well be a big screen TV)

and the opening screen is a compilation of the sites you visit most frequently... I guess.

Here are my embarrassing secrets.

Facebook Gmail OKCupid ThisBlog
Blogger LibraryRequests AlbanyPublicLibrary YouTube
Amazon Vimeo Etsy Ally's Blog

EDIT: visually appealing as this screen may be, it is infinitely bad for my (usually nonexistent) ADD. I think of Googling something, I open a new page, I forget what it was, because that new page is no longer about:blank.

Sometimes, however, the page I want is one displayed and I can just click and that's nice.

The best friends I never had.

In the spirit of Ally's synchronicity, I just spent.....maybe.....12? hours watching the video blog communication project of John and Hank Green.


John Green is an author of young adult romance novels, and Hank Green is an enviro-blogger. They live on the other side of the country from one another, and their communication had dwindled to IMing, e-mailing, texting, and the like. To counter this, they challenged themselves to take turns posting videos on YouTube every non-holiday weekday, and not communcating textually for an entire year.

I stumbled on this project, or rather, their YouTube channel whilst watching videos of cute animals (this originated in Sloths and the Slow Loris)

The video I stumbled upon was the following:



If you google the word "adorable," this is one of the first things that shows up.

This video is after the whole "Brotherhood 2.0" project, but I was so amused that I watched a few random videos and then decided to start at the very beginning (a very good place to start) so that I would understand all the lingo.


I feel like I could be (or maybe like I am) good friends with these guys. I also love Hank, but strictly in a celebrity-crush sort of way. This is because 1. He is married (as is John) and 2. from what I gather, our theology differs too greatly for me to have been able to consider him if he even was on the market.

One of my favorite books is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test which, I realized after I finished reading it, is non-fiction. Sometimes, I want another book. To be able to follow up on the characters...because they're real people is really satisfying.

I have had a similar experience with John and Hank Green. It is almost like if The Office were real, and you could send presents to, and potentially hang out with Jim and Pam. You could send them well wishes, and these might actually be received by them.

After the Brotherhood project was over, John and Hank were not finished vlogging. I sort of want to send them a present, but I want to make sure that no one else has given them this specific present, so I am going to wait to do this until I have caught up with all of their videos. They've vlogged through the entire 2008 year (I think once a week at least, each), and it seems that they've continued through 2009.

Hear an interview with them on NPR.

Also what is cool about John and Hank is their accessibility. Though they have thousands of subscribers, they keep up with the conversations in the comments, and comment on them. Vlogging is dynamic.

So I think that I could just drop in and hang out with these guys...but then I remember that I am one of sooo many. If everyone were to do that, it would probably be terrible.

Soon after the project began, John challenged Hank to write a new song every other week. I've tried to write songs. Have you heard them? That's right, because I have never finished a single song. Anyhow, Hank's love for TMBG is apparent, and his music is entertaining and enjoyable. He has actually released a CD (almost 2?) of his music, when I believe that it was just a hobby prior.

My love for John and Hank is almost directly related to my love for Liam Lynch.

The idea of vlogging used to really make me cringe. This is in large part due to Tila Tequila and her boring lame vlogs. (I was going to give you a link to the vlog that first made me want to shoot myself, but it appears to have been removed from the webs). However, I have had a change of heart about vlogging due to Ally's entertaining self, and the vlogbrothers.

I think I might start vlogging. It is something I'm doing in service of my Road Trip video (which I will probably upload in sections on the internet). The only trouble is my Flip video camera may or may not have died. (After like 3 months WQHTKXF!?)

One last thing! Hank lives in Missoula, MT. It is not a big town, and I totally stopped there on my road trip. If only I had known about his existence!

I suppose I'm creepy.
On an unrelated note, I suppose I'm a total nerdfighter.

You down with OPC? Thoughts on babysitting as a twenty something

is for Children.

I've agreed to babysit for several days. This isn't much different from my usual position, babysitting a teacher's class, except that it occurs within a home, is less structured, and affords me no breaks.

Unlike when I was 12 and babysitting, now watching someone else's kids makes me a little bit sad. I look at their beautiful life and their beautiful children, and read their children an Henri Matisse story book which I begin to think might be boring separated from an art lesson, and I just die a little inside when a very cute insightful little boy makes precocious observations.

For example: comparing a more classical Matisse painting with a more Matisse-like Matisse painting, he identifies that the more classical one seems more realistic because of the texture. Texture! I would be excited if I heard an 8th grade make that comment! This is what my kid will be like....if I ever do have kids.

Also things that make me sad are other people's home ownerships.

.....I would really like to own a home.

So I am babysitting for a group of kids, only one of which lives in the house where this is taking place. One mom dropped off her little boy, who I noticed had a wet spot on the crotch of his pants. The spot was about the size of a quarter, and seemed pretty high. I give him the benefit of the doubt and think...oh that is too high to be pee. Pee happens a little lower in boys.

But then I remember that he is 4 and maybe pee doesn't happen so low for him.

This notion was confirmed later in the day when he asked me to turn the sink water on for him so he could wash his hands post peeing. He is quite short.

He was already in the process of peeing when I answered his call, door wide open. When he was done peeing, and he had certainly peed all over his...self, I asked him if he was going to wipe (because it appeared that this wasn't in his plans).

"No, I...I, My mom, my mommy says, I, when I pee, my mommy says when I pee I don't have to wipe."

Wet spot mystery: solved.

Discussions on a Fort from Me on Vimeo.