living, will

death has been on my mind a lot lately. well, more than usual. ever since i was a kid, i've lived in fear of death, lived in fear of that great expanse of unknown beyond my last breath, in fear of my parents' death, haunted by the sudden passing of friends and family gone too soon. who was it that said life is just the act of dying? or "the day we are born we begin to die"? i hate to think of my life as a shadow negative of this inevitability, but there can be no denying it. i think learning to live is in many ways learning how to die.

this has become more pressing lately. when my Uncle Tony passed away ... spring of 2009, my entire foundation was rocked. it was one of my first years truly living away from home - out of college, working my first real-life, "grown-up" job as a teacher in a public middle school in south central - and i got the news in the middle of a school day, maybe it was even a wednesday. this was the thing i'd always feared, my entire life: leaving home and being away and alone and having to truly assume adulthood when i'd only previously been playing the part. acting like an "adult" in front of a room of insane and belligerent special ed 6th graders, while your entire understanding of reality and space/time is being torn asunder around you is truly an initiation into "adulthood" by means of trial by fire. i have never wanted to punch an eleven-year-old special needs child so much in my entire life.

that first experience of death, trying to understand the definitiveness, the finalness, the never-again-ness, changed me. it ripped the fabric of logic and reason, made my persistent daily wants and needs and desires seem cruel, selfish, terrible. i disgusted myself, felt disgusted at other people, at my/our insistence on living. my hunger pangs, my exhaustion, my cravings for warmth or kindness or whatever were just constant reminders of my own body's persistent fight to stay alive, to feed itself, to rest, to recover. all this pained and aggravated me, since it was also a reminder that these were things my uncle once did, and now won't.

the day after i heard the news, i remember, i emerged from my dark room, where i'd spent the majority of the day [which makes me think the news might have occurred closer to a weekend, or that i was still doing this - violently weeping - several days after the fact] on my bed in a fetal position, my body pinched in on itself in a full-body sob, weeping uncontrollably and relentlessly, and walked outside to get some fresh air (again, the body's urge to do what it needs to survive; in this case, getting some air and sunlight and resuming an upright, healthy posture). the sight of seagulls flying above the palm trees overhead, the sun shining in an almost cloudless sky, the onslaught of terrifying LA rush-hour traffic - all seemed to be terrible, disrespectful, indignant external reminders that life goes on; this day is, in all other respects, just like any other.

---

i have been reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, a birthday gift from my brother this past year. i don't remember how i came to hear about this book, but one day at work i was reading about different psychological phenomena, and "magical thinking" was mentioned, and the book's premise interested me, and since i've spent some part of the last year reading "award-winning" books, i asked for it for christmas. it has been... an informative book. well-researched and well-written, definitely, and interesting, although i hesitate to say "pleasurable," since of all the effects it has had on me, it's probably inspired an even deeper and more paranoid ideation with death, the "act" of dying, and living.

one of the ideas from Didion's book that's really stuck is the idea that the dying person can foretell their death, even in cases accidental or sudden. "Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left." this is, in some ways, a comfort, especially to those who have lost a loved one in tragic accidents, to know that perhaps they knew their time was coming. but, in my case, it's been a terrible fear-enhancer. suddenly, things my parents or friends do, like tell me they love me in an exceptional way, or giving me an important document, seem like portents of doom. and i know that's a terrible thing, like, the prime example of letting fear of death control your life and thoughts. i know it is the mark of a coward to live in constant fear of death, but, here i am. and what to do?

naturally, the thing to do is to prepare. this constant, unebbing thought that "we all know when our time has come" has, of course, come to make me think that perhaps i am about to die. (and even as i write this, i wonder to myself, will typing it make it even more true? will uttering this aloud make it come true, or stave it off?) does the fact that i persist on this notion indicate that i am nearing death, that this book and this idea, given to me so recently, is relevant for a reason, that reason being that something terrible is about to happen? i can't help wondering these things, even though i know it makes me crazy.

last month, my partner Ben lost his younger brother Andrew in a terrible accident. he had been living abroad for nearly 2 years, travelling and teaching in China and Taiwan. he was on a ten-day bike journey around the island of Taiwan, during his 2-week Chinese New Year holiday, when he was struck by an old man driving a van. Andrew died. (typing that still hurts, because it hasn't yet felt real. typing that feels like betrayal, like i've given up hope Andrew can still come back, like i've turned my back on him because i've accepted this reality, even though my mind and heart (and Andrew) live now in a reality separate from what that sentence means). in the days and weeks following, friends and family who knew Andrew have been grappling to understand what happened. friends received Christmas cards from him just days after the accident. i looked back on our exchanges, scrutinized emails, trying to examine them for clues that Andrew, in some way, knew. Andrew and i spoke via email just days before it happened, and i talked to him about visiting Taiwan in the summer, with Ben, and he replied that he was so excited for us to come, he couldn't wait to show us around. the day before the accident, i wanted to post something on his Facebook, commenting on one of his pictures, saying something about how he looked so much like his dad. i didn't, i hesitated and then decided not to, because i wasn't sure how he'd respond or take the comment. i wonder now, if i'd posted it, if he would have paused in the morning to read and respond, and would have thus been a minute or two behind on the road when the van swerved off and hit him where he was, without the comment.

Andrew kept a bucket list, or as he called it, a "to-do list." he didn't want to be an old man looking back at his life with regret. did he know? even if his to-live list wasn't a premonition, he understood that life is precious and fragile and not to be wasted - a profoundly inspiring wisdom borne from an acknowledgment of death; Andrew knew how to live. this is what i want for myself and for my fear of death, a greater appreciation and predilection for living.

Andrew's bucket list was a physical list he checked off and added to. i love that, i love that there are documents that speak to his life and his goals. now that we've lost Andrew (where did you go?) these documents - to-do-lists, journals, emails, blog posts, Facebook - are what we have left, what we can return to. this is my document.*

these days, we are all susceptible to getting lost in the daily grind, on focusing on ends rather than means, and thinking about a distant future rather than enjoying the present. i think living in the constant shadow of death can mean reclaiming life, and i intend to do that.


*i wrote previously about maintaining an e-life thru internet documents here, on my very first blog.

spunk (n), definition:

how fuckin' fun and cute is Robyn in this? i think it's even better than the music video because girl can sing.



and when she does her somersault and tries to slide her feet up on the floor but can't because she's wearing gigantic rubber soles? my heart melted a little bit for her. *girl crush*

alone in the wilderness

i'm tired of all the sturm und drang associated with valentine's day. suddenly it becomes especially important to be with someone and examine your life in the context of being successfully paired off. is it ok for some people to want to be alone? what if that is what makes them happy? i think that's ok, and it's not just because i'm feeling particularly alone today.

this is probably not the best place for these kinds of thoughts, since it's so public and all, but that's also why it's perfect. aren't we all just lonely strangers screaming out into the dark to be comforted by our own echoes?

i think my partner/fiance/best friend/confidant and i have ... separated? broken up? had a falling out? what is the right phrase to use? "separated" doesn't quite make sense, since we've been apart (living on two coasts) for so long. "broken up" sounds stupid and juvenile (and thus, i realize, perfect), and "a falling out" doesn't seem to recognize the gravity of the situation. it's more than just a silly quarrel, it seems, even though that's how it started (how did it start? i can't trace the beginning, maybe it was all the way in the beginning), and now i feel seismically jolted out of what feels like the imagined reality of the last 5 years.

5 years is not a long time, but also a very long time. 5 years is 20% of my life, long enough to preserve vestiges of college, to encompass my first two "real-life' jobs, to contextualize my last 3 moves, to transition me from feeling young and indomitable and awesome to feeling old, insecure, scared and bewildered. 5 years is long enough to change what you believed about life, love, your future, goals, and the meaning of life. it's long enough to cultivate a fragile trust in another person, to believe that you really found an extension of yourself in a stranger, to start to think of life in the context of a dependable togetherness.

here is how crazy love is: you meet someone, a complete and utter stranger, and you actually tell them all the deep, dark, most terrible secrets you'd never even had the courage to utter aloud to yourself. you dance like an idiot in your underwear. you talk about your grossest, most humiliating bodily (mal)functions. you can honestly talk for the first time about your childhood, your parents, your fears and desires. you learn to cook better, you travel, you stay up late and sleep in, you go grocery shopping, you throw dinner parties, you protest in the streets, you dance, you sing karaoke badly. you devour life. you do things you would never have imagined doing, and you do silly inane things and find yourself enjoying them with a new sense of thrill. you feel yourself growing in ways you never thought possible, and the whole time, in total naked view of another person, a stranger.

so how do you reconcile yourself with losing something like that? it doesn't make much sense, do you grieve? blame yourself? get angry and upset at the other person for wasting your best years and treating you so cruelly in the final moments? maybe? or maybe you feel nothing at all, and this is what surprises you most. everything becomes a sort of dullness. the sharp sting of sadness, the bite of sudden loneliness, the burn of anger and the urge to fight, these were things that made sense before but now you can't even seem to muster them. it's like your heart burned so brightly and is now just burnt out. and it may burn that way again, but always in a lesser way. Said the Gramophone said it best when they wrote:

Every time you stop loving someone, your heart loses some of its blush. It vanishes. It's cancelled. & you wonder which of your feelings you'll no longer have the capacity to feel again. How much less am I, today, than I was yesterday? [from here]

alight on a rooftop with me, and let's nestle together and cast our gaze on the stars

lyrics for Andrew Bird's "Night Sky" (transcribed by me, as i listened to the mp3 below)

chorus:
sound is a wave, like a wave on the ocean
plays the ocean like a violin
pushing and pulling from shore to shore
biggest melody you never heard before

if i were the night sky (x2)
here's my lullaby
lullaby to the eve bye
if i were the night sky

verse 1:
what if we hadn't been born at the same time
what if you were 75 and i were 9
and i come visit you
bring you cookies in an old folks' home
would you be there alone?
when the late summer lightning fires off in your arms
will i remember to breathe?
you know i never will
if i could convince you that i mean you no harm
just wanna show you how not to need (/leave?)

what if i were the night sky?
here's my lullaby
lullaby to the eve bye
if i were the night

verse 2:
what if we hadn't been each other at the same time?
would you tell me all the stories from when you're young and in your prime
will i rock you to sleep
would you tell me all the secrets you don't need to keep
would i still miss you?
oh would you then
had been mine

chorus

[download mp3]

This American Life examines a Chinese life on the assembly line

EVERYONE NEEDS TO STOP WHAT THEY'RE DOING AND READ/LISTEN TO THIS RIGHT NOW.

what does it mean for something, everything to be “made in china?”

fascinating/horrifying revelations of the factories and working conditions in china that make all the shit you take for granted.

Shenzhen is a city without history. The people who live there will tell you that, because 31 years ago Shenzhen was a small town. It had little reed huts, little reed walkways between the huts. The men would fish in the late afternoon. I hear it was lovely. Today Shenzhen is a city of 14 million people. It is larger than New York City. Depending on how you count it, it's the third largest city in all of China. It is the place where almost all of your crap comes from.

And the most amazing thing is, almost no one in America knows its name. Isn't that remarkable that there's a city where almost all of our crap comes from, and no one knows its name? I mean, we think we do know where our crap comes from. We're not ignorant. We think our crap comes from China, right? Kind of a generalized way. China.

But it doesn't come from China. It comes from Shenzhen. It's a city. It's a place.

Shenzhen looks like Blade Runner threw up on itself. LEDs, neon, and 15-story-high video walls covered in ugly Chinese advertising. It's everything they promised us the future would be.

[...]31 years ago, when Deng Xiaoping carved this area off from the rest of China with a big red pen, he said, this will be the special economic zone. And he made a deal with the corporations. He said listen, use our people. Do whatever you want to our people. Just give us a modern China. And the corporations took that deal, and they squeezed and they squeezed. And what they got was the Shenzhen we find today.

i find it important to emphasize, that my absolute horror and disgust in reading this is less directed at the Chinese government and the Chinese leaders or even at the Chinese corporate heads who allow this condone this sick, sick operation (though, of course, they are fault here as well). what horrifies me and disgusts me most is actually the fact that American people are totally ok with/ ignorant of / willfully ignorant about it. we condone this kind of human rights abuse, because we want our crap to be cheaper, and we always want more of it.

think about how amazingly, completely backwards and effed up this is:

As a creature of the First World, I expect a factory making complex electronics will have the sound of machinery, but in a place where the cost of labor is effectively zero, anything that can be made by hand is made by hand. No matter how complex your electronics are, they are assembled by thousands and thousands of tiny little fingers working in concert. And in those vast spaces, the only sound is the sound of bodies in constant, unending motion.

modern technology has advanced to such a degree that we (Americans) assume most things  everything is made by machines, even the relatively simpler things that used to be made by hand, like sweaters, and books, even our food. most people probably think we live in the mechanized future, where handcrafted things are a luxury, a long-lost artifact of history and ancient cultures and the pioneers. so in an age of inconceivably advanced technology, where the machines get smaller and more complex and powerful year after year, you would expect these machines to also be borne from the labor and precision of machines. but, in fact, Mr. Disney tells us, they are assembled by hand, millions of precise hands, working repetitively in an unending mechanical whir. and, in fact, these millions of tiny hands are actually cheaper and more expendable than those big machines.

what makes that such a perverse and deplorable realization is compounded by the fact that those big expensive machines are what put people in America out of work. and here is where i get really angry: in America, where we have labor laws and unions and it's illegal to pay your workers nothing and have them work endless days, the big corporations figured it's actually cheaper and better for business to bring in those big machines. that's what happened in the coal industry, and the automobile industry, and many other industries: human labor got replaced with non-stop, wageless, liability-free machines. other corporations, who couldn't use machines (such as computer manufacturers, i guess), shipped the jobs overseas, to China and India, where they could get human hands to build their products and still get paid next to nothing.

and the really terrible thing is, that China's and India's wages keep dropping year after year, to "stay competitive" with one another in the international market for jobs. so you see, this is a compounding problem that grows worse year after year, with no foreseeable end, because the trend in dropping prices of tech products comes at the price of workers' wages and working conditions.

but, slave labor does not necessarily have to exist in order for these markets to exist. if American companies, such as Apple, commit to fair labor practices (as Apple just did, in joining the FLA), they set the standard for business practices around the world. if American companies demand ethical practices from their suppliers and partners, businesses and employers around the world will change to meet the demand. American companies and American consumers need to demand and expect better.

the dangerous cunning of internet scams

over the holidays, i was at home in kentucky eating lunch with my family, when we got a phone call. my brother, being the most spry of us at the table, jumped up and answered the phone. my brother, also being the most patient/naive of us at the table, listened to the automated message long enough to hear that whoever just called us had put us on hold, to wait for "the next available agent." my mom immediately grabbed the phone from him and hung up. everyone at the table chided him, "when you get calls from telemarketers, just hang up!"

but, this was one of several similar calls we'd gotten this week. at another point during the holidays, we got a call from "American Express" which i thought was a telemarketing call, so i hung up, but then i remembered that credit card companies sometimes make courtesy calls when strange or suspicious spending occurs on a credit card (i'm grateful to my credit card EVERY single time this happens, even the one time it was for $70 of groceries at Safeway). so, it being the holidays, i had a twinge of concern in the back of my mind and asked if my parents had checked their credit card activity lately. my mom, being a somewhat paranoid and worrisome person, immediately checked her wallet and my dad's wallet and freaked out that one of their AmEx cards was missing. she called American Express back to talk to someone to see if something suspicious had happened on their card because one was missing. 10 minutes later, we found the card (at the bottom of a purse or briefcase) and AmEx informed us they hadn't made a call to us in the last half hour.

but, because of this earlier incident, in which a potential telemarketing scam could have also been a potential credit-related courtesy call, my mom's curiosity was more piqued than it would otherwise be, and she called the-place-that-put-us-on-hold back and asked them who they were, why they called us, and if it was such an important matter, why they put us on hold. the person on the line then continued to inform her that i owed $400+ in debt to a hospital in LA for a visit occurring nearly 2 years ago. my mom was incredulous at first, then angry, argumentative, and lastly, she asked me if i knew anything about this. i thought it was preposterous, i had a string of freak medical emergencies about 2 years ago for a work-related health injury, but i had paid all my medical bills up front, out of pocket. i also had two different sets of insurance, my own medical insurance and workers' comp. so to have an outstanding debt of this size from over two years ago, and not hear anything about it until now, seemed wildly suspicious. worse, the man on the phone threatened that the issue had to be resolved TODAY.

luckily, my mom was in a hurry to go to yoga and told him he'd have to wait, and then just hung up. we didn't hear from them again. until a week later. they sent a letter to my house, which i didn't read or see because i wasn't home when my mom got it, but it freaked her out. from what i can tell though, from her reading it to me on skype, is that there are no details regarding the visit, what services or procedures incurred the debt, or even who the doctor(s) was/were that i saw. the letter said i had 30 days to write back to dispute it, otherwise they would assume i acknowledge a debt was owed and they would pursue it.

well, this afternoon, while i was sitting in the sun enjoying a post-lunch break with some reading, i received another call. again, the man on the phone was insistent that i needed to resolve the issue today. i told him, firmly, that i would not be doing ANYTHING today, i would not admit debt, would not resolve to pay them, would not speak to them further, until i obtained written documentation from them and the hospital with more details about the supposed outstanding bills and until they could tell me specifically where the charges were coming from. they couldn't even tell me what date the visit(s) occurred. the man on the phone said he wasn't a doctor and could not provide that information. i asked to speak to his manager, was put on hold for 10 minutes, and then i hung up because i thought it was ridiculous. they called me back another ten minutes later, but left no messages when i didn't answer.

this angers me so much because what the man on the phone is telling me is that the hospital i saw in LA "sold" my and others' medical files and bills to the collection agency he represents. isn't this a violation of HIPAA and patient confidentiality acts? if some third party company does in fact have access to my information (such as address, phone number) and was sold that information, i am pretty sure i have firm grounds to sue. 

well, i looked up their number online and found that others had received similar (unwarranted) phone calls and had filed complaints, indicating some suspicious, scammy behavior. i also called my insurance and workers comp representatives right away, and received notice from them that what this company is doing is ILLEGAL. according to my workers comp agent, discussions of debt or bills directly with patients (at least as it pertains to workers comp cases) is illegal, they should always go directly to insurance first. also, i should have received fair warning of this, even if i did not pay something, rather than hearing about it suddenly two years later.

my biggest problem with this is the predatory nature in which these kinds of calls are being placed. without having to do more than mention "debt" "collection" "credit report" in one sentence, they made my parents draw their own conclusions with a lack of evidence or data and had them fearing for their financial security. they immediately feared for their ruined credit scores, having all their assets seized, legal troubles that could easily be disappeared with a quick $400 payoff. this is the scary nature of scams these days: scammers can easily get you to leap to conclusions and be under their thumb, because the economy is so scary right now, everyone's trying to stay out of debt, and everyday people feel powerless and ill-prepared to challenge even the most dubious of financial crises or disputes. my parents thoughts immediately turned to "it will be easier to pay this now while it's still early than to try to delay it and incur litigation fees or penalties." but where's the proof? also, resolving a financial dispute over the phone immediately seems very strange to me.

furthermore, scams of this nature erode our sense of security and foster paranoia - how can we distinguish between a real scam and a legitimate call from my credit card or hospital? how will i know when i actually owe money and when i'm being taken for a ride? (answer: always keep really detailed and careful records of all your medical-related bills and large purchases, always make sure you pay on time - and keep records of debt repayment - and keep a rolodex of people at each agency or organization you use services from and their customer service lines. NEVER take anyone's word for it that you owe money and didn't know about it).

if you are similarly the victim of dubious medical bill-related calls, here is what you should do: tell them they should contact your insurance (but DO NOT provide any insurance phone numbers or plan data) and if they contact you further tell them their actions are illegal and you will report them to an accountability agency. then see if you can have their numbers blocked from your phone.

the point of this post is: in today's increasingly confusing and difficult to navigate digital world, information and misinformation are equally abundant and equally dangerous. scammers know that a lot of people are paranoid right now about issues related to money, and many don't know how to differentiate between legitimate companies and scams (for example: my dad opened a spam email from "Amazon" telling him my brother had purchased a $500 laptop computer, and then forwarded it to my whole family asking who bought the computer, before i told him to delete it immediately and not click any of the links because it was spam. you don't see a lot of "Nigerian prince" emails any more, all the spam is masked as notifications from companies you actually use - Viagara and Rolex being perhaps exceptions to the rule).

all that glitters is gold

ever since a friend told me about golden birthdays, when we were probably 7 or 8 years old, i've been sorta latently anticipating it, slowly building it into this Moment that would like, validate my life. like, i kept telling myself by the time of my 26th birthday, my golden birthday, that i will have figured my life out.

because 26, to a 7 or 8-year-old, seemed so old. and i remember wondering at the time what kind of person i would be in what seemed like such a distant future (2011 sounded futuristic in the early 90s). would i be married? would i have kids by then? what would i be doing? how tall would i be? would i still have the same friends and enjoy the same books, where would i live? would i finally have pets by the age of 26?

as a kid, i figured by the time i became a 26-year-old, by the time of my golden birthday, i would have my shit figured out. i would have grown out of insecurities and achieved some dreams of mine, that surely by 26, life would be a little less rocky, i'd be a little more sure of myself, i'd be, you know, an adult.

another thing: the reason, i think, i put so much emphasis on my golden birthday as a kid was because earlier in my childhood, one of my teachers at the Montessori school told our entire class during circle time about the Hale-Bopp comet. apparently, this amazing astronomical event, this once-in-a-lifetime event, had just occurred the previous night and i had totally missed it. what was i doing!? this knowledge, that i would be dead the next time Hale-Bopp passed into visibility, was just too tragic and agonizing for me to handle as a small child. i think i cried thinking about myself dead in the ground while a magnificent meteor passed overhead and me without the eyes to see it, and then maybe possibly i threw up a little on the inside. henceforth i took to staring a lot at the sun, even though my teachers and parents told me to look away, and stood outside once in the winter with my dad observing a lunar eclipse - i had just taken a shower and it was so cold outside that my hair froze stiff in a rolled bun on top of my head.

basically, my golden birthday was my personal Hale-Bopp comet. i knew i was only going to get one chance at this in my lifetime, and i'd better get it right.

but you know what? i thought what i wanted on my birthday was luxurious, extravagant celebrations, a gilded cake, to be swaddled in gold lurex and lame and parade around like a Macy's day float. but what it turned out i needed most was to spend my birthday with my family and allow myself to be reminded how wonderful small moments can feel and how these moments can erase all the uncertainty i have about my life. every little day is a Hale-Bopp, you know? and i'd rather live my life appreciating the beauty of a million everyday stars than lament forever one shooting star.

cubicle chronicles

i have started drawing at my desk as a way of coping with the feelings of horrible boredom and waste of my life's potential that comes with my job. it is also an excellent way of managing my anger and frustration and staving off my daily existential crises.

i like to "free draw," that is, i like to make random lines on a page and turn those into drawings. i like to think of it as "liberating" the drawings on the page. all this to say, i definitely don't consider myself a serious artist, and i don't know what i'm doing.

but the other day, i was drawing, and the drawing turned out to look a little/ a lot like me.

i gave her a mean stare (because this is how my face probably looks most of the time at work), combat boots and nunchucks, so she'd be tough and not stand crap from anybody (because most of the time at work i feel silenced and powerless). 

and then i decided to keep going with it, and i started making these comics. i put her in situations that bother me at work, like when people at the cubicle next to mine start clipping their nails at their desk, or when my supervisor who smokes and drinks lots of coffee decides to breathe into my face. soon i'll have her confronting the people at work who don't recycle, who talk really loud on their phones, who don't clean up the microwave. it's been surprisingly therapeutic. these are the drawings i've done so far (click to enlarge):

The Nail-Clipper

Coffee-Cigarette Breath

an important mystery has been solved!!!

over a month ago, i posted this tweet:

the foot in question greatly disturbed me, to an alarming degree; it created in me some nagging, paranoid fear of an expanding unknown natural world, a cruel, heartless world in which creepy-looking, unidentifiable feet are violently severed from their bodies and horrifically displayed in my work parking lot.

here is a crappy photo of a crappy cell phone photo of the aforementioned foot (i haven't figured out how to download photos off my cell yet, sorry). the poor quality of the photo greatly dilutes the creepiness of the foot; you cannot see, for instance, the bleached bone protruding from the scaly green flesh, the torn tendons, the little curvy nails, sharp and pointy at the ends of the toe pads. 

but, just as i'd forgotten about the foot, Ben and i went to Golden Gate Park and spent an afternoon hiking and walking around Stow Lake. there, by the water, to my great surprise, disgust and horror, i saw the feet again, this time walking towards me!

all around us, these strange birds i had never before seen. they were a weird cross between a chicken, a duck, and a lizard. they had small, fat black bodies, with weak-looking wings, white beaks, red eyes. and those feet! they looked like a strange chimera of chicken and an iguana. and they enjoyed coming close to us! we'd never seen birds like these before, and we were terrified.

well, tonight, i learned what they are! i found this book online, The Birds of Golden Gate Park, by Mailliard:

i had to look pretty hard, but finally, towards the end of the water fowl section, this description:

"Can be confused with no other Park bird"

"chicken-like"

"feet lobed, greenish"

yep, that's the bird! what we saw was a Coot, or mud-hen. also, that solves the mystery of the foot i saw in the parking lot of my work... but not how it got there. my guess, after watching the seagulls get hostile with the coots, is that maybe a seagull attacked one, ripped off its foot, and then carried the foot, in its beak, further inland, dropping it in the parking lot near my car. *shudders* nature can be strange.

further question: is this where the phrase "ya old coot!" comes from?

i mean, really, can anyone look at this and honestly tell me they are not creeped out!!?

aaaggggghhh the toes!

Black Friday is a disturbing reflection on our society, yes, but have you seen the Justin Bieber fragrance ads?

i hope all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving (and for those who don't celebrate, i hope you had a peaceful Day of Mourning). i am personally extremely thankful for my family and friends and my physical health and well-being and clarity of mind. i'm especially grateful for the latter, as the day of giving thanks quickly gives way to the day of rabidly consuming everything in our paths.

Black Friday, truth be told, scares me shitless. never do i have less understanding or compassion for humanity than when i think of hoards of people trampling and ambushing each other in the malls for the sake of bargains and/or sport. it really is terrifying.

when people decide to camp out in a public square or park in the name of democracy, choose to care for each other, educate one another, engage in dialog, and live cooperatively, it is deemed a "health and/or safety hazard" and immediately pepper-sprayed or dismantled or demonized. but, when people choose to forgo family dinner to camp out in front of big box superstores the night before things go on mega sale, it's understandable? that makes no sense to me whatsoever.

on to other salient points: have any of you seen the Justin Bieber fragrance ads? i saw one for the first time a few months ago, when i was shopping for sweaters at the mall. 

what i simultaneously love and am repulsed by, is the oh-so transparent marketing scheme. the fragrance, obviously marketed to young teenage/tween-age girls of Bieber Nation, is being sold by the eponymous little pop tart Justin Bieber, who will make mega, un-godly bucks this holiday season peddling and inflicting this sugary sweet hormone juice on our unsuspecting populace.

what i love/hate about it is that there's no smidgen of pretense: Justin Bieber and his handlers/marketing machine know where the money is. of course they're not going to bother making a fragrance or aftershave for mini-dudes. the mondo money is with the itty-bitty ladies. so, of course, when i saw this ad for the first time at the mall, my initial thought was "hm, how weird, Justin Bieber made a fragrance for girls?" but of course he did!

and not only will it sell, it will sell like hot cakes (hot cakes with Justin Bieber's face on them, that then want to fuck you! those kinds of hot cakes!) because this is the precise thought process that goes into buying a bottle of Bieber's lady scent (so hilariously packaged in a bright pink blossoming flower):

it is not, as it would be with other celebrities who have fragrances (see: Britney, Gwen Stefani, J.Lo) "i want to smell like Bieber."

it is, "this is what i want to smell like if i want to be fucked by Bieber."*

and that is why i feel particularly depressed on this eve of Black Friday.


*additional thoughts: does the perfume actually smell like Bieber? does the perfume ostensibly attract Bieber to its wearer because he likes the smell of himself? or because it's the smell of money?