I’d mentioned how my parents recently sent a box filled with beauty products from Japan. The box included a white plastic package containing cotton pads made for facial cleansing, toning or removing makeup (I always get the round ones, so I’ll call them “cotton rounds” henceforth.) Great timing! I thought, since I was almost out of the last ones I’d purchased in France. I like to use cotton rounds with Sonia Kashuk Eye Makeup Remover, my favorite product for removing eye makeup.
The package was covered in Kanji writing. I know nothing about Kanji and can’t read it at all, but I knew what was inside the package, because Mom had talked about how its contents were beloved by many Japanese women. “They’re really thin cotton,” she’d said. I could understand how “really thin” would be an ideal feature in a cotton round, as the skin around the eye area is very delicate, and the more gently you apply anything to that area, the better. Leave it to the Japanese to modify something as simple as cotton rounds, I thought. In general, anything they do with products for the face is amazing.
The Kanji-covered package sat on the bathroom counter for a while, and I eventually opened it and filled up the container I use to store cotton rounds.
The first thing I noticed was that they were square, rather than round. No big deal! I like cotton squares just fine.
The second thing I noticed was that they were individually wrapped. Now that’s strange, I thought… but I didn’t dwell on it, because they were Japanese. After a while, you don’t think twice about the unusual things the Japanese do with their products. There’s a picture of a horse on the “washing form” facial cleanser, and the cleanser itself is an opaque, dark metallic gunmetal gray cream that looks like a beautiful automotive paint, so why would I take special note of these cotton squares being individually wrapped?
When I went to use one, the mystery that I didn’t know was a mystery was solved.
I had my bottle of eye makeup remover ready to go. I opened the cotton square. And I found that it had to be unfolded.
“Well this is weird,” I said to Callaghan, who was in the next room. “It looks like a… wait…”
Realization started to set in. I turned it over, saw the strip, and yanked it off.
“…a pantyliner!!”
I bent over laughing and stuck my arm through the bathroom doorway so Callaghan could see the pantyliner dangling from my hand, attached to my palm by its sticky adhesive backing.
After a few moments of boisterous hilarity, we calmed down, and I felt pretty stupid. Looking at them again, I couldn’t believe I didn’t suspect that they were pantyliners all along. Those Japanese! They’re so quirkily innovative, once I had it in my mind that these were cotton pads for the face (which I guess I’d just assumed since everything else in the box was for the face), I didn’t question the design… it didn’t occur to me that they might be for the vagina even when I saw that they were individually wrapped squares.
I realized that ever since I decided to post here on Tuesdays and Fridays, I’ve been posting on Wednesdays and Fridays… this is the fifth Wednesday in a row. Not a Tuesday in sight on the recent calendar. Somehow, despite my efforts for Tuesday, Wednesday is just when it happens. Maybe I’ll try to start posting on Mondays, as well, to make it a 3x/week affair.
Saturday evening, we went downtown to meet a friend at Champion’s, and he took us for a stroll onto Rainey Street in pursuit of some local flavor. I kept expecting to find Casey Moore’s cozying up to the old houses lining the street. I wonder when the look-out in the back of my mind will stop automatically using my old Phoenix metro stomping grounds as a cultural point of reference for Austin? Austin is a very unique place with a distinct character of its own, but without wanting to, I’m finding Arizona corollaries for many places we encounter here, as well as many of the same businesses. Some of the Austin neighborhoods appear to have twins in The Valley (Greater Phoenix Metro Area), especially around Arizona State University.
That brings me to this one thing about Austin: there are no major professional sports teams. This is not a source of distress, mind you… it’s just different from what I’m used to. The Greater Phoenix Metro Area has the Suns (NBA basketball), the Diamondbacks (MLB baseball), the Cardinals (NFL football) and the Coyotes (NHL ice hockey). The Ironman Arizona Triathlon is there, and there’s pro fighting. Golf is also big in The Valley of the Sun; the WM Phoenix Open is the largest professional golf tournament on the PGA TOUR. The Super Bowl was hosted at Sun Devil Stadium in 1996 (Cowboys vs. Steelers). There are also two college bowl games hosted in the Phoenix metro area (the Fiesta Bowl and the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl), and MLB Spring Training takes place there annually. Phoenix is a huge sports town by anyone’s standards.
Here, the major professional sports situation is this: San Antonio’s 1.5 hours away, which actually isn’t that far… it’s the home of the Spurs (NBA basketball). Drive to Houston (3 hours), and there are the Rockets (NBA basketball). And Dallas – 4.5 hours away – has the Mavericks (NBA basketball), the Cowboys (NFL football) and the Dallas Stars (NHL ice hockey). Also in the Dallas area, you’ve got the Texas Rangers (MLB baseball). So the teams are here in Texas, for sure. Just not here in Austin, which is perhaps a good thing, because it’s already bad enough that we’re tempted by live music opportunities every which way we turn.
It’s not like I went running off to sporting events all the time when I lived in Arizona. I didn’t. But I do enjoy the energy of a sports town, and there was the occasional game or boxing bout.
The most memorable one was on May 9, 1993; it was Game 5 of the Suns vs. Lakers NBA Western Conference play-offs. That was some basketball! The Lakers were in the house, and my boyfriend and I decided to go at the very last minute. We went downtown, bought tickets from a scalper and folded ourselves into the madness, because isn’t that what any sane college student would do when she has a final exam the next morning? I had my priorities straight. There were memories to be made. We had a feeling that the game would be phenomenal, and holy crap, our instincts did not fail us. About 500 mini heart attacks later (or maybe it was just one big long heart attack – yep, pretty sure I’m remembering that correctly), the Suns won 112-104 in an astounding over-time upset. That win constituted the biggest upset I’ve ever seen live, in person. Actually, it may have been the biggest upset I’ve ever seen, period.
I was there!
That was Jerry Colangelo’s Suns, with the likes of Charles Barkley; Dan Majerle; Cedric Ceballos; Danny Ainge; Kevin Johnson; Oliver Miller and Mark West on the roster. Remember that team, Suns fans? I was unabashedly obsessed. I was working part-time as a barista and found myself ridiculously flustered early one Saturday morning when coach Paul Westphal came in an ordered a latte. I don’t think I breathed at all while I was making his drink, and I was embarrassed because I thought he could see my hands shaking. At least it wasn’t KJ standing there before me. I would have passed out.
At any rate, I’m sure I’ll get to a point where I’m not looking around seeing Phoenix everywhere we go in Austin. We haven’t even been here two months yet. There’s a lot of discovery yet to happen, and we’re really loving it here so far!
Here are some pics from Saturday:
Stopping for a pose with this sculpture on our way to Champion’s on 4th
A casual look at the scene while I was waiting for my Greek salad at the food trucks on Rainey St
I was distracted by the industrial beauty of the view while we were eating
Rainey St hang-out (with live music, of course!)
A building downtown, lit up all gothicky and sweet at night
On the bus the other day, we trundled past the billboard on Lamar that asks, “Can You Name 7 Kinds of Berries?” It’s a fruit ad for summer. There’s one for “5 Kinds of Apples” somewhere, too. I turned to Callaghan to see if he was up to the task.
“Okay… name seven kinds of berries!”
“Halle Berry.”
He didn’t even blink. “Halle Berry” was literally the first thing to pop into his mind when he heard “berries.” But the woman is inhumanly beautiful, so who can blame him?
“Chuck Berry,” he continued, grinning. “Barry White. Barry Manilow…”
“What’s Ronnie James’s nickname?” I cut off his string of berries, even though I was laughing.
“Precious Kitty Baby Boo Boo?”
“WRONG!”
“Wrah-Wrah Boo Boo?”
Where’s the “Boo Boo” part coming from, I wondered. I’ve never used that nickname. And “Wrah-Wrah” is one of his own terms of endearment for The Ronnie James. (Actually, it’s a word in RJ’s vocabulary. It’s Kitty-ese. We’re just imitating him when we say it.)
“It’s ‘Precious Angel Baby Bunny Dragon’,” I reminded him. Duh.
“Oh. Yeah.”
More on that later. It’s a “NOT UNLIKE” kind of thing.
Anyway, I would be remiss in not providing a visual for this post, so here you go….
Halle Berry
Have a luscious (and nutritious) summer weekend, All!
On Saturday night, we went to see Black Sabbath, as in, the British hard rock band that was formed in 1968, the year I was born. As in, yeah, these guys are a bit older now, so can you believe that I actually got to see them perform?
Last month, they released 13, their first studio album in 33 years, and the album took off. After its first week, it sold 155,000 copies and inexplicably ripped its way around the Billboard obstacle course, spiraling up to hit Number One on the charts in the UK, USA and seven other countries. With this accomplishment, Sabbath secured the Number One spot for the first time in history and escorted hard rock/metal done the old-fashioned way back onto the scene. At the concert, we saw many people our age and older, but we picked out all age groups in the massive crowd. The teenagers in the seats in front of us were probably no older than fifteen.
I was beside myself with excitement over this show. It really meant a lot to me.
I’m passionate about many different types of music, including classical, EBM/industrial, (some) rap and (some) country and a smattering of other genres, but since I’m talking about Black Sabbath here, I present the following brief chronology of my history just as a hard rock/metal fan:
(First, let me just say that it’s my parents who rock. They survived the years I skulked around in a Black Sabbath t-shirt and chains while they observed other people’s daughters looking cute and preppy in pink Izod shirts [and who went off to college immediately after high school. I was the only daughter they knew who joined the Army and went to war and did the whole college/grad school thing later. But that’s another story]).
–Sixth grade: I bought Back in Black, AC/DC’s new album. I was 12, and Back in Black was the first album I ever purchased myself, which established hard rock as my first love of all the genres of music. I was taking piano lessons, so I was listening to Chopin waltzes, too, among other things, but I didn’t blast Chopin waltzes. I blasted AC/DC, loudly and frequently. My parents started to wonder what was happening.
–Grades seven and eight: my friends and I fixated on Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Oz and Diary of a Madman.We shed real tears the tragic day Randy Rhodes, Ozzy’s phenomenal guitarist, died in a plane crash. The gloom that blanketed the world of music that day fell heavily upon the halls of Steinbeck Junior High in San Jose, California. Rhodes was a legend, but we felt like we’d lost our brother. I don’t know. We were 13 years old. We were like, “Randy Rhodes is dead? WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO NOW?” It was inconceivable.
–Grades nine-twelve: High school. I listened to ALL the metal out there – and it was a lot, remember… this was the 80’s hair-band era – but AC/DC, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, Van Halen, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath and Ozzy were my favorites in the genre. Also, I spent many a Saturday afternoon listening to Iron Maiden with the guy who worked the bar at Shakey’s Pizza. (David. Funny that I still remember his name!) It was cute. Though we really liked each other, nothing “happened” when we were hanging out – he was a lot older than me – but he got me hooked on Maiden with Killers, and that was it. To this day, Killers is still my favorite Iron Maiden album, and Maiden is still one of my favorite metal bands.
–During and after the Army, Queensrÿche, D.A.D., Faith No More, Vixen, Warlock, Savatage, Megadeath, Slayer, Anthrax and Metallica were some of the bands that joined the crew in my metal music collection. I also really enjoyed guitarist Joe Satriani, and my love for Alice Cooper’s Trash album bordered on obsession.
–Flash forward to 2003, when I discovered Disturbed’s The Sickness while training in Muay Thai at an MMA gym in Arizona. My trainer kept it cranked, and I loved it so much that I had to own it. I bought it and wore it out in my little truck. The significance of this is that The Sickness was the last metal album that I actually purchased until Sabbath released 13 last month. (This is not to say that there weren’t other bands in the interim, because there were. I just didn’t go out and buy any metal CDs between Disturbed in 2003 and Black Sabbath last month.)
What can I say about Saturday’s show?
It was definitely An Experience. The guys did a fantastic job overall. We had a solid good time, and I will never forget it.
It was an incredible feeling just to be there.
Waiting for the show to start. We got there early.
What I really took away from the show was a reinforced crush (maybe not a “crush” so much as some sort of hero-worship thing) on lead guitarist Tony Iommi, who is a God.
Iommi lost two of his fingertips in a factory accident when he was a teenager, but that didn’t stop him from doing what he knew he was born to do. He fashioned some “thimble-like devices” out of a “squeezy bottle” and stuck them on the ends of his amputated digits to extend them, then went on to play guitar for Jethro Tull before co-founding Black Sabbath with Ozzy, Geezer and Bill. They were a bluesy kind of hard rock band at first. From there, they evolved into their signature sound and ultimately grandfathered heavy metal and all of its derivatives. Yes… one of history’s greatest hard rock lead guitar legends has amputated fingertips.
Tony Iommi, lead guitarist and co-founder of Black Sabbath
Quoting from wiki: “Iommi is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential rock guitarists of all time. A prolific riff-maker, he was ranked number 25 in Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of the ‘100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time’.”
Fake fingertips, okay? And I mean, not costly, sophisticated works of custom-made, medically engineereed craftsmanship, either. We’re talking homemade fake fingertips that he stores in what appears to be an old Altoids tin:
The man is tireless, in possession of a relentless drive, an admirable work ethic. He’s constantly busy. The solo album he released in 2000, called, simply, Iommi, is a veritable piece of musical collaborative genius and one of my all-time favorite metal CDs. (I introduced it to Callaghan, and it’s now one of his favorites, too.)
Yet young at 64, Iommi’s now working to beat down lymphoma. Blood cancer. Where was he on Saturday night? Here in Austin, on stage, rocking his ass off. His performance was spectacular. I sat back in my seat and closed my eyes, listening to his solos in the dark with people around us screaming, and thought, Wow. That’s Tony Iommi on that stage down there!! I never thought I’d get to hear him play live.
You know, Ronnie James Dio, who took over Sabbath’s lead vox after Ozzy’s departure in 1979, died of cancer in 2010. (Why yes, we did name our kitty Ronnie James after him!)
Ronnie James with my headphones on the left. Ronnie James Dio with his mic on the right. NOT UNLIKE.
“It’s only now, since his passing, that people are coming out saying how great he was,” Iommi says of Dio in a “good-bye message” he videotaped in 2011.
(video cuts off at 1:48)
Iommi received his own cancer diagnosis within a year of this interview, in early 2012.
News for you, Iommi: YOU are great. YOU ARE THE MAN. You’re looking good and performing like it’s no one’s business, and thank you so much. Thank you for inspiring us with your passion and dedication! Here’s to many more years of showing them all how it’s done!!
Here’s my favorite Black Sabbath song, “Megalomania” (Sabotage, 1975):
And here are a few pics we took before, during and after the concert…
Callaghan, mid-stride
Me, pausing for a snapshot outside of Consuela on Congress
From left: Geezer Butler (bass), Tony Iommi (guitar), Ozzy Osbourne
OZZY
The Texas State Capitol, a gorgeous building. We walked through the grounds to get to the concert and back to our bus on Congress.
Me with Ronnie James as I was writing this. Ronnie James loves him some headphones!
My parents recently went to Hokkaido for Dad’s annual Japan summer golf trip. As usual, shortly after their return, a package arrived for me because Mom went shopping and thoughtfully sent a few things my way. For quite a few years now I’ve been using random Japanese and Korean beauty products from Japan and Hawaii, and they’re amazing. (Not sure whether any of the brands are tested on animals. I know to avoid stuff made in China, but I have no idea as to the others.)
Here are some of the things that arrived last week:
Background: facial gel exfoliator & foaming cleanser (made in Japan); Juicy Drop BB Cream (made in Korea) Foreground: a variety of sheet masks (all made in Korea)
A fun by-product of getting Asian cleansers and creams and such is the Engrish you’re sure to find on the packaging. In case you didn’t know, “Engrish” is the result of humorously botched English translations from some Asian languages; there’s a website that pays homage to it. Product packaging is a fairly reliable supplier of examples, and this blog post right here exemplifies why I would be a terrible beauty blogger: my amusement and enthusiasm in sharing the Engrish on the labels outweigh my interest in telling you about the products, themselves.
Behold:
This is the foaming facial cleanser… “Washing Form” in Engrish.
(Not sure why there’s a picture of a horse on the bottle. Not sure I want to know why, either.)
Now take a look at THIS. I hope you can read it (click photo to enlarge). This is the text on the back of the one sheet mask that’s not an Epielle – it’s the one to the far left in the array photo above, with the woman’s face in the picture:
Contains beauty gredients for skin activity in the sheets! Helps horny clear up! Put a water skin on the face. TAP YOUR FACE FOR BEING ABSORBED COMPLETELY INTO YOUR FACE. Keep it coolly at the case status and use it.
Awesome, right? And, bonus… it really is a lovely product!
We saw three movies over the weekend: Pacific Rim, The Heat and The Conjuring.
Brilliant times were had.
In the existing sea of apocalypse movies, newcomer Pacific Rim does a fair job of defying all of the superlatives in the English language… and that’s okay, because it handily makes up its own as it goes along, relieving me of the burden of description for those who ask. It’s inventive like that. Pacific Rim is such a staunchly self-defining film that I can only recommend that you go watch it for yourselves so you can see what I mean. It’s visual bombast at its finest. It’s one of those movies that manages to inhabit its own cinematic space while stealing from everywhere at the same time. I might be saying this to lazily avoid thinking of the words, but I also might be doing you a huge favor. Go and enjoy yourselves a hearty 131 minutes of campy, cheesy, Godzilla-mated-with-the-Loch Ness Monster-in-the-aftermath-of-a-nuclear-event-and-spawned-meets-Iron Man goodness. Sit back in your seat in the dark and let your eyes gobble up the spectacle that spills out before them. Not since the delightfully awful Tank Girl have I been so gratified at a Good vs. Evil apocalypse fun fest (though Tank Girl is technically post-apocalyptic). Seriously, I’m not a sci-fi fan per se, but I love these movies. They are the exceptions for me. Like Tank Girl,Pacific Rim is a sci-fi action film that I’m going to want to watch over and over again.
Side note… there should be an industry awards category called “Best Use of War-Paint in an Apocalypse Film,” because Mako Mori co-storms into combat wearing red lipstick, and she would get my vote for that award. Red lipstick? It might sound frivolous and potentially reductive, but it isn’t sexy or glamorous so much as bad-ass. (Becca in Tank Girl wore it too, come to think of it.) People from cultures all over the planet have fought battles wearing paint on their faces from the beginning of time, so there’s nothing new going on when Mako shows up wearing her “Yeah I’m a Rookie SO WHAT” shade of red. She just does it with aplomb, and it’s a costume detail that stands out when you consider the character’s personal circumstances. It’s a dash of defiance. (Interestingly, I can’t find a still online showing Mako in that red lip, but I swear I saw it in at least one scene, and Callaghan remembers it, too.)
If the Kaiju monster in Pacific Rim is the new Godzilla, then Ashburn and Mullins in The Heat are the new Beverly Hills Cops (though Ashburn’s actually a Special Agent), as Callaghan aptly remarked as we exited the theater. We went in expecting raunchy fun times ahead, but we honestly didn’t think we’d laugh as much as we did. Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy make quite a pair!
Finally, The Conjuring pulled off the nearly-impossible and thoroughly creeped us out with its sneaky direction, pacing and use of, um, props, shall we call them. (No spoilers here!) I definitely am a fan of the horror genre, and it’s hard to make me jump. The Conjuring did it.
In summary, it was an excellent weekend at the movies, which is an intensely satisfying thing, especially since a weekend at the movies is a rare event for us. Neither a cent nor a second of our time went to waste.
Okay, so I dwelled on Pacific Rim a bit longer than I’d intended. I also wanted to point out one of the hidden hazards of public transportation.
This week, I started having dreams of disconcerting detail. I jotted them down each morning, though I didn’t need to, because I still remember them all… these were not normal dreams, especially not for me, being someone who rarely has dreams she remembers. This week’s dreams have been sharp, multi-faceted and multi-dimensional, layered with thought processes, inner voices and memories.
Monday night: Details such as my dream-self thinking of the specific reason why I’d gone to bed when I did, in my dream, and the chipped paint on the corner of the distressed piece of furniture (a small chest of drawers), and how there were four pieces of white furniture, but two of them were different shades of white than the others, the image of the different shades etched deep on the surface of my memory when I woke up… and also knowing and remembering exactly how it was that I’d come across these pieces, and my thought process regarding the differing shades, looking at all four of them together and comparing the colors, and then the crisp detail of the style of the first piece, and of the others, going clockwise around the room and back, etc…. This kind of detail in a dream can drive you crazy, can’t it?
Tuesday night: The detail of the side of the bed in which I – my dream-self – had slept, and why I’d chosen that side. Dream rationale. The layout of the house, its floor-plan, how the water – the shoreline – wrapped around it; on the left side of the house, the fence closing off the private backyard, and noting how, from that side, you could only access the water from the inside of the house (a private little stretch of the beach), but how on the other side, to the right of the house, the water could be accessed by the public, though it was still a part of the private property. This kind of detail, and also the detail of the reasons why the new homeowner bought that particular house. The detail of the interior scents, as each room had its own, unique fragrance. The detail of the planning and the strategizing that went into the moving (into the house). The weather on the day of the move, and what the person explained to me (regarding my motivations the previous night) when my dream-self woke up in the morning.
Exciting stuff, right?
Wednesday night: How the angles of the clouds looked in the reflection of the rising sun. Yes, the clouds in the sky were angular. Fluffy sharp mirrors, blinding. Remnants of the hours spent dwelling on this. This is insanity. Also, the clouds were conversing with each other, and they were speaking French, each side of the dialogue absorbed into the ether.
Thursday (last night): The dog, a cute mutt, sitting and waiting in glorious detail on the front steps of a particular house in California, the key under the doormat, the doubled food and water bowls in the garage (hot pink bowls nested inside larger electric blue ones), and the heavy smell of rain in the air, a scent of rain so powerful that it wasn’t just intense, it was actually invasive, the dream-scent lingering in my nostrils when I woke up.
What is all of this? I wondered when I opened my eyes this morning, feeling tired after four nights of dreamscape insanity. Where are these dreams coming from?
Then it occurred to me.
On Monday, my doctor at the V.A. gave me Ropinirole for Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS). Ropinirole is a dopamine agonist, which is a compound that works to activate the brain’s dopamine receptors. It’s prescribed to patients with Parkinson’s disease as well as those with RLS. Following my hunch that it must be related to my bizarre dream activity, I looked it up online and read that the drug can cause hallucinations.
What a bottle of crazy dreams looks like. Not as nice as the mug Callaghan got me while we were waiting for the pharmacy pick-up (at the V.A.).
So that explains it, right? Whew! I’m tired. How can anyone feel rested after nights on end dreaming to this ridiculous degree?
Since the drug isn’t really helping, and since I’m not enjoying the level of dream activity it’s provoking, I’m going to stop taking it. There are other options.
There’s a reason why I’ve never been attracted to the notion of experimentation with hallucinogenic recreational drugs – I don’t want to hallucinate. The idea has never appealed to me. I like reality. I like reality in all of its mundane and often depressing, dubious splendor, and I will navigate it with my sanity intact, thank you very much. Give me reality and the dreamless sleep of the dead any day.
Some of you appreciated my impromptu ramble about masks, so let me do another “1-Minute Topical” as a kind of Public Service announcement. Subject: sunscreen. I wear it on my face every day, no matter what. Even if there’s no sun. Even if I’m not leaving the house. It’s the one product about which I’m kind of fanatical; I’ve been using it religiously for decades.
I once read – and I truly believe – that where there’s daylight, there’s a need for sunscreen, because a room filled with daylight is a room filled with damaging UV rays. Yes, your skin can sustain damage under a cloud cover! The term “sun damage” is a misleading one, in my opinion. You don’t need golden beams of sunshine to end up with skin damaged by UV rays. You are not safe if it’s overcast. Know how vampires are affected by daylight even if they’re inside? Same danger.
Skin cancer happening
While I envision horrible things happening to unprotected skin after sunrise, I’m not daunted. It’s easier to put on sunscreen than to hide from the daylight in a coffin until nightfall. I like an SPF of 30, minimum, in a broad-spectrum (that means UVA and UVB) formula. My current anti-UV ray weapon of choice is Eucerin’s Sensitive Skin Everyday Protection Face Lotion, SPF 30, which I’ve used since at least 2009. It’s great. (Side note: Eucerin and its parent company, Beiersdorf, claim to not test on animals, though their names don’t appear on current cruelty-free products lists… so I’m not sure what that’s about. Conflicting information alert.)
Speaking of animals, our boys’ true natures have really emerged since we’ve been here. It’s warm, and there’s carpet, so they’re letting it all hang out, so to speak. I’m not sure about Nounours (he’s harder to read), but Ronnie James is Hawaiian at heart. This is clear from the fact that he enjoys playing air-ukulele while lying on his back. We’ve caught him dancing the hula, also while lying on his back. And he loves to sit on his butt in big armchairs, as people in Hawaii are wont to do. (I know this first-hand. My family is originally from there, so I’ve spent a lot of time there, myself.)
Mmm-hmm… Ronnie James’s got the hang-loose ‘tude of the locals down (not that Al Bundy is Hawaiian), and he was obviously born with it, because his ukulele-playing, hula-dancing self has never been to Hawaii.
Last week, I wrote about disaster movies. Imagine my horrified bemusement, then, when I woke up this morning to realize that #SharkNado struck the airwaves last night, and somehow, we weren’t prepared. The gory aftermath was splattered all over my Twitter.
It started with this:
Which drove me straight into the bowels of the internets. I had to find out all about it.
(This may or may not be related to Callaghan interrupting my train of thought just now to say, “Hey Baby – we need to start making a food stash.” Seriously! He didn’t know that I was writing about this! The sixth sense is a funny thing.)
So, a Sharknado is a storm in which great numbers of some species of shark – I’m assuming Great Whites, from the looks of it – come raining down onto the land from a Category 5 monstrosity broiling over the sea. Meteorologists have no doubt already taken note that the eyes of these storms are special. For one thing, they’re lateral.
Now, I’m not a film critic. But if I were a film critic, and if I had the task of reviewing #SharkNado, the first thing I’d do is call out the omission of Samuel L. Jackson. Samuel L. Jackson was in Jurassic Park, and, of course, Snakes on a Plane, two of my all-time favorite disaster movies. Because this was the one thought pounding through my head as the trailer wound down:
WHERE IS SAMUEL L. JACKSON? A MOVIE CALLED “SHARKNADO” MUST FEATURE SAMUEL L. MOTHERF*CKEN JACKSON!!
A few days ago, I had my ass handed to me by a giant box of kitty litter, and since then, it’s been all about pain management up in here.
It destroys more than just ammonia odors if you hold it carelessly with one hand and bend over and extend yourself at a weird angle while trying to fit it into a specific spot in the back of the closet.
Here are the results of experiments I’ve conducted with the various pharmaceuticals lying around the house:
–Extra-Strength Advil, my preferred over-the-counter pain medication: I took four at a time and experienced no relief. When I checked the expiration date, I found that it was expired. Trash! It was almost empty, anyway, so not much went to waste.
–Extra-Strength Tylenol: I took two at a time and didn’t get any relief from it, either, which isn’t surprising considering that my brain doesn’t get the memos sent by many types of pain-killers. There’s a rumor that natural red-heads tend to be difficult to anesthetize. My biological father has flaming red hair; my natural hair color is reddish (it’s actually really red in the front, where my bangs are). When I woke up from my major abdominal surgery a few years ago (my biological mother had ovarian cancer, so I had a recommended prophylactic bilateral salpingo oophorectomy with hysterectomy, aka the “Everything Out!” women’s surgical special), we discovered that I “don’t have the receptors for morphine,” in the words of one of the nurses. Yep, I woke up feeling everything. My brain does respond to Demerol, though. Lock it up! (No, on second thought, don’t lock it up. Find it. Bring it. Thanks.)
–Aspirin: I tried taking two aspirin yesterday morning, and it also failed to have an effect. So I spent most of the afternoon sleeping.
I see no reason to visit the doctor for this, because I know from vast experience over the course of years that prescription pain-killers like Vicodin, Percoset and several others have very little if any effect on me. They usually do nothing.
The true moral of this story is that I need to get back into working out, so I can keep my lower back strengthened and protected against these kinds of ridiculous mishaps. An MRI from a few years ago revealed a ruptured disc – S1, I think – so I know that I have a weakness in that area already. My favorite way to work out is to train in some kind of martial arts dojo, so I’m going to start researching options around here.
This post was brought to you by Ronnie James and Nounours, who really do appreciate their clean litter every day:
“Mr. Hammond, after careful consideration, I’ve decided not to endorse your park.” (Jurassic Park)
What a great conclusion! What valleys of chaos traversed to reach it! (Hmm, if we were to return to our wilderness home in France, would we find T-Rex and Velociraptor tracks in our wake?) Humans seem to thrive on mayhem. What is it about disaster – especially violent disaster – that mesmerizes us?
“I wonder if robots will ever watch Terminator and figure out that they’re supposed to kill the humans,” Callaghan mused as we were eating our salad the other night. “Maybe it’s the movie that’s going to trigger everything!”
Indeed. When it comes to entertaining ourselves with disaster, it’s not enough for people to kill other people. Nature killing people isn’t enough, either. We need robots to kill us, too.
For me, it’s clowns… call me a traditionalist, or maybe just a person with a weak imagination. For those of you who were wondering, the incessant buzz over World War Z extinguished my preoccupation with zombies. Main-streaming the topic to that over-budgeted extent in a “summer action blockbuster” production finally killed it for me. (I enjoyed Zombieland, but even that was borderline. We did try to watch Warm Bodies recently, but we lost interest not even halfway through, and couldn’t finish it. When it comes to zombie movies, nothing does it for me like Shaun of the Dead.) World War Z might be a great movie, and I might really like it, but its making dethroned zombies from the top of my list of dark, fantastical obsessions. My horror sensibilities are stimulated most effectively in the more obscure tunnels of pop culture. Reading the hundredth little article on the production troubles of WWZ, I turned back to clowns with a perverse nod of respect and restored to them their hold on the freak-out center of my brain.
Clowns scare me because those colorfully diabolical characters embody the insane. Insanity means complexity, and the more complex something is, the more there is to fear. Clowns also tend to be smart, and that makes them terrifyingly unpredictable. Zombies are brainless and therefore completely predictable, engendering fear in the opposite way. (If we use this comparison as a political analogy, which would be the scarier party, then, the Clowns or the Zombies?)
Plus, clowns’ origins can be found in nature. This explains everything:
A while back, we were watching something, and there was a reference to boiling a bunny. Hart of Dixie, perhaps? I think it was Zoe Hart… she was talking to Lavon or someone about Wade – or maybe about George? – saying something along the lines of, “I’m not going to boil his bunny or anything like that.” (I could be misremembering this. Maybe it wasn’t Hart of Dixie at all.) Whatever the case, it made me snicker, and it brought to light an important information deficit. Callaghan didn’t get the reference. It turned out that he didn’t know anything about boiling bunnies, because he’d never seen Fatal Attraction. This threw me off. Callaghan got his American citizenship (he has dual French/American citizenship status) back in 2003, and I don’t know, I guess I’d just assumed that familiarity with Fatal Attraction is some sort of requirement. I mean, shouldn’t it be on the citizenship test? How can you claim to be an American if you don’t know about Glenn Close boiling a bunny? The cliché has become as American as baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet, as the old commercial jingle goes. It’s circa 1980’s American Pop Culture 101 material.
So we watched Fatal Attraction, effectively rectifying the situation. Now, Callaghan has all the background he needs on Glenn Close and boiling bunnies, and he is enriched. His life is complete. What would he do without me?
Being dedicated pop culture afficionados, we ventured downtown Friday night to the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Ritz) for The Big Lebowski Quote-Along, so we could sit in a theater with a bunch of fellow Big Lebowski geeks and shout out the famous lines captioned on the screen (lines we all know by heart, anyway), waving our glow sticks for The Jesus and swinging our oversize blow-up baseball bats to show Larry what happens when you fuck a stranger up the ass. Our waitress brought a White Russian for Callaghan, a tall glass of ice water for me, and a huge metal bowl of the best movie theater popcorn we’ve ever had.
The timing was great, since we’d been overdue for a Big Lebowski fix. Satiated, we emerged from the theater onto the thumping street. 6th Street in Austin at almost 2:00 on a Saturday morning looks like this:
Austin closes off vehicle access to 6th Street during the night on the weekends. The bar-hopping pedestrian party needs all the space it can get.
Even the going-home was entertaining! The bus that took us back to our apartment is dubbed “The Night Owl,” but it should be called “The Party Bus,” because that’s exactly what it is. From 6th Street to our apartment. Direct.
No In-and-Out Burger on the way home for us, though. Nor music by the Eagles. You see what happens, Larry?
We’ve been in Austin for a month now, and we’re finding it to be a pretty kick-ass place. We’re enjoying the process of discovering our new city, and we’re transitioning well, overall.
One thing we’ve done is we’ve freed ourselves from the hassles of ownership as much as possible. We don’t own cell phones, property or vehicles. For phones, we use Magic Jacks (we each have our own). We rent an apartment, and we walk and take the bus to get around. Thus, there are no phone bills, mortgage payments or auto-related expenses in our monthly budget. Not having a car is also economically beneficial in that it eliminates the ability to give in to instant gratification impulses… there’s no jumping into a car on a whim to go do stuff or buy stuff we maybe can’t afford. We have to mindfully plan our excursions and make decisions about what’s a). necessary, and/or b). worth our time and money, and what’s not.
At first, the idea of going wheel-free unnerved me somewhat, just a little bit, as I’d been as accustomed as anyone to the independence of mobility inherent in having a vehicle. My last vehicle – in Arizona – was a little red Chevy truck I’d named “McKenna.” I loved her and considered her to be a member of my family (I can be obsessive like that. And, okay, I’ll admit that I have a thing for Chevy trucks). (No, I did not have a decal of Calvin pissing on the Ford logo.)
In reality, it turns out that being wheel-free is anything but a hardship. It’s actually incredibly liberating, and it makes so much sense for us, it’s almost ridiculous. Our new lifestyle is quickly becoming second nature. We love not having to deal with parking and getting gas. Also, not having a car keeps us active… we walk an average of 10 miles per week, just going around doing our errands.
Our biggest surprise source of glee has been the bus. The bus-line we use the most is the 1M, and it’s fantastic. The 1M picks us up right in front of our apartment, and it cuts south through the Austin metro area, taking us almost everywhere we want to go, from N. Lamar to Guadalupe to Congress and beyond. Mainly, we go downtown. The 1M takes us there directly… no transfers!
The advantages of riding the bus are numerous. For one thing, it means that someone else is driving, so we’re free to stare out the window and make nifty discoveries. (For instance, thanks to the 1M, we discovered the Hyde Park neighborhood, which we love.) We don’t have to pay attention to the road. We can talk, daydream and even take a short power nap. All we have to do is be aware of when to pull the stop bell.
We’ve yet to have a bad bus experience (though I’m sure we will at some point… those are the odds). So far, the bus has always been either on time or early. It’s beautifully air-conditioned, meaning that we get to travel in a comfortably chilled environment, rather than in a hot car with cold air blasting onto our faces. We enjoy the diversity on the bus, all the proverbial walks of life we encounter. The mix of people includes students, yuppies, hipsters, housewives and gangsters; both white and blue-collar employees heading to work, everyone from engineers to artists to construction workers to librarians; homeless, disabled – sometimes with helping dogs – parents and teenagers. There are children and elderly. There are loners and lovers. There are groups of friends. Shades of skin represent the full spectrum of the human rainbow, and it’s beautiful. There are hundreds of stories on a bus at any given time, and with my penchant for people-watching, I love to image what some of those stories might be. A bus ticket scores you free entertainment, too, because human beings can be pretty funny creatures.
The first time we rode the bus, we were sitting there talking when an old guy got on, loudly singing a Mac Davis song:
“Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble/When you’re perfect in every way…”
He walked down the aisle past us, continuing to sing.
“I can’t wait to look in the mirror…”
Then he doubled back and stuck his face in front of Callaghan’s to sing him the final line:
“Cause I get better lookin’ each day!”
Which caused us all to crack up. See? How often do you get to burst out in spontaneous laughter while driving? Instead of cursing out traffic conditions and other peoples’ stupid driving behaviors, we’re being comically serenaded by a happy crazy person. Awesome!
Here, check out the view from our favorite bus:
Heading downtown on the 1M, our go-to bus-line. We jump on the 1M several times a week, at least.
Crossing the Congress Ave bridge
It seems there are as many different architectural styles in Austin as there are types of people. I love them all.
Have I mentioned that Austin’s a pretty friendly place?
Coffee on every corner! Seems that way, anyway.
I posted this on Facebook yesterday: Tuesday afternoon, we were on the bus going downtown and I took this pic of the Texas state capitol not knowing that a badass Texas state senator called Wendy Davis was inside at that very moment, doing badass things. (Like her or not, she is a badass.) This is what history in the making looks like from the outside.
“Stay alert to stay alive” – there’s a reason why the military teaches you to live by these words. You want to be aware when a demon dumpster tries to sneak up behind you and your friends.
Here’s a little tribute to one of my favorite actors. Every time we pass this, I think of Christopher Walken, so finally, I took a picture of it.
say “fromagggge!” or “camembert!!!”
Making a conscious decision to not own a car is the best thing we’ve done, and we’re lucky that we have this option – I know that not everyone does. We, too, might need to get a car one day, for whatever reason, though we sincerely hope that doesn’t happen. So we’re going to enjoy this freedom for as long as we can. It’s just a pleasure to get around without speeding mindlessly through our day. We can see what’s around us when we walk and ride the bus. Plus, we’re no longer contributing to the pollution problem by adding an engine of our own to the mix. If we ever do want or need a car for a few hours, we can rent one, or use Zip Car or Car 2 Go (we see Car 2 Go Smart cars all over Austin). Win!
Ha! I just startled Callaghan when he turned around and found me covered up in an Epielle Facial Essence Mask. The single-use mask is basically a small, white cotton sheet cut to fit the face, with holes for eyes, nose and mouth, heavily saturated in liquid botanical extracts and other ingredients. You unfold it, drape it over your face, and smooth it down into place. So easy! I leave it on for 30 minutes. Peel off, throw away, done. There’s no need to rinse. Your skin drinks up the product and air-dries after you remove the sheet, and then you can carry on with your normal routine.
Continuing for a second with this tangent (because I didn’t plan to talk about facial masks): I love sheet masks. Oil-absorbing clay masks have their merits, but seriously? Making the effort to remove a hardened clay mask from my face was never my favorite thing to do. I’m too lazy. (I’m not a fan of peel masks, either.) Mom sent three different varieties of the Epielle masks: Firming and Lifting with Vitamin C (“rejuvenating & conditioning formula”), Green Tea & Aloe (“detoxifying & soothing formula”), and Cucumber (“refreshing & purifying formula”). I’m currently wearing a cucumber one, which my skin loves. It feels luxurious, and it smells delightfully like a faintly sweet, fresh cucumber.
My mother has been my beauty mentor all my life. I do my own research to stay current with the science behind skincare, but I follow her advice and use the products she sends. She looks a good 15-20 years younger than she is. She’s amazing, and I’m lucky. I started using sheet masks when she first started sending them to me over ten years ago. Thank you, Mom!
So here’s the question that’s been smoldering in my mind since yesterday: Do you ever wonder what’s going on behind that closed door when you go to someone’s place and no one answers, but you suspect that someone’s home?
Yesterday, Callaghan and I were sitting here on the loveseat when someone knocked on the door. Based on recent events, we guessed that the visitor was either a kid selling something, or a couple coming to talk to us about religion, though we could have been wrong. We deliberated for a few seconds before deciding that we would answer the door. But there was a snag. Literally.
“Back here!” Callaghan hissed in my ear as he frantically pointed and gestured behind his neck. He was leaning forward at a tentative, strange angle. I looked. A thread from one of the couch cushions behind him was badly ensnarled in the clasp of his thin gold chain necklace. He was stuck! The cushion was attached to his back like a shell on a turtle, and someone was waiting at the door. I muffled a laugh with my hand as I hopped over him quickly to get the scissors from the kitchen.
The gold chain is very delicate, and the loveseat cushion is very nice, and we didn’t want either one to get ruined, so the situation required some patience and finesse. By the time I’d extricated Callaghan from the cushion, the person at the door was gone. Maybe I should have answered the door on my way to the kitchen, but then we would have had to explain that we don’t usually wear our furniture. (Rather, our furniture wears us.)
So that’s what the person on the other side of the door would have seen had they come equip with wall-penetrating X-Ray glasses. Something to think about the next time you go to someone’s house and they don’t answer the door. You just never know what’s going on!
(That’s based on Shirley Temple’s “Animal Crackers in My Soup,” in case you didn’t know.)
This post is brought to you by the eleventh orange I’ve eaten this week. Not the eleventh hour. The eleventh orange. I’m pretty sure that crime scene investigators could apply their crazy ninja forensics techniques to my laptop keyboard and uncover hard evidence of all eleven of those oranges, as careful as I am to avoid smudges.
Now, what was I going to share? Oh yes:
“A Giraffe totem corresponds to farsightedness and balance between earth and sky.” (Llewellyn)
I’ve been thinking that my so-called spirit animal must be the giraffe, since reading that quote has an oddly grounding, motivating effect on me. Now, when I close my eyes and envision the giraffe at the window of the safari bus in Arizona that one time, a feeling of centeredness comes rolling back. It works!
I remember when I thought that my spirit animal was the wild horse. I re-thought that whole thing when I discovered, not too long ago, that I’m actually kind of uneasy around horses. I’m still in awe of the wild horse spirit, but the reality of a horse and me standing together is just… I don’t know. It’s a hard thing to phrase, so, just to show you, here’s a picture of me with our neighbor’s horse in France back in April:
Pardon me. I just live here. Oh wait, this is a French horse, so… Je m’excuse. Now how do you say “I just live here” – “J’habite seulement ici?” Or “J’habite juste ici?” Not working. American slang doesn’t translate! Nevermind.
See the body language dynamic going on there? This was a candid shot of a chance encounter. Callaghan captured a spontaneous moment, and looking at this picture brings back the awkwardness of it. That horse and I were both, like, uhhh… yeah. I just didn’t know how to relate to that guy. Have you ever felt self-conscious in front of a horse? (Surely I can’t be the only person who’s ever been discomfited in the presence of a horse.) I didn’t connect with that horse on any level. It was like he was the reincarnation of someone I used to know. Someone who used to fluster me at cocktail parties.
So, yeah, giraffes.
Speaking of animals, the other night, I was reading to Callaghan about the liger (lion-tiger hybrid) and her baby liligers (offspring of a liger and a lion) at the Novosibirsk Zoo in Russia.
“Check out this liger,” I said, shoving my laptop under his nose. “They actually exist outside of Napoleon Dynamite!” We started flipping through the slideshow.
“Look at that! He’s got strots,” said Callaghan, pointing at one of the baby liligers.
“Strots?”
“A mixture of stripes and dots.”
The liger and her liliger cub at the Novosibirsk Zoo in Russia
In other animal marking news, my current favorite eye makeup look is sparkly pink shadow with a matte black overlaid on the lids:
Can you see it? (Don’t mind the hair. I had the front chopped and deep layers cut all around for growing-out purposes.)
While I’m at it, here are some pics of us goofing around before we left the house this morning:
A bonus cool thing that happened today – our state ID and drivers license arrived in the mail! Texas state residencies established, check.
We’re all happily ensconced in our place now, but the getting here was not without its perils. The Ronnie James kitty almost got abducted by a UFO the second we stepped over the threshold into our new apartment.
To begin with, it had been a long journey for the little guy. First, the morning we left France, he fell terribly ill as a result of the vet-prescribed sedative – NEVER AGAIN, by the way – we gave him and his brother, Nounours, in preparation for travel. (Thankfully, Nounours did not have this adverse reaction.) Next, there was the cramped, cold and damp taxi ride to the airport in Lyon two hours away, where we boarded a flight to Frankfurt, Germany.
At the Frankfurt airport, kitties sat patiently in their pet carriers while Mommy and Daddy sucked down beers, waiting to board our next plane. (What. It was Germany! Having lived there for two years, I’m incapable of stepping foot in that formidable country without imbibing their ambrosiatique – there, I just invented a word – brews.) Then there was the long flight to Houston, Texas… trans-Atlantic, halfway across America, non-stop. It was a 10-hour flight, but we were actually on the plane for 12 hours, since bad weather in Frankfurt caused a two-hour departure delay. Two hours sitting on the plane on the ground, 10 hours in the air. Our boys were beautifully behaved the entire time. No one even knew they were there. We were so proud!
We’re American kitties now! Rah Rah Rah! Now let us out! **NEWSFLASH**: the inside of these carriers look the same here as they did in Europe.
We spent the night in a motel in Houston. Ronnie James and Nounours knew exactly what to do… I opened the kitty suitcase to bust out their litter box, and they used it immediately after I set it up. They drank water and gobbled down their crunchies and the canned food we set out for them. They raced around the room, took flying leaps through the air onto the sofa, bounced around on pillows and cushions, got more cuddles and kisses and praise than they knew what to do with, and slept. The next morning, we packed them back up in their carriers, buckled them into the back seat of the rental car (being the responsible parents that we are – “BABIES ON BOARD!”) and hit the road for the three-hour drive to Austin.
A friendly sign along the way.
In Austin, our final stop was supposed to be our new home, but there was an unforeseen problem with the apartment. We found ourselves pulling a fast Plan B out of our ass and checking into another motel room, where we stayed for four days; thankfully, that was as long as it took to find and move into our ideal new place.
By the time we’d secured that new place, though, Ronnie James and Nounours had already decided that they were home. In the motel room. They had a double bed all to themselves, courtesy of the large, gruff-looking man behind the counter who’d kindly insisted that we take a free upgrade since kitties “might be more comfortable in a larger room.” They might enjoy a bed to themselves, he reasoned. (It turned out that the motel staff loved cats. We were told the story of how the night shift guy’s cat followed him to work every night, lording over the front counter with Daddy.)
How right he was! Kitties did, indeed, adore having their own bed.
Our own bed? THANKS NICE MOTEL PEOPLES.
They also enjoyed the maid service. We straightened up the room every morning and always made sure to leave the “Do Not Disturb” hanger on the doorknob before going out (me being paranoid that kitties would slip out and get lost if someone went in), but at the end of each day, the room would be immaculate, and there kitties would be, lounging like little princes on their bed, looking suspiciously as if someone had brought in silver platters of caviar and sea-brine champagne while we were gone. They probably got smothered with complimentary kisses and attention while we were gone, too. They were as content and purring as kitties could be. Ronnie James looked particularly blissful.
Maid came to change mah sheets!
So when the time came to check out, Ronnie James balked. Because, you see, not only were kitties being treated like royalty by the motel staff, but there was an armchair in the room. As far as Ronnie James is concerned, home is where the armchair is… especially if said armchair gets daily catnip treatments, as that one apparently did. Throwing everything back in the suitcases and approaching Ronnie James with his empty kitty carrier earned me this expression:
What is that you have there OH HELL NO I am NOT getting back into that carrier. There is nothing wrong with this armchair, see.
For the first time in the whole five-day ordeal, he resisted us. He cried all the way to the new apartment. And when we brought him inside and released him, his world blew apart in a mist of terror when he stepped out, looked up, and spotted the Unidentified Flying Object from hell:
Spinning black blades. Lights and flickering shadows. Wind. WE COME FOR YOU NOW.
It was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. Adding to the problem was the fact that, being in his carrier, he’d seen nothing between his cozy motel room and this.
He did not get to see our harmless-looking apartment from the outside.
Not scary. Top floor, corner unit. It’s peaceful. Summer quiet (students gone) or all the time quiet, I don’t know, but it’s lovely!
He did not get to see our completely innocuous front door.
Not scary.
And he did not get to see the benign view from our breezeway.
Not scary.
He only saw this:
The menacing, spinning bladed aerial beast lies quietly in wait.
His level of alarm took me by surprise. It hadn’t occurred to me that the sights and sounds specific to a warm-weather place would concern the kitties, but of course… duh! In France, kitties never knew the low-grade hum of an air conditioner, and they certainly did not know ceiling fans.
It took almost a week for Ronnie James to adapt. The first two days, he huddled alternately under the bathroom sink (having quickly learned how to open the cabinets) and in the corner of the kitchen counter, where we brought him food and water. (Meanwhile, Nounours was fine. As Callaghan put it, you could drop a piano in front of him, and he wouldn’t blink an eye. He is, however, terrified of garbage bags.) On Day Three, Ronnie James ventured out to use the litter box. I picked him up and held him close in his favorite cuddly position. His eyes widened to the size of CDs and he shook violently with fear in my arms as he watched the flickering of shadow caused by the ceiling fan in the next room. My heart broke.
Finally, he realized that the rest of us were still alive after four days of normal life activity under the ceiling fans, and he started to gradually lower his guard. This process was helped by his discovery of the beat-up old armchair we’d found just for him on Craigslist:
Mine! Mine mine mine.
He’s all fine now, our little Wrah Wrah James, wandering around and making his little “wrah wrah” happy noises.
UFO? What UFO? I’m chilling under my ceiling fan!
Belly rubs pleeze and thanks sez the Ronnie James
Too much excitement around here. I’m out.
And Nounours (AKA “Mr. Sheds-a-Lot” – no need for the year-round winter coat here!) has been enjoying the company of his brother again, whom he’d missed during his week of hiding.
I’m eager to settle into a writing schedule now that we’re here and moved in. Thursdays had become standard for blog posting. Today’s Friday. The last time I posted here was Saturday, and it was mostly pictures. But I’d love to start writing, for real, and writing regularly on a more frequent basis, like twice a week. Let’s see… I started this blog at the end of November. In January, we decided to move, and it’s been chaos ever since with one thing or another going on, plus packing and other move preparations. Now, for the first time, there’s nothing major happening. We shall see!
I’m sitting on the bed wearing a short little dress, feeling perfectly comfortable – neither cold, nor warm. We have a fireplace, but it’s blessedly unnecessary. Callaghan’s in the other room. The bedroom door between us is halfway closed. The bedroom door. We have doors in our apartment! It’s a small, one-bedroom apartment, but it’s bigger than our house in France, and the vaulted ceiling makes it feel even more spacious. We have doors. We have closets. We have drawers in the kitchen, and we have a bathtub and a shower! There are screens on the windows, and there’s plumbing. (There was no plumbing in the house in France the first six months we lived there.) There’s a disposal in the sink, and we have a dishwasher. All the things I took for granted before I left the States.
Fully-loaded. Have oven, WILL BAKE.
Also, we have an oven that works, and this… well, let me tell you. This is a huge deal for me. We did not have a functional oven in France, so for almost two years, I couldn’t bake, which is one of things that I love to do the most. Baking has been a favorite hobby and profound source of joy for me since I was like, I don’t know, thirteen. So I made a loaf of whole wheat banana bread yesterday; it was the first time I’d baked since I left Arizona almost two years ago, and I was ecstatic. Callaghan appreciates the oven, too, as evidenced by the fact that there’s only three slices of banana bread left.
Whole wheat banana bread… the first thing I baked in almost two years!
Today is our two-year wedding anniversary. It’s weird to think that yesterday’s banana bread was the first thing I’ve baked for him. Right?
We attended an interesting 3-D art exhibit gathering with our friend Joe
Our first venture out started here, with Joe. Good company, delicious cocktails. Thank you, Joe!
It’s early Saturday morning, and we’re in our apartment drinking Peet’s coffee (how I’ve missed it!) and catching up online now that we have internet (as of last night). Next week, I’ll tell you about the Ronnie James kitty and his UFO crisis.
We wish we weren’t THOSE PEOPLE on your flight, but we are. We’re sick. Not only that, but we’re the worst kind of sick for flying – we’re coughing. Yes! Surprise! We are your in-flight airborne virus carriers… and we’re so sorry. It’s been cold and rainy here, and we caught this bug (of the sore/scratchy throat, coughing, losing our voice variety) from a neighbor just this last week. The timing couldn’t be worse, we know.
We’re uncomfortable, but we’re more concerned about you than about ourselves, really. It’s just unfair to have to sit on an airplane with sick people. Believe me when I say that we’ve been trying to speed up the healing process for your benefit. We’ve been to the doctor, who put us on a variety of medications. We gargle with hydrogen peroxide twice a day, trying to kill germs in our throats, and we’re taking lots of vitamin C. We’ve been eating fresh oranges. We’ve been drinking lots of water. We’ve been huddling up to the kerosene heater, keeping as warm as possible. We’ve also been resting a lot… even while having to get so much done in our last days here.
Laughter heals. We tried to watch the new Arrested Development, but so far, it’s failed to make us LOL (we gave it a good three-episode shot), so we’ve put that on hold and settled back into Hart of Dixie, which had started to drag a little toward the end of season one, but has blossomed into a fluffy delight in season two. It’s coming through with exactly the simple, cute lightness we need right now! And we love Rachel Bilson, who we think possesses good comedic timing and resembles a young and even prettier Brigitte Bardot. (Our opinion!)
Rachel Bilson
So we’ve been trying. But we’re still coughing. You will give us dirty looks, and we will understand. We’ll try not to cough in your direction; we’ll keep our heads down. We loaded up our tablet with a zombie movie: Warm Bodies. Nothing like a zombie movie for traveling! That, and Kit-Kats.
We spent most of the last week visiting friends and family. So for the second year in a row, we were on the French Riviera during the Cannes Film Festival, and for the second year in a row, it was raining and cold down there at the time. After we got back, I came across some online photos of attendees in their red carpet attire and shivered just looking at them, thinking of how I’d spent the last four days in layers of clothing over my jeans – t-shirt, sweater, jacket.
For instance:
The intrepid Emma Watson at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival
You know how powerful the mind is? My first-hand knowledge of the weather where this picture was taken kills the adorableness for me. I’m distracted by wanting to wrap her up in something warm. I’m glad I didn’t see this picture while we were there, because if I had, I might have been overcome by the urge to rush over to her with a fur-lined cloak (of invisibility?) – such as it is that the weather triggers my maternal impulses.
Still, in a weird way, I admire these festival-goers. You’ve got to be some kind of a badass to deliberately go around dressed for summer when it feels like winter. It’s not like these people don’t have access to weather forecast reports. We knew what it was going to be like down there before we went – they must have known, too.
Here we are on the train coming home, all cozy and warm:
We got up at 5:00 in the morning to stumble onto this train from Cannes. It got us home in three hours! Awesome. I’m wearing the previous day’s make-up (I don’t usually go to sleep without removing it, but that night, I did), a ponytail elastic (which is a poor substitute for a hairbrush, but whatever), and you can’t see it, but I’m clutching a Kit-Kat (candy bar) like it’s the answer to life. Because at that moment, it was. And it was damn good.
Though we’ve been busy with moving-related business, we did get to relax in Valence over the weekend while Chantal was here. It was nice. It was our last time hanging out in Valence, since we sold our truck yesterday and are now officially without wheels. Yes! We’ve made it to the stage where the “lasts” are piling up.
Saturday, 11 May 2013. Last time hanging out in Valence (while we live here in France, anyway)
Saturday, 11 May 2013. Last time hanging out in Valence (while we live here in France, anyway)
So, the movers are coming today, and then we’re going back down to the French Riviera for (another!) last visit with family and friends before we leave. And after we get back, we’ll sit here in the forest with no car and no stuff and try to sell everything that’s not going with the movers today. Or we might give stuff away, if people would be willing to come out to the boondocks to get it. Here’s a picture I took of our house when we went for a hike with Benedicte (when she came to visit) a few weeks ago:
Our little house! We live in the upper right corner of the building.
Little House in the Rhone-Alpes! (Just imagine the accent circumflex over that “o.” I don’t have my French keyboard with me right now).
“Homme” is how you say “homie” in French. It’s basically the same word. It means “man.”
While Callaghan was busy drawing a hermaphrodite tin can with a pair of mismatched rocket man-boobs and its lid flipped up like a hat and a skirt around one of its tentacle knees, I went down to the bergerie to retrieve a few things. Along the way, I encountered a donkey and a large snail, and I found two lizards hanging out on the terrace when I got back. Down in the laundry/storage room, the largest spider I’ve ever seen here in France ran across the wall when I walked in. Up here in the front room, the morning’s scattered ant swarms have finally died down.
Nature is active today, and we’re having a relaxed and productive afternoon. The house smells pleasantly of ginger and cardamom from the Ethiopian chickpea wat (stew) I made yesterday for tonight’s dinner – it’s one of those aromatic dishes that’s good to make a day in advance, so the spices can mingle overnight. I’m going to serve it with brown rice, since I don’t know where to find injera around here (Ethiopian flatbread), or the teff flour I’d need to bake my own.
I miss Ethiopian restaurants! Soon. In three weeks, we’ll be back in the States. First thing I’m going to do is find an Ethiopian restaurant and attempt to eat two years’ worth of injera in one sitting.
Ah, food. Bread. The plight of carbs’ reputations crossed my mind the other day when we were in the supermarket. It’s odd how popular it’s become to believe that carbs are “bad.” It’s like, one day, everyone became aware that allergies/sensitivities to gluten are common, so, alright, let’s be hyper-aware of that. Millions of people now feel a lot better on reduced-gluten or gluten-free diets. Great! But then, somehow, that entire category of food came crashing down from grace with a sweeping, extended indictment: Carbs make you fat. The problem with this is that it’s only half-true. Not all carbs cause the metabolism-compromising biochemical reaction that leads to weight gain.
I generally avoid simple carbs (white sugar, white flour, white rice, white pasta and white potatoes), but as far as I’m concerned, life’s not worth living without complex carbs. I love whole grain breads, whole wheat pasta, brown rice, quinoa and sweet potatoes. I’m lucky that my body gets along with wheat, because I’d be forlorn without it. I could never do a raw food diet; after a while, I’d go crazy without pasta. I eat it for lunch almost every day, as I have ever since Callaghan discovered my pasta with garlic and olive oil obsession. Though I maintain that just plain old garlic and olive oil would be fine with me every day until the end of time – it’s something I’ll never get tired of eating – he’s undertaken the challenge of creating variation after variation on this heavenly theme. He should write a book: 365 Variations on Pasta with Garlic and Olive Oil.
So he makes lunch, and I make dinner, usually. And he draws hermaphrodite tin cans with mismatched rocket man-boobs and lids flipped up like hats and skirts around their tentacle knees. We’ve got our division of domestic labor all sorted out.
We now have a shipping date. We’re packing and trashing and selling all kinds of stuff, and Callaghan’s starting to eat some of the preserved food we’d stockpiled for emergencies, because why not? It’s there, and we’re not taking it with us. Last night, he opened a can of cannelloni to eat with the salad and fresh asparagus we were also having.
I studied the contents of his plate. The cannelloni looked like reddish-beige rubber tubes with glossy pink sausagey-looking things inside.
“So what exactly is that ‘mystery meat’,” I wondered out loud, fully aware that if there was an answer, then it wouldn’t be a mystery.
“A course,” said Callaghan.
I thought I heard “of course.” I waited for him to continue.
“A what?”
“Course!” he repeated.
I’m so confused! My head’s going to explode!
My mind whipped through all the French words I know, searching for one that would sound like “course” that might bear resemblance to a meat-related word in English.
“Course.” I tried out the word myself. Still didn’t make sense. What the hell is he talking about?
“If you don’t know whether it’s a cow or a horse, it’s a cowrse,” Callaghan explained.
Oh. Duh!
Survival food – little pieces of COWRSEmeat wrapped in pieces of pasty white industrial dough, smothered in some kind of red sauce
…said Jake Chambers in The Dark Tower epic series by Stephen King. Better words to capture the essence of escapism have never been spoken.
Whoa! This last week’s been about packing, cleaning, taking stuff to the dump, hanging out with a friend who came to stay for a couple of days, and working around technical difficulties – up until this minute, in fact – with both our internet connection and my computer AC adaptor malfunction.
I’m flipping through my agenda, the book in which I keep track of exciting things coming up. I like looking forward to stuff. I have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with secondary clinical depression, so looking forward to stuff is like the key to my well-being.
Mainly, right now, I’m looking forward to moving, and that’s a big thing. It’s exciting, but it’s big. It’s so big that it’s not on my list of things that I’m looking forward to, even though I am. It’s the small things that make a difference, because they don’t carry the caveat of stress that the big things do. The small things are just there to be anticipated. They are fluff, and fluff cannot be underrated.
Here, I’ll share this with you… Fluffy Things I’m looking forward to, in no particular order:
1. The return of Arrested Development (T.V. series) in May. The Bluth family. Because the chicken dance matters.
2. The next episode of The Following (T.V. series). Thank you again for this recommendation, Arne F.!
3. Stephen King’s The Wind through the Keyhole. Because Roland “The Gunslinger” Deschain, aka Roland of Gilead in the aforementioned Dark Tower epic series, is my fictional boyfriend.
I’m not an aficionado of the fantasy genre, but I’m obsessed with The Dark Tower, which is a brilliantly crafted literary collage of fantasy-horror-western-drama. When I finished all seven books in the series, I sought out the short stories that featured Roland. After that, I had to accept the fact that I’d read everything with Roland in existence. Life went on. Then, last week, we were browsing through the books in the English section at Cultura, and guess what! I discovered The Wind through the Keyhole. How did I not know about this publication? It came out last year. It’s a new installment in the Dark Tower series, but it can be read as a stand-alone novel, too. I’m forcing myself to wait until I’m on the airplane to crack it open.
Yep. Settling down on the plane over the Atlantic with this new Dark Tower book on my tray is going to be my reward to myself for surviving the stress of moving.
4. Lee Child’s new Jack Reacher novel Never Go Back (August). Because… Reacher!!
5. American Horror Story, Season 3 (October). This new season is called “Coven,” and a lot of it will be filmed in New Orleans. I’m sure it’s going to be as richly atmospheric as the first two seasons. Can’t. Wait.
(If we’ve been friends forever and you’re confused because you never knew me to watch T.V., let me explain what happened: Netflix streaming. And we started to watch Bob’s Burgers. That was the beginning of it. Or the end of it, depending on how you look at it.)
I also used to think that I’d never be interested in reality T.V., but then? Cake Boss.
For those of you who don’t know, the Cake Boss is this guy called Buddy who owns Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken, New Jersey. The show follows Buddy and his family and crew as they create these freaktastically detailed specialty cakes custom-ordered by people for various occasions and events. The Cake Boss takes on some spectacular challenges; he seems to be the type of person who works well under pressure, thriving in merging funnels of drama and disaster, always managing to deliver his splendiferous works of sugary art in style. “NOW WHO WANTS TO EAT SOME CAKE?!”
Callaghan and I have an ongoing banter about what cakes we’d order from the Cake Boss. Callaghan knows that I’d love to have one for Valentine’s Day. Every once in a while, I’ll suddenly ask him… wait, okay, let me do it right now…
“What cake are you going to order for me?” I’m calling it out, since he’s in the other room.
“It’s a surprise… you’re not going to know. Heheheh! Coquine! You thought I was going to tell you, hein?”
See? He answered immediately, like he was waiting for me to ask! He has no idea that I’m writing this, and that I just keyed in what he said, word for word.
Shoot. I mean, okay, I’m not desperate to know. I’m not going to secretly administer a truth serum so he’ll tell me. I’ll enjoy being surprised.
It’s just fun to think about what he might order. It’s fun to think about getting, say, a Jack Reacher cake from the Cake Boss. Or a beautiful Dark Tower cake, featuring red roses and lobstrosities.
In September 2011, The Universe poured us a tall glass of France. The Universe was generous.
Universe: Say “when.”
(fast-forward 17 months)
Us: When!
That was in January. Since then, we’ve been super busy preparing to move. We’re now less than two months away from moving day.
While there are aspects of France I’ll miss, I’d be lying if I said we weren’t excited to be continuing on our amazing journey as a couple living completely irrational lives.
We’re heading across the pond to Austin, Texas. It’s on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, which I love. (Yeah, I was the 22-year-old girl who moved to Phoenix “temporarily” and wound up staying for 20 years. I’m a heat-addict.) Austin has a 100% approval rating from everyone we know who knows it.
Us: Hey Austin – Joe, Holly, Nick, Davey, Eden, Tracy, Christa and the person who wrote that cool book about bats have all told us so much about you!
Austin: Only good stuff, I hope.
Us: Of course! Here we come!
Austin: You seem weird enough. Especially him. Knock yourselves out. Oh, and BY THE WAY we’ve been targeted by that crazy man in North Korea. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Well, okay.
In addition to its obvious advantage of having a legendary flock of bats under a bridge, Austin has a low cost of living and a diverse music and art scene. It’s a state capital and a university town, and it’s on the Colorado River. We’ve never been there, and we’re especially loving the excitement of that! We’re looking forward to exploring a new place together.
As for the transient bats we have with us here in France, well… they’ll just have to carry on without us, those shameless little camera whores.
The bat crew
Look! They’re wearing pants!
Posing for Myspace
“Do you seriously think an Austin bat could be a cute as ME?”
I can’t believe it’s already April. I can’t believe it’s already April fifth. The last time I wrote here, it was still March, and it doesn’t even seem that long ago! But there’s a lot of craziness going on right now. I’ll come back to that later because what I’m sharing with you right now is a story per Callaghan’s request. Last week, we went down to visit his family and friends on the French Riviera via covoiturage ride-sharing, and afterward, Callaghan was all, like, “YOU HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT THIS.” (The last time I wrote about covoiturage, I praised it for its entertainment value.)
This is our story about being epically late because of someone else.
The idea behind using covoiturage for transportation is that a driver can get you from Point A to Point B because he’s heading the direction you’re going. It’s basically hitch-hiking, but you organize the ride in advance, online. Passengers are picked up and dropped off at designated points along the way, and the whole thing is based on scheduling… if you’re driving south to Cannes and you want to make a little money, you post on the covoiturage site that you’ll be cruising through Valence at 2:20 in the afternoon. If anyone in the area wants to catch a ride, they can meet you there.
So this guy said. And we replied, “Sure! We’ll meet you in Valence at 2:20pm! We need to get to Cannes.” We chose that particular guy’s ride because the time he’d advertised was going to be perfect for getting us to the birthday celebration dinner on our agenda.
Maybe we brought the shenanigans upon ourselves when Callaghan pulled up the posted photo of the vehicle, and we laughed because it was a white van that looked like it should have the words “serial killer van” painted on the side in black block letters. And when we found the photo of the driver, we laughed again because he looked like he belonged with the van. Do not laugh at the photos of your driver and his vehicle. He will know, and he will get his revenge.
As it turned out, the driver wasn’t hiding bodies in his van. But he was three hours late.
There were four passengers already in the van, and they were all alive. The front seat held a rat (in a cage) and a girl, who were not together. In the middle row sat a woman and a young guy – they weren’t together, either. Callaghan and I climbed in to sit in the back. (We were together. Ha!) We settled in and cracked open our iPad to watch Zombieland again, which seemed strangely apt for the circumstances.
“C’est le Magic Bus!” said the driver, whose name was Alex. Magic, indeed!
The first passenger to depart was Middle Seat Lady. Instead of dropping her off somewhere along the route, Alex exited the highway and meandered around to a specific bus stop in Le Teil. Callaghan was furious.
But since we still weren’t late enough, there was the second passenger drop-off. Front Seat Girl was moving back in with her mother. We exited the highway again and pulled right up to her mother’s doorstep in the middle of Aix en Provence.
This was now looking more like a limousine service than covoiturage. It was also looking like a house-moving service. And like a van with undead people in it. With a rat in a cage, and a driver who’d only gotten two hours of sleep the previous night (true story).
In Aix en Provence, Callaghan and I stood back on the sidewalk to stretch while Alex, the girl and her mother unloaded her things into the house.
The third passenger off the van was the rat, who had come down from Paris. This one was okay… Alex cruised into a rest area in Fréjus, where an old couple sat waiting in their car. (They had my sympathy, because by then, it was 10:30pm. I know I’d be annoyed if I had to sit on the side of the highway at night for five hours, waiting for someone to bring me my rat.)
And half an hour later, Alex took Middle Seat Guy to his stop in Mouans-Sartoux.
That left us. Callaghan, seething mad, asked the driver to drop us off in Grasse, instead of in Cannes, as planned. We’d missed our restaurant celebration, and we were by then entitled to our own special drop-off request. Plus, there was no one left to inconvenience, so it didn’t matter.
We got down there a total of five and a half hours late.
The next day, Callaghan checked the covoiturage website and found an explosion of negative driver reviews for Alex from the hapless passengers of the last two days. People were furious. For two days, from Normandy to Nice, Alex had plowed down through France in his white serial killer van, scooping people up anywhere from three to five hours late and pissing them off. There was only one good review, and that was from the girl he’d helped move to Aix en Provence. She was thrilled with the service she got – as well she should be, since she got personal door-to-door moving service for practically nothing!
I still think Alex might be a serial killer, though, since something about him did kind of set off my serial-killer-dar. Or maybe I was just imagining it because I’m watching The Following right now, and I’m obsessed.
You know how it is when you’re standing in the shower and you glance down and your eyes pass over the long, cobalt blue tendrils drifting near your foot and your brain zooms backwards into its nifty little visual data archive and – zing! – matches the tendrils to the image of the Portuguese man o’war that wrapped itself around your ankle in the water on Maui that one time?
But in actuality, you’re looking at clumped strands of silky thread from the insides of the plush, bright blue socks you were wearing before you got in the shower?
Callaghan looked over at me as the final episode of American Horror Story: Asylum dwindled away with the closing credits.
“Wow. What’re we going to do now?”
Season Two, fini. The wind bludgeoned our closed wooden shutters as if to make the ending perfectly clear. If you’re going to watch a disconcertingly evocative horror production such as the fine piece of art that is American Horror Story, March is your month. The weather’s antics heighten the effect, and after all, one of the goals of watching such a show is to get scared. Crazy wind, rain, snow and even hail braced the atmosphere of Murder House and Asylum during the four days it took us to tear through those two seasons. We curled around each other in the gloom of the overcast days and inky nights and had to scrape our eyeballs, dry in the chill and artificial heat, off the screen when we were done.
“Season three comes out in the fall,” I said, just as forlorn.
“But what are we going to do until then?”
“What I was wondering, exactly.”
We sat and stared at the dark, blank screen.
The next day, Callaghan got on Facebook and posted a line from the Asylum theme song, “Dominique,” which ignited a conversation with his friend Matita, a fellow American Horror Story fan. We returned to mourning the end of season two.
“I should call Matita and ask her what she’s going to do,” Callaghan said.
“Maybe we should start a support group,” I said. “For people suffering the throes of American Horror Story withdrawals.”
“Hey baby… wouldn’t it be great if we could do the support group in an asylum? We could play that song, too.”
Two years ago, we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day at Gallagher’s pub in Chandler, Arizona. Last year, we didn’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day at all, since we were occupied in Nice. This year, we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by drinking Killian’s here at home, listening to Alan Stivell – not Irish, but it’s Celtic music, so close enough – and savoring Callaghan’s cooking.
“Callaghan” is an Irish name.
With this in mind, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I thought I’d interview Callaghan about how he got his nickname.
INTERVIEW, PART 1
Me: You’re French. How did you end up with an Irish nickname?
Callaghan: Because my friend’s a cowboy.
Me: Uh….
Callaghan: He used to wear a fringed leather jacket that made him look like an Indian.
Me: I’m not getting it. I need further explanation.
Callaghan: Back in 1988, Dude (Jean-Michel, aka Jean-Mi) got a beautiful fringed leather jacket that went very well with his long, dark hair.
Me: WAIT. Jean-Mi had long hair?
Jean-Mi is one of my favorite people in the world.
Callaghan: Yeah. He looked like an Indian, so we gave him a cowboy name, haha!
Me: Why – oh, because the French are enamored with the whole American “cowboys and Indians” thing.
Callaghan: Oh yeah!
Me: Okay. But why “Callaghan” for a cowboy name?
Callaghan: GriGri (that would be Christophe… no one I’ve met here goes by their actual name) started calling him that. Because of Clint Eastwood. Dirty Harry. You know, Dirty Harry Callaghan?
Me: No. I do not. I guess I’m a terrible American.
Callaghan: You suck. Especially for a San Franciscan!
(lunch)
INTERVIEW, PART 2
Callaghan: Yay so we finally have a journalist interested in this! Well just so you know, there’s really a cult of Dirty Harry here in France. People in France really love Dirty Harry. Now I’m VERY surprised that you don’t know about him.
Me: I know about him, I’ve heard about him, but I’ve never seen it. So how did the name “Callaghan” go from Dude to you?
Callaghan: Well, Dude decided that the name “Callaghan” was so intense that he should call GriGri “Callaghan,” too. And because I was hanging out with them all the time, I became “Callaghan” as well. And then I started to… well, it became a nom de plume… I started signing my drawings “Callaghan.” So the years have passed, and um I stayed “Callaghan” because I was signing my drawings, and… so people called me “Callaghan.” Because of my drawings. And I was still calling Dude “Callaghan” for a long time. I still do today, from time to time.
Me: Dude? I never heard you call him “Callaghan,” except when you introduced him to me as “the other Callaghan.”
Callaghan: Yeah I just call him “Dude,” really. When I came back from the States, people were calling him “Dude” because his brother Lio – that’s short for Lionel – oh, and Lio’s wife’s name is Valerie, but we call her “Valoche,” which is argo for “suitcase” –
Me: Why do you call her “suitcase”?
Callaghan: Nah, it’s an actual nickname for Valerie. “Valoche” is a nickname for Valerie, and it also means suitcase (valise). And even another word for “valise” is “valdingue.”
This is how I learn French.
Me: Okay! So anyway… Dude…
Callaghan: So Dude. Um… so um yeah so when I came back from the States, Lio was calling Dude “Dude,” so I started calling him “Dude,” too, instead of “Callaghan.” Anyway, “Callaghan” stuck for me. And I’m still signing my drawings “Callaghan.” Parce que j’ai un gros flingue. (“Because I have a big gun.”)
I won’t even go into that. It’s yet another slang phrase derived from French pop culture.
So that, my friends, is how Callaghan (Philippe) got to be called “Callaghan,” and Dude (Jean-Mi) got to be called “Dude.”
Our biggest armful of cat goes by the name “Nounours.” (In case you were wondering, this is the one who was originally called “Bruce Willis.” That name never worked. Nounours is French for “teddy bear,” and he responds to it.)
The upper half of Nounours was slung over Callaghan’s shoulder, the lower half was cradled in the crook of his elbow, and his back paws were tucked into the palm of his hand… 17 pounds of cat you could barely see under the smothering that was taking place. Yes, the kitty pampering in this house is shameless and pathological.
Anyway, so there’s Nounours, snuggled neatly in Callaghan’s arms, and there’s Callaghan, caught up and carried away in the bubble of kitty love.
“He’s so happy and proud, this Nounours!” he gushed, covering Nounours with kisses.
“With his big blue eyes!” I said, rubbing Nounours’s fur.
“Look at him, gros Nounours!” said Callaghan, bursting with kitty-daddy pride.
“With his pink ears and butterscotch and cream fur!” I said, kissing his velvety nose. “And his little pink nose with freckles!”
“He’s got a pink ass with freckles, too,” Callaghan added.
That Asian-Looking Chick 