I cook a lot. I love cooking for people even more than I like eating. I've cooked in soup kitchens since I was 19, and that's my commercial kitchen experience, which is fine by me. I crochet blankets for sick kids through Project Linus . I made their Web site. I like making simple Web sites. I like to crochet. I used to crochet in church. I used to go to church. I like arts and crafts, including drawing, painting, block-printing, paper-making, collage, grafitti I mean stencils, and assemblage. I also like making little books and magazines, and art letters to mail to friends out of leftover or not-so-leftover office supplies. I read a lot. I've been known to read at red lights. The first time I ever got a speeding ticket (not that this happens frequently ... well, not counting issued warnings, and really, there was only one ticket), I read while the cop was writing my ticket up. I read in the potty, too. I love writing. I work out every day, and most days, it's because I have to, not because I want to. I do weights, kickboxing, and yoga. I like to schlog around on treadmills or read on the incumbent bike (and sometimes, I even pedal!). I love walking around the neighborhood, but only when it's under 85 degrees, and I love hiking. I used to love rock climbing, but I injured my wrists. =( I plink on my guitar when I can. I enjoy plinking on the piano, too, but I have only a guitar on which to plink. I like petting my dog; she used to love hiking, too, but her hips are going. I like fussing in my patio garden. I play DDO, and used to play a lot, but my computer's having issues, so I'm going to eat it, piece by piece, with gravy, and let hun build a new one for me. Anyway, in DDO, I play a good badly built rogue, a decent DPS fighter with crap AC, and a johnny-on-the-spot cleric. I'm a fair bard. My mage skills suck butt. But we're not in Stormreach, so none of that matters here.
I'd like to meet:
Okay ... I wanna meet people who can teach me: how to throw knives; which desert plants I can and cannot eat; how to teach a cat to fetch; how to drive a manual (thanks, Shaye!); how to bake a successful pavlova (taught myself); how to swim with the stingerless jellyfish in Palau; and how to work on cars. I want to meet people who can build cool things out of LEGOs and will take me on rides on their motorcycles, and then teach me how to drive one. I want to meet someone who washes skyscraper windows for a living. I want to meet people who don't talk so much but still think a lot, and think well. I want to meet someone (else) with their own handcuffs. I want to meet someone who knows all the lyrics. I want to meet someone who asks me how my day was after I've survived it.
Barring that, I'd like to meet people who are humble, witty, and kind, and who make me remember just how good I've got it. I wanna meet people who are smart beyond their years, and still observant enough to know when a friend needs them. I wanna meet people who never seem to talk shit about other people. I wanna meet people whose creativity knows no bounds and whose talents reflect the world better than any newspaper or reality tv show. I'd originally had examples listed alongside these traits, but I took them out because if you don't think you're these things already, then you might want to consider aspiring to be so.
Music:
My friend Corbet told me music was the fastest way to convey an emotion, even a complex one, to another person. I tend to agree. My trumpet-playing brother and I would watch the Boston Pops and random orchestral shows on PBS. He taught me the instruments, and he taught me to love music. I don't have a favorite genre. I love music and/or lyrics that move me or make me want to move. When I was young, I wanted to play the piano, but my parents didn't have money for lessons. From the time I was 6 until I was 13, I was in speech therapy for selective mutism and because I had trouble with half the letters in the alphabet. Singing was my unofficial therapy, and it was free. When I was 10, I was in the school chorus. Rad! I love to sing, even though I'm not much good at it. All through junior high and high school, I listened mostly to popular hip hop (you know--early LL Cool J--when he was a panther, not a goat), California skate punk (you know--like early Green Day, pre-Dookie), a shitload of country, rock, classical and pops, and a lot of stuff that was on MTV. I like hair rock bands, but mostly their goofy squishy love ballads. I like dance music, but am usually only aware of its beat. I love noise bands. I'm always looking for Team Dresch. It's rare that I love an entire album, or more than one or two albums from a single band or musician. Some exceptions: The White Stripes, Ben Harper, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, RHCP (Blood Sugar Sex Magik), Metallica's Black Album, and Kid Koala. There are others, but I can't think of 'em right now. I like orchestral, Broadway, and opera, but most of my friends don't, which is more than the amount of friends who are into country. The hip hop I'm into now usually doesn't have words to it--Kid Koala, Cut Chemist, DJ Radar ... I miss going to The Blunt Club with Tony and listening to DJ Organic! Ha! I wish more people I knew listened to Mos Def, Rosie Thomas, and Ozomatli.
Movies:
Favorites:
Punch Drunk Love ... that movie is about me, as played by Adam Sandler, because:
Barry: I'm looking at your face and I just wanna smash it, I just wanna fuckin' smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze it. You're so pretty.
Lena: I want to chew your face, and I want to scoop out your eyes and I want to eat them and chew them and suck on them.
[pause]
Barry: OK. This is funny. This is nice.
and
Barry: Well bye-bye, then, you stupid motherfucker...
I am Barry Egan.
And then there's: Fight Club and destroying something beautiful,
Brokeback Mountain and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it,
The Royal Tenenbaums and its bald-faced suicide, 25th Hour and fuck you too,
The Muppet Movie and daydream believers, American Beauty and its floating plastic trash,
Johnny Dangerously and my mother did that to me once,
Foxfire and homemade tattoos,
Airplane! and my drinking problem, Good Night and Good Luck,
The Princess Bride and anybody wanna peanut?,
Disney: The Fox and the Hound and we'll always be friends forever, American History X, most movies starring Edward Norton, and Janeane Garofalo for that matter, Good Will Hunting and how do you like them apples?, and
Napoleon Dynamite--whatever I want jeesh!I also have a soft spot for all PIXAR movies--Toy Story and Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo, and Monsters, Inc.Other favorite kid movies include:
The Neverending Story and
The Dark Crystal ... okay, ultimately, my all-time favorite is an obscure movie called All Summer in a Day that I first saw on HBO or PBS when I was 5. I couldn't find it on video anywhere until I attended ASU, looked it up on a whim, and saw that they had it in their archives. That movie makes me want to die. To sum it up, I love comedies, but not always the insultingly stupid ones like Dumb and Dumber. I like fucked up movies, but not ones I can't wrap my brain around like Donnie Darko. I like mockumentaries, and I can't think of any exceptions. Christopher Guest is my hero. The Incredibles is good. I like great scripts, even if the movie isn't always that great. I love great cinematography, even if the story isn't always that great. I love great characterizs, but that's hard to come by these days because everyone's so fucking one-dimensional (but I'm not talking about movies anymore, am I?).
Television:
Most TV annoys the fuck outta me, but I have favorites:
The Twilight Zone, Miami Ink, Pimp My Ride (shows about fixin' cars),
Whose Line Is It, Anyway?,
Iron Chef, Top Chef,
Good Eats ... hell, I love cooking shows in general and keep the Food Network on in the background. I like shows about places and food and culture, mostly because I'm starving for all of that. I can go months without turning the TV on, though. I never miss it, though once in awhile, when I catch it on, I appreciate it. Go read a book, a newspaper, a zine, surf the Internet. Read the comics. I don't care--just stop watching reality television; there are better ways to entertain yourself. Go read LiveJournal! Go fishing! Go masturbate! Build a treehouse ... fuck yeah! Treehouses rock.
Speaking of books ...
Books:
I really love reading. By high school, I was clearing a 500-page novel in a day or two, and now that I'm all growed up, I'm paid to read all day long. Woot! I have a lot of favorites, including:
Different Season by Stephen King,
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (but one of my most favorite literary quotes comes from George Eliot's Middlemarch), everything Calvin and Hobbes, most things Bloom County, most dictionaries (especially The American Heritage and the three versions of Webster's), The Muppet Show book, A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman ... shit, man--I just like to read, okay? Put it in my hand, and unless it really bites my ass, I'll read it--for reals.
Heroes:
Rachel McKibbens is one of many poetry heroes:
Johnny Brewton ,
Matt Wobensmith , old school
riot grrrls , Guerrilla Girls , and my Dad, who doesn't have a Web site, but is still famous beyond words. I *sap*. My heroes tend to be everyday people like writers and artists and people who fight fires, but only bad fires because sometimes my heroes are people who light fires. My heroes know what "guerilla poetry" is. My heroes stop talking about what they can do and just fucking do it--they're people like Stephanie, my friend who went to law school and started a nonprofit for kids with HIV/AIDS. My heroes give a damn about the world and do all kinds of good shit to prove it. My heroes run around with stencils and spray paint and something to say. (Okay, they did when I was 12 years old, anyway.) Fuck--I'm gonna stop because I'm starting to sound like an anarchist greeting card. (Anarchists usually aren't my heroes.) I'm just sick of people who go on and on about how the world is broken and then stop with the complaining, adding static to an already noisy world. I hate when they form packs like hyenas and do nothing more than chew on the carcasses of dead ideas. They tend to trample the little old ladies they're should be helping across the street, slathering rants the whole way. And jaywalking, too. I hate jaywalkers. Don't get me wrong. I'm no hater. I don't hate people. I just hate when people try to be more than just people, and I hate when people start to care more about their ideas than the people their ideas were meant to protect, and when their ideas are more about building superiority instead of real equality. My heroes tend to be everyday and in the world. They don't often scream about change because they're too busy changing it.My totem animal is the mighty puffin.
