You people and the washing of the hands!

I'll never understand how people have guests at their house and don't have soap in their bathrooms. Honestly! I mean, fine, you don't wash your hands after peeing or pooping, but give your guests the opportunity to choose! And it's really really gross when you don't. Gross!!

When I am in the house after I realize that they don't wash their hands, I'm all skeeved out. I just get a CSI image of feces streaked sofas and countertops.

This entry is so nasty. But it's my greatest pet peeve in life. eeeeeeeeew! The title is a quote from my cousin Gianna, who is seven. She is from a house that also has no soap in the bathrooms. She seems to think we, as a family, have some kind of problem with washing our hands. I don't know about that...

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!

Wow, just read over the post from last night. Holy crap, I ramble when I'm hurting! What was I doing on the computer anyway?

This weekend is my last one of freedom before school starts. It's the weekend of the christening. Oh boy! Our family and the baby's dad's family in one place, let the white trash wars begin! Of course, there are so many more of them than us, but what we lack in numbers we more than make up for in intensity. Can't wait to update all my rabid readers about this!

School's In! Let the pain begin!

I went to campus today for an introductory breakfast that I helped to organize. We have a student group within the department. It's silly, the acronym is GAHO (graduate art history organization) and we pronounce it gay-ho. I don't think everyone understood when we named it. I said, "G-A-H-O, gay-ho". And they all say, "There it is, our name" to which I reply, "No guys, gay. ho" Do they expect us to be taken seriously with that name? Really?

Anyway, it's funny that later on in the day, I got a migraine. I've been migraine free for about a month now. It's school, it just has to be! Migraines are awful, and I wouldn't wish them on the girl who was supposed to be my best friend in high school who convinced me how much I still really cared for this guy I had been seeing and got me to admit it and tell him and then we went out again and then one night I caught her at my boyfriends house and he was cheating on me with this girl who was totally busted looking and had a big broad back and a hairy upper lip. I mean, I don't think I'm gorgeous or anything, but seriously, I am wayyyy hotter than her. Yeah, so I wouldn't wish the pain of a migraine on her, even.

It makes me sad sometimes that I have to take preventative medicine for my migraines. By the way, don't call them headaches to a person who gets them. I get headaches occasionally too, but migraines are so much worse because they involve nausea, sensitivity to light, sound, smell, and they just hurt like hell on top of it. For me, the pain is always in my eyes, and that is just the worst place for pain. Except maybe your mouth, that sucks too. Anyway, I worry about what I'm doing to my liver. I take a beta-blocker to stop them from coming, Zyrtec for allergies, the sniffling associated with the allergies triggers my migraines, and of course the good ole birth control pill. And then when I get a headache, I take Imitrex. My own little helper. The only bad thing about that drug is that it makes me all flushed. Looking like you've been slapped on both cheeks is not a good look, but anything to take away the searing hot nauseaeous (good lord is that a hard word to say!) pain.

Another side effect is an urge to ramble. I should cut this off before I write another 38 word sentence.

Waiting for the shoe to drop

I sent in a paper to the Rutgers Art Review. It's a grad student publication, and I had thought that I'd have a pretty good chance. That is until I looked up past issues and saw that there are about six papers per year accepted. Oh, now there goes my self-confidence. No way I'll get in now. So I'm waiting for my rejection letter.

The paper is pretty good, though, if I do say so myself. It's about an artist named Hannah Wilke. She was a performance artist and photographer. She did a lot of pieces that involved her being all nakey and stuff. And since she was pretty, she got a lot of craph for it from feminist writers. Ah yes, the f word again. So the gist of the paper is the limitations of working within the feminist rubric when dealing with Wilke's art. Here's the kicker. She died of Lymphoma, a type of cancer, when she was in her early fifties. And she documented the deterioration of her body on film. In brilliant color, not black-and-white, which would give it a more documentary effect. There was also this strong Catholic underpinning in the imagery. And the posthumous show in which this Intra-Venus work was shown served as a memorial/pilgrimmage/relic of her life. Because she showed herself going through these changes and disfiguring of her once-beautiful body, she was lauded for her courage. And her early work was championed in that it served as reminder of her former self. One has to ask oneself-- if she had not gotten sick and died, would her earlier work have been so widely accepted and praised, retrospectively.

Ah, I go on. But that's what the paper is about. I'm pretty proud of it, but I don't think it'll get accepted. Paying dues sucks, and I can't wait to have the PhD after my name to make this all worth my while.

And just so you know, since I never really do this, the second post of the day is so that my blog doesn't have 13 posts in it. Cause I'm crazy superstitious like that. ;)

Strangest request, ever, revisited

Okay, so the funeral for my cousin's wife's mother was on Friday. The typical big Catholic to-do, with viewings and everything all packed in to a couple of fun-filled hours. I wrote the eulogy the night before, as is my usual operating schedule. And it was pretty good, if I do say so myself. Considering I didn't know the lady and all. She used to paint in her spare time. Wouldn't necessarily call her an artist, but that's just me being a snob and not really enjoying her paintings of puppies and stuff. So I did this whole paintings theme. I gave them what they wanted. But my mom, who as you may remember, was reading said eulogy, and she made a few mistakes. First, she got the year of the lady's birth wrong. Not my fault, it was a typo on the notes. And she said the completely wrong month for my cousin's birthday. (Had to do with Corrine being the light of the lady's life, etc etc) But all in all, considering we didn't know this person very well, it went off fine. Although my sister and I did overhear someone saying "Who is that lady" when my mom was at the lecturn reading my speech.

And a big shout out to Andrew M for reminding me of the Newsradio episode in which Dave writes a eulogy for a guy at the office who everyone just barely knew. At least this lady didn't end up having any major skeletons in her closet!

Strangest request, ever

My cousin's wife's mother died this week. (Got that?) She died of some sort of digestive system cancer. Irene was a nice lady. I've met her a few times, at showers for Kelly (the cousin's wife) and their kids' birthday parties. I've been to her house, maybe once or twice. But I didn't know her very well.

Which brings me to my point. Why would they ask me to write her eulogy?! It's not completely my own work, they've "written down their thoughts" for me. I have to string it into a coherent speech. Maybe they liked my work on my mom mom's eulogy? I don't know. But this is my whacked out family, and I'm going to do it. Weird.

Even weirder, they've asked my MOM to read it. With my cousin Corrine, who is 7. My mom didn't know this woman any more than I did. Well, if you know my mom, who is super friendly can talk to anyone, she knew more about her than I did. Still and all, it's gotta be strange. Imagine the cousin's wife's brother being at his own mom's funeral, thinking, "Who's that woman giving Mom's eulogy?" I've never been to a funeral where I didn't know who the eulogist was in relation to the deceased.

I'm warning that there will likely be a follow up to this macabre post. Also, I may detail for all my rabid fans my obsession with funeral homes. Maybe it's related to Six Feet Under's series finale this week, but maybe not. I'll try not to get all creepy up in here. Promise

As the dim reality of September sets in

Ah, late August. It's a great time of year, especially if you enjoy heat and your car's air conditioner has woefully passed from this earth. But it's also the time when I get all big-dorky-excited to be going back to school. It has been said that I am the ultimate consumer. It's all about the school supplies. I haven't bought my pens yet, but I do have my very special teeny-tiny three subject notebook. Buying pens is a big event for me. You have to have the right utensil to really want to take notes. I'm also searching high and low for something that I might have imagined-- mechanical pencils with gel graphite. Maybe I dreamed it, I don't know. But I have yet to find them. Next stop, Office Max.

It's funny, but since I've started my PhD courses, there haven't been many classes that I've been dying to take. And the ones I am excited about turn out sucking majorly. I'm still in the running for the class on drawings at Penn, but it doesn't look good. I really don't want to take greek Vase painting, ew. So I must resign myself to the fact that I have to take another filler class, one that I don't love or even care about, again. BOO!

But I am really excited that this December, come hell or high water, at the expense of royally pissing off the Graduate Chair, I AM GRADUATING!! From my master's, but still. I am still really fucking aroung trying to get this thesis thing written, but hey, I do well under pressure. And if I'm super stressed, maybe I will lose some weight. Cause loath as I am to acknowledge it, some professors really, let's say, prefer that their students look nice. And the ice cream belly I have going on right now is just not going to work. Not to mention that very soon I'll have to buy new clothes to squeeze my ass into. Which reminds me, I bought a workout DVD about 2 weeks ago, where is it?!

You'd think with all the money they have, they'd have come AC

Last night I had to go to St Martin of Tours church to attend pre-Jordan class. I am going to be the godmother of my sister's son, Liam. Not William, or Leon, which are two of the most common mishearings of his name that we've gotten. Hey, kid, I understand, people say "Warren?" to me when I say my name. Uh, yeah, my mom thought I looked manly when I was born. Come on!

Anyway, so here we are, sitting in this SWELTERING hot church. You'd think because of all the marble in the joint, it might be cool. WRONG! So I'm sticking to the pew, right up front, while this nun yammers on and on about the Church. She really dumbed it down, too. She didn't seem to know the PX symbol has a real name, the chi-rho, or that it spells the first two letters of christ. It's an early christian symbol, Constantine, in hoc signo vincit and all that stuff. So anyway, we're getting the whole Catholic lite treatment. One thing she really hammered home was the paschal candle. Sister, remember when we lied and said that we're all good, practicing Catholics? Yeah, we all know what that big ole candle in the front is, m'kay?

Why is it that all nuns smell the same, anyway? They take a vow of poverty, so maybe they all have to use the same products and that's why? It's a mix of old lady smell, undoubtedly the products, and mothballs, and maybe a little old lady perfume. Weird.

Anyway, back to the heat. I had sweat dripping down my back as I sat there and smelled olive oil and chrism. And then she kinda skimmed over what we actually have to do the day of the Christening. So I don't know who holds the baby, and what I have to do, and the godfather doesn't know that he has to light the baptismal candle (I only know because I saw a baptism this week at church. What, I do go, about 50% of the time.) It was just like our wedding rehearsal, except this nun last night didn't yell at us the whole time and make me cry. The wedding Nazi was awful, and which of my friends did she like the most that night? Jim, good old, messy, often looks like he's homeless jim. Jim courts the tortured artist thing sometimes, and his hair is wild and curly. He's often mistaken for being Middle Eastern, but he's just regular old Italian. Sicilian to be exact. The reason the catholic nazi liked him was because he was wearing a tie and kissing her ass to make fun of her. Good ole Jim.

So what I'm trying to say with this whole entry is that I feel a little unprepared to do this whole godmother thing. I hope I do a good job, because I've never done this before. I mean, I'll be able to always be there for little william, and I'll always be a doting godmother to lil leon, but I just hope I don't fall into the font.

Revisiting the Artist in Me

This summer has been all about the art. As any reader to this blog certainly knows by now, I haven't done much writing. But, in an unexpected turn of events, I've been making art again. Whoa! I have a BFA in painting, but I haven't really used it in, let's see, four years. Dude, that's sad. So this summer, I decided to treat myself. Because last semester was the semester from hell, worse for me than the semester when I was helping my mom and cousin to take care of my mommom who was in hospice care (some funny/sad stories there, maybe I'll revisit them sometime here), I decided to take a while off.

I took a class at Fleisher Art Memorial. You may have read about my cats' sabotage of my one drawings before. I was the youngest person in the class by at least 30 years, which was fine. It's been a while since I felt young in the classroom. I made three drawings, two of which I really liked. I had a lot of fun drawing. And, I'm happy to admit, I didn't completely suck! I sometimes feel like a fraud because I have this BFA, and I don't do anything with it. I mean, why bother to get it, right? Overall, it helped me realize that I love art history and want to do this for the rest of my life. But to not make art at all seems lazy to me.

So like I said, I made a few pastel drawing this summer. I also helped Kevin to make tshirts today. We broke out this silkscreen kit that he had bought me a few Christmases ago. I should post a picture of our wares. They're pretty cool. They're for a gig that he has this weekend with Problem Solving. It's a woodstock-like event, so I'm not going. Not really a nature girl, this one. So I'll have plenty of time to write.

Even though my t-word isn't complete yet, I still feel I've had a productive summer. And there's still a few weeks left to eek out that paper.