Starting off Friday morning with a guinea pig* on your lap, a cup of tea, and a list of things that make you happy is pretty wonderful. Here are some things I happened upon in the magical land of the internets this week that I think are grand.
I'm pretty sure the best way to combat hate groups is not to fight them, but to just refuse to take them seriously. Nothing's worse than being ridiculed when you're trying to martyr yourself. Plus, this is just flippin' hilarious.
2. Chrissy just shared this beautiful essay by Brian Doyle and I can't stop rereading it. I'm trying to find some sort of art project to incorporate it into. Stay tuned...
3. Every time Delightfully Tacky posts throwback pictures of her long hair, it makes me itch for my curls. I've been in a straightened hair kind of mood for the past year, but I think my big hair might be about ready for a comeback.
4. I think I want my next hobby to be artisanal cocktails. I want to start infusing my own liquors, and making fancy, complicated drinks with them. Hence, this blog is my new favorite thing.
5. Two of my favorite ladies. I love seeing strong women support each other.
7. This story about Republican senator Rob Portman openly supporting gay marriage makes my heart happy.
Have a beautiful weekend, loves, and a St. Patrick's Day filled with Guinness, Dropkick Murphys, and green!
*I have two lovely new guinea pigs named Violet and Clover! I want to tell you all about them, but I am waiting on some camera issues to be resolved so I can post pictures. Not to worry, I'll soon be smothering you with piggie stories as well as all my cat-blathering.
Alright, muffins, here's the last two videos from our Drunken Debates night. In case you missed the first batch, Ann and I posted on Facebook asking for random debate topics, got real drunk, flipped a coin to decide who argued for what, then furiously debated. Watch, enjoy, then tell us who you think won each debate!
If there is one thing Ann and I are good at, it's screaming at each other. As fellow bloggers and attention-whores, we recently realized a good way to transform our madness into Youtube glory might be to get drunk and film ourselves debating completely random ass topics. We posted on our Facebook walls, requesting that our friends offer us debate topics. We then went to town on a bottle of Captain Morgan and produced the following. There are 5 videos total. Instead of bashing you all over the head with them at once, we've decided to break them into two posts on our respective blogs. Expect the next batch in about a week.
So here's how it works: Watch, enjoy, then write in the comments who you think the winner of each debate is. Ann kicks kittens for fun, so you're probably going to want to vote for me. Also, if you remember that we live in an apartment, and that our neighbors probably heard every word of our drunken hollering, you will undoubtedly get much more enjoyment out of these videos.
Without further ado, I shame-facedly present Drunken Debates.
Have you all heard of Katie Dill? If you haven't, you should go listen to her music right now. She's got a killer smokey old-timey voice and plays a mean uke. This is probably my favorite song by her.
Hello, Internet. I have been up to some very important things this week, perusing you and your many splendors. Allow me to share some of my favorite recent aspects of yourself with you.
I am all the crap about these songs as of late.
So... when I first heard the following song on the radio, I thought it was some sweet indie band and thought it was maybe the most adorable song I'd ever heard. I later learned it was by One Direction and have been hating myself ever since. Every time it comes on the radio I love it and subsequently die a little inside.
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This project is cool and I love it. It's haunting and transfixing and kind of sexy and, as the first commenter says, looks like ghost porn.
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Have you heard about this? This evokes two main thoughts for me: that anyone can change, and I love that; and that I feel deeply frightened but also oddly compassionate when I realize how many people do (what I consider to be) terrible things truly believing they are doing something good.
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Me: Want to look up videos of hamsters eating spaghetti?
I am a decided tea drinker. I'm a total tea snob, drink expensive, loose leaf tea almost exclusively (it would be completely exclusive if I could afford it) and think derisive thoughts about people who don't know the difference between green tea and oolong.*
But. Coffee smells really good. And a few weeks ago I went into Big Bear Cafe and looked around at all the cool, intellectual-looking coffee drinkers. I began to fantasize about being the kind of girl that hangs out in coffee shops, sipping away at her fair trade, freshly ground coffee, hiding behind a battered copy of On the Road as I peer at it from behind my hipster glasses and cozy, hand-knitted scarf, occasionally getting into debates with fellow coffee-shop dwellers on various types of roasts. I started to get pretty excited about it.
However, I have the caffeine tolerance of a nervous gerbil. Once, while working in the scene shop in college, the head of the shop took us all out for coffee first thing in the morning, since it was a fairly light day. 16oz of coffee later and I'm crouched on top of my chair, shaking slightly and chattering at about 147537 words per minute. I pause briefly to notice everyone staring at me, looking mildly alarmed. Steve (scene shop boss man) then says, "Hoookay. Well. When we get back, I'm handing Katie a piece of sandpaper, and it is everyone's responsibility to keep her away from the power tools."
What can I say? I'm an excitable person with a zest for life and a shit ton of energy. I really don't need caffeine.
However, I gradually coaxed my body into being able to handle the low amounts of caffeine in tea, and I am determined to do the same with coffee. And don't tell me to just drink decaf. I've had that shit, and it totally doesn't taste as good. Plus, my coffee shop fantasy involves me being one of those people who wakes up in the morning and says, "My god, I simply HAVE to have coffee before I can function." It seems more legit to me.
So, I've been upping my morning cup of tea to two cups. This seems like it wouldn't be that big of a deal, and on most days, it isn't. Thing is, most days I drink two cups of tea and then power walk for about five hours. Today, I'm working from home and I am BOUNCING OFF THE WALLS. I'm trying to keep a lock down on it for Ann's sake, and I think I'm doing a decent-ish job. Under the surface, though, my little heart is pounding like a hummingbird on crack.
I don't know why my caffeine tolerance is so low. I don't really know why I am actively trying to beat my body into a caffeine addiction, when most people would kill for my alarming levels of energy. And I'm not giving up on tea. I'll still love tea forever. I guess when some people are bored, they do productive things, whereas I just search for more substances my body can become dependent on. Whatever. I'll see you at the coffee house, bitchlets.
*That's totally not true. I'm actually very nice and rarely think snobby thoughts.
Although this looks like a beautiful, early spring day, this was actually taken on the coldest day of 2012-2013 winter thus far. As a life-long Maryland resident, there are many things I love about my home state. The weather is not one of them.
Unlike most Marylanders, though, my complaint is not our wretched, thick, heavy, humid summers. I'm used to that, and have actually grown pretty fond of them. No, what I hate is our mild winters. I like extreme weather, and I love all seasons. I want to need a coat and scarf and gloves and a hat when I go outside in the winter, not be able to comfortably walk dogs all day in a sweatshirt. I want a white Christmas and a foot of snow on the ground from December to mid-February, not a few flurries and a catastrophic winter advisory that amounts to a couple patchy inches and some ice.
This last week, the weather gods seemed to hear my grumbling and answered with 20° weather. Wind that bites your face and ears, cold that penetrates through many layers, breath fogging around your face. I was freezing my ass off, but I was a happy kid.
My body, however, did not appreciate this abrupt change to seasonally appropriate weather, and decided to inform me of this by getting sick.
I was a very sickly kid. As a toddler, I was rushed to the ER on three occasions for croup, one time even going blue because I could barely breathe. I had sinus infections all the time. I missed tons of school. Winter was pretty much one long coughing spell for me. I was pumped full of antibiotics constantly, until my body stopped responding to them and then I had to just wait out the now super viruses that seemed to attack my poor little self. When I was about 17, in the doctor's office for about the 3069th time in my life, a nurse practitioner said, "Do you eat a lot of dairy?" I eagerly responded yes, as I was a milk fiend and drank it all the damn time. She told me to stop that, because milk thickens your mucus (is that a gross sentence or what?) and makes you way more vulnerable to infection, especially if you're a pile of genetic crap like I apparently was.
So I did. And I don't get sick anymore. Seriously, almost never. I also eat much, much healthier than I did as a kid, and exercise a lot, which I'm sure helps. But aside from mild colds here and there, I haven't been sick in about four years or so. It's awesome.
My body however, apparently forgot this, and up and crapped out on me. You would think, perhaps, that with my early, hideous childhood state of constant maladies, I would handle illness better than most, but you would be incorrect. I've gotten quite accustomed to my health, and when my body dares to succumb to disease, I get pretty outraged at it. I toughed it out for one more day, determined to cure my ills with the power of health food and rage, but to no avail. On Friday, I woke up an achy, shivery, feverish, coughing mess, and figured my best bet was to give myself a break from the cold and recover.
I'll pause here and tell you that I'm pretty anti-medication. As in a refuse to take it unless it is proven to me to be absolutely necessary. I think we over-medicate the crap out of people in this country, and I think we treat symptoms without bothering to figure out what the cause is. I think Western medicine definitely has it's place, but I'd much prefer to use a natural preventative method as often as possible. I'm also very anti pain medication. My thinking is - pain has its own biological imperative. If I can't tell I feel like crap, I won't be gentle with my body and end up making things much worse, because I'm actually still sick. If I can feel pain, sure that sucks, but I'll probably take better care of myself, and be back to being healthy soon. Capiche?
Perhaps my favorite natural remedy is the Devil's Smoothie. This is a miracle elixir. It tastes pretty really fucking intense, but it works miracles. Every time in the past five years I felt myself starting to come down with the slightest hint of a cold, I drank a blender-full of this and it never amounted to anything.
So, this weekend was spent chugging through 4 liters of that crap, wasting my life away on Pinterest, knitting myself an adorable yellow tea cozy, talking waaaaay too much to my cats, pretending to be a frail and dying Victorian lady as I sobbed like a pregnant woman while reading Little Women, and watching this video over and over again until my eyes bled from sheer, unadulterated joy.
I think my brain has melted slightly, but, aside from sounding like I'm about to hack up lung every time I breathe too deeply/laugh/talk for more than 23 seconds, I'm doing much better. As far as illnesses go, this really wasn't too bad. Friday was pretty rough, but nothing too extreme, and I've been feeling better and better since. Fingers crossed I don't undo my recovery working outside again tomorrow. Although, the temperatures are supposed to be up to 70° by Wednesday, so I'll probably be fine.
