Postcard Puzzle

I bought these postcards in Japan a number of years ago. I just stumbled upon them and wondered about them. They are pretty weird. I like them. The guy with the bling-y collar is saying "gochisou sama," which is what you say after a meal. He does look like he's just become stuffed from a good meal. The other guy is Shin-chan, and it says someting about him laughing - "Shin-chan, please don't laugh," I think it says? I am frustrated because I'm not sure about the verb ending and obviously need to practice Japanese more. Actually, whatever it is, I think the milk is saying it. It would make sense for the milk to ask him not to laugh right now, right? Or does it only make sense because I promised myself I'd go to bed at 10:30 and it's already 11:09?
Anyway, the name on the backs of the postcards is "Shinichi Hoshi." I looked up Shinichi Hoshi online and found that he was a Japanese science fiction writer famous for writing short short stories. I didn't find anything about an artist, which kind of surprised me because I feel like I remember seeing a lot of paintings like these while I was there. It made me wonder, did this scifi writer also make wacky paintings? Or is this a separate person? Anyone know? Anyone? Hello??

i just now got home from the place i come from. let's give a shout out to warren, ohio, where both my parents grew up and where i lived on and off as a kid. it was not a happy visit, though. my grandma died earlier this week. i'd already been missing the real her for a long time, but i found out that i could miss her even more. someday i'll write about her cinderella story and her glittery beehive and her sparkly shoes. she had a hard beginning and a hard end, but a damn fine middle. that's the good thing.

i definitely associate her with food. she always had these mints around. actually, warren, oh is all about food to me.












i was the last one of my family to head back to detroit today, so before i left town i picked up six half-cooked pizzas from my dad's favorite pizza place, sunrise pizza, and delivered them around to our various homes in mi. the picture is of their classic "old world" pizza, with hot peppers added. my car smells pretty awesome right now.









i also brought home a hunk of cookie dough that my aunt made from my great-grandma's recipe (on the other side of the family). We cut out, baked, and decorated some cookies last night, which my aunt is using for her holiday stuff, and she sent two more hunks of dough with me and my sister so we can make some, too. Sure. I am pretty positive that i will end up slowly eating the raw dough instead.

this photo should be subtitled "me, after crying for three days, sleeping on a leaky air mattress, and driving for five hours with wet hair that dried badly, in a car that smelled like a pizzeria."

everthing is lousy, except this children of the corn jumper, and it's pretty lousy too.

It's Sunday, right?

What do you do when you're pretty sure it's Sunday, but all signs point to it not being Sunday?

For example, the mail. There isn't supposed to be mail on Sunday, right? So why was a mail truck stopping at each mailbox in my parents' neighborhood when I was there today?

And the busy hair salon I walked past. Are hair salons open on Sunday? I didn't think so.

The newspaper says "Sunday," though, so I'm going to go with it. Plus, I know I had a Saturday, I remember it, and if today was Monday, someone would have called me by now to find out why I'm not at work. I would have had to make something up, like "I had a jumper crisis," because no one would believe me if i said, "I thought it was Sunday."

TV seems like a good way to keep track of days. maybe i need to watch more tv. the office is the only thing i make that much of a point to watch. i used to like lost, but it's lived up to its name and lost my interest almost completely.

It's "spitting snow," as they say, and I'm enjoying it. It seems really sad for some reason. not because i think it should still be warm or something. it's just that kind of day. gray and gloomy and snow settling slightly on people's hair. It seems kind of sad, but fits my mood.

if i could be anywhere now, in the most escapist sense of the phrase, i'd be on the other side of the earth, at my old favorite, yuri jazz cafe, in nagoya, jp. i'd drink the ginger beer (actual beer with ginger flavoring) and write in a notebook and watch the two guys who work there select the next record from the rows and rows against the walls. they'd pick the next record without any fuss, put it on, display the cover, and go back to the tiny "kitchen." i'd sit at my scarred wooden table, one of six, and peek through the shutters now and then to the world outside. i could stay there all day. they didn't care. i could be by myself, writing in my notebook and staring into space, or i could be with someone. it didn't matter. that's where i'd escape to right now. not the beach or san francisco. those don't match my mood. just yuri jazz cafe.

jumper wearers of the world, unite and take over

I really need to go to bed, but I've settled on tomorrow's outfit and thought you'd want to know. How could I have overlooked my puffy white blouse and my Children of the World jumper?

What would a Children of the Corn jumper look like, I wonder?

No more workhorse.

(from biologyreference.com)

I'm trying to think of anything non-work related right now and i'm drawing a mean blank. Yes, a mean one. Work is an amoeba and I'm the thing it's engulfing (shown above). Do you remember drawing pictures of amoebas engulfing things? I do. In high school biology, I guess. Or maybe work is a mass of green jello and I'm the pineapple trapped inside. That's more of a grade school cafeteria memory. See, all my memories relate to various schools! Who am I? All I do is work or sleep so that I can work or make lunches to eat at work or put things in/take things out of bags carrying work materials. Conferences again tonight. "Your daughter lacks intellectual rigor." "Your son smells my shoes."

There are amazingly few good pictures online of pineapple trapped in jello. This one will have to do. The jello sites make me queasy. They usually also involve a lot of mayonnaisey and cream-of-something soup recipes. I am grossed out by those things.

So, I do have an identity beyond school! Awesome. It's about food.

By the way, do you think I should wear my Apples-n-Alphabet outfit tomorrow, or my sassy "READ" overalls with accompanying turtleneck? It's so hard to make these decisions each day! Also, all jokes aside, you will, won't you, sit me down if this ever really happens to me?

Ouch, and then some

1. I hate Emily Dickinson. And I hate that I suddenly can't remember if it's spelled Dickenson or Dickinson. I hate all those dashes she uses, and her prim outfits, and how she was all morbid and housebound. And I really hate that we have the same birthday.

2. Today I have numb and tingly legs. Scary things come up when you google "Numb and tingly legs," by the way. But I think it has to do with my lower back, and some pinched nerves, perhaps? I wonder if it's all the fault of those blasted standing sprints in spinning class?

3. Had a feast from LaShish at Deborah's for her birthday yesterday. Me, Deborah, and Tim ate and cracked up about stuff while Isidora dozed in a hugely oversized sweater, which was super cute. I wondered why she seemed to be struggling to keep her eyes open at times. I do that when I want to finish a chapter or a movie or something, or when I'm teaching a boring lesson or sometimes while driving, but what reason does a newborn baby have? Succumb to the sleep while you can, Izzy!

4. Sheesh, LaShish is so damn good. I wouldn't say no to a bed of hummous with pine nuts, with some of that awesome soft bread for pillows. What do you think of this for their new motto: "SHEESH, LaShish is good!" Would it make you want to go there? I want to go there right now. But I'll bet that uptight Emily Dickinson would have never wanted to eat there. Loser!

5. Like I am even capable of ever teaching a boring lesson!

moomins, y'all

I have a bad memory for books in general, but I think of all the Moomin books I had as a kid this was my favorite. I mean, shouldn't it have been? LOOK! Look at them on their stilts! Stilts and comets! That's a winning combination if ever there was one. I was trying to remember how I started reading these books, thinking it was my Finnish grandma, but no - I think I happened upon them in the bookstore in Dublin as a kid. I still remember the bookstore we'd go to during the two years we lived there. I remember how it smelled, and I remember that the book selection was totally different and that was exciting. So I read Moomins, and I read two boarding school series by Enid Blyton, Malory Towers and St. Clare's.



In these books there were lots of sensible English girls and one or two headstrong ones, and usually a spoiled, glam American nuisance with a lazy drawl and maybe a hot-blooded Spanish girl. At least one of the group would be horsey, one would be strong and athletic, one would be dumb as a stick, and one, whipsmart. They'd get into scrapes and arguments. At least once a term they'd have midnight feasts by flashlight, tucking into tins of pineapple, lovely cakes, and orange fizz sent in parcels from mummy and daddy. Sometimes they'd be careless with the crumbs and would get caught the next day and the headmistress would have to give them a frightful scolding. Sometimes they'd sneak out at night and fall off cliffs, or get dragged by a wild stallion, or stubbornly try to prove themselves by swimming in a dreadful current. They never seemed to meet any lads, though. Pity.

Yeah, I thought it all sounded pretty exciting, that English boarding school life. Looking back, though, Moominland would definitely have been the better place for me. I found some Moomin song clips at http://www.moominvoices.com/listen.html . Some are pretty wild, consisting of multiple layers of moomin voices.

I'm glad that when I can't sleep I can get online and look up things like "moomins." There's over a million sites. A whole lot of obsessed souls out there, which works out great for me. But these two? These two give me the creeps! I knew a few people in Japan who had gotten married at Disneyworld, though, so I guess between the two, a Moomin style wedding is way cooler. I would have included stilts, of course, in case of a comet.

Ha ha!

Someone made me feel really crappy about myself earlier today, and hence I'm enjoying a bit more wine than I normally would on a Tuesday. Plus, I am not with my students tomorrow, but at a workshop all day. So: a second post just to say....

HA! I laugh in the face of typos. As I was self-obsessedly re-reading the cleverly titled post "Flinging things around," I noticed a typo, in whose face I laughed. I mistakenly wrote, "All week I want to send time there," instead of "SPEND time there." It got me thinking: How great would it be if I could send time to my apartment? Like, if I was at the dentist, or the gym, or school for a certain number of hours, it would earn me a certain number of minutes or hours which would be sent with free shipping to my apartment to use there? That would be awesome.

Are the polls still open? I'm voting for whoever is going to make THAT happen!

Sigh. Sometimes the badly typing fingers really know what they are doing!

my closet and other crazy shit

I think I may have a bona fide crazy lady as a neighbor. She is always dressed to the nines in flashy, fluffy, fur-trimmed, brocade clothing, no matter what the hour, and constantly recieves packages in the mail from clothing stores. Her car seems to be filled to the roof with bags and boxes - of clothing, it seems, and some children's toys in their regular packaging. Plus, I always think she is talking to me when we meet in the parking lot, and she is, at first, but then she's mumbling into her trunk full of bags and boxes, and seems to have forgotten I'm there. Unless I'm on my cell phone, when she tries to have full and complex conversations with me. Did I mention that the door to her place is almost obscured by boxes? It is. I worry.

She locked herself out on Sunday and knocked on my door to use my phone. Her hands were full of bags and clothes and, for some reason, a rug.

Why does the crazy lady scare me? There was a crazy lady who shopped at the food co-op in ann arbor. she would buy tiny litle dollops of things from the salad bar and make funny noises in her throat like she was choking, but she was well dressed, too. she scared me worse. i guess i thought, why are the crazy lady and i always here at the same time? am i following the same itinerary as the crazy lady? shouldn't our paths cross only very rarely? ok, and let's face it - am i someone else's crazy lady?

This one also makes me think about my closet. I do have a lot of clothes. The funny thing is, despite my generally chaotic approach to life and organization, my closet is a rainbow of color-coded harmony (well, a rainbow with more black and gray in it than most rainbows). I delight in it, I must admit. It's like a piece of art. I want to leave the closet door open when guests come. My cd's are also arranged by spine color. Here's what's organized in my life: My clothes, my music, and my books. My fridge is semi-organized. My paperwork and financial stuff is NOT ORGANIZED. So if you wondered what I care about in life, I guess that pretty much says it all. Here's what it looks like, at least a small slice of the side with shirts, a bit crooked because of course I took it with my computer (and I just drank some wine). Not shown: The other side, with dresses, skirts, and pants.

flinging things around

My pirated (aaargh, Pam) wireless is weakish today, so I just drove silly far to drink coffee and write and do work at a coffeehouse far from my home. I like it here, and there's nowhere comparable near my home. So I drove. Now I'm here, bathed in sunshine, as you can see.

I have a strange relationship with my new apartment. All week long I feel like I'm there just long enough to fling things around and I wish I could send more time there. Then the weekend comes and I know I should get stuff done at home, but I just want to be out among people. Real adult people. With skin and everything else that real people have.

It's like I only want to be there when I'm supposed to be at work. When I'm not supposed to be at work, I want a total change of scenery, maybe another identity altogether.

I had a headache near that one lumpy spot on my cranium this morning. It was a caffeine withdrawal headache! Yea. My favorite kind!

I hesitate to mention it, but there is a student who sits near my feet every day when we're at the carpet and sniffs my shoes. An actual quote from this boy: "Ms. G_____, your shoes today smell just like the boots you were wearing yesterday."

Well, I guess what can I expect when I wear these boots to school?

Halloween

I lived through another Halloween.

I used to like Halloween, but things have changed. It used to be that Halloween was an excuse to dress sluttier than I normally would. Now it seems to have become an excuse to wear pajamas to work. It was my colleagues' idea. I was all set to be a leopard, which would have consisted of clothes I already have plus a leopard thing on my head. But they wanted us to have a theme, and that theme is too embarrassing to plainly write; however here's a hint: it involved a pacifier. Ugh. So terrible. I am not a person who has a stockpile of adorable pajamas at the ready, and even if I did, I don't want to wear them in public under any circumstance. Somehow my coworkers all own one-piece zip-up fleece pajamas! I ended up wearing "sweats," which is another word I can't stand.

Some would say I don't know how to have fun. I do know how to have fun, but it's not your everyday kind of fun. It's very specialized. I can send you a brochure.

*
Added a few minutes later:

I think that because of how public school teachers are viewed in our country, and how I constantly strive to present myself as an educated, intellectual professional, and how we are currently working without a contract, dressing like a b*&$ just seemed like the wrong message.

A leopard would have totally gotten the right point across.