stories

I’m sure the blogs of America are now full to bursting with people talking about St. Patrick’s Day. I was going to write something about how I don’t really celebrate it, that I don’t quite see how one can “celebrate” St. Patrick’s Day who isn’t Catholic, but instead I’ll explain.

I have Irish blood, sure. Most of my friends do, too, and only really lay claim to it in early March or under special circumstances like drinking contests or when Notre Dame is playing.

Fact: My grandmother changed the spelling of her daughter Bridget’s name to avoid having it be “too Irish” (fear of being associated with the IRA.)
Fact: My mother converted from Catholicism when she married my father.
Fact: I don’t actually know a thing about St. Patrick. (Now I do.)

Therefore, I don’t really feel like I can claim any kind of loyalty or right to celebrate today. Ah well, it’ll save me a hangover.

Instead, why don’t I celebrate what I am actually proud of about my family’s history:

My mother’s mother took dancing lessons from Gene Kelly. My grandfather owned a double-wide in the sticks until the day he died. It was full of weird little trinkets; on one wall hung at least a dozen different-sized calipers. A WWII pilot, last year his gruffness actuallly gave me the opportunity to say “Chinaman isn’t the preferred nomenclature, Grandpa.”

My father’s parents passed away when I was a kid, but I remember Granny being sweet and smelling like powder. She made mashed potatoes with lard, which made them taste much better, and always had little bowls of gumdrops that I would suck all the sugar off of and then try to put back. Mase (I actually thought this was his first name for most of my childhood, only later did I realize it was a shortening of our last name) had my dad and I over for lunch every Tuesday, and he would boil four hot dogs and cut them into bite-size pieces. I would douse them in ketchup and watch cartoons while he and my dad visited in the kitchen.

If anything, I think St. Patrick’s Day should be about celebrating your heritage, where you come from. I’m a Mick, a Limey, and a Kraut. (I hear I also have some Scot in me, but I didn’t know a racial slur for them.) But that isn’t where I come from – that’s just trivia. I come from the people who raised me; they come from the people who raised them. So today, when most everyone I know is getting hammered just because they can, I’ll drink to them: Mary, Melvin, John, and Audrey.

(Thanks, Gabe, for the title)

The weather in Michigan has bred in me a deeper empathy and understanding for Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining. I no longer believe that to be a horror film, but rather a documentary about Seasonal Affective Disorder.

As a bit more background, I work for a ticketing agency that is wholly owned by an arts venue.

For some reason, the management of this venue feel an urge to hold quarterly meetings of the whole organisation (mostly, they happen so the Marketing department can continue to justify their existence).

In 2002, myself and the 2 other members of the IT department had a mild obsession with the Upright Citizens Brigade (particularly the finale of season one) and an overwhelming desire to not attend these meetings.

Enter Tuvok.

With the Tuvok action figure, we could safely send 2 people to the meetings, yet semi-truthfully say 3 members of the IT team were there.

In the intervening time, the other 2 have left and others have come in, but Tuvok has maintained his record of perfect meeting attendance, something that nobody else in the IT department can boast.

Being an office drone, small distractions such as this are what make life tolerable.

I just don’t know what will happen when Tuvok finds his way home.

It’s 75 degrees in Washington today (that’s about 24 degrees for you metric-system types), and in my walk around the block for lunch I noticed that the attractive people have returned for spring.

I can only assume that they follow the homeless population south for the winter.

Sometimes, many happy accidents come together at once to bring a little joy into your life. I’m going to tell two of those stories.

First, I went to see 300 on Friday afternoon with Josh. We both enjoyed it well enough but found ourselves leaving feeling like there was a better movie lying there somewhere. As we walked, I figured it out – the movie had no sense of humor about itself, it didn’t let itself be the rollicking bloodfest we wanted it to be – it was taking itself too seriously.

At the very moment we were wondering how to give it that sense of humor, we walked past a van blasting AC/DC.

Someone please cut me a 300 trailer scored to “For Those About To Rock.” Please.

Story two: I finally got around to pulling the pictures off my camera from when some friends visited, and found, nestled among the drunk people and smiles, this tender moment:

Worf, you’ll teach us all a lesson about love, you old dog.

Q: Which is sadder?
A: The fact that I stayed home on a Saturday night and watched a nature documentary (the wonderful BBC documentary Planet Earth) OR
A: That the documentary made me burst into uncontrollable tears because the Amur Leopard is extremely endangered, and there are only about 40 left in the wild.

Caption: Baby leopards make me cry.

Hello everyone. I’d like to start by saying that I’m quite pleased to be invited to participate in this project and hope we’ll all be life-long internet best friends.

I’m Jess’ friend, Rachel. Jess and I lived together in AmeriCorps and we spent absurd amounts of time together in New York City.

Now I live in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I’m getting my M.A. in Children’s Lit (No, I don’t want to teach or write children’s books. I just needed something to do for two years) and I teach Writing Composition at Eastern Michigan University. Despite the fact that I teach writing and grade papers I still have no idea where to place a comma. Don’t tell my students.

I live in an apartment with paper thin walls. My neighbor recently got a new girlfriend and I can hear their wild, monkey-sex goings on at top volume. I’m impressed with his stamina.

None of that was terribly interesting, but I bet this is: My face is on a thong! So for just $9.99, you can have my head buried in your crotch any time of day or night. That’s a bargain, people. (Normally you’d have to buy me dinner first.)

Happy blogging!

Hey everyone! I’ve never had a blog before. I had something called a “Deadjournal” in 2002, when it was a fairly funny play on “Livejournal”, (and it was invite only! I felt so special!) but I think I made about 4 posts and couldn’t be bothered to do anything else on it.

But here I am today! I sometimes do things on the internet. Today LRR put up not only a video I wrote, but also my comic (which is not very good.)!
I even found time to do a doodle at work:

It kind of looks like an ugly doll in a devil suit.

And now for a good story:
I live in a very Chinese part of Vancouver, just about at the intersection of 41st Ave and Victoria Drive. I can tell it’s a very Chinese part of Vancouver because there is a bubble tea house on my block that has menus that are all in Chinese, but you can get ones that are bilingual. It also stays open until 2:00 am on weekends, and serves the kind of Chinese food that sounds like a good idea at 2:00 am, provided you have been drinking all night. Last time I went I had some of a friend’s fish ball soup, but we all debated ordering a side of crispy fried pig intestine.

There is also a Chinese market a block away, which is hells of cheap, but their food goes bad fast, and sometimes it’s bad before you’ve gotten a chance to eat it. Once I cut the end off a perfectly normal looking zucchini and a rancid brown goo poured out of it. It had somehow rotted from the inside, with no discernable outside symptoms, such as the a sloshing noise from it’s liquid interior.

Anyhow, 41st and Victoria are also very busy streets, and my apartment faces out onto the road, so I’m used to a constant stream of car and bus noise, well into the night. I was sitting in my living room at about 10:00pm, trying to finish my comic (which was mentioned earlier) when it seemed like all outside noise stopped. This sudden silence actually caught my attention far more than anything else I’d heard that night, so I looked up from my work, but I got distracted by trying to draw just the right look in panel three, and went back to work. Gradually the silence was filled by what sounded like a woman singing on the street. I was almost about to get up, and see what kind of woman could make all the cars and buses and people stand still long enough to listen quietly to her song, when I finally nailed the right nose-to-forehead-to-chin ratio. By the time I had finished what I was doing she had walked by, and the traffic had started up again.

Whether they endorse it, of course, is another matter entirely.

I’m writing this from a hospital computer at Crappy But Well-Paid Job, because it’s ten to eight in the bastard morning and I’ve got sod all else to do. Crappy But Well-Paid Job involves covering sick leave and holidays on the York Hospital switchboard; it’s crappy, but, well, yeah. It does yield the odd interesting anecdote, though, which I’ll relate here as they come.

I also do two other jobs; Awesome But Poorly-Paid Job (bartender, The Ackhorne, most excellent pub; I’m the “friendly barman” described in the first comment, I rule) and Super Awesome But Extremely Intermittent Job (freelance illustrator – What I Want To Do With My Life, but gigs are currently too infrequent and low-paid for me to make a living at it). Doing illustration stuff all day long would be ideal, of course, but at the moment I have to say I’m glad of the variation in my work life at the moment. When I got out of art school, I foolishly thought I could blaze straight into The Business, becoming a high-rollin’ illustration sensation with a reputation all men envy; of course, business-wise, I didn’t know my arse from a hole in the ground, and spent six months unemployed. Like everyone else, I’ve since realised that success, real success, in this game is far more dependent on who you know than how many e-mails you can stomach sending to art directors.

I’m going to be exhibiting at the UK Web & Minicomix Thing next weekend, so expect the next few days’ posting to be shrieking, panicked hollerings as I deperately try to get all my shit together in time. Either that, or I’ll return with a con report around the 20th.

My name is Luke and I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

Edit: hee hee hee the rota here says “HO’S ROTATE BETWEEN WARDS” on it! (HO = house officer in this case; UK equivilent of a resident, but still. Giggles are few and far between on the 7am-3pm shift.)

Tonight, I had to search through the DMG to buy glamered Elven chain and a Python rod for my tenth-level Changeling Beguiler. I also bought a miniature Bronze Griffon that will serve as an aerial mount when I need to escape and a baleful polymorph when I need some combat assistance. My boyfriend is on the phone with my oldest friend discussing feats.

If you understood that paragraph, I’m sorry. This is not something I have done before, but it is something I am doing with a vigor that, frankly, frightens me.

My name is Jess and I am discovering that I like D&D.