i have found my happy (t-shirt) place!

as most of y'all know quite well that i love making t-shirts. and my love of making t-shirts is hindered almost entirely by the fact that it is really hard to make good quality t-shirts using household items. even if you make the t-shirt well, it doesn't survive the laundry. that's just the way it goes. but today, through a series of extremely complex moves along the internerd, i came across a place that was made for ladies like me (and kels. you need to check this out, girl! all our dreams can come true!)

anyhow, check out my inaugural design here.

pretty rad! i hope i don't get sued by either kanye west or the city of ny, however. that would suck. i will try to keep my future designs away from the realm of copyright infringement.

next up: no dinosaurs allowed! that's going to take some work.

china hearts smoking (not 'china' the has-been wrestler, although i think she hearts smoking too)

i thought it would be the virginians and the french who wouldn't go quietly with the whole smoking ban movement...but check this out! looks like china will always be a haven for those who love to smoke...

reuters: customers desert smoke-free restaurant

frustration, revelation and robbery. my life of late.

i've been in a weird headspace the past week or so, mainly because my sleep patterns are all fucked up. the problem is something that shouldn't really be a problem: i actually have a lot of free time at the moment, being that it is winter break, and also, that it is january, when everything naturally slows(except the construction around my apartment. that goes on and on...)

however, the excess of downtime has created a bit of a sleep problem, being that i have been sleeping later, which translates into staying up later, which means that i am insomniamanically browsing the television at 2am every night until i finally can't take it anymore and wake up cw, who has fallen asleep on the couch, to go to bed, just so i can lie awake for another two hours making mental lists and trying to find a position that will help me fall off to sleep faster(doesn't exist). and so i finally fall asleep at four and then i am so exhausted that i sleep till eleven and start the whole cycle over again.



i didn't help that i was sick this past weekend and was taking a lot of decongestant, a med that doubles as a stimulant, so i was pretty much screwed. i made a point of getting up early this morning(despite not falling asleep until my normal 4am) just so that perhaps later i will be inclined to go to bed at a normal hour. sucks.



i also have stepped up my hunt for a good volunteer tutoring gig. i have to start doing something now, or i'm going to pull my hair out by the time school starts on the 27th. so late! i am probably going to be doing some one on one tutoring with hiv/aids patients through a program called project samaritan.



i would probably be able to go meet with the director today, except that i don't have minutes for my phone, due to a bizarre series of events on saturday that led me to a poor banking decision. but get this:



on saturday afternoon, cw and i were headed to the e. village to watch the packers-seahawks game with friends, and we stopped off at a nearby commerce bank branch to deposit some cash so that, among other things, i could go online and purchase some phone minutes. as we entered, a distraught looking commerce employee in a suit was locking the interior door. a customer who was entering the bank ahead of us asked him what was up: it was only four and the bank was supposedly open till six. the bank guy answered him with a bunch of customer service jibberish about having to close early and his going to another nearby branch, and that maybe they would open back up once they dealt with the emergency... the bank had just been robbed! literally moments before we walked in. the cops weren't even there yet! in fact, the bank manager was just locking the door, which means the robbers had just left! it was pretty crazy. we literally missed being held up in a bank by like ten minutes. it really made me think about all the little things that went into our missing it- if i hadn't had to run back into the apartment twice because i kept forgetting things...if we had made one train earlier... all that kind of thing. it's pretty weird to think about. i'm glad i'm so disorganized! it saved us from getting robbed!



so anyhow, as a result of this news, we were so freaked that we just went and deposited into the atm without thinking about how long it would take to clear, so long story short, it's two days later and i'm still without a phone. boo.



also contributing to the space madness of my brain is the renewed extremity of my social anxiety of late. this is something that i have been living with literally forever. i would have to go back to elementary school to find a time when it didn't affect me, but sometimes it gets especially bad, and after all these years, i think i can say that when i don't have a lot that i "have" to do, like working a lot or school or a particularly active social life, it gets much worse. if left to my own devices, i will let it overrun me, or maybe i don't really have as much of a say as i think i do. at these times it can overrun me so severely that it literally can take me three days to leave the house and go across the street to the grocery store. no joke. and when i finally force myself into the trip, i am freaking out the whole time. it's pretty bizarre. sitting here right now, i can't believe that i am even talking about myself, about things i do, but if i were to get up right now and try to get ready to leave and go somewhere, it would be a whole different story.



anyhow, it's really been getting me down lately. i hate feeling this way, it makes me so angry sometimes, and so sad at others; i feel so helpless, to have such a severe disconnect within myself is extremely disconcerting. and the way it affects my life, the quality of my life... i probably wind up doing less than one percent of all the things i think about doing every day, all the things i want to do every day. and it really kills me, when i have this much time, to be totally paralyzed. it's quite a conundrum.



i have been working on it myself for some time: the best i can hope for is that when i force myself to do things, it will make doing other things easier, but it's still hit or miss. when i was in richmond, i started seeing a behaviorial therapist at vcu for a bit, but i wound up feeling as if they were not so much trying to help me specifically as they were trying to conduct a larger study(which they were) and just pick out parts of my situation to illuminate their work. a lot of the things we were doing/were going to do were things that i already do, mostly exposure therapy, and i just felt that it was going nowhere.



i have always been anti-drug when it comes to psychiatric medications(which is ironic considering how pro-drug i have been in every other regard) and i still have serious misgivings about the idea of trying to treat this problem of mine with medication, but i am getting kind of desperate. now that i am finally back in school and i see where i want my career to go, i am really nervous about the impact of this problem on those goals. it can be very arbitrary, how this affects me, and it can occasionally overpower me and i have abandoned things in the past due to a feeling of being overwhelmed by trying to force myself through the anxiety. i am 31 years old, soon to be 32, and i really feel that where i am going now with school and my future in that way is where i really want to go: i don't want this bullshit to fuck that up. and, from where i presently sit, i cannot guarantee that it won't. sad, but true. so i really have to shift this problem to the foreground and figure out a way to deal with it that will actually net some results. i wish i had a better grip on what that entails.



this turned into quite a post! that's what getting up early can do for you... or something.

holy f*#@%ing crap!

i haven't been this excited over a new product in some time! check it!

i knew there was a reason that i hadn't yet found myself with an i-pod dock! i hope they release this thing soon... i can't wait to see it in person.

check it out on the web here.

thanks to kanye, connect-four maniac and herald of all things cutting edge.

here's a link to wyclef's sweetest girl for alison. holla.

Wyclef Jean - Sweetest Girl (ft. Akon, Lil Wayne & Nia)

ouch.

although i have long-ago recognized the futility of getting upset at the wonton use of art to advertise things, or to soundtrack dumb shows like laguna beach or whatever, and although charles has managed to convince me over the past two and a half years that the relative merits of such works are not contained within their ability to remain obscure, i must report that i am saddened by the use of joe jackson's "one more time" to advertise the return of the gordita to taco bell.

i'm sorry. i know i should be able to rise above, but it hurts me. it really does. i can deal with the clash playing as some dweeb drives a nissan around, i can handle and even understand when chan marshall creates a song for the express purpose of selling it to a jewelry company who can in turn use it to convince television viewers that someone can only truly express their love for you if they provide you with a diamond necklace that symbolizes your "journey" together, and that you can find dangling from the neck of every upper middle class housewife in the united states.

but the gordita? the gordita! joe jackson selling the gordita! i'm not blaming joe, or judging, or whatever...everyone wants to make a living. it may not have even been his decision. but i imagine that there is another song that expresses the sentiment of something "returning" that could have been used and would have inflicted less pain upon me. and i just wish that somehow, someway, there was someone in the advertising chain of command on this project who could have saved me from this torture.

sigh.

i know there is no good fight, really. i do. but a small shred of idealism lives on in me.

anyhow, for anyone who doesn't know joe jackson, you probably do know some of his songs and just don't know that it is him: there were a couple of popular ones back in the eighties. "steppin' out" was one, characterized by a driving bass and piano line that makes you think of early eighties nyc club culture(or that's what it makes me think of). his songs manage to combine the brashness of punk rock with a delicate, emotionally vulnerable underside that is really touching, to use a totally cheesy phrase. "different for girls" is a beautiful song that, if played at the right moment, and through the right headphones in the wee hours of the morning, might bring one to tears. "one more time", the gordita advertising jingle in question, is a fast, hard, angry, breakup song that stylizes bitterness to the point where one can almost find satisfaction in its taunting "baby, baby... tell me that you never wanted my lovin', tell me one more time"

Joe Jackson - It's Different For Girls

here's one of my favorites for your enjoyment. if you wanna hear "one more time", just turn on the television and wait...

drinking on the l.e.s. with alec! x-mas '07 vol. 1

boy. well, it's been a little while since the holiday season wrapped up, and i think i needed a bit of a breather before i sat down to reflect upon it. it went by really fast, which i suppose is for the best. but now it all just kinda feels like a blur, with sufjan stevens playing in the background...

first of all i would like to say hi to alec, who i know for sure is reading this, since i finally got to see her last week in nyc! she was up-to-date on all the blogworthy details of my(or should i say our) life, which made catching up that much easier. we didn't have to spend much time going over the events of the past three years, and instead could concentrate on hearing about her beautiful daughter sloane, and watching her husband, russell, attempt to ride the mechanical bull that the bar we were drinking in so kindly provided.

i feel i need to qualify some of these statements i just made with descriptions, most especially the mechanical bull. alec told cw and i to meet them at mason dixon, a bar on the lower east side which i had seen before and noted due to the fact that it's front door is fashioned to resemble that of a non-descript barn. unfortunately, the rural decor did not inspire the lower-east sider types to dress like normal people rather than like the douches that they are, but no matter- as alec and i have proved many times before, we can have fun anywhere. and probably even more so if there are people to make fun of. i should note that neither alec nor russell were instrumental in picking this bar. they live in miami, so they can not be implicated in nyc bar choices. however, i think i speak for all of us when i say it turned out to be just grand.

back to the bull. at the back of said bar was an area set aside for mechanical bull riding, a spectacle which i imagine might become totally unbearable given the crowd, but on this night was not seeing a lot of use. after losing a bet of sorts(a whole other story), russ headed back to ride the bull, being that he is a man of his word. he very wisely allowed himself to fall off pretty early on in the ride, ensuring that he wouldn't have any bull-riding related injuries. from what we heard, it doesn't always go so well.

anyhow, basically the story is that i got to see alec and russ, and they got meet charles, finally, and we did all of this and saw russ ride a mechanical bull, and got licked on the face(all of us) by an extremely intoxicated and arguably insane gentleman from new zealand who insisted on screaming the words to "i will survive" at me until i relented and finished one of the verses with him. charles, for the record, got motley crue.

ah...new york.

i must go, it's work time. but i will finish my x-mas holiday reverie at a later date. promise.