5 Things I Wish You Loved Too

Jasper Fforde Books

Jasper Fforde is in my top 3 authors of all time, alongside C.S. Lewis and Neil Gaiman. (Yes, they are all white men from the UK.) The worlds he creates are delightfully absurd and still ring with jester’s truth. I am obsessed with dystopian fiction and Fforde delivers that with a wink and a smile. He released the unfortunately named “Shades of Grey” in 2009 and 2010 in the UK and US respectively, which will be my favorite trilogy when it is finished. It never got enough attention to warrant publishing the sequel(s), because every time you bring it up someone thinks you’re talking about bad mommy porn. If everyone goes and reads the first one, maybe they will stick to the 2016 date on Wikipedia.

He also has a fascinating Instagram account filled with resplendent ceilings!

The Hoobs

The Hoobs is the greatest children’s show ever. Imagine Douglas Adams, instead of writing for Doctor Who, wrote Sesame Street. The puppets are created by Jim Henson Studios and the children they encounter are all the cutest tiddlypeeps the UK could muster. The Hoobs are aliens that come to earth in search of information. They are a species who devote their entire existence to finding things out and adding them to “The Great Hoobopaedia.”

The green Hoob bears a more than passing resemblance to Jerry Garcia, who is undoubtedly a personal hero of at least 1 person involved in this production. The most frustrating thing is that DVDs or digital downloads of more than a handful of episodes are totally unavailable. There is one season on Hulu.

Playing By Heart

This movie is on Netflix and if you haven’t seen it you should go watch it right now. This is one of those 1990’s ensemble dramas. Half a dozen seemingly unrelated storylines weave a theme before being wrapped together by a mundane element of everyday life. It stars, in no particular order, Sean Connery, Gina Rowlands, Gillian Anderson, Jon Stewart, Ryan Phillippe, Angelina Jolie, and Dennis Quaid. (There are a few more actors you may find more or less notable, but you get the idea.) Jon Stewart, in my opinion, is reason enough to see this movie. For all of the pot shots he takes at his own acting on “The Daily Show,” I fall in love with his character every time I rewatch it.

The Cruxshadows

Because of this band I almost got a 3 barred cross tattoo long before I ever considered conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy.

I saw this band a few times at Nocturne, a weekly goth night in a Philadelphia night club. (Sadly, it is no more.) I also saw them once at a very sketchy bar in Ithaca, New York. They don’t seem to tour in the US much anymore, but have a huge following in Germany. The lead singer is a character, and he has devoted himself to his 90’s goth kid persona, but he is also a high caliber musician and composer. The use of violin in their heavy, dark electronica is kinda like salt in caramel.

Ron Funches

I have a weird crush on this comedian. He’s like a living, breathing, foul mouthed, Muppet. His stand up is about women, weed, and food, but he just has this sweet disposition that makes me smile whenever I watch him on TV. He’s currently starring on “Undateable” and is a regular contestant on “@midnight.” He’s been popping up in a lot of places lately, I hope that keeps happening. (He also shares a birthday with my daughter, which is by pure coincidence, today! Happy Birthday Ron Funches!)

Ghosti & Ursula: Part 1

We did it! We traded our Subaru Outback for a 1985 Prowler 23 foot trailer. We bought a 1995 Suburban to pull it.

It was a crazy whirlwind of a weekend. We bought the car on Friday, and then we drove the car and the Suburban to Eugene (about 2 hours away) only to discover there was a miscommunication about which one of us was grabbing the title. So we had to drive back to Portland to get it, do the whole trip again, and then pull the trailer out of yard storage, in Oregon, after dark. We did it, the trailer is safely parked in my mother-in-law’s backyard. The builders of their house were RVing snowbirds, so it is a great place to put it until our lease is up. There is a problem with the transmission on the Suburban, but we bought it for so cheap we expected that. It is going to take a little bit more money than we allotted for car repairs, but because the trailer already has a solar set-up we have a little extra from that budget to go into the transmission. We are getting quotes for someone else to do it, because transmission really isn’t a good starting point for learning about working on engines! We have applied to the Oregon State Parks for Park Hosting. We are really hoping to get a Day Host position at Willamette Mission State Park, because it is a reasonable commute to Mickey’s classes from there, and we might be able to start right away and stay through the end of his program.

We have named the Suburban Ursula. We are not Disney obsessed, though I do love “The Little Mermaid” a lot! Ursa, as in “Ursa Major” means bear in Latin. Ursula is a woman’s name based on that word. We picked Ursula because driving around in her is like riding around in a big Mama Bear. She has a reassuring rumble and Magdalen falls right to sleep when we start to drive. A mama bear seemed just the beast of burden for our new home. Names are important to us.

Not sure if this will be our bed or our living room.

We have decided to name the trailer Ghosti. Ghosti is a hacked up job at transliterating the Proto-Indo-European word from which guest, host, and ghost are all derived. Though, it is often listed as meaning stranger. In Sanskrit it is rendered “घसति” and I think I will paint that onto the window screen that use to have the manufacturers name and logo. It is a word we both became fascinated with listening to “The History of English” podcast. This word has taught anthropologists that the roving herdsmen of the Eurasian steps understood giving and receiving to be the same thing, two parts of the same whole. It does also have the idea of not belonging to the tribe, being an outsider. I think the odd duality of the word, and its absolute antiquity, really drew us in. So Ghosti shall be our home!

It’s the cutest woodstove ever!

Before we take Ursula and Ghosti out on the road we need to do a few things. We need a refrigerator. RVs are designed with everything built in. The guy we bought it from, who was a hoot, removed the fridge, lined the cubby with sheetrock, and put in a “Gypsy Caravan” stove. This means we need to decide if we want to give up counter space for an itty bitty fridge, if we want to lose about 25% of our closet space for an apartment fridge, or if we want to put a chest fridge in the behind bench storage cabinet. We need to put a half door in front of the woodstove, also lined with sheetrock, so Magdalen doesn’t burn herself on the stove. We also need to decide if we want to sleep in the “bedroom” or if we want to pull out the bed, set up a playroom/den area, and make the foldout dinette bed in the front a more permanent bed.

I’m not sure if I’m thrilled or if I’m thrilled or terrified.

If you have want to weigh in on anything, come on over to the Facebook page I set up for our project. I will post regular updates, list things we are selling as we downsize, supplies we are looking to get 2^nd hand, and polls asking for opinions when I’m feeling indecisive.

Nothing To Stop Us Now!

I have been holding in an announcement for about a week now, because I wanted things to be firmed up a bit more. My husband and I have decided to take the plunge and downsize to a mobile home! We have listed our beloved Subi, Sheila, for sale and pick up our “new” Suburban on Friday. We are looking for the right trailer, we need something with a separate bedroom, which means at least 25 feet long. I am so excited, and my paternal grandfather would finally give a damn about something I’m doing! The man was the Irish Rube Goldberg, he built elaborate plywood contraptions to adapt the world to his and my grandmother’s tiny statures. I have plans for a travel desk to fit next to Magdalen’s carseat for long days in the truck, and a similar one for the front middle, so the passenger can work on a laptop.

My plans are nothing short of grandiose, and a bit absurd!

We have been spending 75-90% of our income on housing for almost our entire marriage. We decided that we were going to make a conscious decision to live differently. We are going to focus on creating a beautiful and peaceful place to be. We are going to build a place that nourishes us. We are both feeling like we are constantly maintaining a life that gives us nothing. I feel like Magdalen may be developing a stress response to my mood being so volatile, because I don’t love my space, because it ultimately isn’t my space.

We are tired of paying someone to keep us in their box. If we are going to be in a box, it is going to be one of our own making. It turns out there are a ton of amazing families that do this with more kids than we have. Right now, and it has to be RIGHT NOW, we have an opportunity to own a home of our own, as tiny as it may be. That home will not require payments, and Sheila will buy solar panels and electrical upgrades, so that we can be off grid by June. From April until June we are probably going to be in a trailer park, which is a fraction the cost of rent. This summer we will be “boondocking” around Mt. Hood and down the Oregon coast. Oregon is a particularly nice climate to live in when you need to spend a good deal of time outside.

I’d like to think this is the kind of trailer we will have.

We recently discovered that Oregon State has an ecampus that is more extensive, and academically rigorous, than the other online classes Mickey has been considering. We have found a reliable way to get internet almost anywhere we go in the lower 48 and most of Canada. So, we are looking at the best way to travel around the country, me doing more blogging and Mickey putting his web design certificate to good use while finishing his BA. We had no idea that there were volunteers who make coffee and hand out maps at State Parks in exchange for a place to park their trailer. These positions last anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months. Maybe we will spend some time at some other state parks, maybe we will find a great spot to be and become more or less permanent, at this point we are really open to anything.

Sometimes I can’t help but worry I’m going to stray too far this way.

This is the first time in my life when I am going to be free of anyone’s ownership and not have to worry about someone turning the lights off. The last stressor to get over is deciding what to throw away, what to store, and what to fit in the RV. I am feeling lighter with each real step we take. I am so grateful that something came along, I was a hair’s breadth away from despondency. Now if we can just iron out some more internet based work for one or both of us, we can really move forward into something, rather than just trying to get out of one hole after the other. This is the first time in a long time that I can see by the light coming from the far end of the tunnel. Ready, Set, Go!

The Tribe: Or How a Bizarre New Zealand Children’s Show Changed My Life

When I was sixteen or seventeen I was finally allowed to watch TV in the living room when I had insomnia. When I was a little younger my parents had let me bring an old black and white TV into my room and I could watch Leno and Conan, but no other channels came in. So at 2am one Thursday Night/Friday Morning I was up to channel 542, the Starz Kidz channel, having found nothing to watch on the other 541, when I saw this…

As ridiculous as this sounds, my life was changed forever. The Tribe is a show about life after all of the adults in the world are killed by a mysterious virus. This virus must have checked IDs, because I was 16 when the show was filming and a couple of those actors are 2-3 years older than me. So all these kids were gathered into shelters in city centers and their parents, as far as I can tell, lay down in bed and die while their kids are driven off in buses, by soldiers, who apparently get to live an extra hour or two, because they are driving. It really is an absolutely ridiculous show, but I loved it.

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve called the genre of my art and style “Post-Apocalyptic Kitsch” and I didn’t really say much about what that is, but this show was the seed from which my life philosophies sprung. These kids didn’t have food, there were raiding parties for batteries and gas, but every kid had a life time supply of Manic Panic and that weird lipstick Cheerleaders wear. The protagonists, The Mall Rats, lived in a mall, and so they had a bunch of luxuries the other “tribes” didn’t have. Like “Gilligan’s Island” these kids can’t figure out how to fortify their giant concrete building with anything but those grates that come down from the ceiling, but some kid figured out how to keep video games running. The professor could build a radio and bike powered generator out of coconuts, but the man couldn’t get them off the island?

Case and Point

When I was a married woman I was shown the movie “Tank Girl”. My philosophy started to grow up a little bit and “Post-Apocalyptic Kitsch” started to form out of the nebulous fog of obsession I had carried in my brain for all things post-apocalyptic and dystopian. I started thinking about what it is that keeps civilization, the march of human progress alive, when a system falls apart. The final piece of Post-Apocalyptic Kitsch joined all of this silliness from a very unlikely place. I was listening to NPR, and a woman was telling the story of her grandmother and her grandmother’s brother running from the Nazis with their grandmother. She had managed to jump from a train with both children and they ran through the countryside. They came upon a farm, or a deli, or something, and found ham. The grandmother gives the children the ham, but she does not eat even though she was starving. When the little girl, who grew to be the grandmother telling the story, asked why, she said she was old enough that surviving but not kosher was not truly surviving. (I really think it was an episode of “This American Life” but I can’t identify the episode.)

That is Post-Apocalyptic Kitsch. It’s building a coffee table out of ammo boxes, but putting a doily and vase on top, because it’s a coffee table. It’s making lingerie out of ace bandages and safety pins, because it’s still Valentine’s Day if Kangaroos are trying to eat our brains. It’s being civilized in the wilderness, because you aren’t an animal. It’s about living for more than shelter, food, and sex. It’s about making art out everything by having to make anything, because Amazon doesn’t ship in nuclear winter, or you’ve simply been priced out of “polite society.” My personal apocalypse has happened, I may have had as many as 6 apocalypses in my life. I choose to enter my own personal Post-Apocalyptic context and be just as kitsch as I please. There will be hair dye, ridiculous gadgets to get internet truly in the middle of nowhere, and all the sequined, patchwork curtains I can sew. The fact of the matter is, I would not have ever had this concept, and therefore intellectual freedom, if I hadn’t sat up at 2am every Thursday night watching Starz Kidz.

I’ll Tell You What I Want

So here’s the story! We currently live in a tiny 1 bedroom apartment, which is half of the finished basement in a very average sized suburban rancher. We moved in when I was pregnant, and honestly I could not have handled too much more space when my daughter was a newborn. As my daughter gets ready to turn one we are feeling a little claustrophobic around here. Our lease is up in 6 weeks, but our finances are not what you would call “good.” Husband was laid off when our daughter was about 7 months old and enrolled in an unemployment job training program. I make money babysitting and writing a few blogs a month. That is to say, we are really darn broke, but there is a chance that in a year we will be in a much better place. So what do we do for the next year?

I want to get an RV and move between the handful of state parks that are within a reasonable commute of husband’s classes. I know it sounds completely insane, and definitely not the solution for claustrophobia, right? I think it might actually be the perfect solution. My grandparents on the other side of the country have a 5^th Wheel and truck that they don’t use at all anymore. I find myself musing about calling them and asking if we could set up a 5 year payment plan. We can use what would have been all our deposit money to move into a new place to fly out and drive the RV back on husband’s break.

I just can’t get over the idea of living out in the woods, in an RV, homeschooling my kid, and building up writing and web design work while husband finishes school. I am going to embrace my life as one giant piece of art. I always describe my art and my personal style as “Post-Apocalyptic Kitsch” and I think that is how I want to live. I want to embrace being a gypsy, a stranger in a strange land. I want to only have what we need, to live simply, for an extended period of time. I want to live as the love child of Moses and The Partridges! I can’t think of any reason not to, except what everybody else is going to think.

Why do I let myself do that? Why do I care what you think of my life? I don’t! Except I must, otherwise why would I be writing this right now? I’ve made a lot of “off-beat” choices in my life, and they have had about a 50% success rate. As I’ve gotten older, though, I find what other people think of my choices seems to matter more. People have this idea that children need a lot of rules and a lot of things. I have never found either to work out for me. I’m very much “Lawful Good” in alignment, but I find that most rules are the tools of “Lawful Evil.”  I feel like the law is sodium and personal liberty is chlorine. Together, they are necessary to human life, you will die without them, and your French fries will taste like crap. Either ingested alone will kill you. This balance between law and liberty, between peer-pressure and social progress, can drive you nuts. Just look at poor Hermione in the last few “Harry Potter” books! She got pretty unhinged for a while.

So, do I bow to the withering gazes and raise my daughter in a “normal” home or pursue something everybody will thinks is nuts? Is the rule that you don’t raise toddlers in an RV sodium or salt? I DON’T KNOW! Are people just trying to keep us from dropping out of the system, or are they trying to keep us from screwing up our daughter? And how legitimate are other people’s fears? Just because when I say we homeschool in an RV you think “crazy fundie cult,” should I validate that conclusion you just leapt to? If you think “Laissez-faire hippies” when we say that we don’t have a lot of rules, does that make it true? Who gets to define that line between “different” and “insane”?

Here’s to the people who have the guts to just do it, to buy an RV instead of an apartment, to build their own house on a crappy piece of land, to move to a different continent with nothing, because they believe the life they can imagine for themselves is better than the life they were handed. I don’t know if I will ever have those guts, but I will always envy those that do!

5 Movies You’re Not Allowed To Hate (But I Do)

A Christmas Story

If I am being completely honest, I’ve never watched this one from start to finish. I have seen all the parts that everyone talks about, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all but about 15 minutes in dribs and drabs. The reason I have never watched it, even though it is on almost constantly for what seems like months each year, is because I’ve never laughed at anything in that whole movie. What is so funny about frozen tongues and pink bunny pajamas? But when I told my husband he looked at me like I had said I occasionally liked to eat BBQ kitten.

Grease

Let’s just examine the true plot of this movie. A young girl from Australia meets a nice boy, who proceeds to spread lies about her. When she refuses to live up to the lies he spread he dumps her and turns their social circle against her. The happy ending is reached when the underage girl smokes cigarettes, wears clothes she had previously stated made her uncomfortable, and flies off in the backseat of his car. As far as I can tell, the moral of this story is, high school is the best time of your life and if you aren’t having fun then you will never have any fun, ever! The worst part, and the part that might make me hate it the most, all the little girls who just love it. It is really creepy to see little girls dressed as Pink Ladies.

Field of Dreams

I’m pretty sure dude was actually some kind of weird serial killer who kidnapped vagrants and made them play baseball before he buried them in his corn field. While my theory might make this movie more interesting, it still can’t cut the saccharine. If I were right, it would be the most nauseatingly cute slasher flick ever! This movie is for grown men with daddy issues what “Practical Magic” is for goth chicks whose mothers just don’t understand them. I think this movies popularity springs from the fact that we really are a nation full of daddy issues.

2001: A Space Odyssey

This one hurts me to write. “Space Oddity” is one of my favorite songs, the music in that movie is insane, and the cinematography is breathtaking! Unfortuneately, the acting is terrible, it runs on too long, and Stanley Kubrick was a raging narcissist. I watched this movie primed to like it. A bunch of people I respected, including a boy I liked, had al told me it was brilliant. So I watched it, and I was confused, so I watched it again. I was pretty sure at least two of the people who recommended it had been on drugs when they first saw it, but that didn’t account for all the others. But it remains 4 hours of my life that, if given the chance, I would like to get back.

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

This one might be George Clooney’s fault. I am the only straight woman on earth, born between 1950 and 1990, who does not find him attractive. I also am not a fan of gospel music. It gives me flashbacks to singing “Negro Spirituals” with all the other white kids in my parents’ church choir. I am fascinated by resetting classics, and the Odyssey is as classic as they come, but man, I really just could not get into it. But, you tell anyone that and they basically assume you want to listen to boy bands and read Twilight.

Surprisingly Funny

On the surface my life seems really depressing to a lot of people. Sometimes “a lot of people” includes myself. I’m 32, under-employed, crazy, sick, and lame. I find myself completely, uncontrollably, and ravenously angry at injustice in the world. I spend the vast majority of my time (80% or so) at home with my baby daughter. Somehow I find myself talking about life one minute and the next my husband and I are laughing like hyenas . Recently, some freelance ghostwriting I did got some positive attention. It had a tongue-in-cheek feel and I decided I’d take a shot at learning this whole WordPress thing with a blog about some of the silly things that go through my head. I hope you like some of it, I’m sure not even my husband will pretend to like all of it.

I’m going to try to keep everything tilted to the humorous, but you should know which direction my sails blow. I’m a left leaning political moderate, but I am also a socialist, so people confuse me for a far leftist. I am an Eastern Orthodox convert from Reformed Evangelicalism. I am a Platonist. I am an artist. I love  fiction. I write dystopian fiction. My sense of humor was formed by Douglas Adams, Monty Python, Red Dwarf, Eddie Izzard, and Jasper Fforde. I am convinced that my 10 month old daughter is the most beautiful baby girl to ever grace this blue marble. My husband drives me nuts, but he’s smart, funny, and handsome. Let’s see how this goes!