Look – you can almost see Daiso from my apartment!
Oh the dollar store. As a kid, I would walk to the one on the corner to get all my Christmas gifts: creepy porcelain cats, a woven basket with a hole in the bottom, a pencil case.
I thought my dollar days were over until my sister made me go to Daiso, a Japanese-franchised dollar store in the “ID” (Psst, International District) here in Seattle. It’s other places too, so if you see one stop in and take a look around.
First off – there’s the whole look and feel. It’s bright. Everything is arranged nicely – no plastic bins filled with broken pencils and opened packages of expired crackers. It doesn’t even smell like a dollar store, meaning it doesn’t smell like someone peed in the corner and then misted the air with bad cologne.
Not only is everything gloriously cheap, oh-so-cheap, it’s useful. There are cool cooking items, including a green onion knife that cuts green onions into ribbons. Cherry blossom stickers. Beauty masks. Sure, the instructions and ingredients are in Japanese, but that makes it only more fun. Continue Reading →
On Quebec City, my favorite Canadian city with Vancouver, its anglo rival. French has multiple words for the type of affair you’re having. What Vancouver and I had would be called an aventure– a brief affair. Ours lasted 24 hours. A liason is a longer, more involved indiscretion.
I headed to Vancouver to give my best friend, who I have known for over 15 years a good time before her impending marriage. Note, I did not write “one last” good time because we’ll be having good times well into our 80s. Maybe even our 90s.
Whenever I head out on the road (often), I pretend I am Hunter S. Thompson or Jack Kerouac. Don’t worry. It’s less about peyote; more about legal, goofy fun with sunglasses and loud music. Continue Reading →
To all the May birthdays in my life. There are so many of you!
i’d very much prefer staying firm and slim/to grow old like a vintage wine fermenting/in old wooden vats with style ~ Nikki Giovanni
…If I could dance that way again I would do it for twenty-four hours straight. I get sad, then I think some people never dance at all. My grandma, the youngest 83-year-old I know.
Ten…
I never liked dolls.
When I was four, a well-meaning uncle gave me a doll and I pretended to rock it in my miniature wooden rocking chair, holding a plastic bottle to its pursed lips.
When he turned away, I tossed the doll to the floor. I can still see its sky-blue eyes staring up at me, unblinking.
I favored stuffed animals (less demanding) and as an adult, I prefer puppies to babies. But it doesn’t matter. Because by the time you’re 10, your friends tell you to GROW UP and leave the dolls behind.
You think he knows how old he is?
I’ll call her J, just in case she finds and reads this. J was my childhood friend who convinced me I was never good enough at the age I was (the same age as her).
J was one of those girls, who at 10, acted 12 and at 12, acted 16. Continue Reading →
What life looks like after graduation. (I don’t know who painted this.)
So you’re an English major. Welcome. It has been almost ten years since I graduated college and I prepared some advice, as well as responses to common questions. No other major has been so scrutinized, so deemed USELESS by the gainfully employed. Useless. What an awful word for a fantastic study.
If you’re reading this, it’s probably too late to change it. But you wouldn’t want to.
My “useless” degree in English taught me to examine the fabric of life. Everything is present in books. Everything. A writer observes and records. A writer makes his characters suffer so we know what it will be like when we get there.
I learned about love, death, desire, war, sex, passion, food, junk, poverty, disease, diplomacy, philosophy, social issues, activism, etc. I still don’t get commas though.
In short, an English degree is the universal degree. You just need to learn how to market it, how to make it work for you.
Let’s start with advice from one of my favorite writers: Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.~ Murakami.Continue Reading →
What goes on backstage. Coeur de Pirate’s sound test at Summer fest 2011.
Anyone lived in a pretty how town…~ E.E. Cummings
As a teenager, I wasn’t much for journalism. I defined myself as a creative writer, too artistic and impatient for plain old facts. I didn’t like sports and never wanted to write the expose on the cafeteria pizza. I wrote stream-of-conscious poetry for guys who didn’t like poetry and didn’t like me.
I was an idiot.
Journalism is storytelling. At the Quebec City Chronicle-Telegraph (the oldest newspaper in North America), I focused mostly on the small stuff: charity drives, local teams, high school graduations, restaurant openings – the minutia of the small English-speaking community.
As small papers dry up or battle for readership online, we’re losing human-interest stories. We may never read Shelly Brown’s obituary, Shelly who spent thirty years working the counter at the deli; who gave the community three great children, who dedicated her life to rescuing dogs.
Why care about Shelly, the smiling deli worker? We have this to read:
10 Things You Didn’t Know About Syria.
10 Things Amanda Knox Has in Common with a Unicorn.15 Pugs Who Look Like Dictators.
Just like there’s a time and place for the above, (lunch breaks), there’s a time and place for newspapers: Sunday afternoons. I can’t remember the last time I sat with a newspaper article, chewed the story over, let it linger. I love blogs, but getting the story out is stressed more than getting the story out right.
Years ago, when I saw a casting call for the Amazing Race, I thought about it. Travel the world? Win expensive travel packages? Race around the world for one million dollars?
Then I did something I’ve never done before:
The Math.
After the tax man has cometh, one-million dollars turns into $500,000. That $500,000 has to be sliced evenly between you and your partner. Even if you carried your partner in your arms like a baby the whole time and still miraculously ended up in the winners’ circle; you’d have to split it. Otherwise, you’d be the jerk who said, “I should get 70% because I won 70% of the challenges.”
The most you can bring home is $250,000. IF you win. And then, you’d have save for your kids’ college, buy a house, retire mom, give to all the third world countries you traipsed through during your ’round the world jaunt.
That’s if you win.
Winning seems much less exciting to me. But there’s still the glorious-magnificent-earth-shattering travel right? Here’s the thing about that…
5 Reasons I’d never try out for the Amazing Race
1. I like to SEE things when I travel
I fully plan on seeing the world and writing as I go, but at my own pace. I get that the show is spliced and edited into episodes, but it moves so fast, there’s no seeing anything. If I go to Bali, I want to swim and surf without this nagging voice that says, oh yeah, it’s time to get out of this bath-like water now or I’LL BE ELIMINATED IN FRONT OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE.
2. I’m bad at sports
If the challenges involved eating 100-plus Cheetos in a sitting, or sniffing out the most infested food cart, it would be game on. But they don’t. No, the race comprises terrifying challenges only those who endorse sports drinks should do, like base jumping and freefalling.
This would happen to me. Twice.
3. I have no Interesting Backstory
Amazing Race teams fall into two categories:
Couples with gleaming teeth and tight calves or partners with an interesting backstory that can be broken down into a one-word nickname: Doctors. Pirates. Debutantes. Divorcees.
I don’t have much of a backstory. I transpose lettesr a lot but can’t say I’m dyslexic. I grew out of my scoliosis. I compulsively stockpile Cadbury mini-eggs, but that’s not a backstory. Continue Reading →
