New Header!

For those of you who are interested in the details of my new header (*crickets chirping*), I spent quite a while choosing the ideal font. I went with Sloe Gin Rickey from Beefont.com.

I updated my header after a conversation with a classmate the other day in my Graphic Design class about the awesomeness of gradients and pretty/ugly designs. Like, how they're not often appropriate but sometimes they are.

So here's an alternative design. Woo! Gradients:

Enjoy! *Hugs*

The Hive Mind

I was recently invited to a party that I might like to attend-- a classmate who I had worked on a group project with invited me. I figured since we had a good time working on the group project (especially given the fact that it was schoolwork), the party could potentially be fun. But I was unable to confirm for sure-sure because I said I had to check in with the "hive mind."

I've begun thinking of my friends and our collective decision-making strategies as "The Hive Mind." Once you get it down, it's a strange experience. Forget checking in with the wifey before planning anything. While seven days of the week I am an autonomous being, I have some great friends to whom, especially over the weekends, I commit a lot of my time. The reasons I do this aren't very complicated-- I always have fun, and I therefore feel deeply loyal to them. I probably have fun because I feel like I belong, and we all look out for each other. We are a pseudo-mid-20s-family-er-friends blobual, and in a bind I would do anything in my power for these guys.

Maybe because I didn't have a close-knit group of friends in high school (just a few close friends and lots of acquaintances), I find this group dynamic fascinating. Deciding what to do on a Friday or Saturday night is always a balancing act of weighing interests, potential activities, who-all-is-ins and constraints. There are plenty of unstated rules (also known as "norms" to some of us who have had too many years of secondary education) that need to be followed. The Hive Mind certainly poses some problems and challenges: the relationships we choose matter to the group. After all, boyfriends and girlfriends come and go, but many of us have been friends since the 90s. And the mid-90s, not the late ones! The Group can be either a boon or a bane to the people we go out with. The ones that stick tend to be the ones that like to spend time with us-- all of us.

Not to intimidate potential suitors, though. There are always spans of time where one or another of us seems to disappear from the group. Probably our instincts are kicking in-- at the end of the day, one-on-one relationships outside the scope of the group are meaningful and desired. But they are complementary to The Group, not mutually exclusive. And I don't think this is that far off the mark from many other people in their 20s.

And it is with these circumstances that I am faced with a dilemma: do I go to this party on my own, or do I check in with the group? The answer may seem obvious, but it isn't to me. There are just too many things to do! My life is full of people, and this is an embarrassment of riches I never anticipated having. Especially not as a dorky kid wearing sweatsuits coated in puffy paint who referred to my cat as my brother, who I hung out with a lot in the 5th grade because I didn't have a lot of people-friends.

The Hive Mind resembles A Cult* in the same way I'm like 18th cousins with King Tut. While we have no leader per se, our sense of obligation to the group is strong. Actually, I went to church a lot as a kid and it's a similar communal benefit (without the side of spirituality). I guess life is short, and we should spend it with the people who make us happy. That's about as close to a life philosophy as I've put down in le powpow. Sure, down the road I'd like to have a partner and a family, but I'm not there yet. Still in my 20s, I find my sense obligation to The Hive Mind odd and fascinating.

* If The Hive Mind actually resembled A Cult, I wouldn't be blogging about it. I'd slowly become more disconnected from my friends and family. We aren't recruiting. But for more on cults, see the video below.

Darren epherma

In my last post, I blogged about Darren from Bewitched. Coincidentally, while searching for some footage for an upcoming assignment, I came across this weird little film, starring Dick York, who you Bewitched fans might recognize as (the first) Darren (Dick Sargent played the second Darren). It's called "Rest and Health" from 1949. What a stoner.


It's a weird little movie, and it kind of reminds me of early episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the episode where Xander joins the swim team, and they all turn into these weird gross fishy things, and it's all a metaphor for taking steroids), which makes me wonder if Joss Whedon saw this movie. Dick York kind of has that Bruce Campbell/Xander look going on. Dick York's internal monologue is especially weird.

Anyway, enjoy.

Toy Money

One morning when I was little and my dad was about to leave for work, I asked him if he was going to go to make some toy money. This amused him greatly but baffled me. In fact, the whole concept of money was baffling. I had just started playing Monopoly, though I probably wasn't old enough to play it right, and certainly wasn't old enough to play it tongue-in-cheek. Monopoly, and money in general, confused me. What was the difference between the little pink, yellow and blue pieces of paper we accrued in the game and the bills my dad pulled out of his pocket before sitting down to dinner? There were often spare coins in the house that my parents attended to in sort of a half-assed manner. It confused me too why they would want the dimes more than the nickels-- why was the smaller stuff better than the bigger stuff? At least we could all get behind the quarter.

My parents both worked long hours, though at different times of my growing up. I would watch or hear them get ready, listen to my dad shuffle around and blow his nose, watch him fold up a hankerchief or occasionally come downstairs with a piece of Kleenex on his chin to stop the bleeding where he had nicked himself shaving. He dressed well and carried a hard briefcase that I remember playing inside when I was really little. He left the house the same time each day.

At night, we'd watch Bewitched on Nick at Nite. Dad used to say that he wanted to be like Darren because Darren was in "the Advertising Business." He was half joking, but you can see how that clean-cut 1950s corporation man with a life (and nose-twitching housewife) like Darren's would have had its appeal to a kid growing up in the late 1950s. And Samantha was an interesting character-- she was a housewife, but the show was really centered around her. And the whole thing was kind of "off"-- they had this big secret that nobody around them could know about (my friend Lizzy wrote a paper about the closeting of Samantha's witchiness for our TV History class, but that's another subject altogether, a really interesting one but not for my purposes. I'm trying to evoke a memory and some feeling here!)

My parents both had jobs that were centered around finding and making the things that you'd want. It wasn't until Mad Men came out that I saw the appeal of the advertising world of the 1950s and 60s that had captured the imagination of my parents, one that would be about to disintegrate, to a certain extent. I mean, cmon, the characters of Mad Men all have style.

I can remember a time when I was oblivious to why my parents left each day in pursuit of making the things we want. I remember being really small and helping my dad wash the convertible, and then it was gone. And why it was gone has only started making sense to me now. My parents both put a lot of themselves into their professional lives-- more than it seemed they had to spare at times. Their jobs made them who they were, and it was surely a choice to only have one of me in order to let them keep working. But you can only hold with that life for so long. They're both nearing retirement now. It'll be harder for me to find a job than it was for them, though I've got a great skill set and I'm qualified for a lot of things. And when I do find a job that pays well enough to live with a little bit of style, I can expect to work 60-hour weeks, at least. And what my life will become after that, I don't know. I don't know what happens when you give most of your waking life to a job, what that does to you internally.

My parents managed to find time to carve out a family. My dad thought it was pretty funny, my confusion over toy money and real money. And in retrospect, so do I because I definitely can see the difference. In order to know how to want things, you have to have money. And you know how to make money by knowing how to want things. And at the same time, you're human so you want things. Like to be loved and to live a purposeful life.

another sea change

Wow! I can't remember the last time I sat down and decided to conduct a wrestling match with my interior life via PowPow. I feel like I used to do it all the time. Then I got all "professional" and moved on, for the most part, to my more "professional" blog, and posted goofy things here now and again.

But sometimes I feel like life calls for a person to sit down and expel a long blog post. It's cleansing for the soul, maybe. And now is that time. Maybe you'll stumble upon it and find comfort in a random person's confusion as she makes her way through life.

Lately I feel like a toy rocket with an uneven flare, one that sends me ambling generally upward, but in weaves and spirals. Right now my future is a gaping question mark, and the only thing I have to bring to it is my Master's degree (and my little knapsack full of life experience!). If we're gonna start to get existentialist on this shit, we could say my backpack is packed full of tools for my future endeavors. But as far as what I want to do with them-- like I said, a big effing question mark.

Life isn't what I expected it to be. I wouldn't say it's harder-- actually, I think it's not so bad, but I didn't expect to have to wrangle so much with my own emotions. That's not to say I'm an overly-emotional person, but staying happy is one of the biggest and most constant challenges I face. It helps to do the right thing and be nice to others, but to err is human, and besides, bad things happen anyway. And I didn't expect people to surprise me so much. I pretend I think they're predictable, and my Master's degree has prepped me to design things based around assumptions about human behavior, but my goodness, do the exceptions beat the rules every time!

And I didn't expect my life to spiral in and out of the lives of so many other people. When I was a kid, life was pretty quiet. I had friends, but we were into kid stuff. Life was all possibility and future, and most of our friends were new because we were new. But when you grow into adult sized problems and begin having romantic relationships, your friends take on a new light. They become your family away from your family. And I think, if you are me, you feel love for them that kind of makes your heart want to burst. To contain it, you think of that kind of love as an amorphous blob of friend love (and if I'm not mistaken, I'm not the only one who feels this way, which is at least partially why we all get so excited for Tundig weekend every year). I just saw Where the Wild Things Are, and there's this part where they all sleep in a friend pile. I could identify with that.

And yet, as is true of your friends, you are free to float in and out of each others' lives. I'm writing this now because big changes are coming. I've lived in Michigan, except for that one year, for almost 27 years. I moved around the state a lot when I was younger, but my whole adult(ish) life has been pretty firmly anchored in Ann Arbor. I know this city from many angles and from most hours of the day. My heart's been broken and healed here, I've fallen in love. I've walked home, taken taxis, lived on the North, South, East and West side. I've seen Red Hot Lover's close and open and become Ray's Red Hots. I've tried to grow dred locks. I've tried being vegetarian. I've taken weekend road trips to Chicago, Grand Rapids, Leelanau, Marquette, Niagara Falls, New Hampshire and Connecticut, but mostly to Chicago.

I'm afraid of change, and yet I'm putting my face up into the wind for a taste. I have every opportunity in the world, and I'm afraid of what will happen if I don't exercise at least some of them. The phrase is "be the change you wish to see in the world," and that's asking a lot, because life is mutable but continues, and because I needed to pause and say but I like it here.

Wish me luck!

I just applied for my first professional blogging gig, and I gave them this URL as a reference. I don't know if that's a good idea or a bad idea as my relationship to this blog is pretty casual, but people have told me they like reading it, so I decided to strive for more writing opportunities.

If it doesn't work out, I still have my day job.

Pieces of You (or in this case, me)

Is it just me, or is this really effing funny? I've watched it 2 or 3 times and it has elicited tears each time. While I know I may just think it's funny because I'm a devoted viewer of Cat on the Prowl, and also a reader of pamie.com, it still cracked my shit up, and more than usual. Oh, and it's really gross.

Symbolism in Reality TV Elimination Shows

You know the television genre: reality/elimination show, perhaps best exemplified by CBS's Survivor. There's usually a vote or a decision by a panel of judges or other experts before the individual is eliminated. To keep each show uniquely quirky, there's usually a catch phrase and some kind of accompanying symbolism as each person is eliminated (think Heidi Klum asserting "you're out" in her iconic accent).

Below is a run-down of the symbols and catch phrases used in various elimination shows (note that the videos, by their very nature, contain eliminations so if you don't want to be spoiled, don't watch):

SURVIVOR
Symbol: the torch.


AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL
Symbol: Offically, the model's best photo. Unofficially, Tyra and/or the Tyra freak-out


THE BACHELOR
Symbol: a rose.

See a Rose Ceremony.

THE BIGGEST LOSER
Symbol: a scale.


MAKE ME A SUPERMODEL
Symbol: the model's portfolio.
Catch Phrase: "We cannot make you a supermodel."


PROJECT RUNWAY
Symbol: the runway itself.
Catch Phrase: "You're Out." ("Make it work" is also a classic)

REAL WORLD/ROAD RULES CHALLENGE
Symbol: a gauntlet, an inferno or something else vaguely medieval (contestants usually have to compete "in the inferno", etc. to keep their place in the group).


ROCK OF LOVE
Symbol: Officially, a rock of [x]. Unofficially, Brett Michael's wicked bandanas.

Rock Of Love 2 Finale
Uploaded by TheDlisted. - Check out other Film & TV videos.

SHEAR GENIUS
Symbol: a pair of scissors

TOP CHEF
Symbol: a knife

What else am I missing?