younger at heart

This may shock some of you, but when I was a kid I wasn't exactly the active, sporty type. No, no, it's true! While my compatriots were out playing tee-ball and soccer and tag, I was inside drawing pictures and imagining to myself what it would be like to be a piano phenom. Don't get me wrong -- my imagination also supplied me with visions of being the world's first great female catcher or a tennis superstar, but mostly it supplied me with cartoons and music.

I loved to color on construction paper, which is why this edition of MS Paint drawings are done on yellow backgrounds. Yellow was the closest you could get to white when you'd already colored on all your white pages.

I didn't know this until sometime in early elementary school, but it was while Peg Oman was doing daycare for me that it was brought to my attention that I liked to draw people. And that I liked to draw people whose proportions were all wrong. Their heads were ENORMOUS and they had these teeny, tiny bodies. The MS Paint up there I'm pretty sure doesn't even do it justice... I'm sure the bodies were really more like half that size. But I remember loving to draw hair and mouths, so I'm pretty sure this is why I paid all the attention to their heads and just drew on little bodies really quickly so I could move on to the next face.

"Why bother drawing bodies at all?" you may ask.

Excellent question. Apparently I am hard-wired to be... sick in the head. People HAVE bodies, we can't just go around drawing people WITHOUT bodies because it wouldn't be RIGHT!

But my imagination was always there, right alongside my obsessive side. When I was very young, I remember "inventing" a new symbol. I was so proud of it, and I would fill dozens of pages of construction paper with this symbol... over and over and over again. (This is an example of where imagination and obsessive go hand-in-hand, kind of like Jane Seymour being unable to stop painting what is clearly the female form over and over and over again.)

Imagine my disappointment in third grade when we began to learn cursive and I discovered -- after all that time -- that I'd only managed to invent the capital letter "L."

today my day is...

drama llama

I'm a green

There's a funny thing about being hired to be someone's boss, and it is the following secret: you were kinda thrown into the deep end of the pool, and some of the things you're saying are nothing more than your best guess. Yes, this is true of many jobs, but when you're also someone's boss it adds an extra dimension of danger, because your best guess could turn out to be a great big FAIL, and then you've not only hurt your own reputation but that of your employee. This is generally considered to be a bad thing.

Luckily, I find myself with an awesome staff who are not only solid at their individual jobs but are great at serving as backups for one another. They also have a really great understanding of now they work as individuals and how they work together as a group. One of the ways they came to this conclusion was through a personality test, taken about 9 months ago. Naturally, the first thing they did was insist that I take the test, too.

It turns out I'm a green.




Which means I'm good at being a boss, but not a lot of fun to be around.

getting back to my MS paintings

I work in a place called Foggy Bottom.

(pause for giggles)


However, Foggy Bottom is not on my Metro route. Rather than pay the extra $0.10 to transfer lines and suck air conditioning until I'm within a block and a half of my building, I get off the train 0.6 miles from work and walk it in. I believe it to be faster than switching trains. Also, there are far fewer people walking along the sidewalk than there are crammed into Metro trains, and that suits me just fine.

On my walk, I pass a few guys begging for change or food. Some artfully, by playing classical trumpet accompanied a full orchestra, playing with all their might from the confines a boombox. Others beg obnoxiously, by constantly shaking an empty McDonald's cup full of nickels. But none panhandle quite so aggressively as the guy I encountered on Friday, June 11th at the Starbucks on 19th and K.

I made eye contact with him as I passed by.

He seized the moment.



"GO BUY ME A WATER!!!!" he shouted.

"No, thank you," I whispered, and hurried off.

we can't take us anywhere

Last night, Bret and I decided we were feeling celebratory, so we decided to get a dinner out on the town. After much too much deliberation, we settled on Jackie's in Silver Spring. Citing a mere 30% chance of rain, we walked off into the gloom and soon found ourselves in Silver Spring's most retro eating establishment. A very cheerful man gave us our pick of tables and walked off to play The Cars - Greatest Hits.



Mini Elvis burgers to start followed by orders of fried chicken and potato salad.

What? We walked there. Don't judge.

The burgers came out and the inside was pretty pink. I am exceedingly squeamish when it comes to the sliding scale of meat doneness, but even Bret thought these were kinda raw. But it's an Elvis burger at a place with hot pink seats, so you figure they know what they're doing. And we ate 'em. Pretty good. Not "Sweet Mama I Need More," but pretty good.

Then the chicken. The first bite was like "Oh, this is pretty okay." As I continued to eat, it got less pretty okay. It was greasy. Oily even. But somehow the meat stayed dry.

Then I looked at Bret's chicken, and it didn't look anything like mine. Stilly greasy, but not dry. Moist. Squishy even. And... pink.

We chalked it up to the fact that the booths were pink and the lights were pink and figured it was probably an illusion of our decor kept eating. But my brain was skeptical. So I pulled the chicken out of his hands and... pink. It was pink and squishy and undercooked and even bleeding in some spots.

We stopped eating. I flagged down a waiter. He graciously offered to bring us anything else we wanted or to cook us up some new chicken, but we were pretty done with food by that point. He was kind enough to take Bret's "fried" chicken off our bill.


We walked out into a grey sky with a few raindrops plinking away, feeling less celebratory than when we left the house.

But then the incredibly cheery man who'd seated us started shouting into his phone. OH YEAH? I'VE PAYED MY MORTGAGE EVERY MONTH ON TIME FOR HOW LONG? AND THIS IS HOW YOU... YOU CALL ME EVERY SINGLE... YOU... OKAY, HOW ABOUT THIS, HOW ABOUT THIS? I CURSE YOU! HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT? I CURSE YOU! YOU AND YOUR FAMILY. YOUR WHOLE FAMILY. HOW ABOUT THAT, HUH? HOW DOES THAT FEEL? HOW DOES IT F- HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE DOG VOMIT, HUH? HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE DOG VOMIT?


And then the sky opened up and let go.

A helpful tip for the gentlemen:

No, I am not impressed when you wink at me and slowly say "After you, sweetheart" as you hold open a door.


Not impressed.

Baracktopus

Let's keep this octopus thing going.

Haptopus

Back... to the Marsupial

Dead air? Maybe not anymore.

I'd like to think he's watching a CSI marathon.

So B.A.

With Love for Korea (for Sohee)

#33

JPGs Sometimes Aren't Awesome

Psychadelic Puppet

I'm Sorry

I Swear I Just Heard This...

It Ate It.

For Kelly

The Needle Points...

Something New