Hello internet friends,
I've somewhat outgrown this blog space - not to mention its color scheme, which is so hard on the eyes that I've been neglecting this site for ages! It was fun at the time. But... ow.
If you are looking for knitting patterns and information, please set your bookmark links to: http://pony-knits.blogspot.com/
Enjoy!
17 April 2013
Spring cleaning & moving
i said this to your mom at 19:48 0 people have something to say about this
21 January 2013
Queer Fiber Arts Committee of Brooklyn
Every Saturday at 2pm, bring your knitting, crocheting, hand sewing, cross stitching, and sassiness on over to Outpost. We will tell stories about our first kisses, secret dance moves, and plans for world domination via yarn-built spaceships, all whilst crafting cute gloves and scarves and eye pillows and whatnot.
Should you need help with your crocheting and knitting, fear not! Help will be at hand. All manner of craftiness is welcome; and if you’re simply not feeling up to crafty snuff, do come by and share a cup of tea (or coffee… or beer… or a cupcake!)
This is a weekly event. How else would we have time to knit spaceships?
i said this to your mom at 11:10 0 people have something to say about this
pigeonhole: brooklyn, committee, crochet, fiber arts, knit, queer
30 June 2007
oh, my doctoral lists are progressing just fine.
i said this to your mom at 13:50 1 people have something to say about this
pigeonhole: domesticky, knitsy
10 June 2007
welcome back, crotchety ol' cotter.
luckily, my roomate is letting me strip her old bike (which is old enough to have the cotters i need for mine) because she traded up... the up being a size joke since she bought a child's bike. being short evidently has its perks: she got a brand new bike for 99$. i got la janky straight from the 70s for 75$.
so since i'm putting the metal to the pedal (literally) on my bike, i'm going to relate to you some new knitting news.
i have been informed by no less than 3 people (one non-knitting woman, one man, and one queer) this week that knitting is for girls. so i had to give up knitting. but then i remembered that since most humans of any gender have opposable thumbs, and that the only biological parts required by knitting are fingers and not gonads, i breathed a sigh of relief. then i did this:
1. i bought a yarn winder. it makes center pull yarn balls in about 5 minutes. this is terribly, terribly exciting. trust me on that.
and what is that yarn all wound up for? it will be accompanying these guys below in being a quilt for my dear friends max and katie for their commitment ceremony next year:
2.
two addenda:
1. camouflage originates from the french noun camouflet, a main feature of which is moufle, meaning muzzle. the verb camoufler originally meant to blow smoke up someone's nose, notably in a humiliating way.
2. you may feel moved to extrapolate from all this that i am getting absolutely no work done. and you would be pretty much correct, although today i did finish proofreading the forthcoming literary revue open-faced sandwich. which should be appearing soon, and which is quite excellent.
i said this to your mom at 22:00 3 people have something to say about this
pigeonhole: cyclophilia, domesticky, knitsy, words of the week
29 April 2007
dropping stitches, dropping the ball.
or, friends don't teach friends who have addictive personalities how to knit.
the majority of my research in the last few days should serve to help me write papers on learning to knit. the only intellectual work i've actually accomplished in the last few days is listening to vendredis de la philosophie and audiobooks on nietzsche while knitting. unfortunately, this is not exactly what one could call a hot topic in french lit, and will most likely be unacceptable to the venerable professors overseeing my doctoral life.
so this is what the researchliness looks like:
i acquired some fugly cheapo acrylic yarn. since i learned to knit on some really nice cotton yarn, it's amazing how much harder it is to knit with shit yarn. however, it's handy since i want to acquire more skill before moving on with nice yarn projects. so, having taught myself how to purl, i learned how to integrate knit stitch and purl stitch into a pattern. this yields more squares:
i'll be real happy when i can do something that involves a non-square shape. but what makes me feel better about squares is that there's a childrens' shelter that needs knit squares donated to make into friendly quilts. and since i'm training on squares, everyone wins. that's nice, huh?
i am also learning, very awkwardly, to create cable patterns. the quality of this picture is equal to the "quality" of the product:
all of this learning, though, has convinced me to undo the eventual hand towel (a rectangle! woohoo.) that is destined to my friend katie for her birthday:
i started purling (which is better than hurling) on that project: but now that i know how to create some border patrol, my perfectionist ass is undoing it all and starting over.
ignoring my budgetary concerns, i dropped 50 bucks at purl in soho on some seriously fierce yarn made by a womens' collective in uraguay and some nice circular needles. the point of this purchase was not to immediately make something with it, but mostly to inspire me to be worthy of using this yarn. it does have a vague future purpose that has something to do with matching the color scheme of a close friend. suggestions concerning the destiny of this yarn, and practical ways to make myself worthy of knitting it are welcome.
pages written, 0.
fulfilling the basic requirements of my academic career, 1.
the fiber arts, 4.
i said this to your mom at 12:33 3 people have something to say about this
pigeonhole: domesticky, knitsy
29 March 2007
new fingerings.
my fingers have been particularly busy in the last couple of days.
#1.
#2:
yesterday, i learned how to knit from the mistress of domesticity, margaux (who you can find online OR in the pages of a recent curve magazine getting interviewed about her personal femme style).
i said this to your mom at 21:09 5 people have something to say about this
pigeonhole: domesticky
11 October 2006
looking for au revoir.
last night i ate dinner with isabelle and arnaud, two of the most amazing folks you could ever have the honor of meeting, and that's what sunk it in. after dinner and a viewing of profondo rosso, they walked me to the metro and then into the metro and then waved goodbye all the way until i disappeared into the tunnelled stairway leading to the 8 train, leading back to bastille and margaux's apartment which is filled with luggages (one of which weighs, no joke, *more* than i do), various hair products strewn about, and insomnia.
i want to tell you briefly about isa and arnaud, because they are of that rare breed of intellectuals that are not in school at all. they are beyond smart, have a beautiful living room filled with bookshelves, and possess above all stunningly astute critical-thinking minds coupled with a commitment to art and artistry. it makes me feel like cardboard, my intellect held up and sustained and pushed mostly by the unrelenting bootcamp of academia rather than my own desire to understand things (notwithstanding the amount of time i spend cruising articles on wikipedia). isa works in a bookstore and translates articles on sharks and such for national geographic and reads like a maniac and is able to put her finger on the pulse of books and ideas better than most academics, and arnaud is a pion (a lower-level highschool employee), but does so only in order to devote time to his auto-didactic art studies and his writing. a more succinct example: he reads kant's critique of pure reason every year just because he enjoys it. both of them are so admirable because they choose to be.
as i was heading back from the metro and their goodbyes, i was walking down the sidewalk and sneezed. a guy many several yards away came up to me and said, in english, "bless you." i looked up and was so shocked that it took me a few secocnds to say not "thank you" but rather stammered "merci." it has been awhile since i've been blessyoued, and i was very surprised. although you might tell your friends "à tes souhaits (ah tay sou-ay)" most folks who sneeze in public excuse themselves. to my mildly germophobic mind this makes perfect sense; why bless a perfect stranger who is actively spreading potential disease? sneezers, i think, should apologize for their germ expulsion. but both that well-intentioned blesser and especially my reaction solidified the growing realization that (a) perhaps i have after all become quite parigified and (b) i am leaving.
all this and the fact that for the first time in a long time i am no longer sharing a bed with my partner kept me up until 5am. at 4h30 or so i despaired of falling asleep and went outside to sit on the stoop and smoke, and was amazed for the first time since moving here by how quiet paris gets. on sundays and late at night, and certainly at 4h3o am after a sunday, no one's around outside. and bastille, which borders the marais (the gay and jewish and currently-infested-with-yelling-tourists district), is a pretty hopping neighborhood (except at post-sunday 4h30 am). it was so quiet that i could hear the rotating ads on the metro signs flipping, and there was no one to stare at or be stared at by, so i looked up at the buildings and it made me so sad to think that i will be leaving these buildings, and this city which i even until recently denied belonging to or belonging to me in a way.
more updates on all this dissumulating and sublimated whimsy as departure progresses.
xo.
i said this to your mom at 11:52 0 people have something to say about this
news from the land of imploding innards.
well, well, well : bon-fucking-jour.
the next week should hopefully bring a bit of a drop-off in postings to my blog. i'm saying goodbye to paris, and to round things off a bit, goodbye to a 3-year relationship with a partner
whom i am still in love with, despite everything.
needless to say, it's all mixed up, and i'm rather at a loss as to how i should deal with it. yesterday i spent most of the day sitting on the floor, alternately crying and getting overwhelmed by folding a pair of pants. that freaked me out a bit, and today i've entirely called off responsibility and at 3pm, i am still in my pyjamas and on season 3 of sex and the city and my second baguette drowned in butter and cheese.
me watching sex and the city proves how despondent i am. dialogue-wise, i think it's a crap show, and even though i am not familiar with the mating habits of heterosexual women, i really really hope that these are fictions. those ladies rather scare me. but crap shows distract me from sitting on the floor or musing on the overwhelming nature of trousers, unlike music. i have forbidden myself to listen to:
- ani difranco
- catpower
- the alkaline trio
- elliott smith
- belle & sebastien
- nina simone
- really anything that falls under soothing strumming and lovely lyrics or is anyway meaningful.
that's it. i'm trying to muster some funny or at least some sardonic for this, but all i got is a wavery willingness to find out what carrie bradshaw will be wearing in the next episode.
har.
har.
har.
i said this to your mom at 11:52 0 people have something to say about this
becoming a pariginer, part one.
as we were approaching the bridge, i made some comment about how it looked like shit for a long time (which is true; they had to rip up all these sidewalks and there was shit everywhere). for a quick vocab break:
thomas: c'est beau, non?so basically, i've been pronounced a true parisian. it's not the first time that i've heard it. when i questioned thomas about what exactly makes me a parisian, he offered this list:
pony: ouaaais mais c'était bien bordel la dernière fois qu'on l'a vu. ils ont mis du temps à le faire. mais maintenant c'est génial.
thomas: oh le vieux grognon que tu es... t'es un vrai parisien maintenant.
- threatening old ladies on the bus
- getting into yelling matches with people on the street
- complaining about how the government takes forever to get shit done and how it looks like crap while they're doing it
- bitching about tourists
- being a snob about bread.
- i moan about the bugs coming in the windows because windows in france don't have screens. apparently screens should make you feel as though you've been emprisoned. i disagree. i like laying down in bed and not getting cozy with six or eight-legged friends. diva, on the other hand, is fine with it. she loves her new toys.
- i cut the mold off my cheese. this is, by all appearances, tantamount to cheese rape.
- i drink too much water. by french standards, proper hydration consists of perhaps a glass a day.
(or not if you don't dig it, but know that je t'emmerde mémé - et si tu me cherches tu va me trouver !) :
a lot of the 13th arrondissement where thomas and i live is a weird mixture of things. the buildings don't match and are in tons of different styles, and there are whole sections that don't seem at all like paris or a city for that matter. this is another train:
i love the cute street cleaner trucks. it has to do in part with my love for bright kelly green and the garbage men's kelly green jumpsuits, as well as the fact that from this perspective, the cleaner truck looks like an insect (i like them when they're not all up in my house) :
dog poo. dog poo everywhere. there are signs all over that say j'aime mon quartier je ramasse ("i love my neighborhood so i pick up after my dog"), and all i can deduce from this is [a] that everyone hates their neighborhood, and [b] that man is sodomizing his dog :
this is a recycling plant nearby. there's always smoke coming out, but apparently it's not pollution. that's the official line at least. it's a byproduct of making gâteaux de filtration, or filtration cakes. that is the actual term:
graffitti on a squat nearby :
and my favorite picture of all (taken by tyco and donna while they were here visiting), can be found in pigalle, the sex district :
***
j'aime paris. et paris m'aime aussi.
i said this to your mom at 11:49 0 people have something to say about this
say it with a french accent: dude!
first of all, what kind of dude do you want to be? to make this easier for you, let's split it up by age groups:
- mini dude (the under 13 dude)
- voyou dude (teenaged upgrade)
- middle aged dude (to begin after you get tired of throwing cans in people's open windows)
- ole pappy dude (set of boules required)
1. mini dude
the mini dude is best epitomized by one of the boyfriend's of my super's 6 or 7 year old daughter (who, by the by, i once heard say to her mother "what is this bullshit?" after her mom was yelling at her in portugese). so little mouthy miss has a boyfriend, which i know since i've seen them strolling around together a lot. but let's separate this fact from another regular building occurence: at least once a week, for most of this year, i've heard someone banging like holy hell on the front door, wanting to be let in. it's aggravating, because i'll be trying to work or read or watch a movie, and all of a sudden i'll hear what sounds like godzilla trying to destroy the building. now i might be right at the front and could therefore easily let godzilla in, but who wants godzilla in their building, especially if they obviously don't live here (since they dont have the code)? after months of trying to ignore godzilla, i finally went out onto the landing to tell godzilla to fuck off and just call whoever his friend is before coming over, or at least writing down the code his friend gives him and carrying it in his wallet. but when i stepped out onto the landing, godzilla turned out to be the nerdy 6 year old boy with glasses who wishes that he was 3 feet tall.
2. ado-dude (F.D.S. version and Arab/African versions)
as hinted at above, all of the ado-dude models mostly just like to throw trash in my window. when they're not doing that that, they are also titillated by standing near my window and giggling, or yelling sexist comments at Margaux on the street (a favorite activity of all dudes, actually, except perhaps mini-dude who hasn't yet figured out what that lump o skin between his legs entitles him to). after that, it gets more complicated. F.D.S. dude (Français de souche, or 'native'-born french dude with frenchy sounding name) gets left out of Sarkozy's (conservative minister of the interior) and Le Pen's (big ugly facist face) candlelit dinner parties. The CRS and the very thuggish RATP (metro) cops don't like to play with FDS dude so much. They prefer focusing on dudes with tans.
3. balding dude (sober and drunken versions)
3.a. drunken version
Personally, this is my favorite dude of all in La France. Me and him like to have long chat which may seem loud and violent, but really, when it comes down to it, drunken middle aged dude loves me.
3.b. sober-ish version
When not asserting his dudely virility by eating steack tartar (raw hamburger meat with a raw egg on top. seriously, people eat that), sober middleaged dude can be found stroking his cock (in a totally heterosexual way) over Zinedine Zidane sweating a lot and running around in a thong, while repeating over and over Oooh Zizou, oooh ohh Zizou, ohh Zizou caress that ball, yeah. That is except for when he takes a break from Zizou in favor of Margaux.
4. hé pépé, yer balls are hangin' out !
i promised y'all a couple of posts ago that i would revisit the boules thing, and i'm trying to get better about my flakiness. so since i've finished my abstract, i can now tell you about me and margaux's pétanque trip to the jardin luxembourg. it started off well: we found a cranny with not too many folks where we could play. after a few rounds, a grandma came by with her grandkids, let them and herself walk through our game, and when she noticed the little boy picking up one of our already-played balls (thanks!), she picked up the kid by the arm and dropped it real hard. then the cops came over and told us we had to go to the special boules terrain in the park. so off we go, looking for the pappies. and lo and behold, when we got to the special pappy terrain, it was stunningly clear just how virile a sport this is. the only woman over there was in a small kiosk cooking (and selling) food. almost all the terrains were full of pappies, some of whom had special hats and gloves. there was a coat rack in the middle for their sports coats, but the best part of all was the piss trough in the bushes with no walls, just like that. can we say marking our territory? so needless to say, since margaux's a high femme and i'm just an ambiguously gendered kid with a mohawk, and both of us are well under age 65 even if you add our ages together, everybody stared at us and we were a little bit intim-A-dated, y'all. what's more, you have to ask permission to use one of the terrains, and they kindly gave us the one right next to the piss trough. all in all, though, we held our damn own, cos we some HOT SHIT when we play boules. that might just be because we're some spring damn chickens, y'all.
want more boules? watch bill csby and his dad get all grumpy pappy widdit on the cosby show, or go play boules online (click on Ouvrir le jeu, then in the pop up window type your name and click on Jouer une partie). or, even better, you can play with my balls. i have my own garishly colored set and i'm always down.
obviously, this dude post is my vague nod to the now-over world cup. folks were crying in france yesterday, y'all. The craziest thing of all is that the aforementioned Zidane (the chou chou of french football) got voted the best player in the world cup-- after he end his career by getting thrown out of the game because he headbutted a player (who didn't even have the ball) really hard. that's when the crying started. but it's okay, because italy won, and they deserved to since they are not only the prettiest boys on the field, but also posed in their skivvies for a dolce & gabbana ad. yay italia!
so that's it, really. but i have a question for y'all:
am i the only person out there who thinks that the World Cup Trophy looks like a golden turd?
i said this to your mom at 11:48 0 people have something to say about this
pigeonhole: frenching
i heart the superhighway.
pony: this article is ridiculous. i think i've taken on way too much for one article. but then again, it'll be easier to use it for a dissertation chapter. of course that means 4 more years of staring at this goddam thing.
margaux: well, look on the bright side...at least you already hate it. you're ahead of the game.file under fun: bowling in paris.
i know, i know, paris to most folks equals romantic strolls along the seine or wandering up the eiffel tower while eating baguettes (soaked in wine and raw meat with crème fraiche).
a quick side note: i have a french friend here who says that american food makes her anorexic, but the other night thomas and i went to a restaurant with his aunt. we ordered something that we had ordered before at that restaurant, but this time we ended up eating not just meat by accident, but rather all kinds of meat by accident: chicken, shrimpy bits, and fucking beef. and i thought southerners were sneaky about slipping me meat (and i don't mean that meat. no, really, stop giggling.)that aside, the ideal of a lovely summer evening in paris does not for most americans involve going to a bowling alley and hooting and hollering "strike, strike, motherfucker!", but recently, me, thomas, margaux, and joey (a pal of margaux's who's visiting) trotted ourselves down to montparnasse to the arcade-slash-pool hall-slash-bowling alley. we strapped on our shoes (which make the germophobe in me have nightmares about working at the shoe station in a bowling alley), and margaux certainly won the hot-look contest with her evening dress and knee-high fishnet stockings with the bowling shoes. at one point she got up to answer her cell phone and a girl actually laughed at her to her face. such is the price of mixing an excellent femme fashion sense with bowling shoes.
thomas, however, without a doubt, won the bowling style award. apart from his habitual grandstanding, we got to make fun of his odd bowling approach style, which invloved an overhand throw and short swings before letting go of the ball. after an hour of fun-making (quick vocab break: foutage de gueule), we noticed actually, that other folks in neighboring lanes were doing the same thing. and so we came to understand that french folks bowl as if they are playing boules (also know as pétanque), which is like lawn bowling or bocce ball.
pictures of the 3 pétanque techniques (for visual reference):
while looking for these pictures, i found a video on bowling basics, the highlight of which is this quote:
"this is the nitty gritty, bob: you gotta learn to walk before you can bowl."
a few days later, now thirsting for a rousing game of boules, margaux and i trotted on down to the jardin de luxembourg with the grumpy pappies to play. more on that later, promise... for now, i have been reprimanded for my rampant procrastination.
i said this to your mom at 11:46 0 people have something to say about this
bowling for academia.
pony: this article is ridiculous. i think i've taken on way too much for one article. but then again, it'll be easier to use it for a dissertation chapter. of course that means 4 more years of staring at this goddam thing.
margaux: well, look on the bright side...at least you already hate it. you're ahead of the game.file under fun: bowling in paris.
i know, i know, paris to most folks equals romantic strolls along the seine or wandering up the eiffel tower while eating baguettes (soaked in wine and raw meat with crème fraiche).
a quick side note: i have a french friend here who says that american food makes her anorexic, but the other night thomas and i went to a restaurant with his aunt. we ordered something that we had ordered before at that restaurant, but this time we ended up eating not just meat by accident, but rather all kinds of meat by accident: chicken, shrimpy bits, and fucking beef. and i thought southerners were sneaky about slipping me meat (and i don't mean that meat. no, really, stop giggling.)that aside, the ideal of a lovely summer evening in paris does not for most americans involve going to a bowling alley and hooting and hollering "strike, strike, motherfucker!", but recently, me, thomas, margaux, and joey (a pal of margaux's who's visiting) trotted ourselves down to montparnasse to the arcade-slash-pool hall-slash-bowling alley. we strapped on our shoes (which make the germophobe in me have nightmares about working at the shoe station in a bowling alley), and margaux certainly won the hot-look contest with her evening dress and knee-high fishnet stockings with the bowling shoes. at one point she got up to answer her cell phone and a girl actually laughed at her to her face. such is the price of mixing an excellent femme fashion sense with bowling shoes.
thomas, however, without a doubt, won the bowling style award. apart from his habitual grandstanding, we got to make fun of his odd bowling approach style, which invloved an overhand throw and short swings before letting go of the ball. after an hour of fun-making (quick vocab break: foutage de gueule), we noticed actually, that other folks in neighboring lanes were doing the same thing. and so we came to understand that french folks bowl as if they are playing boules (also know as pétanque), which is like lawn bowling or bocce ball.
pictures of the 3 pétanque techniques (for visual reference):
while looking for these pictures, i found a video on bowling basics, the highlight of which is this quote:
"this is the nitty gritty, bob: you gotta learn to walk before you can bowl."
a few days later, now thirsting for a rousing game of boules, margaux and i trotted on down to the jardin de luxembourg with the grumpy pappies to play. more on that later, promise... for now, i have been reprimanded for my rampant procrastination.
i said this to your mom at 11:45 0 people have something to say about this
nationalism's blue period.
with the 5 gabillion-million tourists -- mostly anglophone -- who have descended upon the downtown of paris, i hear the same conversation over and over and over again. english speaking tourist clusters are comprised of a couple of people looking at shit and running into folks (their only lines in the conversation are ooh and mmm and je ne sais quoi, a phrase i have never heard uttered by any french folks) and invariably one show-off who is laying out the most superficial and mundane information you could care for: "ah, look there, that is the Sorbonne, the universit-ay. ah, the Seine. ah what beautiful architecture. ah, blabla Culture blabla The French blabla Noder Dame blabla"
SIDENOTE: this is not to say that The French, when touristing, have better conversations. those consist primarily of parents inflicting The History of a place on their children who are ignoring them.
i don't know why i hate tourists so much. i think it's almost certainly rooted in rampant elitism. i begrudge them their superficial bullshit that passes for knowledge/understanding, and their dillettante knee-jerk reaction towards anything that is high art. they point at what everyone points at, they wrap scarfs around their necks in summer because they are in paris, they complain about graffitti that i find beautiful and that is a very real part of paris (one reason why parisians hate the film Amélie is because it is a tourist's Paris, and they digitally did away with all the graffitti and real parts of parisian life). but i also understand that you don't have to and shouldn't have to have a non-superficial understanding of places and things, and that enjoying all that is okay, really.
but right now, english is the mother tongue of downtown paris. and whever i go there with margaux, speaking english, and i buy cigarettes or books or whatnot, *even though i speak french to the shopkeepers*, they will refuse my french debit card, assuming that it is an american credit card. or folks on the metro will talk about us as if we couldn't understand.
it's given me a new outlook on being bilingual. when i hear people speaking other languages, i don't assume they don't speak another as well, but there is this idea that they cant speak in another language and understand the language of the country they are in. this, i warn you all, is false. i can carry on a conversation in english and listen to motherfuckers make fun of me in french.
french, french, french.
soon, in a month or so, this won't be an issue. are you tired of my postings on french culture? have you, more to the point, contracted a dire case of ennui ?
i said this to your mom at 11:44 0 people have something to say about this
gay gay gay paree.
this saturday was paris pride, so here's the key vocab:
pédé = fag
marcher pendant des heures en dansant à la fois = dance-walking for hours
tout le monde drague ceux qui sont bien sapés = everyone hitting on the best dressed
en buvant des diabolo-menthes = while drinking mint-flavored lemonades
putain, ça déchire = what fucking fun.
that's anne-laure (with the fraggle-style hair) talking to cécile (the lead singer of Anatomie Bousculaire).
it was good times. but after 7 hours spent dance walking in the sun with tons of folks and loud music, we came to place de la bastille (as in the Bastille, scene of the big french revolution) and saw this:
you can't herd gay men to a big phallus-shaped monument on pride day without them getting up and grindin' on it. you know how it is.
so even though folks were still in full-on party mode, we looked like this:
because maybe we are getting old. that was the talk that ensued actually: are we still party people? can you be just by wanting to?
even if you can, we just went to margaux's house, took off our shoes, and lounged in various prone positions on the floor discussing feminist solidarity and russian literature.
we maybe are old, but damned if we aren't pretty and smart.
i said this to your mom at 11:41 0 people have something to say about this
reasons to take up watching the world cup instead of leaving one's house.
yesterday was paris's fête de la musique. high school students and the elderly alike were unleashed on the streets of paris to drink too much beer and dance violently badly in public.
this was followed by tonight's venture to a club to see a drag show that ended up being someone (who, to give you an idea, was an eerie version of peaches only 30 years older and with no fans) lip synching and barely dancing while wearing, i shit you not, a headband with three pieces of fruit stapled to it. the word tragic is highly applicable in this instance.
good taste, 0.
french taste in the musical arts, 2.
i said this to your mom at 11:39 0 people have something to say about this
to stapes, tu savoir good parlor.
so, as i was finding out that i was accepted to nyu, thomas found out that he will be receiving a fulbright grant for next year to go play in the archives in d.c. last week he received an extremely fancy embossed invitation to a garden party at american embassy in paris. when he showed this fancification to me, i told him to call those motherfuckers with a swiftness to say that he was going to be arriving with a pony. so begins the tale of how the pony crashed the ambassador's garden party...
but first let's back it up a bit to last august, when pony was hiding in a corner of its apartment in seattle watching strangers come and buy all of pony's worldly goods. after the strangers left with the worldy goods, pony set to packing its bags and getting on a plane to paris. when winter came, pony realized that it had brought a total of 4 sweaters with it to paris. when i started teaching at the high school, i also realized that although i had brought with me 7 or 8 pairs of shoes, none of these were not garishly colored sneakers. this means that often, pony was denied entrance through the teacher's door at the high school because it was mistaken for a high school student. what can i say... mohawks, tattoos, raggedy jeans, and garish sneakers do not scream "i am a professional!" nor even "i am a grown-ass adult!"
not surprisingly, the garden party demanded tenue correct : nice dressin' that the pony couldn't muster. while there were plans of me showing up as Cherry Poppet in a borrowed tube dress and lee press-on nails, because i am a flake (c.f. previous posting) i forgot to acquire the necessary accoutrements before the ambassadorial soirée. so my tenue not-so-correct involved 3 different non-matching shades of black, all slathered in white diva cat fur, and bright green sauconys. add mohawk, tattoo, and a cigarette hanging out of my mouth for half the party, and you get why thomas kept giggling and calling me a gavroche (= street urchin boy).
when we got inside, it was crazy gaudy. think mini-versailles for those of you who have been to versailles or seen sofia coppola's marie antoinette. thomas immediately got ushered towards an intellectual elite photo shoot, which meant that i could stick lots of petits fours in my mouth and stick my nose into everything all over the ambassadorial residence. there were things on every wall, with tags that claimed that these things were art, but i refuse to acknowledge a poorly-taken photo of a door with two ribbons entitled "god and country" as art. ditto for a cardboard statue of liberty colored with tempera paint. even if you're the ambassador, and some kindergartener makes you some piece of poo statue of liberty, that does not give you still do not have the power to deem said piece of poo "art". no. no. no.
my other find was 2 photos of Craig Stapleton, The American Ambassador To The Whole Country Of France Where They Speak French, displayed at the entrance for all to see. on the first, there was an inscription:
George W Bush