I was in Trader Joe’s last night, doing some grocery shopping.  I couldn’t find coconut milk on the shelf, so I asked the employee in the aisle where I could find it. He replied that it was out of stock, to which I said, okay, thanks anyway.  But then, this very persistent young man wanted to check on the status of the coconut milk for me to see when it would be back in stock. I told him if it was out of stock, that was all I needed to know. After all, there are about a zillion other grocery stores in this city. I can easily procure it elsewhere.  But he told me to wait again, and I didn’t see much of a purpose in arguing, so I let him go to check on the stupid coconut milk.

In the meantime, I was standing around in the aisle. If you’ve ever been to Trader Joe’s, you will know that this is a terrible idea. No matter where you go, you are standing between someone and their organic, free-range, cruelty free, locally grown, sustainable tuna curry in a vacuum seal or whatever.  So you wind up doing a little dance shuffle, up and down the aisle, and pretend to seriously mull over the rice options whenever you get a chance to stand still. Basmati? Organic Basmati? Jasmine? Brown? Brown Jasmine? However will you choose?

When the eager employee returned, he said that the coconut milk was out of stock at the warehouse, so he didn’t know when it would be back in. All of this was inane and mildly annoying, but this next part is where he really pissed me off: he proceeded to tell me, in the sort of voice normally reserved for explaining things to kindergarteners of below average intelligence, that I should definitely check back soon, since what they sell is actually light coconut milk, which, “tastes just like regular coconut milk, but is way better for you.” Ah ha.

Maybe the average person wouldn’t be pissed off by that statement, but I am not some slip of a girl: I am substantial. When I hear a skinny hipster with a Supervillain Haircut tell me that light coconut milk tastes just like regular, but is better for me, I believe I could properly translate that to mean either:

A) despite having lived in the United States of America for 26 years, you appear to be so stupid that you probably failed to pick up on the definition of “light” or, in the vernacular, “lite”, when applied to food items and/or

B) you are fat and I should help you with your food choices

Supervillian Haircut, Nutritional Consultant

Hipster then threatened to commit “Harry Carey” [sic] with his box cutter over having disappointed me with the lack of coconut milk. Let it be known, I made no attempt to stop him.

Part of me wants to write an email to the management, but on the other hand, maybe I’m just sensitive to this sort of “advice”.  And being a douchey hipster with a Pete Wentz haircut is probably its own punishment.  But since I’m airing this publicly, what are your thoughts? Was it a harmless informational statement or a thinly veiled slur?

Hmm. A rather curious email from Old Navy arrived in my inbox at 2:23 AM:

Save 20% on Your Next Adult Purchase!

Is Old Navy in the dildo business now?

Friends: January is gone! Ding dong dead. It will be a cold, drunk day in 2011 before January is back and I for one am very happy about that. January, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

1. The window in my bathroom grows a layer of frost and my shampoo, which lives on the windowsill, grows ice crystals. The shampoo slushie – an intriguing novelty that no one wants.

2. My houseplants die from the cold, the lack of light, and the fact that I’m too bummed out about it being January to water them.

3. There is absolutely no motivation to photograph, what with the dirty gray snow and dull, overcast sky and the seasonal affective disorder.

4. I am always broke, thanks to all of those boring, functional Christmas gifts I bought.

5. I have to take down the Christmas decorations and stop baking things for parties (because there are no parties).  That is straight up depressing, yo. Plus there are all those Christmas trees in the dumpsters, which bums me out so hard because it’s a beautiful tree that’s been killed and left to rot and Christmas is over. Bah!

7. The rush on the gym.  Just at the time of year when I could most use to get on the elliptical machine and embarrass myself boost my endorphins, there’s a line 5 deep for all of the ellipticals and treadmills. Listen new gym peeps, I do not have time to wait around whilst you fulfill your resolutions. It’s hard enough for me to be seen in public covered in sweat and wearing sweats, I can’t have you prolonging the experience. So I don’t go to the gym in January. I mean, I don’t think I went in December either but whatever, I was busy. Eating.

Anyway, now it’s February! Rejoice! Here’s a list of things I love about February:

1. It is not January!

2. Valentine’s Day = someone inevitably buys me chocolate and I usually get laid. What-what.

3. Even if no one buys me chocolate, I can buy chocolate for 50% off on February 15th and lay around reading magazines and gorging on it.  I’m not proud. And I can go to the gym afterward! Eh. . . probably not.

4. Thanks to global warming we usually get a few days of over 50 degree weather in February here in Chicago. Sometimes thanks to global warming we get like 2 feet of snow, but I’m willing to roll the dice.

5. I usually file my taxes and can look forward to a little cash influx. I’m looking at you, black flats that look like ballet slippers.*

*I know those are not hot shoes. I know. They’re mildly cute at best. Most bloggers would link to, like, these.

Believe me, I also want those. Drool.  But that would never happen, never in a million years, because . . . I guess I have to come out and tell you guys this: I have giant feet. Monstrous. It’s not that they’re that long, a size 11, which would be manageable, but they’re so wide. They’re like flippers. They’re like hobbit feet without the hair. They may have been formed with recombinant DNA, half human, half sasquatch.  Mom, was I experimented on at birth? Actually,  I’m sure my mom doesn’t remember. She once told me that in the year I was born, women were required to get enemas after giving birth, so she pretty much blocked out that whole day. So I guess we’ll never know.

Happy February!

When I woke up this morning there was sheet of ice over everything.  The back stairs leading out of my apartment were particularly treacherous, so I went down them at osteoporosis speed, clutching a rail in each hand. I have kind of a thing about stairs.

The first year that I lived in the city, it was in this really strange apartment building from the 19th century that had originally been a hotel.  It was situated at the corner of a 3 street intersection, so it’s one of those triangular buildings, like the Flatiron in New York, except way smaller and not cool.  Between the shape of the building and the conversion, the layout inside was really wonky.  The hallways zig zagged back and forth, so you couldn’t see one end from the other, and they were lit by old globe shaped light fixtures hanging from chains in the ceiling. Presumably because the building was built before electric lights were commonplace, there were shafts, about 3 feet square, cut through the building vertically at random intervals.  My roommate and I both had windows looking into the shafts in our bedroom closets. We had a front door in our living room and a front door in our kitchen. In the hallway, these doors were directly next to each other and people would frequently knock at one only to have us open the other. The ceilings were really high, maybe 13 or 14 feet. When a lightbulb burned out in a ceiling fixture, there was no possible way for us to change it, we had to call in a maintenance guy who would carry a full size ladder up to our apartment to put in a new bulb. It was all kind of creepy and exciting and fun. The only dangerous features (besides the 100 year old wiring) were the staircases.

There were two stairways, one at each entrance to the building.  Because the ceilings were so high, the staircases were quite long and really, really steep. The stairs were carpeted in a wondrous burnt orange/brown/green pattern, and the old carpet was baggy in some places, which made it easy to trip over, and matted down in others, which made it slippery. To make matters worse, each staircase was bisected in the middle by a set of doors. Like, if it was a 30 step case, you’d climb up 15 steps and reach a set of doors. Without a landing, to be clear, they were just double doors placed on a single stair in the middle of a staircase. Often, when coming up the stairs at night, these doors would be locked and you’d have to balance yourself there, holding groceries or school books or what have you, and dig out your keys.  The doors could not be pushed open because they would run into the next highest step, they had to be pulled open. This meant that if someone was coming down the staircase while you were going up it, they could push open the doors and knock you backward down the stairs. Whee!

So one morning, I was dashing off to my job as a barista (running late as always) and I was in such a hurry that I didn’t slow my go when I got to the staircase. I made it down 2 or 3 steps just fine, when suddenly my sensible work shoe hit a slippery patch in the carpet and slid out from under me. I fell forward down the steepest flight of mother fucking stairs in the US of A. Down I went, ass over teakettle, grasping madly but uselessly at the walls and the ground, not totally sure of which was which, past those evil doors at the midway point because on this particular day they had been propped open and therefore did nothing to slow my descent. I finally stopped, somehow, about 5 stairs from the bottom.

If you’ve never fallen down a staircase, I don’t recommend you try it. It is g.d. traumatic. You are aware the whole time of the fact that you are falling, and you know you need to stop, but you are totally incapable of battling the inertia and gravity in order to stop yourself and so you keep falling, and with every milisecond that passes you’re being injured more and more, and things are cracking and thudding and the terror is building that only 2 months after moving out of your podunk town to the big city, you are going to die a greasy haired virgin in a Starbucks cap, murdered by a staircase. And they’ll take your body back to that podunk town and the people will stand over you, shaking their heads and murmuring, “That girl grew up in a 4 bedroom ranch! What made her think she was ready for staircases?” What, indeed?

After I stood up and brushed myself off, I was left with that uncontrollable “I don’t feel anything, why can’t I stop sobbing?” thing that I normally reserve for, like, bad car accidents and dog bites. (I’m looking at you, rottweiler #1 circa 1993 and rottweiler #2 circa 2001. P.S. SUCK ON IT, ROTTWEILERS. Yes, that’s right, I am a dog racist. Now you know.) I remember snorting and sniffling my way down the sidewalk to the coffee shop where I worked, trying to pull it together. Because instead of calling an ambulance I actually walked myself to fucking Starbucks afterward and made Grande Nonfat Lattes, extra Nonfat, all day long for ladies with $3,000.00 strollers. For their dogs.

My only real injury turned out to be an epic bruise, 6 inches of black and green and purple, blooming off the side of my abdomen, as well as a damaged ego and, as I mentioned, a healthy fear of staircases.

If, say, you were lusting after these curtains:

But couldn’t figure out what the fabric was, and likely couldn’t afford it even if you found it, would any of these fabrics make a worthy substitute?

Let’s see a few more successful examples of Delft colored curtains, shall we?

Sassy Jonathan Adler room.

Another Domino pic

Your thoughts?

Eric and I had our six year anniversary a few weeks ago.  Every time we say that to someone, they squeal with anticipation because they think I’m about to tell them that we’re getting married. We are not getting married. Stifle your squeals, America and other English speaking regions of the world. Why would I buy the cow when I’m getting the milk for free? I know, that’s a crude metaphor. What I mean to say is my boyfriend is livestock, and I’m using him for sex. Wait. That didn’t come out right. I’m using him for sex and health insurance. There we go. Romance is alive and well.

I didn’t get an anniversary gift for Eric. Normally, he doesn’t get me anything either because our anniversary is a week after Christmas and we’re usually tapped out.  We just go out for a nice dinner and remind each other of the awesome, loving Christmas gifts that were exchanged the week before, and everyone is happy.  I actually thought I was doing pretty well this year because I took the guy to a sushi restaurant and it wasn’t even the All-You-Can-Eat Sushi Buffet, it was a place with like, a martini menu and women lounging at the bar, tossing sheets of glossy, flat-ironed hair around and wearing their belts in intriguing new ways. Real classy-like.

But someone decided throw out the anniversary gift rule book this year and make me look bad.

He bought plane tickets to Barcelona. I know what you’re thinking — that guy’s a real showoff.  I couldn’t agree with you more.

Someone came to my site today searching for “mom huqin sex”. Let’s get some visual aids here. That’s Mom:

Image blatantly stolen from a Google image search

Huqin:

Image "borrowed" from Wikipedia

And sex:

Whatever you’re going through man, I hope you get the help you need.

Tomorrow I have to go to the lady doctor. You know what I mean. I am not excited about that. I tried to find one non-embarrasing undergarment to wear to my appointment and I discovered something: I don’t own any. Seriously, how pathetic is that? It’s all full of holes, ill-fitting, inappropriate, or my swimsuit.  I may wear the swimsuit. My friend reassured me that the gyno is like a typical straight dude, in the sense that they do not give a shit about the wrapping and just want to get to what’s underneath. Oh, great. My doctor is a frat boy. Will I have to do a keg stand before getting in the stirrups? Should I compliment the doctor on her Abercrombie polo? Do I have to pretend I like Dane Cook?

I spent about 3 hours yesterday trolling the internet for the perfect mail rack for my entryway. My life is really not as empty as I made it sound just now. Anyway. I came across this gem on etsy:

Photo from Jorgan Jamber's Etsy Shop

That may not seem like the cream of the crop to you, but believe me, after wading through the selection on amazon for hours:

That simple silver rack looked pretty great. I kind of balked at paying $32.00 for it, though, so I thought I’d let it go for 24 hours and see if I still wanted it. Fast forward to today. I’m standing in my friends Marty and Shannon’s kitchen, looking at the fruits of Shannon’s superior organizational skills and getting ready to eat the awesome brunch they made, when out of nowhere I notice a very familiar looking rack on her wall, filled with lids.

“Shannon!” I exclaimed, “where did you get that amazing rack?”

Shannon looked at me as though I were asking an inappropriate personal question. “The one on the wall,” I clarified.

“Ikea,” she said.

I rushed home to consult the internets, and dudes. It’s exactly the same rack. Check check it:

Except instead of $32.00, it retails for $2.99! What do you think, friends, was it an honest mistake? Is it perhaps a slightly different yet somehow incredibly similar rack?  Could I list my dusty Ikea lamps from 4 years ago on etsy at 10 times their original value and call them “vintage” too? Hmm?

[UPDATED TO ADD] As Courtney points out below, the Etsy shelf in fact has only 5 rungs, the Ikea shelf has 6.  Excellent work, Courtney.  I am not so good at that “counting” thing you seem to have mastered.  I take back 56% of my snarkiness toward the mail rack Etsy seller. I can’t take back the other 52% (see my math skills at work? 56 +52 = 100) because it’s built into my personality.

I went downtown on Monday for my French lesson* but I arrived too early and decided to walk myself around the neighborhood to kill time, despite the fact that it was a cold day in January. I was rolling along, appreciating the buildings and the morning light, when something brightly colored caught my eye. This is where things get weird, so if a description of carrion will turn your stomach, feel free to skip the next 3 paragraphs. As it turns out, that brightly colored thing was a pair of pigeon feet, attached to the back half of a pigeon carcass, lying square in the middle of the sidewalk in one of the poshest areas in Chicago.

Now personally, when I hear the phrase “pigeon carcass” I think of something that’s been dead for awhile, and is brownish and flattened and largely unrecognizable. That was very much not the case here. It was a perfect, pretty pair of wings, neatly groomed, white and gray and blue, and vivid orange scaly feet and legs, attached to a backbone, parts of the rib cage, and a mess of pink and grey tendons and organs. No head. No front. But what was there was fresh – it still kind of looked alive, as alive as something can look while missing half of its body. I hope I’ve described it well enough that you kind of can picture it, because it was probably the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.

Upon sight, my gut told me that it was a serial-killer-style mutilation** and that if I was looking at it, then he*** was looking at me. And I ran away, ran away.

But now that I’ve had some time to reflect, I really don’t know how the pigeon could have ended up like that. It didn’t look like it was attacked by an animal – the remaining bits were too undamaged and there was no blood or feathers scattered around. It wasn’t hit by a car.  I wondered about aircraft, but I don’t think pigeons fly that high. A wind turbine on top of a building? A samurai? Has anyone come across a similar scene?

*I seem to like to describe for you the parts of my life that make me sound like a yuppie housewife: Manicure! Cocktails! French lessons! Brunch! But to leave out the unglamorous, student (the code word for lower-middle-class-but-young) realities such as: a car with one door that is actually a wall because it stopped working long ago, washing my laundry only every 2 weeks or so because I have to leave my house to do it, walking at night clutching pepper spray in my pocket because my neighborhood is delightfully “gritty”.  Not that I’m complaining about that stuff, I’m just offering it for comparison’s sake. I love telling people to stop trying to open my carwall.

**Everything I know about serial killers I learned from Law & Order (because they, like me, ignore the truth whenever it’s boring or inconvenient.)

**The killer, not the pigeon. We’ve been over this, the pigeon had no head.