Emmy Doggy Dogg needs a jobby job.

I've been working at the Merchandise Mart the past week. My friend is the manager at a showroom and needed extra help, so I'm just working until tomorrow, or possibly a couple days next week. I didn't like it at first. There was a design conference going on Monday through Wednesday, and all I did was greet people, exchange business cards, and tell people that I can't tell them how much things are. The best time I had was talking to a student at Harrington about a lighting project she's working on. The company sells silk light fixtures, too, so she was interested in them. However, I enjoyed today a bit more since people coming in were actually browsing Mart showrooms because they wanted to, not because they happened to be there. And since the other salespeople weren't busy, a few stopped in to introduce themselves and were quite nice. It made me a bit sad knowing that I would soon be leaving. The main thing I haven't liked about working here is that I have nothing productive to do. I can't help people with projects or sell things or do research etc. I'm just online or reading. I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X for an hour and a half which was satisfying, but it's so cold and quiet in here that after awhile I got drowsy.
Anyway...I really wish I had a job. I'll be tackling the listings once more tomorrow.

You know you watch too many horror movies when...

I was on the blue line last night, and a man was sleeping a few seats behind me on the other side of the car. His scarf was covering his mouth, and it was almost the same color as his skin. I caught a glimpse of him, and I had to take another look to check if he truly didn't have a mouth or if I was just crazy. It was obviously the latter.

Sometimes I hate the internet.

I miss the days when, to let family know that a beloved relative has died (after a few days on her deathbed), you would receive a phone call to hear the news instead of a forwarded email...especially after explicitly asking to be notified when it happened.

Gun crazy.

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, guns were always really scary to me. The only people that had them were cops and gang members. In a way, that's still very true; I hear about shootings near my boyfriend's apartment all the time (in fact, there's a bullet hole in the window pane next to the front door of his building), and a lot of people want to bring the National Guard to Chicago because of the insane numbers of violent crimes that have taken place this year. (Which I'm against, btw. I'm glad it hasn't been done.)

However, I now know a few people that live in Texas and Utah that occasionally go shooting, and it's strange to know that they haven't exploded upon touching a firearm. I'm going to visit both my family and Gabe's family this summer, and target shooting is planned for both trips. I'm pretty excited about it. I've been looking at Illinois gun laws and am thinking about getting a Firearm Owner's Identification Card (FOID), which is required just to shoot a gun, let alone own one. There are several shooting ranges in the area that will rent out guns, and I even have a gun I would want to buy for superficial reasons: a Sig Sauer two-tone Mosquito (Ron Swanson gives one to April Ludgate for her 21st birthday on Parks and Recreation. According to him, it was designed for the officers of the Swiss "pussy" police force).


Obviously I'm not going to just go out and buy one (admittedly because they're $350 and I'm broke). It's just one of these things that I would never think I'd be interested in 5 years ago. And if I have fun shooting this summer, maybe it'll end up being a new hobby.

Besides, wouldn't it be badass to be able to use my FOID as ID in the event I lose my DL from speeding again?

Do you believe in love there?

Suede is reuniting for a few shows, and I got very excited...but Bernard Butler won't be part of the line-up. Boo. Coming Up was pretty good, but their songs were definitely lacking after he left. Still, not that they'll likely come to the US, I'd definitely go if they did, even if it means being disappointed. I don't think anything can beat my inner teenager's soul being crushed when I saw Johnny Marr play with The Healers. Ugh.

And the meteorite is the source of a light and the meteor's just what we see...

...and the meteroid is the stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee.

It's no secret that I love Joanna Newsom. Currently listening to "Emily;" there was a fireball (the result of a meteorite falling to Earth)seen all over the Midwest at around 10 pm last night, from Iowa to Ohio. I was awake; I wish that I'd seen it.
Anyway, I am completely broke at the moment, and so I used some of the $15 in Borders Bucks I had to buy a latte and apple tart (I fill out surveys for points at erewards.com; Borders Bucks are one thing you can redeem the points for). I decided to take a look at magazines. I spotted the new issue of Uncut. The second biggest headline was "JOANNA NEWSOM Welcome to her visionary world." YES PLEASE. I had just enough left on my Rewards card and my checking account to buy the UK (thus expensive) magazine. The intro photo is really beautiful and is obviously from the shoot that resulted in the cover of Have One on Me. I decided to look for it online, since the one in the magazine covers two pages and would have a seam if I scanned it. In my google search, I came across a blog that not only had that photo, but more photos of her amongst his other favorite artists that I had never seen before. So I will share them here...some of them had sources in the file name so I can only cite where those ones came from.

Annabel Mehran, Uncut, April 2010

The New York Times


The one below is from Buenos Aires...
Blogger keeps screwing with the format when I type it.

Voilà.

Ugh.

I love horror movies. I've loved them for as long as I can remember. I've thought about ways I could incorporate them into my art history research...the connection between Le Corbusier's massive apartment buildings and Shivers and Demons 2 are the best examples I can think of. Damien Hirst and The Cell, also.

People often ask why I enjoy horror movies so much. The best explanation I can come up with is that it's a rush being scared and mortified...and often they're more funny than anything comedians like Adam Sandler could ever come up with. So I found it a bit strange when I had to turn off Law and Order: SVU tonight. It was an episode I've seen before; I've seen a lot of them multiple times because I'm addicted to that show. Yes, the crimes investigated in that show are horrendous, but the cast is so great that I can easily overlook it. But tonight, I couldn't. One could argue that SVU isn't a horror show, but a crime show...but it is scary, and once the rapist started confessing his crimes in detail, I began to get sick to my stomach. Part of the issue at hand was that another man had been convicted of these crimes; it wasn't until the rapes began again years later that the detectives realized that they had put the wrong man in prison. After the real rapist confesses, Detective Stabler visits the convicted man in prison and tells him he was wrongly convicted and will soon be released. The man is so grateful. And then I turned the TV off. I knew that shortly, before being led from the interrogation room to his cell, the real rapist would ask to use the restroom, and would then jump out the window and kill himself. Because of some legality, this would mean that the innocent man has to stay in prison after all. I don't know if this is accurate...I certainly don't understand why a window would be in a jail house's restroom. But it still made me sick.

This morning, I watched Demonia, directed by Italian horror director Lucio Fulci. I watched five nuns get nailed to crosses, a man get stabbed, two men impaled, a woman's eyes scratched out by her cats, and a man stabbed and his tongue nailed. Perhaps because none of the heinous acts in the SVU episode were actually shown, my mind filled in the blanks making it more horrific if I'd seen it. Come to think of it, horror movies rarely have rape scenes in them.

...

My cat was super cute today laying in the warm sun!