Kitty Wittermans.

Let me begin this post by saying: Megan--I both love and hate you for this. I wish you had never posted this on your blog because I will spend hours at this site. However, it is an instant cure for depression, so I can't be angry for that.

The title of this post is an exclamation I say every 10 minutes or so of perusing this webpage.

Oh yes. Kitty Wittermans.
.

The hits just keep on coming.

I do these things because I know that Jenrikay actually cares and will read them. We only know of one another's lives through blogs and occasional run-ins on campus.

Three Names you go by:
1. Stevi
2. ZZ
3. Stephanie

Three Parts of Your Heritage/Ethnic/Cultural Background
1. Italian
2. Irish
3. Intellectual

Three Things That Scare You
1. squirrels
2. clowns
3. unabashed ignorance

Three of Your Everyday Essentials
1. mascara
2. engagement ring
3. pens

Three Things You Are Wearing Right Now
1. white pajama pants with big fat pink kitties on them that say "miao"
2. eyeglasses
3. my fox ears that Corey made me for my birthday

Three Things You Want in a Relationship (other than Real Love)
1. commonality
2. conversation
3. commitment

Two Truths and a Lie (in any order)
1. I design clothing, but can't pattern make to save my life.
2. I have gone hiking in the Italian Alps.
3. Robert De Niro is family friend of ours.

Three PHYSICAL Things about the Opposite Sex that Appeal to You
1. eyes
2. facial hair
3. haircut in general

Three Places You Want to Go and Haven't Gone
1. Spain
2. Russia
3. Argentina

Three Things You Want to Do Before You Die
1. Take lots of ballroom and swing classes.
2. Publish a novel.
3. Make gnocchi from scratch.

Three Ways that you are stereotypically a Girl/Guy
1. I love clothing more than any sane person should.
2. I heart shinies.
3. I adore high heels.

At least I know I'm on the right path in life.

You scored as English. You should be an English major! Your passion lies in writing and expressing yourself creatively, and you hate it when you are inhibited from doing so. Pursue that interest of yours! Linguistics 100% English 100% Dance 92% Journalism 92% Theater 83% Mathematics 75% Philosophy 75% Sociology 67% Art 67% Anthropology 58% Psychology 42% Engineering 33% Biology 33% Chemistry 8% What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3) created with QuizFarm.com

A warm mug of liquid sleep.

Worst sleep of my life! I tried, around 2:30 this morning, to go to sleep. I had no plans of waking until about 10 am.

Trying to fend off an approaching coughy cold thing for fear it would ruin my birthday drink-a-thon, I took some theraflu.

Theraflu usually knocks my ass cold. I have no tolerance for the stuff. It's like a warm mug of liquid sleep.

However, the stuff I took last night was not what I expected. I woke up at 4 something, and fitfully slept again until 6. I tried to put myself to sleep again at 6, but after an hour or so of tossing and turning I gave the fuck up.

I don't feel tired. Or sick.

But it is 7 am and I haven't voluntarily seen this hour in quite a long time.

I am so restless; it's like I took speed instead of liquid sleep.

I just went and looked at the Theraflu box and under common side effects it lists typical things like "marked drowisness" and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, "excitability in children." There is also a notice printed in very large letters that one should not use Theraflu if the sealed package is open or torn.

That's common sense, right? Well, apparently, I've none of that.

As I shook the contents of this morning's Theraflu packet, little bits of sandy sleep capsules flew about my kitchen from a tiny tear in the bottom. Figuring that either I or one of my roommates had caused said tear in another bout of sickness and in urgent need of rest, I said, Whatever, and prepared my disgusting beverage anyway.

And now it is 7 am on my 21st and I have slept, collectively, between 3 and 4 hours. This is not the turnout I'd desired.

A day late and a dollar short.

On the morning of my 21st birthday, I return from work to find that my prodigal roommate's car is parked outside our apartment complex.

She skipped town without leaving me rent money.

Which was due on the 1st.

I want to kill her a little bit.

I find her asleep and in my room I find two checks. One for nearly $400 for rent. Another made out for $10.50 for electric.

I am glad to finally have the money that I had to front so the rent would be on time. (Which was my fucking birthday money, mind you. That money should be spent on booze and shoes! Not roommates!) However, it is still 2-3 days after the rent has been paid and rent has always been due to me, the Responsible One, on the 28th of the month. By my count, it's about a week late.

Now I just want to rough her up a bit. Especially because I am a fucking Birthday Princess today and I may do as I please.

I should hit her just for writing two checks when only one was necessary. "Waste not the young saplings, bitch!"

Just add water.

How is that you can give someone a grocery list full of items and they return with a bunch of snack foods and other assorted crap that doesn't actually help you make a meal out of anything?

This baffles me. This is why I buy food for the house. Clearly, the other person with a car cannot be trusted.

But maybe I'm being too hard on her. After all, I've never seen her cook a damn thing since we moved in here. How would she know that snack foods aren't meals?

Dani is leaving soon, and our new roommate, Miss Ashley, will be entering our strange universe. I can only hope that she will adapt well . . . or we will completely scare her off. One of the two.

You gotta work blue.

(Dave Chapelle is on TV in the background)

me: You know . . . I don't really like any black comedians.
heather: Dave Chapelle?
me: Not funny.
heather: Chris Rock?
me: Chris Rock is really smart, but if he weren't so damned annoying I might like him.
heather: Well, what about Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy? Ok, like, 80's Eddie Murphy.
me: Maybe a little 80's Eddie Murphy. And I don't really know Richard Pryor's stuff.
heather: What kind of comedy do you like?
me: I like Jewish comedy a lot.

(About five minutes of silence pass as we change channels. We come across Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on Conan.)

me: Well, I do like Triumph.
heather: Stevi . . .Triumph's not black.
me: He is a rottweiller. Of course he's black.
(Heather stares at me incredulously.)
me: Oh, come on, he has black fur!
heather: Oh, I am so putting this on facebook.

I've missed your sweet clacking.

I have returned from the darkness that is the loss of the internet. A new adapter has finally been purchased, and I may begin again to chronicle my Costanza moments as well as the cooking adventures we embark upon.

Soon I will regal you with tales of: Cambodian food, raging dykes, Danish food, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, Egyptian food and the porno I bought my coworker for Christmas.

But not tonight.

Tonight, I write Christmas cards.

The Bee Box Revisited

I want to personally extend my thanks to poet Lowell Parker who added his poem in a comment on my post "The Bee Box." I read his poem some years ago and it came to mind again when I saw the sparkly peach mummified bee ring at a jewelry vendor on campus. I'm very glad he provided the text so that others may read it and understand the sacrifice that love ought to be. I've reposted the text below so you won't have to search through the comments for it. Thank you, Mr. Parker.

"The Bee Box"

In this small box, my love,
you'll not find a ring,
but instead, a brave, little bee.
He'll be dead by morn, having given his life
defending his flowers against me.
I felt his sting
while picking the small, purple pansies
growing wild along the roadside,
in hopes of an afternoon bouquet for you.
And I grieved the sting,
more for him than me,
knowing full well the price he paid
for my small pain.
And I allowed him his victory,
leaving his flowers as a memory,
and brought you instead
this brave, little bee,
who proves there is love
even in the smallest
of things.

-Lowell Parker

Not Your Advert Whore

Due to the fact that people are using my comments section for their own devious purposes, I've changed my comment policy.

I realize that the internet is a public forum, but comments are intented for commentary (hence the word), not for advertising.

B is for Britain

Pip-pip, cheerio and all that rot.

We have successfully pulled yet another international meal out of our asses, or, rather, our tiny oven.

The Menu:

• Cold Cucumber Dill Soup
• Creamed Artichoke Hearts
• Coronation Chicken
• Bangers and Mash
• Cinnamon Plum Crumble
• Blueberry Scones
• Tea

I would like to state, first of all, that I am the soup master. Yet again I made a soup out of something you would not normally expect to be a soup. Granted, cold soups are meant to be palate cleansers, so something made from a crisp-tasting cucumber seemed a natural choice. You've really just got to taste this stuff. We still have a bunch left over.

The coronation chicken is a British excuse for a chicken salad. It's literally shredded chicken, onions, mayonnaise and pureeded apricots. It's deceptively good. All it's missing is bread.

This was my British discovery: with the exception of the bangers, everything we made could be eaten by people "wif no teef." Hmm . . . sausages and foods meant to be gummed? You do the math, people. I see what those dirty Brits are up to.

Right now, I've a Shepard's Pie in the oven.

A is for Argentina

In one of our typical post-midnight kitchen chat sessions, the roommates and I hatched a brilliant plan to learn about the world by having one international food night each week--that will be prepared entirely on our own through recipies we find on the internet.

We started with Argentina.

And we pulled it off.

The menu:

• Sopa de Manzanas
• Empanadas (chicken and cheese)
• Argentinian grilled eggplant
• Flan
• Argentinian fruit salad
• Sangria
• Red wine

It was a pretty amazing feat. None of us had ever made anything on our menu before, but somehow everything was entirely edible. (Though, the flan did take two tries and didn't turn out so much as flan but as a sort of cakey custardy thing.) Corey made the empanada stuffing, while Kirsten covered herself in flour and kneaded dough. Cassie and Heather figured out the flan. I made the apple soup all by my lonesome. Cassie grilled eggplant while Corey and I fried the empanadas. Dani made fruit salad while I conjured up a pitcher of Sangria and Liz photographed the entire event.

We all dressed like tango dancers and listened to crazy latin music.

If we can manage Argentina, I think we can take on the rest of the alphabet with the greatest of ease.

Next week, Britain, including shepard's pie, bangers and mash, spotted dick and other naughty-sounding taste treats.

The Drag Party

This is all the crazy shit you missed.

30 people in my apartment. Hotboxing the bathroom. Jello shots. Lady-boys. Fabulousness. 7-in heels. Crotch-socks. Absolutely nothing straight allowed. Moustaches. Stuffed bras.

A party so good, the cops had to shut us down.

After all, it's not a party until something gets broken.

Obey or suffer the consequences.

These are things we do not do.

1. Name our children after superheroes. I suppose that naming a kid "Bruce Wayne" or "Peter Parker" or even "Clark Kent" wouldn't be so bad . . . but Kal-el? Nicolas Cage is a Piasano . . . only someone who actually knows Hebrew should be allowed to do this and have anyone respect them.

2. Have sex with Katie Holmes.

3. Rename products to demonstrate your sensitivity to global catastrophes. Case in point, I was at Jamba Juice the other day and I ordered that I thought was a new item, a Strawberry Surf Rider. Only after I ordered it and tasted its strawberry goodness did I realize that something was terribly wrong. I knew this taste. This taste belonged once to the Strawberry Tsunami! I understand the need to be culturally sensitive, but, fuck, tsunamis are not going to cease just because there was one really bad one. Should we rename all carnival rides called "hurricanes" and all little girls named "Katrina" as well? It's one thing to remove the Twin Towers from Spiderman because of 9-11, but to attempt to remove any evidence of a natural phenomena? Something about this is a little off.

4. Park in my space when all I want in the world as I return from work at 1 am is my parking space and a peice of fucking cake. (Yes, in the whole world, that's all I want.)

Jenrikay's Music Tag

I've been tagged, and I am probably going to give her the strangest responses she'll ever see.

1. "Coin-Operated Boy" by the Dresden Dolls
2. "Hallelujah" by Rufus Wainwright
3. "Save My Soul" by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
4. "These Words" by Natasha Benningfeld
5. "Shiksa Goddess" as performed by Norbert Leo Butz, from Jason Robert Brown's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful little show The Last Five Years

You couldn't get past this without at least one song from a musical.

Be suprised that there aren't more.

The Bee Box

I stopped by the vendors who like to entice me to spend more money at my University than I need to only because I heard Mercy trying to talk herself out of large earrings.

I promptly talked her back into them. "Mercy" and "downsizing" are not words that belong in the same sentence.

She tried to talk me into earrings. This is Mercy. This is what she Does.

Instead, I saw one of those giant plastic pseudo-mod/semi-rave rings with a bee inside it.

I was immediately lovestruck. And it was $3.

It is peach, with sparkles, a mummified bee inside it, and it is in the shape of a heart. It reminded me of a poem I read once, "The Bee Box," in which a male lover wants to get flowers for his beloved, but finds that he gets stung by a bee in the process. Noticing how the bee bravely chose to give up his life to protect the thing he loved (in his bee way), the man decides instead to give his beloved "this brave little bee, who proves there is love even in the smallest of things."

Wide awake, despite appearances.

Received a note in the mail today from Mr. Cardoza that was written on a peice of paper he'd found in his desk . . . with a quote I wrote down sometime after I (inevitably) must have had a breakdown in his office. My quote read: "I think I'll be better when I get out of high school because then I can learn to, like, sleep."

Ironically, this arrived today. Of all days. I got about 5 hours of sleep last night, woke up at 8 am, was in class until 4:30 today, and then had a film screening from 6-8. And I cannot sleep yet because I have to hang out at work while we get our floors waxed.

I still haven't learned to sleep.

Am I better?

Waterworld.

This is the progression of hellish plumbing events that occurred on Saturday, September 18, 2005 at the Colonial Apartments in Isla Vista, CA:

1. Apartments 13 and 14 flood during the early morning hours.
2. I wake up at the crack of noon and find that we have no hot water--which is highly unusual because our building doesn't have legitimately cold water ever.
3. This progresses towards us having no water at all because the plumbing in the two flooded apartments needs to be fixed ASAP. (Note: This was not a good thing because I was not feeling well and it was very hot in our building that day, both of which would have been fixed by a shower.)
4. At about 3:30 PM, we get water again and all three of us at home take showers to revel in the glory of running water.
5. Now Dani and I cannot get our water to turn off. We have a scalding hot bathtub for about an hour until one of the plumbers on-site can get a chance to fix it.
6. My sink is backed up and it takes literally two hours for a sinkful of water to drain down. Plus, the garbage disposal spits food up the other side. Wonderful.

Everything is back to normal by today, but nonetheless, Saturday's plumbing disaster was horrible. I have never been so happy to do dishes as I was this morning.

Ring-a-Ring O Roses

Marcus and I are up in Ashland for the weekend. Tonight's adventure was Kit Marlowe's Tragikal History of Dr. Faustus in the Elizabethan Theatre.

So, the Elizabethan Theatre is, as the theatres in Shakespeare's day were, open air.

Ashland is, as Northern coastal states are in September, prone to rain.

I am now a resident of Southern California. I no longer own real shoes.

All of this is a recipe for my tiny little body to have a true Elizabethan theatrical experience.

It drizzled on and off throughout the course of Faustus, and I, in my lack of warm clothes and vastly inappropriate shoes, was soaked to the bone by the end of the show. Therefore leaving me, as well as other members of the audience, the possibility of returning to our hotels to develop pneumonia/catch the plague and die.

But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Here's how Marcus and I summed up the works of Kit Marlowe:

Me: You know, all the funny bits with Robin and Wagner didn't really come across on the page.
Marcus: That's because Marlowe isn't funny on the page. In Edward the 2nd, someone gets a spear shoved up their ass.
Me: Now that's comedy!

The God of Small Things

Heather and Miyuki are here, and they've come bearing massive amounts of small but wonderful gifts.

Miyuki brought us all little gifts to say, "Thanks for letting me stay with you because the University screwed me out of housing." We all received a little paper folding cup-thing with various designs. Mine, naturally, is red. She also gave us all a small notebook, and these things truly are the Way to my Heart, notebooks and the like.

Heather, after 5 months in Japan, returned with a host of little goodies for each of us. We all recieved a sake cup, a soup spoon, and an individualized rice bowl. We all also got two fans, one with a cultural design, the other with a Disney character because the Japanese are evidently all about Walt and his creations. (Cassie got Ariel because she loves mermaids, Dani got Marie from the Aristocats because that's her middle name, and I, naturally, got Tinkerbell. Jen also got Tinkerbell, but that was more of a default "there were only 4 designs" kind of thing. Hers is not as awesome as mine.) We all got a Japanese candy, and from there the gifts begin to vary. Jen got two great Engrish shirts and a pair of Japanese Ped socks, which Japanese girls wear with their high heels. Her pair is brightly striped. Cassie got a lot of weird-ass arcade items, because she asked Heather for 'random crap,' and an Engrish shirt that Heather said reminded her of fart jokes. Dani got an Engrish shirt that actually made sense, as well as a purse from Hiroshima that was hand dyed. Dani and I also got hairclips, which was odd, because we both have short hair. My Engrish shirt was the most awesome of all, though. It is a white tank top with piles of pink glitter over the letters that reads: "I can't dance / I'm a bad driver / Fuck rockn & roll / I like to jerk off / Spiga jeans girl." And I am totally wearing it to class tomorrow.

Heather also brought each of us a unique cultural gift. Dani received a geisha doll, Jen a lace fan used in tea ceremonies, Cassie an opium pipe, and I got a Japanese calligraphy stylus.

I could not be happier. Last night, I was sleeplessly perusing eBay for antique pens because I hadn't acquired any new ones since Venice last summer, where I purchased a lovely red glass pen with changeable nibs. I found a couple of unique antique ones that I'm vaguely interested in, but this pen is just what I needed. It's the first Japanese pen in my collection, and, to go along with it, Heather bought me what turned out to be a marriage record book, which is intendd for a married couple to record their wedding and the fruits of their union. I am going to treat it like a pillow book, because, in a way, that's what it is. Regardless, it's lovely, and the absolute perfect gift for me.

These small things are the way to my heart.