'Cause my mom is awesome

Nate Hopewell at Diamond St. in Lancaster is also awesome.

Putting stuff on your head makes men think you're an artist.

A few months ago, I was sitting outside a Red Cross RV waiting for my turn to get stabbed in the arm a few times by an incompetent phlebotomist, when I started chatting with a lovely young fellow who happened to be sitting next to me. Upon being asked if I had any hobbies, I told him that I enjoy drawing.
"Yeah, I can tell," he said. When I expressed my confusion, he gestured to my hat (a multicolored knit thing that is really quite unattractive) and said that I have style; I look artistic. Since then, I have noticed other people making similar comments linking my affinity for putting ugly knit things on my head and my desire to rub bits of burnt wood against paper.
For example: a few weeks ago, I was at my mom's house wearing a floppy grey hat, when Jim (my mom's fella) pointed at it and said "That's your art hat." I don't know what that means, but okay.
I have also heard menfolk talking about girls who put other shit on their heads; evidently, clipping feathers into your hair or wearing those horrid '70s inspired headbands makes you come off as "creative." I personally don't quite get the connection, but that could be due to my lack of a Y chromosome.

My dad has something on his head.
Does that make him an artist?

Now, I would just like to say that I am not, in fact, an artist, despite what you may infer from my hats. I just like drawing. It's a thing I do because I enjoy it, and I am not very good at it. Allow me to reiterate; I am not an artist. And I would be willing to bet that the girls who buy those two dollar clip on feather hair things aren't terribly artistic either. So what exactly is it that makes putting stuff on your head so, er, creative? Does this concept only apply to women? And why don't baseball caps count? Or perhaps all truckers are secretly "creative types."
I have a very good friend who is an artist. A real one, I mean, who makes his living creating art. He is rarely seen with things on his head, unless it is very cold, in which case he wears those snazzy foldable earmuff things. Also, I knew a girl in high school who was extremely creative, and I cannot recall her ever wearing things on her head. That isn't to say that artists never wear hats; Van Gogh had a thing for hats, if his self portraits are to be taken as a representation of reality. However, Van Gogh also purportedly had a thing for giving parts of his face to prostitutes named Rachel. I think what I'm getting at here is that it is ridiculous to make assumptions regarding a person's ability to make art based on his or her decision to put stuff on his or her head. On a different note, being the only girl in a class of about 40 people is super uncomfortable, especially when the professor keeps making disparaging comments about us ladies. Happy new semester everybody!

I'm so excited!

Oh boy!

By day, I may just be a sad, lonely college student

But by night, I am a mighty conqueror of would-be muggers in Wal-Mart parking lots!
Or something.

Since I already told this story to the cops and my mom and Jim and some other people many many times, I'm not going to tell it to you. Suffice it to say, this is why you should
A. not shop at Wal-Mart alone after 9:00 pm if you are a small to medium sized white girl
B. not park in an area of the aforementioned Wal-Mart's parking lot that does not have any security cameras and is rather far away from the entrance, and
C. really just avoid any and all Wal-Marts that are located in the Antellope Valley.
You should really just avoid the whole area, actually.

On an entirely unrelated note, I still have yet to locate my laptop's missing delete button, so if anyone had a burning desire to buy me a new one of those for Christmas, that would be really exciting. I mean a new delete button, not a new laptop. This is a new laptop.

Behold the glory!

Furthermore, there is a hot dog food truck around these parts that makes the greatest hot dogs in the universe. If you think Pink's is good, it is because you have yet to eat a Dogzilla hot dog. This one here is an all beef hot dog topped with avocado, grilled onion, bacon bits, Furikake seasoning, Japanese mayo and teriyaki sauce. I could live off of these things. Only I would get hugely fat. (Note: I am not saying that Pink's is not delicious. It is. I am only saying that Pink's hot dogs do not hold a candle to Dogzilla dogs.)

So anyway, I was just looking through my sketchbook from last semester, and I came across my favorite unfinished sketch: Jeremy the Bananashark. Eventually I painted this picture in greater detail on larger paper, but I still like the sketch more for some reason, even though it really isn't any good. So here you go, Jeremy the unfinished (extremely phallic) Bananashark sketch.

Happy Finals Week, errbody.

I can't explain

why I find this photo so amusing, but I really think it's the best thing I've seen all day. Scowl on, Arnie.

On an entirely unrelated note, today a black guy told me he likes my "swag," whatever the hell that means. It made me feel rad.

I love Kurt Vonnegut

Or at least I love the nonsense he said and wrote. The man was a genius. In fact, I have a quote of his tattooed on my foot. Lots of people think he's absurd and overrated, but I truly do not care. His works are a bit ridiculous, but I still think they're brilliant. I adore him. At any rate, I just read something he wrote a few years before his death, and it made me smile. So here you go:

“Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, 2004

What's this?

Why, it's a plush appendix! Seeing as I haven't had an appendix of my own for thirteen years, I believe that this would be an excellent replacement. So if any of you were wondering what I might want for Christmas or my birthday or any occasion at all really, well, this is it. The website that carries it also sells plush uteri (yes, that is the plural form of uterus) and since my own uterus is a little bit, er, challenged I think I may also want one of those. It would go incredibly well on my bed next to my Phillies Phanatic pillow pet. Only not really. You know what I really want? I want my left hand to work correctly and stop hurting me for no apparent reason. Because it is making this typing business seriously difficult. The worst thing about this hand nonsense? I can't open the bottle of ibuprofen which would probably make it feel a little better. But I may never know since I can't open the fricking thing.

Anyway, since my last blog post, several moderately exciting things have happened in my life:

• I went camping for a week in Utah with Sarah Allen, Nick Fedorko, and Keith Williams. It was fantastic. Also, rather terrifying at times.
• The day after the grueling 7-hour drive back from Utah, I flew to Pennsylvania with my pops to visit my fantastic east-coast family in Wayne. It was very humid. We saw some guys try to steal a Pontiac.
• About a week after I got back from Philly, I moved to Cypress with a friend of the family and started going to yet another community college. There are tons of Asians in Orange County and everyone drives very slowly. These two things may or may not be related. 
• I also got a job working for a small silk screening company, where I stand all day and get generally very sore and tired for $8.50 an hour. It isn't so terrible, except when it's very hot out, or when my right knee starts hurting me. 
• A few weeks ago, my only good friend moved away to Seattle to go on a mission. A Mormon one. The very few other friends I had are all usually too busy or too... something else to so much as respond to my texts, so actually seeing them on the weekends I come back to the AV is apparently out of the question. I am lonely.

So that's all. It's not ultimately all that thrilling, but I'm okay with it. Now I'm going to keep working on this charcoal drawing because that does not require the use of my lame left hand.
Toodles!