Welcome to Whitfieldia

Nebraska Trip

2008-02-23T17:23:00.012-05:00

So I'm back!

"You were gone?" Yes, ha ha, whatever.

Went to visit my boyfriend in Nebraska, which as far as I can tell would be the only reason to go there except for this wicked cool zoo they have.

From the website: "Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo has four primary objectives: conservation, research, recreation, and education. In promoting these objectives on a local, regional, national, and global scale, the Zoo provides exciting recreational opportunities that simultaneously enhance our visitors' knowledge of the natural world."

Alia's Translation: MONKEYS!

Photos below. ;)

This would be my demon, known to the SLuniverse as Aftershock Warrigal, leading his pack of monkeys away from the scene of the crime. Surely that's some special kind of monkey but fuck if I know what kind.

Once again a species-less monkey (Seriously, I could really care less about what kind of monkey they are. I don't even care if they're not really monkeys. They're cute as hell and they make me squeal and that's all I need to know.) sits down for a pow-wow with me and muh demonz. I don't know what they said to each other but I think it had something to do with the crime out front, the state of the union, and the monkey's obvious glass-kissing effort to flirt me away from him. It was tempting but I was not swayed. I'm just not that kind of girl.

There's a bunch of other photos I took but the day was overcast and many of the displays were indoors which made it difficult to get really clear shots. I'd like to try to clean some of them up for posting but, let's face it, I probably never will. To quote a brilliant man far from here... "Alas."

The other two creatures I met on this trip were Joy and Brahms, his two Great Pyrenees dogs. I used to have one of these dogs, or rather my father did, named Sugar. These are the only three I've ever met of this species and honestly I think it's time to upgrade the name to GIANT Pyranees!, capital letters and exclamation point included. These dogs are ginormous, which is cool because I'm not real fond of the tiny dogs. I mean I take it on a dog-by-dog basis but overall the small ones don't appeal to me much.

Girls, you know what I'm saying. ;)

Anyway, here's a few shots of the beasts in question.

Joy.

Brahms.

It was hard to tell the difference at first when they're jumping around and banging their huge asses into things but I think looking at them together you can see how different their faces are. Don't ask me to tell from behind, though.

So I'm back now. It was hard to leave. I was there for just under eight days (I wasn't counting the hours, really.) and he treated me like a princess the whole time.

He brought me eggs in bed. Nobody's ever done that before.

Anyway so there's a little peek into my real world, or whatever passes for it. There are other photos, of course, but I can't show you those. >;D

Meheheh.

- a.w.

Fucking. Pillsbury. Doughboy.

2008-01-05T04:30:00.000-05:00

(Wrote this a few years ago. My theory still stands so I thought it worth posting here. Enjoy!)

That fuckin ball of dough. He's using us all, that fat little yeast infection. You know he and Santa are fucking, right. Because who does the big red guy get to poke every goddamn time he comes to town? The Pillsbury Doughboy, that's who. And how many other ambiguously fictitious icons of faith get to poke the bloated aborted bagel? None. Not one. Not the Easter bunny, not the tooth fairy, not the great pumpkin. Not cupid, not Jesus, not even Elvis gets to make the little piggy squeal. And we've been watching them go at it for years, and nobody has so much raised an eyebrow. Those goddamn adorable commercials every year, where the juicy little porkpie gets stabbed right in the gut by Mr. Cocaine-Moustache's extended digit, and we look on in blissful ignorance while they wave the whole affair around in our faces.

I know what you're thinking. "The Easter bunny doesn't get any lucious baked goods, angry cynical girl!" Fuck you, okay, because I may be angry and cynical, but that little wonder bread embryo is fucking Santa right up the ass, and we're all helping him do it.
That's right, I said it. and I'll say it again. We've all been merrily decking our balls all over the place for Santa, and what do we leave as a final object of sacrifice to the mysterious red man who loves our children and brings us wonderful things as long as we don't watch him do it?

Cookies.

"But why Santa?" you ask, oh dear, unenlightened one. It's simple strategy: popularity and access. From all the mythical hoopla, Santa is the most widely recognized symbol of idolatry in the world next to the Big Guy himself, and I think we all know how often he makes appearances. If one of God's workers went to a public place and invited children to sit on his lap, he would be shipped to rome in several economy-size matchboxes, with no return address. But every year, we chuckle with nostalgia and shove terrified children over to the strange, dingy man at the mall with gin on his breath and no teeth, to rattle off their hopes and dreams. Enter: Santa. And enter Santa he does, every year. and we encourage him with our unending supply of Pillsbury cookies and cakes and lovely treats of every sort, all at the merry and mirth of that doughy little Hitler.

But not me, you pasty little slut. I won't put cookies out for your overstuffed codependent lover this year, oh no. I'll put a candy bar out. I'll leave him a pack of smokes. I'll treat him to a bowl of melon balls. And when you and your flaky little minions rise up like Mickey's broom shards, I'm gonna get a big blue robe and a pointy fuckin hat and sorcerize your fuckin muffins off.

You won't get me, Doughboy. You won't get me.

-a.w.

Oh, PS.

2007-12-09T02:28:00.000-05:00

I got my demon back. :)

Yay for dirty underworld nookie. And then some.

Really gonez.

2007-11-17T08:02:00.000-05:00

Funny how fast things can change. I wasn't ready for it to end. I knew it was going to eventually, I guess, and I thought it was as good a time as any. I wasn't finished loving him yet. Kinda too late now, though. I'm gonna miss that demon something awful.

I said I had no regrets but I was wrong. It wasn't what we did, though, but what we didn't get to. Loving you, knowing you, has still been worth this stinging pain of heartbreak. I hope we'll be friends again soon.

- a.w.

I've posted this photo before, I know, but it's my favorite.
Live with it.

My demonz is gonez...

2007-10-26T20:52:00.001-04:00

... and I miss him already.

Entering My Twilight Yearz.

2007-10-19T14:29:00.000-04:00

My birthday was this week. It was a good day, and so were the days immediately leading up to and following. I am proud to report that I am just as damn fool today as I was fifteen years ago.

The fact that I can remember fifteen years ago still trips me up. Remembering twenty is more sobering still. Luckily one thing I've learned by this age is how to avoid sobriety.

Tuesday, I got to fuck off. My roomie had taken the week off of work so we could get some stuff done around the apartment we'd been neglecting for a while, straighten up for my demon's visit and getting ready for the arrival of a dear friend of mine, who is moving to the area. This is also very exciting, but more on it later. But I got up on Tuesday afternoon, like I do, and she hadn't really done what she'd planned to do in the morning, which means that still had to get done before anything else got done so we both thought about it for a moment and decided the best course of action would be to call the day a bust, and fuck off for the next three. So we went out for dinner instead and got our favorite waitress at our favorite place. Good times.

Wednesday was The Day.

We took a road trip down to CT to see this carousel museum (it's about a two hour drive, give or take) which ended up being... well. It was an experience. It wasn't an exciting or riveting experience. It wasn't something I felt compelled to ever do again. It was actually pretty damn boring. I mean the displays were beautiful and they had a bunch of art on the walls in this one section, I guess the master carver (or some guy, I dunno, she talked really fast) picks them every month.

This month they'd chosen a Running of the Bulls theme and there was a lot of portraits and abstracts that resembled bulls, some relating to the bull fighters. There was this one that was so amazing, though I don't remember the name just now or the artist, though I think I have both somewhere on a photo. It was depicting a bull's shape (I think it was done completely with a palette knife, too, no brushes - I always wanted to try that!) in the foreground emerging from the doors of its pen at the bullfighting ring. And there was a conquistador in the background waiting to tease and torment him. And in the background still, shapes of faces were obscured but there was a presence of them there. The colors were muted but contrasted each other nicely and looking at it called forth a very strong mood.

I got a real sense of what it must be like for the animal to be walking that walk, strutting from the pen and expecting freedom but finding just this: an enormous room with a man in black ready to piss you off to a breaking point. Below, hard sand. Above, hot sun. Noise and heat and smells and just utter chaos and cacophony. It's confusing, infuriating, upsetting. It makes my stomach turn.

Then I lift my gaze to the fighter, the one holding this cape and wearing this ridiculously fabulous hat. And just as strongly I get this feeling of intense courage and power, unrivaled bravery and absolute pride. He is a strong and capable man, a warrior in this bloodsport.

"Maybe he's a woman?"

Shh. Could be a woman, but probably not. I don't honestly think there was an added political statement for feminism here.

It was moving. I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about the concept of bullfighting or the intelligence or morality in enraging an animal to the point of wanting to gore you. As far as sports go, I'm not really into any of them. I can participate in the watching of baseball but it's not an interest of mine alone, but more the tolerance and appreciation for the passions of others in something that doesn't completely bore me to tears. Don't ask me about football, though. But I digress, you see, because what I'm trying to say is I neither approve or disapprove of the sport. It's not really my place to, anyway. But I love art that makes me think about things I don't normally think about, and this piece was so simple and it was so perfectly constructed. I really felt it. I would have taken it home if I could have.

This is why I need to be sick rich, see? Art collections like this.

Anyway there was a whole other room of art too by a woman named (and you'll see why I could remember this one) Glo Sessions. Her art was fabulous, too. A collection of watercolors and charcoal drawings. I'm thinking of some but I want to get out the rest of my story so I'll just leave it to say it was just totally amazing. The best part about the museum.

OR SO I THOUGHT.

This woman that worked there and showed us around, who was darling and lovely and very excited to have guests there, could not let us leave without showing us the, for lack of better word, Thingie. I seriously cannot remember the name of it so I'll just describe it and eventually get up a photo of the device, along with the lady who was so enamored with it.

It's like those old time pianos that didn't need players, they just ran on air bellows and played through rolls of paper where bits had been cut out long ago to produce a sound when the air blows through it. This is how music is produced from the Thingie. Only the Thingie is not shaped like a piano at all but in fact it is a big cart what spews carousel music out. This lady turns it on and the music literally smacks us in the faces twenty feet away. Next thing I know this woman is clapping and bending her knees in time and jerking to either side in some kind of happy dance to whatever tune was coming out. I didn't recognize it. But man did she have a good time standing there three feet from the source of such noise. I took some pictures.

Finally we got the hell out of there and went to check into the hotel. I got my own room so I'd be able to dick around online with the laptop after she went to bed, since I can't sleep in hotels anyway and wasn't really tired. Plus my demon was gonna be around all night so I could talk dirty to him somewhere besides home for a change. ;)

There was a Famous Dave's BBQ connected to the hotel and it's a pretty decent place to eat. Pretty decent place to drink, too, and we figured we'd never get closer than attached so there we walked for dinner and booze.

The food was awesome, as always. The service was AWFUL. Our waitress had zero personality, though that's no reason to dock someone's tip. What gave us a reason was that she was S--L----O------W! I had to wait fifteen minutes between the end of my first drink and the start of my second. The third was slow too and I have no idea what she thought we were going to do with two to-go containers of food and two half empty drinks for the twenty. five. minutes. it took her to return to the table to ask if we wanted dessert. I could have, and would have, had another two or three drinks in that time and left a much happier birthday girl with a much larger bill to over-tip on. But she didn't get her ass in gear and not only did we leave with a smaller bill, we left a smaller percentage tip than we would have, had her service been at all reasonable.

But we went back upstairs and watched TV, giggled, pillow-fought in nighties ( Sure. ;) ), and I hung out online and talked dirty to my demon. Good stuff.

Next day, not enough sleep. But it's all good, I'm only thirty. I can run on fumes. We get up and out and visit this working carousel and get ourselves tickets to ri-ide. It's really beautiful, the lights are gorgeous and all the horses are real wood, real horsehair tails.

The roommate is old so she needed a low one. Of course, not riding this ride together would have been a crime of epic proportions, yes? And what's right next to the low horse on any stopped carousel?

The high one.

I look at it. It looks at me. Its saddle is about shoulder level to me. I hearken back to the Days of Yore, and I recall the merry-go-round at the Paramus mall in New Jersey, the ones along the boardwalk at the shore. I recall a couple of rungs below the horse on the pole for stepping, climbing. I also recall, on some, a leather strap someone made into a stirrup, which always helped as well. This horse has no such apparatus, merely an iron peg just under the horse's body for someone to assist themselves with.

Suddenly I hear this laughter and I look at my roommate, who is already seated comfortably on her low, low, looooowwwww horse and looking up at me and my horse. Now we've talked about this some and she swears on everything in sight that what she said was, "Yeah right!" In my memory, though, it sounded a lot more like, "You're THIRTY!"

Thirty? Am I really too old at thirty to haul myself up onto a carousel horse? Just because it's a little higher than the one my old, lazy roommate managed to squeeze her leg over?

So my response to her derision was "Hell. No." or something less delicate and I grabbed the pole. I hoiked* my foot up on the peg. I gave a little hop and I fucking pulled myself up and up and hand over hand and swinging and squeaking and yes, my dear friends, I made it onto that god damn infernal wooden animal.

* the sound I made when I did it.

And she was a grand horse, white and perpetually throwing her head back and up with pride. Pink and blues on her saddle and bridle and flowers around her tail. We had a great time together, spinning around to this terrible calliope music and feeling the wind in our respective manes.

The carousel finally stopped and instead of being opposite now my roommate and I were about even with each other, mid-air. I had to peel myself off it but she got to use a step stool, the damn cheater! But I help her anyway and I step down off the circle and suddenly my knee is reminding me of what I just did.

The details are fuzzy but I'm pretty sure I bashed it on the flank on the way over. And again just to one side, and then again at the shin. I guess I probably hit the shin first. The knee is the worst, though, there's a big swollen spot on the side and below and it looks like it's wanting to bruise. It might not, though.

And me? I am SO. COOL. I haven't injured myself by being a dumbass prideful child in a long time and I am damn proud that I still can. There should be no time in life when we are too old to be goaded into pushing ourselves for the sake of knowing that we can. If injury is to be had, then wear your scrapes and scars and bruises like the badges they are.

We caught Rein's Deli on the way home and it was amazing. When we got back, I went over to my dad's place to let him cook me dinner for my birthday, since I'd been away the night before. He made burgers and they were really good. Dad's burgers always are. There's a care he puts into his cooking that he doesn't really apply everywhere, I think. Girls aren't the only ones who can cook with love, after all. And then he brought out a brownie from Mrs. Fields with a candle in it, because he knows they're my favorite brownies and that I never get them because I hate going to the mall. This was extra special because I had not gotten a real birthday dessert yet with a candle in it. The restaurant had been so bad the night before that we didn't want to wait another half an hour for her to bring us a cold dessert. My roomie bought me a piece of fudge cake from Rein's that I had planned on having but didn't need to after that. It was really sweet. Past and present issues aside, sometimes he's a real good dad.

So here I am, two days after my thirtieth and I'm reflecting. I have a dear friend who is twenty three and her life pretty much sucks for it. I remember being twenty three, my whole life sucked too. It wasn't just circumstance but state of mind, as well. I was easily dissatisfied and impatient, felt I'd paid my dues and I deserved a break already. Seven years later I am looking at this world and thinking I am so, so small. My potential is huge, as are all of our potentials, maybe in quiet ways and maybe not, but personally I am a very, very small space in this universe. There is so much behind me and still so very much ahead of me still. With any luck - the only luck I believe in at all - I'll make it long enough that this will not be half my life over.

But if it is... if it is half my life, if I have only another thirty years left in this world or less, I am confident I will do more with where I have to go than I have with where I have been. This is not to diminish or second-guess what I have accomplished as a person, an artist, a woman, a terrified and shivering child, whatever else I am or have been. It is to say that whatever it is that I have seen and done and been, I know that whatever is coming next can only get bigger.

I have a comfortable life. I could make more money but I don't go hungry or cold, we maintain steady internet access and the electricity to run it. I love my apartment and my roommate is fantastic. My circle of friends is full, finally, of people that I can love and trust and count on for love, support and comfort. What family I have contact with is in decent terms, which seems to be saying a lot for the common family unit these days. The guy I call boyfriend is unlike anyone I've ever known and I see mutually enriching times ahead for us. I don't hate my work and I manage a comfortable regime of recreation. My Pengi is coming to live out here. And there is not a regulation carousel horse that is too high for me to mount.

I am thirty, and I rule.

30.

2007-10-13T20:05:00.000-04:00

Stupid age. Whatever.

Less than a week now. It'll probably be a good birthday but made BETTER by the fact that

MY DEMON IS COMING TO SEE ME.

Oh yes he is. And he's bringing me a present, squee! Squeeeee! Squeeeeeeeeee-eee!

Much happiness.

This is why I don't blog.

I R NOT FORD MODEL

2007-10-10T16:37:00.001-04:00

Easy come, easy go. Someday I'll tell this tall tale but for now I think it's best left tucked between my legs.

I R FORD MODEL

2007-09-06T02:00:00.000-04:00

SL's top fifteen girls and I'm number ten.

Hot damn.

Beast.

2007-08-28T17:17:00.001-04:00

Evil, thy name is Cuddles.

Welcome to the new world.

2007-08-28T17:04:00.000-04:00

This is Whitfieldia. It is a land for me by me about me. It will reflect all the love and adoration I feel towards myself, and you are invited to share your maddening infatuation for me as well. Or, flame me. That's okay too.

This is a desperate cry for attention.