Droolio

This is the Adonia by RSVP, and this
is the Fleur, also by RSVP.

Both of these shoes come with a nifty hot-pinkish-reddish metallic lining and--it gets better--something called Footpetals, which according to their listings at Zappos are "inserts at the heel and forefront" which "stop your feet from sliding forward, while heel cushions help absorb shock to heels, legs, and the lower back. Footpetals™ also protects bones and tissue while offering superior overall comfort."

And they're pretty!

I like the red ones especially because they're classically shaped, and would be fine for work or for going out. The black ones are trendier and therefore kind of less appealing to me--but couldn't you see rocking those out with a tulle minidress?

Rather impressively offensive cake-topper company

So I am just going to post images from the site, as well as the actual names the company gives each cake-topper. I don't think you really need my commentary here.

Here is "Bride and Groom with Lace Dress":


Here is "Ethnic Bride and Groom Couple":


Here is "A Sexy Couple":


And here is "A Sexy Ethnic Couple":


Here is "Cute Asian Couple":


I mean I couldn't make this stuff up.

And here is "Chinese Couple," I effing kid you not:

The description from the site for this little pair of figurines reads: "This hopeful young couple, dressed in the beautiful traditional costume worn by the Chinese on their wedding day, look with wide, eager eyes toward their future together. "

What the fuck.

Moving on: There is a Homosexual Cake-Topper section (that's what the link says: "Homosexual," not "Gay" or "LGBT" or anything sort of friendlier-sounding). Now, one would think that in the Homosexual Cake-Topper section, one would find figurines with two brides together, or two grooms together. Right? Or a woman in a tux and another in a wedding gown? Something along those lines?

There are TWO figurines available for sale in the Homosexual Cake-Topper Section. They are both men, and they are both alone. And they are both the same figurine, but one is painted brown. Here are all two of your choices, should you decide to decorate a Homosexual Wedding Cake:

"Macho Man":
and "Ethnic Macho Man":



whose mouth IS PAINTED RED, people. How is this okay in present-day America?


The "sports" cake-topper section only has groom figures. There are no brides engaging in sports; sporting about on wedding cakes, apparently, is a male-only activity. The grooms on this site do include Golf Fanatic Groom:


and Golf Fanatic Groom Ethnic:



Golf Fanatic Groom Ethnic is pictured walking away from Exasperated Bride Ethnic, whom you can purchase separately for $22.95. Because this is how you want people to think of you on your wedding day--pissed-off, cross-armed, mouth hanging open, getting left behind by your watch-checking groom.

You can peruse this site yourself: it's justcaketoppers.com. Jam Guy and I are skipping the toppers, and probably just serving pie.

Shoe lust time.

The Body Parts Pump from the John Fluevog Signature Collection. Drool.

Do I love it so much because of the phallic heel?

Um. Does it matter?

Robert Rodriguez

is the name of the designer of the mystery dress!

Thank you SO much, Craigslist poster and Rodriguez fan who identified the dress as one of his.

Does anyone know who makes this dress?

I saw it on a blog in which the author said she'd found it on the Saks website; I looked on the Saks website and didn't find it; I emailed the blog author who unfortunately couldn't recall the designer; I emailed Saks customer service, who apologized for being unable to help me and suggested I call a local store; I visited an Off 5th outlet--in the hopes that since it's from a previous season, it may have passed through there--and showed this picture to a salesperson, who admired it but couldn't place it.

Please give me a shoutout if you know (or even think you might know) the designer for this dress, or where I could purchase it, or any clues to this long-enduring mystery.

No on 8, obviously

Thanks to Ariel at Offbeat Bride for embedding this video, for always supporting marriage rights for everyone, and for her excellent work bringing the importance of voting No on 8 to the trillions of people that read her super-excellent blog.



Yay. I like this one too.

May in the Bay is brilliant.

"Women are supposed to be 'equal citizens' in this day and age . . . but would Roe v. Wade even be an issue if white men could get pregnant from 'oopses' and rapes?"

Amen.

I...just...don't know how to feel about this.

I have so many reactions, all at once. Here's the link; you tell me how it makes you feel.

It's too much to process by myself.

OK: The Page 56 Meme

Via May in the Bay from Adrienne @ Oh the Joys of Being a Female Playwright . . .

* Grab the nearest book.

* Open the book to page 56.

* Find the fifth sentence.

* Post the text of the next sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

"He put his ear to the floor and fell asleep listening to the house."
--Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry, 1999

Hey, that one turned out kind of nice. I sort of wished I'd had my textbooks nearby so I could look all serious and science-y, but this is the one I fell asleep at the table reading last night.

V? Surfrunner? Now you do it!

Roast chicken for dinner

I just put into the oven a chicken on a bed of quartered yukon potatoes, big carrots cut into chunks, rosemary and sage clipped from the backyard, and several cloves of garlic. I have some chard set aside to sautee with it. So life, at this moment, is very good.

Sometimes Jam Guy and I have days where it feels like we're shouting at each other through a brick wall, in separate, exotic languages, both wanting so badly to be heard and understood that it makes us angry and despairing. Some days it is like that. Other days we bang our heads together in our anxiousness to show our love. Still other whole days we spend apart, still, even when we are in the same room, working or playing through our separate lives.

But if you asked me right now to take the whole sum of the happiness and unhappiness of my life right now, I would hardly be able to breathe for all the joy and gratitude that would pour out of my mouth. I would spill out sappy songs like an old people's radio station; I would rave like a whole coven of chattering holy women; I would reach for Jam Guy and wait for you to see the kind of light he carries so that you could understand why I am so happy. I would wait for you to see the way he and I each light the other, the way we go through our easy days and our difficult days blazing because we are next to each other, explosively incandescing paths that no one knew were there before. Just because we are next to each other.

That is how I know I am done looking for a partner.

If I had known that my life would turn this bright I might have gone through my past shuttered and afraid of all the changes I would need to make and endure in order to reach now. At least I would have been afraid to stand here and look back into the kind of shadow I used to think I would learn to adjust to, to see through. I see now how bright my life can be and should be, which makes me grieve the smaller me that thought I should live in darkness. I squint all day long now, incredulous.

More food stuff.

What Jam Guy made last night for dinner: Nyonya-spiced fried chicken with a chili-lime-worchestershire dipping sauce, along with a rice-vinegar-based cabbage slaw and steamed jasmine rice (Jam Guy: "What do you think of this rice?" Sidewalk Monkey: "It's good." JG: "Good, because I bought a 25-pound bag of it today." SM: "Niiiiiiiiice.").

The fried chicken and dipping sauce recipes came from the Cradle of Flavor cookbook, but I found the recipe posted on this site.

I contributed to the dinner prep mostly by periodically wandering into the kitchen and raving about how good it smelled, and sitting at the table whining about how hungry I was, until this plate appeared in front of me.

Oh, and here's the dipping sauce:



So we pretty much cannot say enough good things about this recipe. It was so delicious. Our entire dinner conversation was about how tasty the chicken was, and how the dipping sauce complemented it so well, and how it wasn't super-difficult to make, and when should we make it again, plus a little bit of complaining about how insipid Heroes has gotten and what a letdown that was after the very smart first season. But mostly we just talked about the chicken.

Jam Guy is a really talented boy, and I am such a lucky girl.

Did I mention he made five kinds of pizza for a dinner party we threw this weekend while his parents were in town? One was pesto and tomato, one was sausage and pepperoni, one was shiitake mushroom and caramelized onion, one was fig, bleu cheese and bacon, and I can't remember the other one. Ham and gruyere? He served them as courses, one after the other. By the time pizzas four and five came out of the oven, we were all pretty stuffed. but it was so much fun to keep tasting the different pizzas that we kept going. Then he brought out this stellar apple-ginger pie, which I could only manage a bite of from his plate; we also had these delicious apricot bars that his parents' friends had brought over. This was all after our good friends brought flatbreads and pickled green beans from their garden over for appetizers, which we served with a cheese and pate plate and figs and pears that our friends from the orchard (where we got engaged) brought over.

And it was such a lovely group of people. I really enjoyed spending the weekend with his parents--they just seem to like each other so much, and they think the world of Jam Guy, which is nice, since I do too. I finally got to meet the friends of theirs that Jam Guy grew up with but that now live in Oakland, and bringing our friends together with his parents and their friends turned out to be this really smooth, easy, happy gathering, where everyone connected as though they'd totally hung out together before. It was great. There was a lot of wonderful conversation, a lot of wonderful food, a lot of wine and beer flowing and a lot of really full people before the night was out. It was like Thanksgiving, but with pizza. Which is not a bad thing at all. I have a lot to give thanks for.

For every day that I question my choices

and distrust my happy new day-to-day life, there is an evening like last Friday night, when Jam Guy and I went to eat a late dinner at one of our favorite bistros, where we sat at the same seats at the bar that we always do, and perused the menu and considered the specials before ordering medium-rare burgers and fries and beers like we do every time. After ordering, we started to ask the bartender for a side of mayo and a bottle of tabasco, to dip our fries in like we always do, remembering it and speaking at the same time, both stopping, waiting for the other to speak, starting to speak at the same time again. Then, feeling happy and close to each other because we have this habit together, we each leaned in to the other for a cuddle and thereby managed to bang our heads together. Ears ringing, I laughed and laughed and Jam Guy smiled and shook his head.

The night before that dinner I had had a dream that Jam Guy and I were walking hand-in-hand in a strange town. We decided to take a short cut through an alley, and were suddenly accosted by a man wearing nothing but a loincloth and a terrifying, oversized mask. We knew that the man had to be disturbed if only because no one who was not disturbed would feel comfortable putting such a frightening face over their own face, and Jam Guy, sounding like a terrified person trying to sound calm, said "I think we should run." I looked at the mask and we ran, and the man in the mask ran after us, and completely panicked, I screamed. I could feel that Jam Guy was terrified also, and that we were each more frightened because of the fright of the other. We ran as fast as we could, chased by this inscrutable, laughing monster, but we never stopped holding hands.

And the night before that I dreamed that Jam Guy and I were in a hotel room, surrounded by motion-sensor-triggered rifles that would fire if we tried to leave. We had to come up with $300,000 to turn over to some kind of mob--I don't know why--and we had twenty-four hours to do it and couldn't leave the room in the meantime. We figured out ways around the rifles and schemed and schemed together. It was him and me against some humongous violent conglomerate.

Saturday night I dreamed that Jam Guy was drafted into the military; we had bickered and he had gone to the recruiters to spite me, but had never intended to go through with it. Once there, though, he couldn't get out of it; he was in a production line of men getting drafted; he stepped up to a desk and when he came out of it they had put chalky foundation all over his face. They were doing that to all of the men; they were making them all look the same, erasing their identities. I was terrified; I ran up to him and begged him to forget it all and come home, and an officer pulled me away and told me not to talk to him, that there was a draft on and they were taking every able-bodied man whether they supported the war or not. They weren't drafting women, but were taking them on a volunteer basis. Jam Guy in his progressively-less-recognizable face drifted away from me down the production line, and I immediately volunteered for the military so that I could stay with him. They told me I would lose my name, my past, and everything about me that identifies me as me. I knew that if I could be with Jam Guy I would be with someone who knows who I really am, so all that mattered was that I registered in time to be shipped off to Lord-knows-where on the same ship as the one that shipped him.

Three nights in a row I had dreams that were all about Jam Guy and me facing down unbearable circumstances by staying together. This is us, up against it: up against the anxiety of being new homeowners in a time when people are losing their homes and our government throws money at an industry that only pretends to help those people, up against the angry voices that rail in my head and tell me what I do and do not deserve, up against small things like the neighbors that don't like our new fence and big things like money and time and history and career. This is us, one pair of tiny fish swimming in the current of the stunning and beautiful improbabilities of geography and circumstance that drew us, inevitably but just barely, together. This is us facing how close we each came to being without the other, and finding evidence therein that the universe must conspire in our favor, and so in all the chaos and precariousness, we must be, we are, just safe enough in our own small path, which is to say, infinitely safe, indefinitely here.

I am so not cool

So the other day I am riding my bike back from the grocery store, feeling oh-so-much-hipper-than-thou: I am not burning fossil fuels on my shopping trip, my vintage Schwinn is killer evidence of my low-consumerism lifestyle, a lot of the ingredients for dinner are going to be coming out of our garden or our friends' gardens and thereby leaving a very small carbon footprint. Even the bottle of red wine snuggled into the repurposed Ikea storage basket that Jam Guy nicely wired onto the rear rack of the bike was vinted from sustainably-grown local grapes. Damn, I'm thinking: I should have a freaking halo floating above me. I am so northern Cali, so helping my planet, so down with the 'aina.

All of a sudden this very big yellow jacket loops in a funny, lazy pattern in front of me, then lands on the front of my shirt. Stay cool, I tell myself in my best Wild-Kingdom-narrator voice. I keep pedaling and kind of fluff the front of my shirt with one hand, which is usually all the encouragement a yellow jacket needs to be on its way. I am proud of myself for the progress I have made with yellow jackets since moving here; basically, I no longer run away screaming when one buzzes past me. But this yellow jacket doesn't go anywhere. After a few seconds with it still on my shirt, my bugphobia starts to get the better of me. I am talking out loud now, basically things like "Stay calm. You are ok. It is just a little bee. He doesn't want to bother you." I stop the bike and stand over the crossbar, pull my t-shirt out a little and peer down at the persistent bugger.

And I see that it is not a yellow jacket after all. IT IS A HUGE FREAKING SPIDER. The fact that a huge spider should be no scarier than a yellow jacket doesn't matter; I just haven't gotten to that point in my anti-bugphobia practice yet.

So I totally lose my shit. I leap off the bike, shrieking; the bike goes crashing down, the wine bottle and organic produce roll out of their reusable grocery bag and into the dusty trail. The spider is apparently unperturbed; either that or he's paralyzed with terror and wondering why he had to pick this noisy, jumpy tree to build his new web in. I dance around. I don't want to touch the spider, or hurt him, but I don't want him on my shirt either. I jump, squat, flail, stomp around, squeaking and hollering the whole time--he just hangs out. Finally I kneel on the ground and shake the fabric of my shirt, and he decides he's had enough and makes a little hop onto the ground (which, illogically, makes me scream more) and scuttles off into the brush.

Somehow my wine bottle wasn't broken, and everything else is washable. But as I'm picking up bike and groceries off the creek trail, it occurs to me for the first time to check if anyone else is around--mostly on the trail I'm alone, but I do pass folks here and there.

And as a matter of fact, there is a guy sitting not ten feet away. He is facing towards the creek, politely ignoring me.