Hey Santa, what’s with the footwear fetish?

Hawaiian kids leave out their shoes for the Magi, stuffed with grass for the hungry camels. Dutch kids fill their shoes with hay for St Nick’s horse. American kids hang their stockings by the chimney so they can be filled with treats. So basically, all over the world there’s this bizarre ritual involving an exchange of goods taking place in stinky footwear. What the heck is that all about?

Hippies do it all the time, so how hard can it be?

The last time I ventured into hippie beauty products, I put on patchouli in the same quantity as I would for a nice light eau du toilette. Even after scrubbing my skin to shreds, my odor made even the homeless guy get off the bus with eyes watering.

But henna can’t be so bad, right? It seemed easy when the mehendi artist decorated a friend’s hands for her wedding. I have known people who use it. There’s an excellent website with very high quality ingredients and tons of information, instructions, and advice.

Maybe it’s easier when you’re high.

Imagine waking up the morning after a party to discover that you’d left out the guacamole. The surface gets all brown and gross, while underneath the green color is kind of unappetizing to start with. Now imagine that your cat had found this bowl of guacamole and ate the entire thing. Now imagine that you’re cleaning the litterbox after the cat’s body had violently rejected this too-rich meal. Now that that stuff and smear it all over your hair. That’s what using henna is like.

I knew that it would stain my hairline, and the preventive layer of vaseline prevented that, mostly. OK, sort of. I knew that I had to wear clumsy, uncomfortable plastic gloves. Next time (ha! next time!) I’ll be wearing latex gloves under the plastic gloves, since one layer isn’t sturdy enough when working with this stuff. Do they make latex gloves in elbow length? So now I have palms so orange that George Hamilton would be proud. I swear, it looks like I’m the staff masseuse at the Willy Wonka factory. And how do I get the gloves back on when they started to slip around? By tugging them up with my teeth. And getting henna on my nose. And even sitting here, after all the application and spattering and cleanup and sink-scrubbing (yes, it remains orange), the stuff is still not staying put on my head, and I have to keep wiping up the drips as they ooze down my face. All I can say is that I’m very very glad to have a hairstyle that covers my hairline, ears, neck, and perhaps with creative blow-drying even my nose.

The only towels I have are white, but I’d have had to sacrifice one no matter what kind of color process I’d use. And guess what? I managed to keep the stuff off my towel. If only my ears were so lucky.

So now I have this nightmare mud pie from hell on my head, wrapped in saran wrap. And I have a couple of hours to contemplate exactly how the hell I’m going to get it off my head without clogging my bathtub drain and making a tub ring that would put Dennis the Menace to shame. If it were summer I might go outside and hose off as much of the goo as possible before showering out the last bits. But it’s 30 degrees out. And I can’t get a shirt on over this mess anyway.

I’m praying that at least the doorbell doesn’t ring anytime soon.

Tits for Tots

Last night the cover charge at Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club was a toy to be donated. The door was staffed by some yummy firemen, and the dancers were called out periodically to do charity lap dances — all tips made during that dance were donated to Toys for Tots. I think that well drinks were free all night, and there were trays of food making the rounds every so often. It was a fabulous evening all around.

As if I needed yet another reason to love San Francisco.

A number of dancers participate in this program, which runs for the next month or so at Hungry I, Roaring 20s, Gold Club, and other clubs in North Beach. I’ll try to find a link for more specific information.

Requiem for yet another wine glass

I hate you, tile floor. I thought I was the cold, unforgiving one, but I raise my broken coffee mug to salute you. You have bested me yet again, and busted my glassware yet again. I hate you, tile floor.

Signed,

Miss Clumsy

I blame the mapmakers

So I’m reading a book about the Donner party, which was troubled by disagreements and bad luck even before reaching the Sierras. But I can’t help but sympathize with their decision to stop near Donner Pass to wait out the winter. After all, the name of the place is Donner Pass. Surely they thought that a place named after them would be a good place to stop! It’s as if a weary traveler named Howard Johnson stumbled upon a like-named hotel just when he needed it. Who would pass by such kismet?

Important safety tip!

If you’re going to do something that’s a little off the beaten path, like putting candles in the oven to soften them for some craft project or other, it’s a good idea to inform the cook of the house so that he takes them out before turning on the oven for dinner.

Luckily I didn’t burn the house down. This time.

Me, I’m not an accident waiting to happen. I’m a just plain accident.

I’ll make a fortune on this idea!

I’ve been making origami gift boxes for my xmas gifts, in an attempt to be crafty AND thrifty AND green. I thought for a moment about selling them via mail order, but either I’d need some major packaging to keep them from being crushed in the mail (a box to mail an empty box in?), or I’d need to leave out the last few folds so the boxes could ship flat.

So they would arrive with some assembly required. And who’s to say how much assembly is “some”?

Take that line of logic further, and I could just ship the origami paper and the folding instructions. An origami gift box, with some assembly required! I’d cut my mailing costs and my production time! It’s genius!

Now that’s what I call stopping traffic!

Every day the traffic report has a mix of accidents, stalls, and debris on the road. Often they tell you what the debris is: a ladder, a mattress, a pallet. The weirdest one I ever saw was on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. On the line between the lanes was a very very large fish.

I hope to never be the reason for this type of traffic report, but today I was hauling some of my stuff around, and was pondering what would happen if my payload came loose. You recall that I knit? Of course you do. I was hauling half a dozen large bins full of brightly colored balls of yarn. Had they spilled, they’d go bouncing merrily about the lanes like so many overgrown superballs.

But what if the accident happened to involve the van carrying kittens to the mall for holiday adoption season? Kittens everywhere. Balls of yarn galore. Imagine the rubbernecking — probably drivers would just stop altogether and watch the chaos.

So I drove very carefully, and no pets were harmed in the posting of this message. Plus, kittens make a very bad xmas gift anyway.

Yesterday was the first day of the rest of my life.

And today is the second, and so help me it’s going to be a lot better.

We got all the divorce paperwork finished on Friday. I thought that the emotional rollercoaster part of the process was over, but nur. The good part is that the bureaucracy works very well at keeping your mind off things. Go to this room. Don’t talk. The man with the gun (bailiff) tells you to stand up and sit down and spit out your gum. You notice that there are a lot of disrespectful people in the courtroom. The judge doesn’t smile at them. She’s much nicer to the ones who stand up straight and who refrain from things like painting their nails. She’s very patient with the ones who need interpreters. And she tells me that my paperwork isn’t quite right and I need to go see the Family Law Advocate to finish up.

It’s very cool that there are volunteer attorneys who cannot act as your attorney, but they can give basic advice on filling out the forms, and they’re much less hurried than the judge.

We spent the afternoon waiting and being called up and waiting and getting one form finished and waiting and then finally finishing the last bit. And then we were official. I think we startled the lawyer by high-fiving each other, and making plans to go get a beer and celebrate our divorce.

Amicable! And many thousands of dollars cheaper than if we’d even had a mediator help us, rather than doing all the negotiating ourselves and using only minimal attorney time to verify that each of us is being fair to ourselves as well as each other.

Yesterday I celebrated and wallowed and pranced and cried and gloated and lamented. Today I’m making a list (yay! list!) of all the things I can do now that I’d had on hold. Cleaning the house. Starting my new job.  Answering customer email that’s been piling up. Making sure my credit reports reflect my new status. Rolling over retirement accounts that I’d been neglecting.

Waving, not drowning.

Aside from… well… the obvious

I think the lyrics of “The Lady Is A Tramp” are all about me. I mean, besides the obvious.

“She’s broke but it’s OK”

“She hates California, it’s cold and it’s damp” (Well, I love CA, but just this second I’m hating the cold and damp part.)

“She gets too hungry for dinner at 8” (…and with that, I have to go eat. Note the time of my post.)