ARDIRI

Surreal Small Things

It's the small things that matter, like finding a headless dinosaur in the gutter...

I am the Walrus!

I have no love for video games, but this Rock Band short film for the Beatles blows my mind (especially at 1:20 forward)!  I SO LOVE IT!

Eraser Cairn

Found one morning on my desk...an Eraser Cairn:

No one shall ever get lost in my 1st grade classroom; the eraser cairn marks my desk!

Alas, I no longer teach 1st grade!  I'm movin' on up to 8th grade English!

Today's Randomnalia: Bikram, Yummy Vegetables, and Cake Wrecks.

•  Yesterday, I did my first class of Bikram Yoga at Funky Door Yoga in the Haight.  

Woomph!  Let me say my butt has been officially kicked by an hour and a half of vigorous yoga in a room heated to 105 fahrenheit with about 40% humidity!  

                                                                                (Image Credit: c3lsius_bb)
Today my body is sore all over in a good sort of way, but my head aches as if I have a hangover (despite drinking lots of water).  Before I do my next class, I am going to ensure that I drink lots of water with potassium and sodium.

• And, no matter how much I love getting my veggie box from my CSA Farmer, I have to admit that I am beginning to get tired of pale, winter root vegetables and am ready for some color like this box from October!
• I am absolutely laughing-out-loud loving the site Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Horribly, Hilariously Wrong.  Exhibit A:

 
(Image credit: Chad C. via Cake Wrecks) 

Randomnalia, again...

• Wahoozicool!  I got a job!  This year I'll be teaching first grade at a private school.  So I'll likely be MIA with the blog for a bit as starting a new school year is stressful and I am nervous as I can nearly be!

• The Best Latte in the Bay Area, in my opinion, can be found at Oliveto in Rockridge (essentially the "Gourmet Ghetto" of Oakland).  Their Goat Cheese Tarts rock , too!

• I've always said I'd be a Hybrid Woman if I got a car, but this damn obsession with the original Mini Coopers continues; they are just too cute!

Of course, I'd probably would never get an old Mini as I'd want the safety features of a new car.  However, my first car was a 1972 Volkswagen Beetle (a VW Bug)--not the safest car on the road.  I've rode in a new Mini Cooper with a coworker and it was divine--especially the heated seats!  Anyhoo, I am pretty much a public transportation type of person--I like to leave the driving to someone else.

• Speaking of public transportation, John and I spotted this couple on the bus.  Look at their matching Converse shoes!  It was awfully adorable to see, but I don't think I could ever pull off such a thing with a straight look on my face.

Hi, ho it's off to work I go.  Must plan, plan, plan!

More Randomnalia--All Over the Place!

• Despite being car-free for a little less than ten years now, my slight-obsession with tiny cars continues.  Submitted as Evidence: Another picture of vintage Mini; this one in the Haight with a parking meter for perspective on size.

  

• The upside of high gas prices?  Shopping locally and supporting small-business owners!

• **Uh, hello, anybody there Reverend Jesse Jackson???**  Could you possibly be more of an ignoramus?  Really?!  I think not! 

Where the hell was your brain when you said (supposedly off-Mic) that Obama should be castrated? 

Why in the world would a black man suggest that another black man be castrated in light of the fact that black men were often castrated before they were lynched?

Ugh, and so much more that I dare not say here...Let me just say, that the Rev. Jesse Jackson made a fool of himself.

• In a related vein, I am nearly finished reading Toni Morrison's Beloved and am thinking that perhaps the Rev. Jesse Jackson might do well to (re?)read this novel as it provides a graphic, haunting, and all-together disturbing refresher course on the horrors of slavery.

• I am tired, oh-so-tired, sleepy-sleepy.  Teaching  English Literature and Language Arts to 33--yes, 33!--6th-8th graders can sometimes feel like taming lions after being dipped in vat of gazelle blood.

  On the other hand, today's sleepiness is a "rewarding tiredness" earned from getting those same kids to be really excited and engaged with what we're learning.

• The 1975 edition of the Vogue Sewing Book rocks!  So much information!  So concise! Such clear directions!

• I had lunch last weekend with a friend and her husband at Zazil Coastal Mexican Cuisine in the Nordstrom's shopping center and was pretty disappointed.  The food is so-so, but not worth the price, and the ambiance of the restaurant is more suited to a fast-food environment.  The three of us spent $158 dollars on lunch and dessert (luckily, we had $100 in gift certificates to spend there!).  I'm of the opinion that one should never feel as if they are eating in an upscale-cafeteria-like-environment when you're paying $50+ to eat lunch.  Give me a break!  Puh-lease!

• My Princeton Review Career Quiz results are:

My INTEREST color is BLUE:  People with blue Interests like job responsibilities and occupations that involve creative, humanistic, thoughtful, and quiet types of activities. Blue Interests include abstracting, theorizing, designing, writing, reflecting, and originating, which often lead to work in editing, teaching, composing, inventing, mediating, clergy, and writing.

My USUAL STYLE is YELLOW:  People with yellow styles perform their job responsibilities in a manner that is orderly and planned to meet a known schedule. They prefer to work where things get done with a minimum of interpretation and unexpected change. People with a yellow style tend to be orderly, cautious, structured, loyal, systematic, solitary, methodical, and organized, and usually thrive in a research-oriented, predictable, established, controlled, measurable, orderly environment.

So shocking!  Not! 

Some of the suggested careers are: philosopher (got that covered with my Bachelors degree) and teacher (been there, doing that), professor (perhaps someday?).  The quiz also suggested I look into working as a Media Planner, Web Editor, Book Publishing Professional--all of which I would find interesting.  I am definietely intrigued by the Media Planner career as I L-O-V-E to critically tear apart advertisements and their often inappropriate placement.  However, I do not see myself becoming an optometrist, a Rabbi or Imam, or an antiques dealer. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Free the Gnomes!

Rise up and free the gnomes!  Despite their concrete- or plastic-ness, these gnomes have feelings, too.  They demand liberation from garden oppression.

(Image credit: freethegnomes.com)

Just a bit of retail therapy and a shot or two of randomnalia.

Things I love:

• Lucky Brand Sweet Dream Jeans--ah, indeed, they fit like a dream!  And I frequently get LUCKY and find them hardly worn--perhaps even never worn since they certainly look that way-- at Buffalo Exchange for $28 bucks--wahoozicool!

• Prescriptives Classic Red Cream Liptstick--I feel like such the 1950's glamourous movie star when I wear it.  Hot, baby, hot!  I just found this color yesterday and will try to get a pic soon to share, as we all know how hard it is to find a good red lipstick that doesn't make one look like a clown!  ETA:  OK, here's a pic where I have licked off a good majority of the lipstick, but you can get an idea of what the color looks like:

• Guerlain Maxi-Lash Mascara--very pricey, but damn it rocks (and if you calculate its daily usage over 6 months, it turns out to be only 15 cents a day!  Aren't I such a good rationalizer?)

• Public Libraries!!!--Thank you Benjamin Franklin!  Benjamin Franklin I love thee, for you created the library!

• The following excerpts that explain the philosophy(ies) of Existentialism by George Cotkin in Existential America:

"[...] existentialism begins with Sartre's maxim that men and women everywhere are 'condemned to be free,' forced to confront the dilemma of existence, to infinitude in the face of limits.  To be existential is to have those dark nights of the soul when the loneliness of existence becomes transparent and the structure of our confidence lies shattered around us.  To be existential is to encounter those moments when vainglorious systems of logic totter and polite evocations of Sunday preachers fail to touch the core of being.  To be existential is to wrestle with most fully with the jagged awareness of one's own finitude, with the thunderbolt fact that I will die and my death will be my own, experienced by no one else.  At such moments, the abstract is rendered concrete.  As novelist, Carson McCullers put it, 'Death is always the same, but each man dies in his own way.'  To be existential is to recognize, in the face of all these somber truths clutched close to our own sense of being, that we must act.  Despite the dread and anguish that accompany the shocking recognition of our freedom, that threaten to stall us in our tracks, we must take responsibility for our lives; we must create the world anew.  To be existential is, ultimately, to join with Camus's Sisyphus in a tragic acceptance of the limitations of existence while exulting in each affirmative breath of life, in each push of the stone up the mountain.

[and that there is an...] upside to existential freedom: the freeing from the shackles of tradition, the possibility of a more authentic existence, and the headiness that comes with the freedom to create and to be creative."
(emphasis added, pp. 3 & 6)

A Penny for Your Thoughts...

That's all?  A penny won't get ya very far, will it Holly?  Nope, not all all!!  However...

• In College: If you decide to study the Humanities (philosophy, literature, the "Classics"), Art, or even Psychology, DO THE SMART THING and also major in Business or Science.  Spend an extra year (or two) in college and do the double major thing, that way you'll satisfy your passion, plus have a bit of practicality.  (Even better is to do the community college thing for your general education classes and then transfer to the college of your dreams!)


• In Life and Pursuance of a Career: Learn how to network; it helps at all times, but especially during economic downturns.

• Money: Do indeed save that three months worth of living expenses.  Six months is even better!  You'll never know when you'll need it.   Plus, you can always  take half of it and go on a vacation to some exotic place!  Oooh-la-la.

So what's up with me?  Why all the annoying Auntie Holly advice? 

• I'm seeking a new job and boy-oh-boy does the job/career world like the business- and science-minded folks.

• Networking actually works!  Just today I might have a lead on a job for a junior/high private school in the Bay Area via a college friend.  Yippee!

• And, well, we all (or almost all of us) could almost always use a reminder to save some of our dough.  Consumption is not always the answer.

I'll give you a metaphorical nickel for your thoughts.  Any nuggets of advice?  (BTW, if it is especially good, I may even knit you something or send you some yarn.)

Let's all have an existential crisis, or two!

"In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer."-Albert Camus

Yep, that's what I keep telling myself.