national aids awareness day.

today i threw away my peeling black hobo purse i bought while i lived in honduras.
today i threw away my peeling brown pointy shoes i bought at target 5 years ago.
today i threw away my peeling brown vintage purse i got at 2 gals junk.
today i threw away my holey black shoes i bought at target for working at the cafe on broadway.

today was a sad day.

today i bought a replacement pair of black shoes from target.
today i ordered a vintage black purse from etsy that was on sale.

today i tried to determine what these two sets of actions i did said i valued.
today i failed to reach any real determinations.

jeans.

some days jeans just feel oppressive.
today is one of those days.

i want to ride my bicycle.

i decided to go on a bike ride this evening in my new neighborhood. what an amazing series of moments it turned out to be. observe:

two adorable hispanic women in long skirts running down the street the opposite way as me at a pretty hefty pace from the smallest kitten i've ever seen.

one man in a dark blue sedan swerving in the street. calls out "sorry pretty lady." and then again once i'm a good ways down the street "my name's herb by the way..." thus crossing that street off any future bike routes.

i greet creeper chris with the obligatory yet stoic, "hey." he proceeds to ask me where my car is. i say it's neither here nor there. thus crossing that street off any future bike routes as well.

i then proceed to ride by a hoard of small children. one whispers to another all too loudly "flaca" which is enough to make any 26 year old woman feel wonderful despite the dinner of french fries she inhaled just moments before.

the next street over and i pass by the adorable hispanic women again. i ask them if they've managed to get free from the cat. we chuckle together while one translates to the other cheerfully.  next time i'll speak in spanish.

on my final lap (read: no more non-creepy men streets left) i see a small boy trying desperately to push is bike with training wheels over the enormous mountains they call speed bumps. i insert a witty comment as to their size and the difficulty of riding a bike in this neighborhood. the boy runs to his mother terrified of the tall white girl on the multi-colored tie-dyed speckled bike.

then i return home.
and thus my world is a better, brighter place.

fragile? i think not.

as a society, i now believe that we are simply too careful with cartons of eggs.

observe: austin traffic at 4:30 this afternoon on 71 heading east from target proved to be a bit stop and go. in true intramural champion ('02-'06, '07-'09) style, i managed to catch the grocery bag of bread and eggs no less than seven times successfully. so i really only missed once. i soundly reasoned that i should leave them on the floorboard of the passenger side of the car since they didn't really have any place to fall from there.

fast forward: i'm at home. i'm imagining the worst. i was planning on making fried eggs on toast for dinner. i currently have no back up besides the black eyes peas in the garden i keep forgetting to water. i open the carton. only one egg is damaged. 1/12 which roughly translates to 8.3% of the carton. not bad by my calculation.

from now on, i won't be so darn careful.

dominating at dominos.

yesterday i joined some of my new neighbors for a bbq quickly turned domino tournament. i won.

the ever sharp 95 year old miss rosa trash talked 19 year old dwight and i incessantly. i made snarky comments about my undisputed winning streak. avon watched with the occasional chuckle. mississippi stopped by to grab some food and take it back to his place to watch the rest of some really important ufc fight.

dwight and i ran into gorde as we walked back and was upset that we had domino's pizza and didn't invite him. (a hard thing to explain away to a man with a severe mental handicap and a severe love of pizza!)

it felt like a family gathering. i feel like i'm home here. and i like that.

i don't think it matters which came first.

in an attempt to eat something different for dinner than the ever-prolific squash that can't seem to stop growing in our gardens and inspired by a mistake the chef made from dinner last night, i piled my plate high with couscous, topped it with baked chicken, and completed the stack with a sunny side up egg. about 3/4 of the way through my meal, i realized how sick it is to eat chicken topped with an egg.

needless to say i didn't finish my meal.

needless to say i'm still hungry.

a run on sentence for you.

for as long as i can remember i've had this gripping fear that if i ever used the handicap stall in the bathroom when all the other stalls weren't in use, that when i opened the stall door to leave i would see a very, very sad lady in a wheelchair shifting uncomfortably and shaking her head at me as she gestures at the other open stalls that i could have used that she can't with a confused look in her eye.

the end.

blurry lines of vision.

so my friend rikki send me this fabulous pair of glasses that i'm tempted to wear daily. they're what she likes to call invisible glasses. i'll let you figure out what she means by that.

lately when i wear them to the office and take them off to clean them, i have this almost un-ignorable urge to continue in my fantasy world and pretend like i'm wearing glasses to correct my lazy eye.

somehow this seem to cross the line between hipster fashion and living a lie.

but oh! what a blurry line it has become.

accidental liar.

i would like to recant my last blog post. i need the caffeine to get rid of this headache.

coffee. a beverage.

this morning i made a monumental discovery. although i love coffee, i don't drink it for the caffeine to help me wake up in the morning as i has once assumed. this realization became apparent when i left my freshly bought coffee at my friend's house for the 2nd time. i woke up this morning, started the hot water for my little french press and dumped in my accidentally bought decaf coffee grounds from the freezer.

i don't need the caffeine. i need the morning routine that waking up and making coffee has become.

bring on the decaf.

or maybe i'll start a new original morning routine. one that entails lots and lots of paper mache. 

gifted uniquely.

i feel as though i have a unique sense of humor and that has uniquely equipped me to work with some of the residents of the community i serve. observe:

me: how are you this morning?
resident: not good at all.
me: oh no! why not? what happened?
resident: i hate this trailer park.
me: why?
resident: well, because i can't swim.

and then i proceeded to grin the rest of the morning. i love missing lines of thinking. sometimes when someone asks me how i'm doing, i'd like to tell them matter of factly that i'm doing well because i had fish for dinner last week.

i also like using words in the wrong figure of speak. like making "fact" into an adverb as seen above. especially if you have to over-enunciate for the word to be understood and open your jaw really widely.

the clash.

i wonder if sometimes you just have to make a decision. you weight the facts the best you can, and then you just decide. if you're wrong, at least you tried. what does it even look like to make decisions based upon your heart if your feeling can't be trusted because they come and go. what if i only feel the way i do because of the last movie i happened to watch? what if i feel differently tomorrow?

blerg.

what makes me smile.

to continue my list theme from last post, i would like to make a list of the things i can see from where i am currently sitting in my apartment that make me happy:

-small bluebird of happiness figurine
-my grandpa's old trunks
-my over-sized and slightly broken black and white clock
-the green straw in my brownish tinted hand-me-down glass
-my newest painted chair project
-my ever-growing pile of yellow books
-the poem on my wall rikki wrote out for me in a way only she could
-the font on the mug with a "j" on it
-that my counter is empty and freshly cleaned
-the birthday card on my refrigerator my parent's sent me this year
-the blooming wandering jew plant outside my window
-my cigar box filled with scrabble tiles
-the colors gray and purple together on my shelves turned side table
-the lime green frame my dad made me with left over wood from a project with claire
-the old lady lamp i traded brittney for a shirt at a garage sale we had
-the fact the most everything in my apartment has a story behind it

my how i am blessed.

listography.

in an effort to get everything off my mind and my heart this evening i've prepared a list of what is taking up space:

• responsible resourcefulness
• keeping up with old friends
• friends in other countries
• friends moving to other countries
• 19 year olds living in the woods with their fiances
• being taken advantage of 
• willfully letting others take advantage of me
• living in my apartment for the next 3 months
• not living in my apartment after 3 months
• asking too much of others
• when spaghetti isn't just spaghetti
• when is rest selfish
• when is pushing yourself to give too much selfish
• alanis morisette
• starting an orphanage
• continuing my work with the homeless and formerly homeless
• people coming and going through the ministry i work with
• defining success correctly and independently
• club dread
• working inside my god-given personality
• breaking through past my god-given personality
• the sum of my habits, intentional and otherwise
• the root of my dysfunctionality
• prioritizing good things
• when efficiency needs to be re-evaluated
• a total eclipse of the heart

innate clumsiness - is it genetic?

somehow i've managed to trip over my own toenail and split it down the middle.

seriously. who does that?

egg-actly.

so i've been buying the brown eggs at the store lately and every single time i crack open one of those suckers i expect the "white" of the egg to be brown. and it's not. and i'm surprised.

also they're shockingly difficult to crack.

but maybe the bigger lesson has to do with expectations. i'm struggling with knowing what are reasonable things i can expect out of my day. otherwise i don't feel as though i'm living up to my fullest potential and in the non-profit world, we all know there is never a shortage of people to serve.

realistic expectations. i'll start with the eggs.

ms 150

last weekend i went to see my friend henry cross the finish line for his bike ride from houston to austin to raise money for MS. it was such an amazing experience to witness. i stood at the last turn before the finish line and got to watch the riders round the bend and see the finish line with the capital building in the background after two full day of riding.

i watched work groups wait for each other so they could cross together. i saw families crossing hand in hand. i saw people with health problems fighting to finish strong. i watched children, classmates, and mother cheering for everyone who passed by.

and it was beautiful.

west and allison.

so i just watched a movie called all the days before tomorrow. in it's description, it claims to be a "quirky episodic tale." how could one refuse such a plot line? i think i enjoyed it mainly because it felt like a series of snap shots of real life. no huge crisis or turning point. musical score was there but more often than not, it was the silence of reality.

for some reason, it really captured me. it's nice to enter into someone else's life for 100 minutes. simple. no emotional energy. it doesn't really matter if people turn out happy or not because they do not exist.

all in all, a nice break this afternoon.

sometimes.

sometimes the weight of responsibility feels too heavy to bear. sometimes i wonder why i am so unbelievably blessed and why i feel so called to turn that back to others.

sometimes i think too much.

where do they have book events in austin?

every time i go to the bank after work, i pass by the alamo drafthouse on w. anderson ln. under the list of currently playing movies is always the phrase "book events here." until this afternoon, i always wondered why they would consistently  publicize with such generalities. if a famous author was in town, wouldn't they advertise him or her by name?

then i realized that "book" in this statement was a verb and not an adjective.

aaaaand i'm off to garden.

a fan of the enneagram

it's funny. i don't like to be put into boxes, but i'm fascinated with personality tests. a seeming inconsistancy. but when i read myself on the test i feel as though i'm somehow more normal.

observe. on the enneagram test, i'm a type fiv3:

Whatever the sources of their anxieties may be—relationships, lack of physical strength, inability to gain employment, and so forth—average Fives tend not to deal with these issues. Rather, they find something else to do that will make them feel more competent. The irony is that no matter what degree of mastery they develop in their area of expertise, this cannot solve their more basic insecurities about functioning in the world. For example, as a marine biologist, a Five could learn everything there is to know about a type of shellfish, but if her fear is that she is never going to be able to run her own household adequately, she will not have solved her underlying anxiety.

and that, friends, is exactly what i'm doing with my life. read more about my personality here.

and i don't even really like parsley.

so i got home from work today feeling kind of sluggish. early morning staff meeting on to my self-imposed last day at the soup kitchen with the tuesday crew i've come to really love on to managing and updating calibration records at the infant incubator company i'm working for part time.

i went outside to check on my new tomato transplant that i lovingly have named roger and lo and behold the parsley seeds i'd planted last week had begun to sprout. i literally jumped for joy! what a wonderful and surprising surprise!

moral of the story: gardening makes me happy and it could make you happy too.

the end.

storytelling 101

i had this great story i was forming in my mind at some point this week that i was excited about posting but for the life of me i can't remember what it was.

now that's a great story.

and it's only february.

i sure am looking forward to the day when i don't have to lug in all of my plants inside when it's supposed to freeze. summer, are you coming soon? it takes several trips and i can't really water them when they're in the apartment. maybe i could build...oh wait...i don't have much free time these days...back to work...

my homemade formula for my current life stage.

time and intentionality somehow seem to have a frustratingly inverse relationship.

mars loves venus.

i was looking up lyrics to the brunette's album and the first four links i clicked were really annoying advertisements. can they do that? and the link i clicked even was part of the song i was looking for. tricky.

wikipedia mix ups

so i got a brief cnn alert that bill clinton was in the hospital and decided to check it out later today. my brother has my google page set up so that wikipedia results show up on the right column of the screen. when i typed "bill clinton" into google, hillary clinton's wikipedia page came up.

does anyone else think that this is really funny?

friday breakfasts with kp.

the highlight of my week:


friday breakfasts from Jen Ardill on Vimeo.

my life in february thus far.

so i have the ending of the short story i've been writing for a year or two now written out on a church bulletin and another scrap of notebook paper, but i can't seem to find the time? the bravery? the confidence? to actually type it up and add it to my existing manuscript. and i do realize that's silly - typing the ending had no significance whatsoever...and yet...i can't seem to do it.

why?

also, i really should wear tights more.

so go get a drink.

gosh I've been thirsty this week.

your friends don't dance and if they don't dance then they're no friends of mine.

to the other individuals who braved the dj mel dance party at the highball last night, i thank you for your inspirational personalities set to music.

to the tall guy in the plaid shirt and glasses, i'm sorry if i gave you the wrong idea by staring: you reminded me of a guy i used to work with at the cafe on broadway.

to the girl on stage who kept us mesmerized by her killer dance moves and who robyn may have mentioned having a girl crush on, i applaud you.

to whoever was responsible for the chards of glass on the dance floor, i just want you to know that i am not looking forward to pulling their remains out of my loafers this afternoon.

and to the girl in the black dress with the tendency to flail her arms, i'm sorry if it is my fault that i accidentally put my arm in your armpit.

kitchen tales.

i seem to have a lot of potlucks in my life. much more now that i'm in austin than ever before. i wish this weren't a problem but i'm an experimental cook and rarely wish i had written down my recipe to repeat the offense.

i volunteered to make dessert for the future farmers gathering tonight. please no comments on my dinner companion choice.

robyn gave me this witty cookbook entitled sausepans and the single girl: bachelor-bait recipes and dazzling ideas for entertaining by jinx morgan and judy perry a while ago and i decided that it was time to try it out. not that i'm in the market for a man any more. i just think it's a funny book. and a funny concept. i feel like i'm digging myself in an unnecessary hole.

abrupt subject change.

so i misread 1/2 pounds of butter to be 1 1/2 pounds of butter. luckily i caught my mistake before going to my local h.e.b. or beginning the baking process. either way, though, does anyone else find it disconcerting that butter in the recipe is measured in pounds? maybe that's what makes the cookies taste so good?

the last future farmers meeting i brought really small crumbly shortbread cookies and had to leave before i saw anyone's reaction. surely cookies with pounds of butter will trump by previous contribution thus fooling people into believing i can cook.

only time will tell, my friend. only time will tell.

no maintence necessary.

i've decided that the easiest job in the world would be to own a parking lot.

even the barista was sick.

so i've been doing my best to ward off a sore throat among a city full of sick people. this is usually done following my mother's age-old theory that "you're not sick. you're thirsty." so as any good daughter would do, i've been drinking tons of water as of late.

and now i'm off to church.

not a great combination.

ruffles, flowers, and neutrals

so i was looking up some songs from an anthropologie play list that jessica sent me and this is the first one i found:



although not quite what anthro was getting at, i'm sure, isn't this how you want to dance to this song? also, i'm impressed that's he's still dancing four minutes later.

me - three years ago

as i was attempting to organize some files on my computer, i discovered a paper i wrote my senior year of college (dated january 16th 2006). this excerpt must be shared:

I respect originality and deep thinking. I respect doing things with excellence. I respect those who love the seemingly unlovable. I respect people who think differently than I do. I respect people who can fight the temptation to compartmentalize their life. I respect people who listen to non-mainstream music. I respect people with confidence. I respect people who read. I respect people who give others the benefit of the doubt. I respect consistency. I respect people who can wake up from naps in a good mood. I respect authenticity. I respect people who know more than one language. I respect people who can see outside their own lives and into the lives of others. I respect people who have figured out how grace and justice can coexist. I respect people who do not have anything to prove. I respect people who know Michael Jackson’s Thriller dance. And I respect honesty spoken in love.

i can't for the life of me remember what the assignment was!

my plants are in the house while i am outside.

it's free week here in the lovely yet chilly city of austin, texas which means last night we were able to check out up and coming artists at the beauty bar, beerland, and stubbs guilt-free. cassettes were sold, swooping bangs were brushed aside by men and women alike, and those not wearing skinny jeans were scorned.

in between concerts, my eclectic group of friends and i went to club de ville in an attempt to stay warm after stopping by the most amazing hot dog stand on red river. they were playing some funky beat so of course we started dancing in what an employee later mentioned to us was simply a hallway.

at one point, i was showing sarah and sheena my amazingly awkward "hackey sack" dance moves (which, of course, requires no hackey sack) when a man in a bear fur-like hat commented on my moves. he said if i didn't patent them in two weeks he would like to claim the rights. i agreed mainly because i didn't have any idea what to tell the man in the distracting hat.

anyone know how to patent ridiculous dance moves?

so apparently i'm not a designer?

i've been working on a brochure for the trailer park ministry (and a website - www.kprojectmlf.wordpress.com) and it has become very clear to me why people get degrees in these things before they attempt them (or at the very least date people who know how to work with wordpress...)

i'm feeling much more confident about the site than the pamphlet oddly enough.

i have the ideas, but how do i get them to the computer? i think possibly, that using microsoft paint isn't super helpful but i don't know what else to use.

be honest, are handmade brochures tacky?
be honest, is anyone with a graphic design degree free tomorrow?

current pet peeve:

billboards that say "do billboards work? just did!"

maybe it just worked if the purpose of billboards to get you to simply look at them. what it should say, in my humble opinion, is "do people look at billboards? well you did!"

also they seem to use ugly fonts.