Thursday, November 04, 2004

"How old is this butter?"

Well... today (or yesterday, for those of you who are technical enough to consider it Thursday) was interesting. One, it involved physical labor (ish) and two, it involved contact with the outside world. [insert gasp]

For the past couple of days, I have been in insane photographer mood, which means I have been scouring the lands far and wide in search of possible photo-ops. Actually, what it means is that I've been sneaking out of the house in my pajamas when no one's looking to snap street lamps, and searching for inspiration inside my house when someone is. And since I've now gotten photographs of every street lamp within a five mile radius of my house, today I continued my search for beauty indoors.

However, upon realizing that my home is a cultural wasteland, I realized that I would have to work a little harder to get a decent picture.

My first thought was that I would smash some of my dad's empty beer bottles (they're green, you know) and use the shards to get interesting reflections on my wall. Unfortunately, they are apparently making bottles thicker than they do in the movies, because contrary to Hollywood opinion, bottles do not just shatter into a million pieces when you smash them against the corner of a counter. I tried that a few times before realizing that it wasn't working, then took the bottle up to my room to try throwing it as hard as I could at the wall. Well, it hit the wall, careened off it, and crashed violently into my printer beneath my desk, which I hope is not broken.

Also, I may have left a few holes in my wall from this endeavor, but the Remus picture on my wall covers all but four of them.

Now, I'm not bright when it comes to this sort of thing, but I'm not stupid, either, and realized that the beer bottle thing wasn't going to work. Still, I like pictures that show a little destruction, and naturally I'm a big angst fan, so I figured that with a minimal amount of work I could get an easy photo of the goth girl signature -- a broken razor! Hooray! And before Sara goes off at me, I did NOT use the razor to cut myself, I used it solely for artistic purposes. Nyah.

It turned out to be more work than I thought, and took about an hour. It wouldn't normally take that long, except that I was being extremely paranoid about keeping all the broken pieces of the razor together and being very cautious about not bending or breaking the actual razorblade. For those of you who have never been bored or stupid enough to break open a razor before, the blades are paper thin and have a tendency to snap. Or at least the Bic ones do. (I'm way too cheap to break open an expensive one just to take a photo, shoot me.)

The result was really nice, if you're into morbid things like that. I set the whole thing up on a white piece of printer paper (blade, broken razor bits, and the nail file I used to split it open) and got some nice shadows from my embarrassingly dim bedroom lamp. I didn't have much chance to try different rearrangements, though, because after two pictures I heard my mom's car pull in outside and knew that I was dead if she found me up in my locked room snapping photos. Hurry hurry, throw away the evidence, grab the camera and run downstairs to pretend to take normal photos, wipe off little bits of plastic from t-shirt.

I was crouched in front of a laundry basket to get pretend snapshots of my demon spawn cat curled up inside (on clean laundry, I might add) when my mom came in. I glanced up innocently with that I-was-not-just-breaking-razors-in-my-bedroom look to wave hello and noticed that she had some Hispanic girl with her, which was weird, because my mom doesn't have any Hispanic friends. I figured maybe it was one of those chicks who'd cleaned our house a couple months back and contemplated making a run up the stairs when mother dearest announced "I brought you some company."

And it was Veena. In my home. I was not wearing makeup but was wearing my hole-in-the-knee-two-inches-too-short Tinkerbell pajamas, aiming a camera at a laundry basket.

Apparently, my mom ran into her at Walmart and decided to take her home to... torture me, or something. I'm not entirely sure. I can't help but think it's not really a normal parent sort of thing to do, but then... these are the parents that invited me to watch Walk on the Moon with them because it's got a sex scene with Viggo Mortenson.

Well, I jumped up, and might have said a hello, can't really remember, and had one of those "just say SOMETHING" moments where you look around desperately for anything to break the unbearable awkwardness of the situation. My eyes landed on a box of cinnamon streusel mix on my kitchen table. "Want to make some streusel?" If it had been anyone other than Veena, it would have been suicide.

But, "Okay, I'm hungry."

She is an enigma to me.

But that's basically what we did. I went to work putting together the streusel while Veena pulled up a chair and got to work chatting about who's gay at Robinson, who's gay and not hot at Robinson, and who's otherwise just not hot period at Robinson. This paused only momentarily when we realized that the thing had to be baked for forty-five minutes. "I am NOT waiting forty minutes, I'm fucking hungry." And the surprising thing is, that wasn't me.

So we raided the fridge. Which was empty. And we raided the freezer. Which was empty. And we raided the cupboard. Which was empty and is missing a doorknob because I accidentally snapped it off one day. So we ended up just settling for a pot of "err... just dump like, half of it in there or something" coffee and bode the rest of our time... washing dishes. Seriously. Because apparently it is not acceptable to have a silverware drawer that contains only plastic spoons and a few dozen spatulas. Whatever. Some people are just so picky.

The odd thing about Veena is that we only see each other every couple of months if we're lucky (i.e. if I'm not too sorry to get off my ass and go to my GS meetings) yet never have any trouble finding things to talk about. Probably because our conversations go something like this.

"Johnny Depp is so fucking hot."

"I know. Especially with all that eyeliner. Drool-o-rama."

"You know, he looks better now than when he was younger."

"Same with Viggo Mortenson. He is like a walking pile of middle-aged sex."

"His son is the ugliest fucking thing, though."

"I know. It's cruel. When I saw a picture of him it broke my heart in half."

"I think I'd really love for Johnny Depp's kids to be ugly, though."

"God, that man is hot."

"So fucking hot."

We are hormonal teenagers with sex and food on the brain. Sue us. Although I have to admit, she is the only person in the entire world who I can talk to about hot guys without wanting to rip my hair out.

"You know who is hot?"

"Who?"

"Michael Daniels."

"I KNOW! OH MY GOD!"

Which made my non makeup day a complete success. I ought to buy both my mom and Veena gifts. Maybe scented soaps.

Nothing says "I love you" quite like soap.

I think I'm going to head downstairs to get some of that streusel now....

christopher @ 2:15 AM