See My Whiskers?

my work makes me feel like a mole. i have never worked somewhere that places so much emphasis on its employees (except security) kind of fading into the background. we have a whole network of underground tunnels and behind-the-scenes ways for us to scurry around without your average visitor knowing it. because of a huge bloch & sosland party last night (big old bigwigs at my work), i had to take an elevator and basically walk under the party so i did not upset the rich folk by walking through their shindig. whenever i leave work (assuming that i leave when it is still light out), i walk through all of these tunnels and then into the deep dark parking garage, and when i drive out i literally go momentarily blind from the sunlight. soon i might grow whiskers, which could be kind of cute, but i'm going to draw the line at buckteeth.

I Have a Reason

i didn't post yesterday because i burnt the roof of my mouth on fried pickles. does that fly as an excuse?

New Rule

new rule. if you post a comment, sign your name or i won't publish your comment. i want to know who you people are since i have like 9 plus/minus steady readers and i'd want to know which one posted an anonymous comment. i am a hardcore stalker so the minute i find out who you are, if i don't know you, prepare to be facebooked. and googled. and potentially myspaced. is it scary that those are verbs?

also today a coworker lent me the new modest mouse & shins cds to put into my itunes. this is a very good thing. so far i'm about to wrap up listening to modest mouse first, and it is as usual excellent. i'm pretty sure the shins will also be excellent. and now i'm excellently tired. shower and sleep time.

Big Spender

today was spent spending money. thanks to a generous donation from my youngest sister, i was able to go out with her today to buy a new bed, mattresses, and dresser. then i went to target and got new pillows, and then to walmart to get things like a shower curtain & liner, toilet paper, laundry detergent, and mini bissell vaccuum to keep my new place in order. my new bed has cushiony leather inserts in the headboard, and is all dark wood with chocolate leather. i feel like my purchase of this much leather is directly at odds with getting biodegradable, eco-friendly dryer sheets later in the day. but...i like the leather. and the #1 best thing about buying all the big stuff in one place is that for the low low price of $49 it will all be delivered and carried up a flight of stairs and set up for me on saturday. a.w.e.s.o.m.e. the less carrying and heavy lifting i have to do in my life, the way better. here is a shot of my new headboard:


i wanted that bedding, and drooled over it, but for $310 and no sheets included, it wasn't meant to be.

Moving

so i didn't want to make any grand announcement til it was more of a done deal, but i am now officially moving downtown! well not really downtown downtown, more like westport-ish, a wonderful 5 minute commute from work. i'll also be about 5 minutes from westport, from my friend jen's house, and from the plaza. i'm moving into a second floor apartment with two girls i found via craigslist. they posted needing a 3rd roommate, and i answered. i get my own big bedroom & bathroom that has 2 windows (yay natural sunlight), we have a huge kitchen, large living room with sunroom, and laundry that isn't coin operated! i've actually only met one of the girls up til now, but she seems cool so i'm not worried about meeting the other. tomorrow will be furniture shopping, and saturday is moving day. pretty quick and all but i think it'll be good. excitement!

Annabel Lee

i kind of wonder what it takes to inspire guys to write and sing and paint in homage to a girl. i started and finished a book by john green (an abundance of katherines) today, and as in his previous book (looking for alaska), there is much to be said in admiration of a girl character in the book by the lead guy. he muses on her to no end. then there are songs like hey there delilah by the plain white t's, poems stretching back to the beginning of written word, etc etc. it makes me wonder...where are these guys? the ones that are in love with women to the point that they memorialize it in some creative way? do they actually exist or is it all some sort of literary/cinematic trope to make us think that guys actually think about things besides sex and beer? i'm pretty sure i have never inspired that sort of thing in someone, or if i have it was a well kept secret. guys should let us know more often if those sort of things go through their minds...they'd find themselves with dates way more often.

She Wears Skinny Jeans & Pearls

somewhere in me i have a music snob. i think she has on skinny jeans and several layers of thin tanktops and vintage concert tshirts, with those checked vans slip ons on her feet. her nails are painted black. she hates you if you don't know who the kooks or the shins or modest mouse are. she grew up listening to weezer, red hot chili peppers, nirvana, foo fighters, pearl jam, sublime, no doubt when they were actually ska, and silverchair pre ana.

and then there's the me that is pretty sure she's lovestoned by jt's new songs. and feels stronger listening to kanye. who unabashedly made cds containing britney spears and the blackeyed peas and their humps, likes to feel fergalicious, and to say ay bay bay.

i sound like a music schizophrenic when i drive home at night. within three minutes i'm listening to top 20 pop junk and the shins' new single. and for some reason i like them all. i can't commit to heavy eyeliner and a general air of oppression, the apparent necessities for loving alternative music. but at the same time there is NO WAY i will listen to pop & rap all the time. i guess each has its own place in my life, and that music snob in there will just have to deal with the non uber cool stuff.

Um, Target?

i have nothing terribly exciting to write about today. i thought about posting more about my love of driving, but i had a sneaking suspicion that that might be incredibly boring. then i thought about posting how much i have suddenly grown to love modest mouse. but that is also kind of boring. i am not that exciting right now. let's see....i have a shopping problem. exciting? i have a compulsion to spend money pretty much every day. usually that just pans out into a grande nonfat caramel macchiato. often, though, towards the end of the week, it becomes a desire for new clothes which leads me to target which usually leads me to the checkout line with something new. i need to move away from super targets. they are made of awesome (this is a new saying i am incorporating into my daily sayings, stolen from john & hank green of brotherhood 2.0), but they are also money drains. anyway, that is pretty much all i have to discuss today. i am sometimes way too thrilling for my own good.

Splurge

when it is that perfect kind of late summer late afternoon thick summery sunshine out, my biggest splurge for myself is to take the long way home. i drive all city streets instead of the highway, bring my front two car windows down, open my sunroof shade (but not the roof itself b/c hi that messes up my hair for reals), flip through my cds in my player or my much-beloved satellite radio, and find something that is perfect to drive to and crank it. there is literally nothing i love more. i drive all the time for fun...it's been a habit since the minute i was allowed to drive. i know all of the speed traps, how each light'll go when i hit a red, and what are the most heavily driven roads to people watch on. even when it's over a hundred out like it was today, i drop my windows down (better acoustics that way) and turn up my a/c. probably not totally eco-friendly but i figure it's my gas money so hey. my decision. i also do it at night, when i can open my sunroof because i can have my sunglasses on my head to hold down my hair. i play everything from sublime & weezer (late afternoon songs) to bass bumping rap and cheesy popular pop. one of my favorite things about doing this is upsetting stereotypes/expectations...you hear bass pounding behind you, it's usually some acne-fied teenager kid trying to bust his speakers and look hard. i kind of have fun being the one that they're looking at - especially when i wear my popped collars and pearls out. i get lots of double takes. it is my biggest pleasure to go driving aimlessly and learn every in & out of my little suburb; it's always been worth a couple bucks in gas money, and i know there are a few people out there who have gone on these excursions with me and can identify. now i've got the urge to go driving...

which ps makes me wonder how often my mom actually believed me when i would leave the house at 10 or 11 at night and say, "i'm going driving, i'll be back in a while." for the record, i always really did just go driving. way cheaper than clubbing or drinking or drugging, and way more fun.

Jazz Hands on the Inside

in the past month, i have lost fifteen pounds. i am secretly doing jazz hands and some sort of kick leg routine over this fact. granted, i have not done it in the healthiest way: i call it the get-broken-up-with-and-then-not-care-about-food-anymore diet. i kind of subsist on starbucks and dinner at this point, and i promise that once i lose about eight more pounds i will start eating something for lunch. but for now i am pretty pleased. i promise not to become a bobble head a la nicole richie. also the cold has almost been vanquished - colds always leave me amazed at one small nose's ability to produce inordinate amounts of snot. but that's about all that's left of this thing besides a sometimes cough and a lot of tiredness, so i'm about to kick its butt. judo chop on you, stupid cold.

Fluffy Puppy

i am feeling vaguely better. i spent most of the day with a tylenol pm hangover, kind of shaky and hazy but better.

i did manage to leave my bed and the house today to take baxter to be groomed. he's never been professionally groomed before, it usually involved arlin pinning him down and me clipping his nails and then body slamming him into the bathtub to be washed. this was generally followed by baxter sulking in his crate, soaking wet and pissed. i decided that, aided with a coupon, it was totally worth $15 to get him a bath, a massage (!), a blowdry, a good brushing to get rid of the last of his winter coat that he's been dragging around shedding all over everything, a nail trim, and an ear hair trim. so i dropped him off, and three hours later (why does it take this long? i don't know) i picked up a fluffily clean puppy who was more than happy to get the hell out of there. he even sat in the front seat of my car licking my elbow on the way home, like thank god you took me out of there i love you so much i'll lick your elbow even. it's nice not to be the Hated One after he gets a bath.

Bed

i have spent the whole day, minus washing my face and showering, in bed. allllll dayyyyyy. i read a book and a half and tooled around online but also sighed dramatically clogged sighs and tossed and turned trying to get some sleep. i can't sleep with bright daylight shining directly into my eyeballs though, so i didn't get too far with much rest. but i think it counts as rest if you don't get off your butt for the entire day and your mom brings you soup. i can't remember for sure but i'm close to positive that i didn't go downstairs all day. i have tomorrow off too, so more of this kind of excitement to come. this kind of lifestyle really makes for exciting blog posts.

OMG Sirius is Dead

tonight i finally went to see the most recent installment of the harry potter movie epic. we had set out to see no reservations, but harry potter in imax won out. they even gave us 3-d glasses for the last 20 minutes of the movie - i imagine it was pretty intense for those people that are able to see 3-d with those special glasses. those of us with lazy eyes in their left eye and therefore unbalanced vision can't synthesize that kind of thing. totally frustrating back when that huge fad was going around of the 3-d images where you were supposed to find what was hiding between the wavy lines...i never did see anything. luckily harry potter is still intense if you can't see it 3-d, so i was satisfied.

i'm still sick, clogged, and coughing a lot. takes me back to college when i was sick all the time. and i have to work tomorrow. my life is really hard. where is my gold star or something to reward me for putting clothes on today? i want a cookie.

Benadryl

thanks to allergies and my need for benadryl to combat them, all that is going through my brain tonight is basically static interrupted with random song snippets. i am exhausted to the point of no return, which involves sleeping through tomorrow. at one point in time in high school i could make it til 2 pm staying in bed, earning me the nickname mufasa (because i slept like a lion...). i don't know if i'll hit that tomorrow, but i've got benadryl on my side.

ps don't take benadryl at the start of your workday. all i remember of most of today is touching my forehead to our cool stainless steel counters and walking around like a zombie hugging myself because i was freezing. i think i talked to some customers but god knows what i said. if i talked to you today and i was basically speaking nonsense, forgive me. thanks.

Random Thoughts on My Drive Home

are we missing an opportunity to teach kids about hereditary genetics with will.i.am's new song "i got it from my mama"? for that matter, what about juvenile's "get it from her mama"?

why is it that license plates in the states look so different from those in other countries? shouldn't we have some big international license plate conference to decide these things?

yesssss it's that whistle song....i don't care about the young folks, talkin bout the young style....

i'm pretty sure i should be a drag racer. my chevy malibu maxx can kick your ass, 1987 volvo.

heat lightning is bad ass. i do not want to get hit by heat lightning.

how do they get those pictures of lightning? do they just sit and aim at a storm and take 10 rolls of film hoping for one good shot? how boring...black sky black sky black sky black sky shit tail end of that lightning bolt black sky black sky black sky....what a waste of film.

whoever designed cars to have some of your radio controls on the steering wheel should get an award. an award shaped like a thumb.

oh look, my eye doctor's place. i need to get contacts, i'm tired of being a girl with glasses.

wow i just rolled my eyes really hard at that dude driving around trying to look hard with his little ear phone gadget thing strategically in his left ear so we all know he has one. what would happen if i rolled my eyes too hard and they stuck? how sad, everyone would always think i wasn't taking them seriously.

why is my car air conditioning always at a temperature just above body numbing? no matter where i set it my feet freeze.

i just made it all the way home thinking thoughts on purpose to put them in my blog. is that sad or clever?

Ritorno

dang it. i had this great, posting-every-day sort of rhythm going and then i leave for new york, the most wired city in the world, and am consequently internet-less for 5 days. FIVE DAYS. WITH NO PEREZ OR DOOCE OR FACEBOOK OR GMAIL OR NOOOTTTHHHIIINNGGG. ok so that kind of sums up how i felt about that whole situation.

but now i'm back. i was at the new york international gift fair (NYIGF for those of us in the know) for most of my time in the city, and had a lot of exhausting fun. shopping with someone else's money is shockingly fun. and also shockingly tiring. you walk and walk and walk and shake hands and take notes and touch and feel and exclaim and dismiss and go go go. which is fine, til you stop. and then, exhaustion. with 43,000 retailers there, i saw every kind of shop owner, from the vp of gifts at nieman marcus to overly-tanned/fake nailed/fake boobed/teased hair sort of ladies from jersey to midwesterners proclaiming everything to be gorgeous to LA boutique owners wearing jeans from an atelier and their louis vuitton fanny packs...lots of "fabulous" guys, snooty ladies, quirky shopkeepers, everything you can imagine. and then the vendors ran the gamut too. so much humanity to take in and slam into.

then to go from that insanity to times square (where we stayed) was a little overwhelming. i was more than glad every day to have a little while in my hotel room with me and myself and my tocca travel candle from katherine to decompress and be away from all those humans for a while.

things i will miss from NYC this trip: cooler weather, 2 starbucks in my 1 hotel, 5 starbucks in my 1 convention center, freebies from vendors, seeing college friends, meeting people i read about in person and telling them how much i love their work, and eating really really well. (ps go to a restaurant called utsav b/t 46th & 47th right off of times square ish, best indian food and service...) anyway now i'm tired, we had two bumpy flights (first was worst, we flew into the tail end of that storm in nyc) which are always traumatic for me, so now i need massive amounts of sleep.

Prove to Me Your Muscles Are Tired

over the past two days i have physically labored to a ridiculous degree at work. receiving in product is no walk in the park, and i have blisters and exhausted muscles to prove it. (how would i prove my muscles were exhausted? just take a picture of my arm and try to make it look "tired"? the blisters are totally legit though.) it has gotten to the point that when my alarm goes off all the voices in my head go NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO at the same time. and for those of you who know me or have slept in the same room with me or have had an early morning appointment with me, you all know that i can usually leap out of bed in a single bound, simultaneously turning off the alarm clock and making my bed. but lately it's been more like shut the F up i hate you alarm clock beeper and i like my down comforter it's so cozzzzyyyy....and then i sleep for an extra half hour. i don't like feeling all sluggish like this.

so this morning, i woke up naturally at 7:37 am and decided against rolling back over. monumental. i spent my extra 23 minutes talking to a friend from college and "waking up slowly" (always my dad's excuse for not getting up at the ass crack of dawn to take us to the park or somewhere exciting - "I can't, I'm waking up slowly."). and yet - after all this business of waking up naturally and slowly and then aided by starbucks, I AM STILL TIRED. i guess that's what hauling boxes the size of my dog's crate around does to you. one more full day of work, then i'm off to new york where i might have to walk a lot but at least i won't be dragging a dolly full of boxes after me.

I'm Going, Going, Back, Back to NY NY

i am just 2.25 days away from heading back to the east coast on my first ever business trip. i'll be in NYC at the international gift fair, buying things to sell in the store where i work. it'll just be me and my boss going, and should be a blast, though she keeps warning me about the gazillion miles we're going to be walking and to brace and fortify myself against it. so i bought two new pairs of shoes. if that isn't braced and fortified i don't know what is.

also i am pretty much wired and amped over the fact that i'm going back to the east coast. after flying back and forth to school in boston for four years and then not setting foot on the atlantic seaboard for a year and a couple months, i am itching to be glared at by skinny bitches all in black and get honked at by men in taxis and whistled at by construction workers and smell that NYC smell that is so one-of-a-kind and not see grass for 5 days. but also to see some of the most amazing art in the world, visit a college friend, learn new things for my job, watch times square out of my hotel window, and be surrounded by a bajillion people all on one tiny plot of land. man do i miss big cities sometimes.

No, I Don't Like Nascar

something i'm only just now fully ingesting about kansas city: we can be a pretty hick place when it comes to guys. i am tired of seeing nascar numbers on big trucks, calvin peeing on dodge or ford or whatever logo the driver is hating on, beer bellies, and overly sunburnt faces from laying around on boats at the lakes here while getting wasted. you may or may not know me yet, but that kind of dude is so not my thing. and they're EVERYWHERE. the more metro guys i go for are usually....more than metro. so here is my wanted ad: david beckham with a deeper voice and slightly more brainpower. british accent fully acceptable. straight. must be interested in art. but not too interested in art because then you might get boring. drive a normal car that isn't on offroading tires and requires $100 to fill the gas tank. be nice. also you must worship me.

ok so that's out on the wide wide web world now, so i'll just await responses in the comments section.

Piacere

welcome to post #1 of my new blog, col tempo. my name is katie, i live in the greater kansas city metro area, i am newly 23 years old, i am single, and i work for an art museum.

i like: nailpolish, music, laptops, my car (actually, i love my car), celebrity gossip, my dog (who i currently have visitation with several times a week), cute shoes, john singer sargent, wellesley, boston, da vinci, harry potter, books, ralph lauren blue, accessories, down comforters, tocca's cleopatra travel candle, purses, bermuda shorts, and now i've just devolved into looking around my room and listing things. ok but maybe i just surround myself with things i like?

i do not like: ugliness, laziness, pontiac firebirds, guys with greasy hair, girls with crunchy hair, tackiness, mushrooms, manual labor, lack of money, throwing up, beer, self entitlement, inflated egos, and toilets that don't stop making that whooshing sound for a long time after you flush them.

that's me in a red hot minute, more to come. stay tuned.