sleeve

ok, think i found the font for the quotation mark tattoo i want. yay!

now, let's go into said tattoo.

i think i've explained this to maybe one person, but i wanted to put out there why i want the sleeve that i want, starting with the quotation mark tattoo.

it started off as ripping off some guy i follow on flickr who's a designer and was in grad school and had to make his own font, and has gradually been adding on to his arm with characters in different fonts and colors.

that was the start. i thought it was a great idea. but then i had to spin it and make it my own.

as many of you know, i have a sordid, mixed past where i've worked as a designer, writer, editor, manager; you name it, i've probably done it. but a big driving force in my life has been to be a writer, in some shape or form. the whole reason of quitting my perfectly fine, stressful editorial job back in '01 was to go back to school and work on being a writer.

which didn't turn out all so well.

but anyway. when i was a designer, i was a huge font geek. i was way into typography, and was always trying to find just the right font to fit in with the right layout, and if i found a font that was close, i'd drop it into illustrator and tweak it until it was just what i wanted. in my head, the right font with the right layout helped convey the story better.

and that's where it ties back into the writer part.

when i think back on it, i've wanted to be a writer my whole life. as a child, i'd write stories weaving me into whatever cartoon i liked at the time. i'd write myself into most anything i read, because i loved everything i read, and i wanted to be a part of it. as i grew older, i found an outlet in journalism. not only could i have an opinion, but people could read it! or i could inform them about the major news of the day! and even later in adulthood, after quitting a job that stilted me creatively, i found myself working a delivery job, and being inspired. all around me were stories just waiting to be told. and it was sort of a renaissance period for me. then i went back to advertising/marketing, and thought i wanted to write for that. but not so much. or maybe it's because i ended up stuck with all the monotonous, uncreative assignments. which drained me a bit more.

anyway. what i'm trying to get to is, the sleeve that i want, what i ultimately want to get, i want it to be a work over time. i don't want to get it all at once, because that's not how stories are written. i want to work on it over time. i want to select the fonts, and decide which character would look best in that font. and in which color. and then add on. i want my sleeve to tell a story. i want to be able to, when asked, explain to people why i selected each font and each character and each color. i want each character to be a chapter, where they all build on each other until, bam, you have a complete story.

basically, i want to wear a novel on my left arm. my novel. and maybe in the end, it would make a hell of a dust jacket.

Summer CHANGE ORDER*

Due 8/25.

1) Find a new place to live. (NOTE: This is due ASAP or by 7/31.)

2) Hang out with friends that I've been neglecting.

3) Lose weight. (I need to lose at least 15 pounds for a good portion of my clothes to fit again.)

4) Buy a bike and learn how to ride it.

5) Write at least two short stories.

*change order is what the agency i work at calls the changes that need to be made once a job has been sent to a client. i know at least one other agency calls the same a job change, and i'm sure there are other names of the same thing out there. but that's the explanation for those wondering what the fuck a change order is.

i'm a powder keg waiting for a spark

what kind of fireworks that will produce (yelling, tears, general violence, all of the above and more), who knows.

/warned

my saturday

saw drag me to hell. awesomeness. must see at least two more times in the theater.

went to mozart's, had a mocha and sat by the lake and read a chapter of the informers.

went to nasty's, had three whiskey sodas, and read two chapters of the informers. reading at a bar is awesome.

now i'm home and about to watch the notorious bettie page to complete my lili taylor movie week. i'll post about that later.

/end

i danced in my underwear in public, and i liked it

matt's birthday party yesterday/last night. much drinking was had. beer, very strong margarita, two bottles of white wine (split betwixt brandy and myself), more beer. drinking started at 2:30-ish, and i cut myself off at around 10. came home close to 1 a.m. said dancing in underwear occurred around 11 and involved myself, my lovely hostess, and two other male friends.

fast forward to this morning. apparently i called and texted a certain someone. a lot. and i feel like a total jerkface about it. and i'm still trying to figure out why brandy wrote my name on my left arm.

overall, fun night. now i face today with an awesome hangover, much laundry to do, and the impending apologetic phone call i have to make to said person i was an annoyance to last night.

/sigh

freakout

11 people got laid off at work yesterday. we lost a major account, of which work was already dwindling. that fact plus the fact that they kept on not wanting to sign a contract for Q2 (even though we're already in the middle of Q2) should've been another indicator.

my major qualm is, well, they laid off an entire department. the project management department. which i worked closely with. which i was originally a member of when i went full-time at work. which i'm really good friends with both of the now former project managers. they are my friends. they are my confidantes. they were the people that kept me sane and grounded at work.

now ...

this all happened before 10 a.m. on friday. after i walked my friends to their cars, i went in to talk to my boss, who informed me he is resigning at the end of the month. he told me that the big boss was planning on having account services project manage their own jobs. i highly disagreed with that. because when i first went back to work there, well, there was no project management, and account services was project managing their own jobs, and it was fucking chaos. it didn't work. people were fighting over resources, people were staying at work every day until around 8 or 9 p.m.

so i volunteered to be the project manager. if work is really slowing down as much as it is, i can again be the project manager and proofer.

when i talked to h.r. about this, as well as my boss, they were concerned, because, well, i was overwhelmed the last time i had this dual role. and because they both know i want to move to copywriting. but you know what? that's a dream. there's no way in hell i'll ever be allowed to advance to being a copywriter with my current boss resigning. he was a big supporter of me being a writer. my "boss", who is the copywriter, only ever really gave me the more technical stuff. never gave me any actual creative things to do. so i was already pretty unhappy in my position, and as being a member of the creative department in general when i didn't do anything, well, creative.

but now i have to get back in the loop of project management. even though i moved back to creative, i was still peripherally aware of everything project management, often helping them out or covering for them when one of them was out. but the one thing i wasn't so in the loop on was this new project management system we implemented and have been using for months. yes, i knew the basics of it, but i had only opened a couple of jobs in it, and there are still so many things i don't know how to do in it that i now have to learn rather fast. i mean, it's a pretty simple software to use, but i'm still fairly new to the stuff i am going to have to do in it.

luckily (or not), one of the interactive guys that helped project management get this new software and train them on it (because he had it as his old job) has volunteered to also help me out with project management. where that worries me, though, is that two of the layoffs were interactives, which put us down to three. with this one helping me out, it technically puts us to 2.5. but with the senior interactive often in meetings and doing research and such, that technically puts us down to 1.5. so yeah, i'm a little worried. because also, the two we laid off were our leads on one account. the three left don't know that account all that well, which means they're going to need more time to do work.

to say it's a challenge is an understatement.

i think i handled myself the best i could on friday. although i did break down when i had to go talk to an AE, which started as a hug and quickly turned into a group hug with five AEs. but you know what? it actually helped. we were all feeling the same way. and we're all facing some of the same upcoming challenges.

i do see several challenges i don't know i'm ready for. one is, before they were laid off, project management was getting ready to also start project managing the analytics team. i wasn't in any of those meetings, so now i have to get up to speed on that, or push back and say we (meaning me) can't handle it right now. also, we laid off the data guy that was doing all the e-mail blasts. so now i know that's going to end up getting pushed on interactive and project management because historically at the company, we were the ones that have done it in the past. this means i have to get up to date on all our e-mail service providers, which i've been avoiding for, well, a year. there's also the personal challenge of having to work closely with the senior interactive, since he is the non-relationshiper i've mentioned in previous posts. we have been friendly at work of late, but we had the barrier of project management betwixt us. now we have to learn how to work closely on a day-to-day basis without my feelings and his lack of getting in the way.

ok, need to stop this before i give myself a panic attack. (i had two yesterday at work! between crying jags and meetings.)

i see much drinking in my future. and lack of eating. or maybe i won't drink or eat. this might be the best diet ever.

/freakoutfornow

you know...

for an issue with her on the cover, uncanny x-men 509 only had psylocke in it for, oh, five panels. but at least it gave the world this line:
"congratulations on freeing the coffee machine from the tyranny of daylight savings time."

as alf would say, ha!

i want...

to make shirts out of lone star bottle-cap rebuses (rebi?). someone help me make this a reality.

hit me on the head, why don't you, universe

not one to normally believe in the universe trying to give me a hint, but it's certainly seemed that way these past few weeks. this week's and last week's episodes of being erica (don't judge me) dealt with unrequited love both ways (last week's dealing with a girl that was into erica, and this week on erica avoiding her neighbor/old friend because she has feelings for him, and it's not reciprocated). then the latest story arc at one of my favorite webcomics, Shortpacked!, is dealing with more unrequited feelings where one is gay and the other straight (start here). it's even showing up in reruns of shows!

i get it, universe. now stop, or i'm sending eris after you. i mean it.

the talk

among the dreams i had last night, one such was of my mother and i shopping at the hancock center h-e-b. what were we shopping for? shaving cream.

i found this hilarious. mostly because i never had any sort of puberty talk with my parents. (shocker, i know.) the first time anything remotely resembling "the talk" happened was when we were going to cover, well, puberty, in my eighth-grade health class. we had to get a permission slip signed by our parents, and for a couple of days, the girls would go to the female health teacher's class, and the boy's from her class would join ours. i remember taking the permission slip home and giving it to my mom to sign. she got a horrified look on her face, like i had just handed her a dead rat with maggots crawling all over it. she threw it on the kitchen table and said i had to get my dad to sign it. so a few hours later when i dad got home from work, i told him to sign it. he didn't even read it; he just blindly signed it.

maybe it's the repressed culture of a mexican catholic family, or maybe it was just my family in general, but there were never many talks that involved sexuality or sex in general. i remember when i was about seven or eight and i found my gay uncle's "art". i was in the tv room at his house watching g.i. joe, and then i decided to snoop around. i found a photo album of my uncle's, and there were, well, lots of pictures of him with pretty men. never any pictures of him and any women. i didn't think anything of it. then i got to the later pages of the album, and found, well, artsy pictures of mostly naked men. (artsy pictures that i would later discover on my own in my teens years, thanks to the internet access at the local library.)

that wasn't the first thing that tipped me off about my uncle. when i was in first grade, i had this great teacher named miss solitaire. (yes, that was her actual name.) she was fun, and showed us willy wonka and the chocolate factory and the neverending story. and sometimes her roommate julie would come in and read stories to us. it was at the christmas pagent that year (i played an elf, and my uncle made my costume) that i found out my uncle and teacher were good friends. i was so excited. i remember telling my parents that i wanted my uncle and miss solitaire to get married, then she could be my aunt. my parents laughed at that and said her roommate might not like that. i remember saying she could live with them, too, and help take care of gramma. they laughed some more and gave me a beer to drink.

the next time i got close to any sort of "talk" with my parents was when i was in fourth grade and got into a fight with a boy in my class who called me a "joto". now, i had no idea what joto meant, but i know when he called me it, everyone around stepped back a bit. i got mad. i didn't know what joto was, but i knew i didn't want to be it if it meant everyone else didn't like me. i didn't even know what it meant? so me and this boy got into a fight (i broke his nose), and we were taken to the principal's office, where they called our parents. i got let off the hook because i was the smartest kid in my class and this was the first time i had been in any sort of trouble. but the way my parents reacted when they came out of the principal's office, you'd think i had pissed on the pope.

when we got home, my dad slapped me hard across the face, while my mother sat at the kitchen table crying. i had no idea what i had done. i was just trying to defend myself from a bully. i remember my dad yelling at me (not asking, yelling) "are you a joto?" i said no. he slapped me again. then he yelled at me again. i said no again. then he yelled "do you know what a joto is?" i said no. then he said "yeah, right." and walked away.

it wasn't until the next day at school that i asked my friend manuel what joto meant. i remember him looking at me dumbfoundedly. then he told me what it meant. i was in shock. this was the first time i had ever been told that sometimes men are with men like they are with women. i still didn't really comprehend what it meant, as i still didn't even really know what sex and sex roles were. i was in fourth grade, for jiminy crickets sake! how was i supposed to know all this?

back to eighth grade. a week after the puberty stuff was covered in health, i got my first facial hair. and it kept on coming out sporadically over my face for the next couple of weeks. (to this day, my facial hair is pretty sporadic, with it mostly coming in on my left side and still spotty on my right.) i had no idea what to do. i remember my sister telling me to shave because it looked like i had pubes stuck to my face. i remember every time i got close to asking my dad how to shave, he and my mom would start getting into a fight, or he'd yell at me and say it's my fault my mom wasn't home. (at the time, both of them were cheating on each other.) so seeing them as not an option, and with my older brother working night shift, i taught myself to shave. and by shave, i mean i put too much shaving cream on my face and cut myself 10 times. the next day, i remember my dad asking me "what the fuck happened to your face? did you get into another fight?" (note: i hadn't been in a fight since the one in fourth grade, at this point. yet it always came up for some reason.) i said "no, i shaved." he didn't say anything; he just walked away, grabbed a beer, and went out to the backyard and lit up a joint.

it wasn't until i was in ninth grade that i ended up having "the talk". it was with my first boyfriend's mother. he wasn't even my boyfriend at that point. he was just my friend danny, and i'd go to his house and we'd do homework, and listen to music, and sometimes we'd make out. i'd stay there late a lot because, well, his parents loved me, and i didn't want to go home. so one night, after dinner, danny's mom and i were having some coffee, and she asked me if danny and i had done anything more than kiss. i choked on my coffee a bit because, well, that was the most candid anyone had ever been with me about, well, anything sex related. i said no, and that i really wouldn't even know what to do if things ever got that far. so with the help of some handy fruit, she explained everything to me. (note: i forgot to mention, she was also a nurse, so i'm sure this was all old hat to her, anyway.) we ended the talk with her telling me i could always turn to her with any questions, and that i shouldn't feel pressured to do anything i'm not ready to do. when she dropped me off at my house that night, i think that was the first time i was ever jealous of other people because they had awesome parents.

to this day, my parents and i have not had any sort of "talk", and we probably never will. maybe it'll come up if i ever meet "the one" and decide to torture him by having him meet my parents and family. but i doubt it. considering to this day, no one in my family will acknowledge that my uncle is gay, well, there you go.