But obviously not over the clever little zing dings into which people have been incorporating the word 'snow' and meant to make light of the fact that DC is entering an ice age (SNOW-MG is my fave). My room in my house used to be a balcony, and I am afraid of it falling off of the house, whirling away, becoming buried in a dog park near the capitol somewhere, a la Wizard of Oz. A suggestion by ways of my brilliant friend Lacy makes me think I need to buy a helium tank and millions of balloons as preparation for the next snow storm (UP-style, check out this link it's a movie trailer mashup of Gran Torino and Up). Not to mention emergency flares for when I'm buried underneath 6 ft of snow and dog shit.
Here are some shitty pictures from my phone from Sat evening. I have never seen the city so quiet. I felt like I was Cillian Murphy having just woken up from a coma to a world taken over by flesh eating zombies.
Imagine trying to dig this out while zombies snap at your ankles and devour your dog. It's time to head for the helicopter pad.
So many potential zombie hiding places.
As you can tell, I've got zombies on the mind. I ordered 28 Weeks Later from Netflix about a month ago and it continues to lay next to my gummi vitamins, daring me to watch it. I keep pulling the DVD out of the sleeve, and then shoving it back in, running away and hyperventilating in the corner of my room with a blanket over my head, only to have the whole cruel cycle repeated again in the next couple of hours. The first time I ordered this movie I returned it without ever watching it, and, now, even though I still lack the courage to watch it, I am unable to swallow my pride and simply return it. It's quite stupid, actually, because I'm losing money keeping this stupid movie for so long. I just get into movies WAY too much and know that if I were to watch 28 weeks later during a snowstorm, I will go crazy and have an urgent need to buy a baseball bat/fling LPs at anything that moves .
Over the holidays, I discovered that some cards I had made received the prestigious honor of hanging on my sister's and Evan bava's fridge.
Looking back, this card seems to be slightly inspired by american apparel. Except the colors would probably manifest themselves in multi-colored stretchy unitards instead. Sparkly ones. Barf.
The card pictured below is for Evan bava, who works with computers or something.
Yes. I really do. All that heat seems like such a waste.
As a result of watching too many Sylvester Stallone, Jackie Chan, Steven Seagal, and Kannada and Bollywood movies of the 'dishoom dishoom' variety (i.e. a movie entitled "AK 47"), I've come to enjoy horribly acted, zoom in zoom out action movies that is sure to involve explosives, anxiety-producing orchestral scores, and sexy, sexy cars/jungles (although I would rather vomit several times than sit through Rambo 4 again).
Super human strength, hyper masculinity, racial profiling, and female objectification are usually necessary components of the formula action B movie genre. A robotic body helps too. A die-hard feminist (haha get it?), these movies have always appealed to me, more so because I envisioned myself as the life-saving hero, wondering how the movie would be different if James Bond were a woman. A woman of color to boot. That’s right, I’d kick your ass all the way to next Tuesday, what, with my second degree yellow belt. I took karate for a couple of months in elementary school, but I was scared of my instructor so I stopped. Actually, that’s what I told everyone else. The real reason was that I couldn’t stand doing push-ups.
Inspired by these insipid films, I often created fantasy scenarios where I would be caught in the middle of disaster and, owing to the extensive database of action movie/disaster scenarios in my head, I would always wriggle my way to safety in these fantasies. Happy endings are Hollywood’s specialty, and a sad one certainly makes for a terrible Jean Claude van Dam movie.
In my scenarios, I purposefully left out the part where Admiring, Leggy, Brooding, Generally Misunderstood Sexy Lady saunters by, and I sweep her away in my gadget-tastic car/robot and we make love on a bed with satin sheets for hours. I didn't think about that much as a kid. My parents didn't even have "the talk" with me. I just got a book under my pillow, which I think was around 5th grade. At that point, I had a crush on a boy who picked his nose, and the most I fantasized about was him doing a Bollywoodsong and dance numberon my lawn with a couple hundred backup dancers (Sidenote: I need that red dress that Madhuri wears in that video, and I HATE salman).
Someday I will make a kickass action movie with female stars who aren’t stupid or annoying (it will be nothing like Charlie’s Angels because that movie is the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy, or at least I wish I’d had one before watching it).
P.S. If you haven’t watchedExit Woundsstarring DMX and Steven Seagal, you are missing out. Put that shit on your Netflix queue, NOW.
I love you. You are my very best friend. I wish I could shrink a bite-sized espresso machine to carry around in my shallow girl-jean pockets for emergencies. My dependence upon you leaves me desperate, wandering in the snow looking for a cup of coffee unblemished by Starbucks brand bitterness, disregarding my cashless wallet and frost-bitten nose (my nose gets colder than my feet sometimes, but not when I have a hot cup of caffeinated something to my lips).
I love you most in my mother's milk tea, spiced with saffron and cardamom, paired with digestive biscuits from Devon Ave, and always hot enough to burn the roof of my mouth. At times, I dip the biscuits a little too long in the cup and the rest of biscuit resurfaces, only half intact, and the other half disintegrated at the bottom.
At home, almost twice a day, you are an excuse to sit back and relax, and chat with mom and Avva. It makes me think of tea in India (super sweet, extra hot, made with milk from bags), long to visit the coffee plantation on which my mother spent her childhood, and of my dream to buy a coffee plantation, become a farmer and live on a farm in my retired years.
Caffeine, you are the reason I didn't drop out my sophomore year of college. I couldn't have made it through all those all-nighters without you. Even though I didn't know how to work my sister's coffee machine and poured water over the grounds, you still managed to pull through for me.
Caffeine, you are also my most treacherous enemy. Why oh why did I make coffee at work for 4 days only to discover after 4 horrible nights and days of what I thought was a sinus headache was the result of caffeine deprivation?? I should have noticed the "decaf" label.
I've recently had the opportunity to make a few more cards for some very dear, dear friends.
Miss Catie reminds me of summer, and when I think of summer I think of watermelons:
I miss my idol Alia who is currently in the PRC so I sent her this along with some other goodies:
aaaaaaaaaaaand speaking of le PRC, Miss Anne came over the river, through the woods, over mountains, continents, etc., and is now in DC! So I made her this card to remind her to always remember her roots (WI):
I made a card for my dad, too, but it's so bad it's embarrassing. I'll just have to fulfill his dream of having a multi millionaire daughter instead.
The holidays are coming around so I've switched from making cards to baking cookies. A much more delicious switch in hobbies, although I may buy a glue gun soon and expand my crafty sensibilities to 3D objects.
While sitting in a leadership development seminar the other day (yeah, quite the exciting beginning to a blog post), I found out that one of the key components to good leadership, fundraising, community organizing and professional ladder-climbing is people memory. People love it when you remember something about them, however small/insignificant the detail. For example, if you remember that they have a voracious appetite for grapefruit gummy candy or that their kid got their head stuck in a chair, or what have you.
Too bad I suck at memory. I forget what people have said seconds after they say it. I also forget to inform important people in my life about important things.
Example from a couple years ago (BF stands for Best Friend, read: inseparable since preschool):
BF: So, what're you doing for New Year's?
Me: Oh, well, I'll be in India so, I don't know, family time, probably won't be clubbing or anything. I'd be lucky if I got to wear a party hat.
BF (highly offended): India? Since when were you going to India? I thought you said you were going to be around???
Me: Yeah, that was back in August. I thought I told you, I'm going to India right before I study abroad in Bolivia.
BF: You're going to BOLIVIA????
Me: uhhhhhh.....
So yeah. I do that too often.
I'm also terrible with names. And faces, and dates. and everything. Speaking of names, while I was working an event for work, handing out name tags and registering guests as they entered, a man approached me and said, "Suma! How are you? Decided not to stay in Minnesota, huh?"
I had no idea how this man knew me. I was noticeably surprised and tried to buy time by pretending to be distracted by the light reflected off of the plastic covering of his name tag.
Unfortunately, it wasn't enough time for me to figure out how I knew this man.
Here's was I said:
"uhhh ooo um, bladiggity blah, oooh yess, Minnesota....ha ha what a night ha ha heresyourdrinkticket why don't i just give you two ha ha old friends and all ha ha??"
All of this was said while I stared at his name tag trying dig through the black holes in my brain to place his face and name with memory.
It was embarrassingly obvious I had totally forgotten him and how I knew him. If he didn't have a name tag, I definitely wouldn't have remembered his name. It was only a couple of hours later when the aperture in my brain clicked into the right setting and the world came into focus and I remembered that HE WAS MY OLD BOSS from a campaign I worked on in Minnesota. AHHHHHH. Talk about terrible relationship building.
In unrelated news, my grandparents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary on Monday. Congrats, Avva and Thatha!
Below is my Avva with the card I made them for the special day.
