strangepulse.com

Ha. I love this:

Features one of my blogging friends, Suz.

I was totally planning on getting all my blogging friends to do a music video next time we all get together. Never thought about doing it apart!

I don’t know if it qualifies as a phobia. I just dislike the phone. I dislike answering the phone, especially if I don’t know who it is, and I really dislike making calls. I rarely call anyone. If I’ve ever called you (and most likely I haven’t) consider yourself a rare specimen. Someone Susan has called.

A lot of it has to do with my auditory processing disorder, I’m sure. I have a hard time taking in what people are saying if I can’t see them. Phone conversations can be hard.

I always screen calls. Always. Caller ID is nice. If you call and have a private number, you’re getting the answering machine.

Last night I went with Daniel and Cat to the cell phone store. They were going to upgrade their cell phones, since Daniel’s is breaking and Cat’s is even older than his is. We thought with our plan we should get a free upgrade, but the phones we were looking at would actually cost us about $30.

While we were there, Daniel was talking about adding texting to his options (he’s never had it), and Cat decided she wanted to keep her old phone. (Our kids are weird. And that’s saying a lot, coming from me, right? But what 19 year old girl refuses a new cell phone? She’s weird.) Then I joked about wanting a cell phone with texting someday, and the saleswoman said if we added a new line she’d throw in two new phones for free. We did some math and figured out if we canceled our land line, which we wouldn’t need if I had a cell, we’d be saving money every month.

And Daniel and I could both have unlimited texting.

So…all you who I’ve never talked to on the phone because I never had one and never call anyone if I did, drop me an email and I’ll add you as a contact…and we can text! Now when I’m sitting bored in the doctor’s office I’ll have something to do. Like I ever sit around anywhere bored…I never go anywhere. But if I add you as a contact, I’ll be sure to give you a goofy name (Daniel is now officially DanielPie) and take a picture of something that will represent you.

So if you text me, bythelbs, a picture of Flat Fergie will show up. Because you’re just as Fergalicious as I am. For Mike I’ll do a picture of vinyl records. How cool is that? And for Amber, a picture of a chicken. First I’ll have to find a chicken to take a picture of. Maybe it’ll be KFC. No offense to your chickens. For Madhousewife, I’m thinking a pirate. Might have to go to West Hollywood to find one, but that’s no problem. Tawnya will get a picture of shoes. Etc.

I’ll have more fun with the camera on the phone than the phone, but that’s OK. No offense to any of you who might actually text me.

My email: whenigodeaf@gmail.com

Oh yeah. Can you guess which is mine and which is Daniel’s?

I went out to the desert on Saturday with a local Flickr contact to take pictures. I’d never met her before, but she works near me and lives in Long Beach. She uses the same sort of toy film cameras I like to use. It’s been fun to have her as a contact because I get to see local spots through her lens.

We went out to Yermo, which I’ve posted about before. A small, depressed town off the 15 in the Mohave Desert. I took pictures and pictures and more pictures. I hadn’t been out there without someone waiting in the car go get a move on before. It was so nice to just shoot for as long as I wanted. And fun to do it with another photographer. Patti was going behind buildings and places it wouldn’t have occurred to me to go, which made me get some good shots I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Here’s some random shots.

This one must have been hungry. He didn’t even pause in his munching when I stuck a camera in his face.

I tried finding some great cannibalism quotes and was surprised at how few good ones there are. My fave:

"There is no cannibalism in the British navy, absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount."
- Graham Chapman

Song about cannibalism:

Written by Rupert Holmes, who also wrote the Pina Colada Song. Do you like Pina Colodas? Eating people in the rain?

Daniel: Why are you home so late from school?

Elijah: I had detention.

Daniel: Cool!

–

Me: So how was detention? Was it boring?

Elijah: Not as boring as it is here. Why do you always think stuff at school is going to be boring?

–

Daniel: Did you order pizza while you were in detention?

Elijah: No.

Daniel: Probably a good idea not to do that.*

–

Elijah at the Disney Concert Hall in downtown L.A., through the Lomo Fisheye camera:

* Daniel once ordered pizza while he was in in-house suspension in high school.

That’d make more sense if it just said “lunch bythelbs.”

So the other week not only were my parents and my brother visiting, but bythelbs was also down here on vacation with her family. We all met up for lunch at Downtown Disney.

I took this picture of us with my Fisheye camera:

I had the film cross-processed, which gives it the weird color. Oh wait. I didn’t take it, maybe William, my brother, did. Or Daniel.

Here’s a pic my dad snapped of bythelbs checking out what the Fisheye does:

Things I remember from this lunch:

• Daniel came along because he wanted to meet bythelbs, because she’s always sending me awesome and hilarious stuff in the mail.
• bythelbs felt bad that she wasn’t very entertaining during the lunch when I told her that.
• When I mentioned to Daniel later that he’d been incredibly quiet during our meal, he said, “That’s because I knew whatever I said would end up on a blog somewhere.” How right he is.
• I learned that Southwest has general admission style seating on their flights, and they’re known for flight attendants singing to their passengers. Kinda weird. And kinda AWESOME.
• I also learned that Michael Jackson made a short movie for Disneyland. Not just any movie. A 3-D movie conceived of by George Lucas and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. bythelbs got to see it. If you don’t believe me.

Geeze, I can’t really remember anything else. Stupid brain.

Except it was really fun to see her and I wish we’d had longer to hang out!

I’ve probably done this post mulitple times before, but oh well. Here we go again!

Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth:

Don’t skip it because they’re a death metal band–it’s a lovely song. Favorite part: “In the rays of the sun, I am longing for the darkness…” at 3:15 or so.

Nicke Andersson of Hellacopters (I must have a weakness for Swedes):

Kind of weird choices, huh? But I can’t help it. There’s just something Nicke Andersson’s voice…I love it.

Dax Riggs:

My husband can’t stand him. I realize he’s not for everyone. But he is *so* for me.

Then there are the obvious choices, like Jeff Buckley, Mark Lanegan, Paul Rodgers. Holy cow, Paul Rodgers:

Whose voice makes you weak in the knees?

We were playing Apples to Apples and the description card was “Intelligent.” The cards that were laid down were “Knock-Knock Jokes,” “Rosa Parks,” and “A School Bus.”

Elijah said, “Knock knock, who’s there? It’s Rosa Parks, and I’m on a school bus! But I’m not sitting in the back!”

–

Daniel won’t normally play board games with us. We don’t play a lot of them, anyway. But he’s a sore loser and an even worse winner, so he just will never play to spare us all.

But for some reason he decided to play Apples to Apples with us the other night. And he kept winning. We all had to endure the constant IN YOUR FACE!s and the jubilant dancing and etc. It was the most fun we’d had playing a board game in awhile.

Actually that’s not true. Whenever we play we usually have a lot of fun, because someone always ends up doing or saying something completely ridiculous. Like the time Catherine was trying to draw King Kong and Nathaniel kept guessing “Odin!” You know, the Norse god of war and death, who apparently looks like a giant gorilla climbing a skyscraper. Now whenever we play guessing games someone always calls out “Odin!”

Do you have any inside family jokes from playing games?

Drag queen show, I mean. Not a drag race.

Well my cousin Scott stars in one. I’d never met him before, but one of the places he performs is in Hollywood. When my brother William was here last week for a visit from Taiwan, he wanted to go see Scott’s show. My parents were here and went too.

We stuck out like sore thumbs. But everyone was very nice to us. In fact our presence there was announced more than once, and every time, everyone would clap and smile at us.

We had seats in the second row. The nightclub is small but when the lights and the music are going it doesn’t seem very small. At first I wondered why Scott had us sit in the second row, but after the show started, I understood. The performers walk around the crowd and interact with people, and the people in the front row get a lot of attention.

I had a camera so took I took some pictures, but I wasn’t prepared for a low light situation, so most of them came out blurry. But here are a few.

My cousin Scott (his drag name is Dolly Levi), doing Catherine Zeta Jones from Chicago:

Isn’t that awesome? He was definitely the star of the show–he got a standing ovation at one point. After pulling that leg up to his face! He also jumped in the air and landed on the stage in the splits once. His dancing was at a different level than the rest of the performers. They were all good, all had different styles and their own schtick they’d do—there was a Cher impersonator, a Bette Midler impersonator, a fat guy who did really funny stuff based on being heavy. One guy who goes by the name Detox did this thing with his lips that was funny—he could make them quiver all over. Here he is:

It kinda creeped me out though!

People would hand the performers money, like dollar bills, throughout the show. It was way less raunchy than I thought it’d be–but maybe they toned it down a bit because they knew my parents would be there, I don’t know.

My dad was sitting on the aisle, and one performer basically gave him a lap dance. It was hilarious. My dad decided to be cheeky and took out his camera to get a picture of the guy, but it didn’t turn on fast enough for him to snap one. While he was waiting for it to come on, he was looking down at it, and it totally looked like he was taking a picture of the guy’s crotch. We were all dying with laughter.

My cousin Scott also played up to my dad a bit, gave him a kiss on the top of his head.

For some reason I thought everyone would actually be singing, but most of them were lip syncing. One guy who was a guest performer did sing, he’d do different voices–Cher, Eartha Kitt, etc–and he was good. My husband laughed at me when I told him I thought it was weird that they were lip syncing. (That’s what I thought was weird?)

Anyway, it was really fun, and really nice to meet my cousin. He told us he started doing drag on a dare, or as a joke, and here he is 20 years later…He said he’d rather leave the drag stuff behind and just be able to perform as a man but so far that hasn’t worked out. BTW, he has a small speaking part in the movie The Bird Cage, if you’ve seen it.

I took Elijah, Nathaniel, and Dillon to Amoeba Records the other weekend and discovered there was a war protest going on. So of course we had to check it out.

It was surprisingly small. But there were cops everywhere.

Not sure who these people were or why they were dancing, but they were:

A peace dance?

There were spectators all over the sidewalk. Here’s Nathaniel and Dillon checking everything out:

At one point Dillon joined in:

This guy wanted to know why I wasn’t taking his picture:

I didn’t have the heart to tell him the light was all wrong where he was standing, so I snapped this. He asked where we were from, must’ve thought we were tourists.

Here’s where the march began:

It’s kind of hard to look out of place at a peace rally (hard to find a bigger bunch of oddballs) but these guys somehow managed to. Maybe it’s the laughter. And the trucker hat:

Of course, it’s Hollywood, so there always has to be a photo shoot going on. Can you see the people on the rooftop? Photographer shooting a model:

Here I am:

It was an interesting day.