Halloween Approaches

Traditionally, I wait until October 1st to start in on the Halloween consumption extravaganza, but I'm freaking bored, Ok, so here we go.


First up, this random catalog I got in the mail from a costume website. In it were mysteries, beauties, and horriblies.

 I don't really know what the cover costume is, but I like the heart shaped corset ruffles.

Things started out OK. I liked the pinup sailor girl costume and the Egyptian royalty costumes. Especially the necklace!

Was a little disturbed that the 90s are now a costume choice. Damns. That you'd even have to buy the Kurt Cobain or Courtney Love costumes is sad because every one can make those using $5 at Goodwill.

Mad props to the costumers for coming up with a Deatheater costume. You'd pretty much have to go to parties full of Potter fans though, because you just look like a dead anteater without the context.

I really loved the Marge Simpson costume. The wig is amazing and everyone would know what you were. Homer needs a much bigger donut though, don't you think?

Video game costumes can be done really well, like the princess above, but the other two need her for context. I doubt anyone is going as mushroom head this year or any year!

Does anyone remember the Ambiguously Gay Duo, Ace and Gary? I do! I love these.

The Dia de los Muertos bride and groom costumes were pretty cool, but kind of expensive.

Then, things got weird. Sexy costumes can be done well, and then there's ridiculous:

There's a difference between the sailor girl at the top of the post and this one. I can't quite place it.....

I'm just not the kind of person who would want to wear or see this slutty nurse costume, when you could much more awesomely wear this:

And then things get weirder:

Dressing up as a Chinese takeout box for Halloween. Notice each breast is emblazoned with the word "enjoy" and she's wearing a fortune cookie on her head. Brain...failure..can't..react...

You are probably wondering what the hell is going on above. What are they supposed to be, you may be asking. Well, that right there is a sexy Big Bird, Elmo, and Cookie Monster costume. Yes. Scrolling down to avoid the horror doesn't make it any less real my friends.

This foursome may also make you wonder what is going on. They are sexy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costumes! Of course! Not quite as disturbing as the Sexy Big Bird, but still so weird. Who (outside of sorority sisters) are buying these things!?

Now, you know this Avatar thing is happening this year, but why is the dude wearing a suit? I watched that movie (well, the first half...snooze), and he spent plenty of time in "faux" native regalia. Which means loincloth, blue abs, etc. In this pairing, only the lady wears a body hugging catsuit. Lame! Just in case you were wondering, the children's version of this pair replicates the double standard:

I like how both the man and the boy are wearing masks instead of makeup. What's up with that?

You know, I get it. Some ladies want to slut it up one night a year. God help 'em, if they do, it's their choice. It's also my choice to think it's kind of sad and not in keeping with the point of Halloween costuming, but whatever. Sexy costumes are going to happen as long as there's patriarchy and being sexy is more valuable than choosing a clever costume. But what saddens me most is that even the costumes marketed to teen girls come in a "sexy" version:

Dude, it's Hermoine Granger (I know it says "wizard Wanda, but we're all in on the copyright infringement that's going on here, right?) . A character that is also a teenager in school! You could just wear the Harry Potter costume with a different wig. Why does a 15 year old need to be a sexpot Hermoine?!

Luckily with the littlest kids it isn't so bad. I was actually quite impressed with the "Buccaneers" costumes that are virtually the same from boy to girl (the only difference is a skirt vs. pants). Little girl Captain Jack Sparrow totally rules!

Each page of the catalog is frightening in different, unintentional ways. The only thing I would probably buy (if I had money or was throwing a party) is this really cool drink/blood dispenser:

Tune in tomorrow when I regale you with my anger over the huge con that is the Martha Stewart Halloween 2010 Magazine.

Chubuary

My family has a history of heart disease, diabetes, and pancreatic cancer. These are the first things I say to a new doctor. Remember in the olden days, when people had the same doctor forever, and he or she was the family doctor, so not only did they know you, but your whole entire family? Was that ever real? Because I’ve had a thousand doctors.

Probably it has to do with the fact that medical insurance hasn’t been a constant, and when it has been available, I have chosen an HMO. Kaiser, specifically. I haven’t been mistreated at a Kaiser facility, but I definitely have had some WTF moments. What was cool about it was that you got access to your records and prescription refills online, and that doctors had a record of everyone you’ve seen because Kaisers are all connected. When my family was on welfare after my parents divorced, I remember just not going to the doctor. The welfare approved facilities were not pretty, nor was the wait to get an appointment. But I eventually got jobs with benefits, and even though I had fairly cheap copays for visits, I still felt like, “Do I really need to see a doctor? Can’t I just wait it out and see?”

I’ve had some pretty bizarre experiences with doctors, who are like a different branch of over-educated people, so I kind of understand their language. They spent a lot of time reading, studying, and perfecting their knowledge of body parts, so they haven’t put a premium on interpersonal skills. Some try, some are just naturally good at it, and some, well, they need some serious help. I try to be understanding of their limitations.

I once went to a gynecologist that I selected specifically because she was Latina. I had never had a hispanic doctor ever, much less a woman, so I though it would be awesome. She was super cool and interesting and she chatted with me rather than just being a robot about the examination procedure. And of course she asked the delicate question “what are you?” (she didn’t ask it that way, but that’s the jist of it) and I told her my family is Cuban. Well, hold on to those stirrups, because the conversation got rolling. I was treated to a lovely discussion of why Fidel Castro “isn’t really that bad.” Which, being a liberal, I understood her point politically. However, is now really the time, lady? How are my ovaries? Do they feel ok? She continued gabbing about Fidel and at the end told me “everything seems fine,” which was not reassuring.

Because I wanted to add my husband on to my insurance, I had to switch to a PPO rather than stick with Kaiser. He likes his doctor and I felt no real connection to my stable of 5,000 doctors, so I thought, I should probably find a good doctor and stick with her/him. There is so much more information on doctors now online! I found someone I thought would be great. She’s got great degrees, did much of her internship in low-income communities in SoCal. She’s African American, works in Long Beach and Compton, and she loves hanging out with her son and reading science fiction. Sounds like someone who would understand me a little better than Joe Doctor at Kaiser.

She was really, very nice. She chatted with me for over an hour about my life and plans one day to maybe have a kid, I told her about how I’m moving, what I do for a living. She gave me good tips about getting around copays by just calling and leaving her messages instead of coming in for referrals.

She saw my family history and immediately gave me some sobering advice. I need to lose weight. I need to eat better. I need to exercise more. The statistics she rattled off about my likelihood of having diabetes and heart problems really hit me hard. I know I’ve been slacking, and that I don’t lead as healthy a lifestyle as I would like. I’m not 20 anymore. It was good to have someone give me the info I needed to hear, not a cursory glance at my file and “have a nice day.” I felt like she actually cared, but...well she has a strange bedside manner.

She said a few things that bummed me out. First of all, I would need to lose at least 25 lbs before even thinking of having a kid or I’d risk diabetes, heart problems, and a deformed baby! The baby guilt train was just leaving the station too, because I am also a bad potential mom because I have tattoos. Apparently, you can’t give blood if you have tattoos (Red Cross says you have to wait a year, but she says there are ‘new rules’). So her advice to me was, “tell your husband not to get any tattoos so if the baby needs blood he can donate.” Like I'm basically a lost cause for ever helping my kid with a blood transfusion. Dude, wasn’t this hypothetical future baby like, living amongst my bloodstream for 9 months? WTF? That just cannot be right.

Her advice on losing weight was pretty good, stuff about buying frozen rather than canned vegetables. How I should try to avoid processed foods and go for the organic stuff if I can. Until she got to the practical kinds of advice you’d give to someone fucking obese. She literally told me that instead of getting a cake, consider getting a cupcake. Like I eat whole cakes! She remarked that some people just can’t help themselves and eat the whole cake. She squeezed my ankle as part of the exam and showed me how the squeezed part remained white. She said that it was indicative of too much salt in my system. But she didn’t say it that way, the way that would be NORMAL. She said, “You see that?” To which I said, “Is it because I’m retaining water on account of my monthly “situation?” She said, “that’s bacon, ham, chips.” Oh. My. Gaaah.

She then told me that my ideal weight for my height should be 120 lbs. I, being a woman, have already looked up the ideal weight/height calculations and have known them since I was 17. For someone my height, I should be between 120-145 lbs. Why, when encountering someone overweight, would you give them the lowest possible weight as the goal! That’s nuts! I haven’t been 120 lbs. Since I was vegetarian and in high school. If she had said 140, I would have been like "that's doable, I can see myself at that weight."

I know, I need to be healthier (btw, she did corroborate my theory that nutrisystem food is full of preservatives that aren’t good for you), I need to exercise and eat better. I need to get out of this rut that has kept me from moving forward, but I really did not need to hear that I need to be 120 lbs. I walked out of the office in a daze.

Part of me wants to think that I’m just mad/depressed because she called me on my laziness. That it’s about time someone said it to me straight. I can tell you I didn’t want to eat at all yesterday, and that I went out and bought all kinds of healthy stuff and didn’t drink soda or coffee at all. I took my dog on a super long walk. I made salmon and asparagus for dinner. Those are good things. Scared straight type of things.

Part of me thinks she means well, but is used to being in a “lecturing” kind of conversation with people who maybe don’t know much about nutrition or who just want the lap band surgery or whatever. And my family history does warrant a serious look at my habits. But the weird advice about tattoos, mom guilt, and the cupcake thing are red flags, no?

I haven’t cried about it, because I haven’t thought it through long enough and I'm trying to be positive. But I had to write this post in small increments over the past 28 hours. I wasn’t even going to post it, but I feel like this isn’t supposed to be a vanity project, it’s supposed to be about my successes and failures. I’ve worked really hard in the past year to overcome some obstacles, including getting healthy. And I did lose about 15 pounds at the beginning of the year, but I went right back to my old habits once school rolled around again.

Sigh...just when you need a cocktail most, you can’t have it because it’s full of calories and will render you infertile.

Have you ever gotten crazy advice or weird guilt trips from your doctor? How did you deal?

Fall Bounty

Are you ready for fall? Maybe it's already hit you where you are, but it doesn't get here until late November if at all. Sometimes we just skip it and go straight to winter. Southern California winter is boring. It's just chilly and things turn brown. No cool fall colors unless you live in Claremont or one of those places where they've carefully grown some colorful trees. Halloween is usually warm. Actually, it's always too warm on Halloween. I can't remember ever needing a jacket when I was little and we'd go trick-or-treating. That's kind of good, costume-wise, but these days I hate sweating in my costume. It's annoying. It could be worse, of course, and believe me I'm not bummed out on our temperate climate, it's why people move here, but as a creature of the night who refuses to wear shorts....I like cooler temperatures and I love fall.

Starbucks already has its pumpkin latte on the menu. A way too cheerful barista indicated to me that I should try one. Sadly, I had to decline. It was 7:30 am and already 80 degrees! No, fall is not here yet. However, just because it isn't here doesn't mean I shouldn't prepare....

I went to Williams Sonoma to redeem a gift certificate this weekend. I was also hoping to see some of the fall-holiday stuff (Halloween and Thanksgiving). There weren't that many cool Halloween things there, other than black and orange cake decorating stuff. A lot of the stuff they have is for people with little kids, you know, like a goofy vampire spatula, or napkins with an embroidered giggly jack-o-lantern. Not my thing really. But these fall-related things caught my eye:



Yes, that is a spiced pecan pumpkin bread mix, which I'm itching to make. And I couldn't help but also buy the pecan pumpkin butter as well, for when I want to remember the pumpkin bread long after it's gone. It's supposed to be really good on toast. As is the Snickerdoodle spread on the right. No joke, it's like a cinnamon-sugar-brown sugar spread. For a cinnamon toast to die for. I love snickerdoodles. They are cookies that are fluffy like little cakes.


I also bought these pans (like I need more pans, but whatever, they're pretty!) The one on the right is for my pumpkin bread. It has fall leaves and pumpkins molded on it. I'm thinking of serving the bread with cream cheese frosting on the side or maybe piped delicately on the sides of the mold.

The tea cake mold is something I bought because I'm considering making snickerdoodles in that mold. Tea cakes are great, but you can't frost them because you lose the beauty of the mold, so you have to make something that you don't need to frost. Snickerdoodles get tossed in cinnamon and sugar before they go in the oven and don't need any frosting, so I was thinking of doing that. Does anyone know if you can make them in molds like this? They are kind of like short bread cookies, but will they just not cook right in the mold? It's going to be a crazy experiment, smelling all that good cookie smell and maybe not getting good treats at the end. But experiments are my thing. I'll update you if it works. If not I'll probably just say "I haven't had time to try."

I started to search for cookie molds to see if there are particular kinds of cookies that you can put in molds like the tea cake pan. I found some cool vintage replica cookie molds from Blueberry Forest. Check them out!

Lots of cute molds like this one were on the site for individual cookies.

And I loved the rolling pin molds as well.

I tried looking for more contemporary versions of these things, but there isn't really a market for them apparently. I'd love to find some if you know of any.

So with my fall bounty I left the mall a happy lady. Although, with the heat and stuff here in SoCal, I doubt I'll turn on the oven until well after November. Sigh...fall, I wish you were really here.

nerd art.

I said I wanted to finish before the semester started, and damn if I didn't get just under the wire. Here's my retablo, a dia de los muertos diarama of my family in time for the fall festivities. Traditionally, the Mexican Day of the Dead is a day to remember those who have died in celebration, not mourning. It coincides with All Souls and All Saints days on the Catholic calendar. There is a costuming tradition as well, with people dressing up as elaborate skeletons. That's my inspiration, basically.

This is my family celebrating in song, with M. and I in the center as bride and groom. My step-dad Miguel is in front in the wheelchair (he plays the trumpet in real life). My Brothers and mom are behind me. M.'s brother is in front on guitar, and his parents are behind him. Our pets are next to us (also skeletons!) Some of the decor are loteria card pieces, but a lot of it is little pieces of flair and clay things that I made.

Now, I have never really done clay modeling, but my core belief system ("I can totally do that") was challenged, and so I went to the place all researchers go--Google. Google has all kinds of sites aimed at showing you how to create metal armatures and foil pieces for the basic body of your clay figure. Now, the quality is kind of not-so-hot, because my abilities are not well formed, but I kind of like the home-made quality of it. I may do more skeletons in a bit larger scale, so that the skulls can be a little more detailed. Maybe in a bas relief frame-like format so that they don't have to be completely three dimensional.


Check out my points-friendly meal of low-fat chili and a chicken taco! My own special chili recipe was already low enough in fat to qualify as a 4 point meal. The trick is using just 1/2 a pound 4% fat lean ground beef and lots of veggies with red beans. Bulking up with veggies is my new way of getting healthy. I have lost some weight with the Weight Watchers thing, but that isn't as rewarding as the feeling of knowing what I'm actually putting in my body. It's much easier to say no to Cold Stone when I know that it would be like a third of the food (calorie-wise) I should be eating for the day. And it gets me cooking more, which is nice, even though the lack of air conditioning makes it a chore sometimes. Luckily my sweet husband does the dishes when I cook, so I can at least cool down after the meal. Can't wait for the cool down in weather. I miss my sweaters!

ooh, I almost forgot to mention, my weird "freak magnet" rears its head again. I posted a pic of my dog on Flickr. He loves when I do laundry and the other day, he hopped right on the bed to put his face right into my folded underwear. So naturally, I took a picture and posted it. I didn't even use the word "underwear" in the description, and yet I got a new "contact" who thinks my photo is a "favorite" and he commented on my photo in order to tell me "looks like someone likes the Victoria's Secret cotton collection." How could you not go take a look at this person's photo site, right? I expected a total grody dude with booby pictures or pictures of himself at "the river" wearing a beer hat. Well, hold your horses, because it's a tranny-one that only takes pictures of himself from behind in satin granny panties from waist to knee. He's a panty-fetish tranny who loves telling people things they already know about their underwear. As Eddie Izzard would say, "weirdo transvestite." And this is only second in my tranny freak magnet lifetime moments. I got hit on at a club by Joan Crawford. Not young starlet Joan, but old-ass Mommy Dearest Joan Crawford, with the white fur hat and melty face. She said, "you going home alone tonight?" in a gravely voice. Maybe I need new perfume....

Thinking Ahead

I know. It is summer. Leaves have yet to fall, and still...I am already thinking of Halloween. It is hands down my favorite of all holidays. I went to the mall yesterday and Halloween stuff is out already. I am not sorry to say that I got totally excited. I got two Halloween votives (one with a raven theme and the other with a skeleton theme) from Illuminations, which actually had really cool stuff for a boring candle store. Their website sucks, so I'm not even going to link it, but you should go in if there is one anywhere near you. I found these awesome laser cut cupcake and cake wrappers at FancyFlours.com . You aren't supposed to bake them, they go on after baking as yet another step in the decorating process. It makes sense, considering that when you bake cupcakes, the liner's design pretty much gets lost. I was so sad to see that my Snoopy cucpcake liners were just plain looking after baking. I've been getting into the Dia de los Muertos imagery lately. I am going to try to make my own retablo, which is basically a diorama with a festive skeleton scene inside (see examples below).

I am thinking for mine it will be a family portrait of sorts. Maybe M. and I with the pets, or if I get good at it, our siblings and parents as well! Nobody in my family will think it's cool, but I am excited to try. I'm going to get clay and fabric today for sure. This is one project that may take a while, though. Maybe around Halloween I will tell you spooky stories of the real live haunted house I lived in for five years with my family.

I am thinking ahead in a more constructive way as well. Today is my catch-up day. I have syllabi to put together, an article packet to create, and bills to sort. I want the semester locked up tight by the end of the week. Students will be e-mailing about things by Monday, and I don't want to look like last-minute Larry.

Students were e-mailing me in July. I tried to be cool about it, but damn, I do not need to be thinking about the semester in the middle of July. Give me a friggin' break. I know it seems like those who teach have it easy with all the summer off stuff, but let me tell you, it is a physically and mentally draining job (and I teach college, I can't imagine teaching elementary/junior high/high school). I prepare like hell for each class and think hard about the skills I am trying to foster week to week. At the end of a day of teaching I am pretty beat. My course is actually very methodically put together. By the end of the spring semester, I start to get really down on the laissez-faire attitude of students and all of the excuses. I need that break so that contempt doesn't start to mess with my ability to relate to people in a normal way. That being said, even though I am way into summer break, I am actually looking forward to work, which is what the break is all about.