Nothing Is Fucked*

*Ok, some things are fucked.

The other night while my mom and I were watching The Big Lebowski the lights went out in the bathroom. When new bulbs didn’t fix the problem it became apparent that we have some kind of electrical problem, so, obviously, we put a floor-lamp in the bathroom.

Ta da!

Why hello there

I love my weird little house. It belongs to the grandparents of this very nice boy I went to elementary school with. They rent it out to us for way less than most of my friends pay for their one bedroom apartments because they are very kind and also because they come and visit a few times a year and stay in a little apartment that is attached to where we are living. I love this elderly couple. When they come to visit their kids and grand-kids who live behind us, grandpa does housework. This man must be in his 80s but he’s out in the yard wearing his plaid pants and work shirt, re-paving the driveway or replacing the mailbox. We love our landlords, which is kind of why we don’t want to bring up the problems with our electricity. We don’t want grandpa to have to come and fix it himself. We are pretty sure we can just live with it.

I love my little house, but sometimes it seems like it should exist somewhere in the pages of There I Fixed It. It has a lot of problems and they probably wont ever get solved because the house is old and it seems like people might not be interested in preserving it for the long haul. When we moved to this neighborhood it was filled with these little Levittown looking houses that I guess were built as summer homes in the 1940s.  These houses were inhabited by elderly people. Then the residents started to die off, and their children would sell these little houses on big plots of land for millions of dollars. Within a year there would be a McMansion built to the limit of the property and many less trees. Our house is of a dying breed, and it doesn’t look like it’s future is so bright. On the other hand, having the smallest, oldest house in the neighborhood pretty much means that no one will ever break in.

Tastefully Hidden Bucket

So, ok, our house is a little funny. The floor-lamp in the bathroom is only the latest addition to our museum of less-than-perfect solutions. We have buckets all over to catch the rain that falls inside. The dryer doesn’t work? No problem, we can get a clothes line.

"GAAAAaaaaahHH!!!"

Leaky shower head? We have come up with this solution. If we loop this thing around the fixtures we should be fine AND it makes a face. We are not troubled by plants that are growing inside the sun room—it started out as a porch so it used to be their territory anyway, sort of like Texas and Mexico. Plants are welcome inside. They make a nice little natural spot for the cat to have her litter-box. A little taste of the wild.

Oh no, our visiting plant friend is looking kind of dead

My sister’s boyfriend is appalled at the state of things here, I think. Don’t tell a handy person about your shitty house, they will tell you you need to get to fixing things right away. Crazy house, like loss of hygiene, is a slippery slope and I agree with Adam that it would probably be good for me to try to get on top of some of this chaos. But you know what? I like the bathroom with the floor-lamp. It’s a lovely soft yellow light. I like taking atmospheric showers. I like that my wrinkles and gray hairs, which have been a serious bummer for me recently, are not so noticeable anymore. You know what? I’m keeping it. There, I fixed it.

The End

Autumnsome? I am bad at puns

I’m going to be upfront and let you all know that this is not going to be that interesting, it’s just a bunch of pictures, and I suck at photography. It’s ok to skip this one. I’ve been trying to write a post about this local movie theater that is going to get torn down, but I haven’t been able to work myself up to it yet. So in the mean time, this is what’s going on in my yard/why I am so happy to be home in Virginia.

So I see this out my bedroom window when I wake up in the morning.

Raking is for suckers

I haven’t seen a Virginia fall in something like seven years. First I went off to Chicago which, obviously, had nothing on this. Sorry Midwest, it’s just the truth.  Then for three years I was in Japan, where observing the brilliant red leaves of maple trees was an annual event. And it was fun. Things were pretty. You’re friends would ask you “Oh, have you gone to see the red leaves yet?” and you’d be all “Yeah, I’m heading up to Kyoto on National Labor and Thanksgiving day!” You’d mill about famous places (temples, gardens) with tons of other people and take a lot of boring pictures, especially if you’re me. A few Japanese people asked me if we have fall in America, if we have red leaves. Yes and no, we don’t have maple trees that are located in special places exactly. Autumn in Japan is great, it really is, but it’s not the same thing as driving down the street and being surrounded by all kinds of big, tall, colorful trees. It’s great that it’s this big national event, but there is something to be said for just having it happen around you…casually?

So, I was very happy to watch all this happen.

The yard in October

The Yard in November

We had a couple lovely days where it was warm enough for me to sit outside with the animals and read Thomas Pynchon (Pynchon is hard enough for me to concentrate on, I don’t need cold toes making it worse). Clearly we are having such fun. I had a very magical moment with my fluffy white cat one evening as we listened the leaves fall all around us under the light of a full moon, her sitting so nicely in my arms, smelling the air.

Ugh she blinked

This isn’t interesting, and everything I’ve learned about writing up till now tells me that’s no good, but I think the internet has decided that this is allowed? I really like my house and my animals. I really like the way Virginia looks as it transitions between seasons. I don’t think there is anywhere prettier in the world, and I kind of think that’s how we should all feel about the place we live.

An Open Letter to Safeway’s Generic Brand Tampons

Dear Marketing Team Who Deals with Safeway’s Generic Tampons,

I can see that you probably have not been given a huge budget to create the packaging for your products, so I’m going to go ahead and give you a little advice, pro bono.

No woman wants to think about getting punched in the vagina when she looks at your tampons.

Thank you,

Brenna Killeen

Top That

I’m pretty sure no one wants to hear about this new song that Angelina from The Jersey Shore put out, but guess what I’m about to blow your mind so stick with me for a minute.

In case you aren’t already familiar, here is the abridged version:

I’m not interested in making fun of Angelina, or anyone on The Jersey Shore for that matter. It seems like all reality tv shows these days are invented by people who understand that we will watch something just because we can’t believe how stupid the premise is. They sit around a table pitching ideas like “Heiress Tattoo Parlor? Hobo Punching Bag? No, that’s not dumb or awful enough to get peoples’ attention.” And then we tune in and go “Wow, really, this is what America watches now? Geez.” 100% of reality show viewers are watching them to judge some other imagined viewer.

Ok, actually, I find the show totally enjoyable. These people are like gummy candy for my brain to chew on. I want to write a paper on Jwoww. My point is I’m not here to laugh at Angelina. In fact, I want good things for her. (Note: if you would like to discuss whether or not Angelina is in fact a sympathetic character in season 2, just let me know.)

Instead, I wanted to ask this: does anyone else think that this song was totally inspired by Top That from the 1989 movie Teen Witch???

There are a million things I want to talk about with this video.

1. It doesn’t even seem real, like someone trying to make fun of the 80s.

2. It’s like you took a group of home-schooled Canadian kids who had never seen television and gave them a one paragraph description about what rap music is and then made them demonstrate what they learned in a small skit.

3. It employs one of my favorite devices of bad writing at 0:29, where you show your audience how awesome or funny someone is by saying “Yeah, he was so funny one time. He said the funniest thing, which I wont bother repeating now, but trust me it was funny.”

4. Yeah, girls, I totally hate it how guys only pay attention to my brains and totally forget to see me for what I really am…a girl. Who needs love. (!)

But the most important thing here is for me to see if the world agrees with me on this one. Angelina sounds like she sought rapping advice from Rhet. Shoulda gone with the girl, Angelina, she can spit.

Anyway, sorry I just wasted your life by making you think about these things. Here is Kenneth to make it better.

Please Don’t Take Me Anywhere

I am pretty sure the point of writing in blog format is to have the ability to be among the first-responders to happenings in pop culture (or news, I guess, if you’re into that kind of thing?) but guess what: I have a lot of catching up to do. For every stupid theory I tell you there are like 16 others that are rattling around in my brain waiting to be articulated (this concept stolen from this Dinosaur Comic, thank you Ryan North and T-Rex for understanding how the mind works!). So please bare with me while I revisit a topic that has been worked to death, that is so played out that I can hardly believe it still interests me. But it does! So please just deal with the fact that I need to talk about Kanye West and Taylor Swift.

Ok, let’s travel back in time to when you cared even a little bit about this. While Mr. West was pioneering the art of being a human interrupting starfish, I was probably teaching some English classes to Japanese 13-year-olds. I only saw the incident well after the fact, so there was already a narrative forming about how mean, classless Kanye West had bullied cute Taylor Swift and been all around inappropriate. Links to the video showed up on my newsfeed prefaced with” what a douche” or whatever. And this narrative is basically correct. I can’t argue that Kanye West wasn’t acting like a total lunatic. But I found myself identifying with him.

Listen: don’t hate me, I recognize that it was a mean thing to do. But I also felt that Beyonce really did make an amazing song and rejuvenated the dying art of the music video. Single Ladies was so amazingly catchy. In Japan us ex-pats paid endless tributes to it in karaoke.

Also: Taylor Swift blows, for real. In preparation to write this, I did due diligence and watched several of her videos. Boring and overproduced. I know I’m not the target audience and that I’m way to old to even care about this anymore, but, god. If that is country music then I am a soccer mom.*

I sound crazy, I realize that.

This is why I can’t watch award shows. I have not seen the Oscars since 1999, when Shakespeare in Love beat Life Is Beautiful for best picture. That a Gwyneth Paltrow romantic comedy that seemed to exist only to allow smug people to murmur “Oh, that’s from Twelfth Night” to each other could beat out a truly original, beautifully human movie about a mans attempts to maintains his sons innocence in the face of the horror of a concentration camp struck me as completely wrong. Life is Beautiful is one of a small number of uplifting movies that doesn’t male me feel like I’ve been emotionally manipulated. Life Is Beautiful took a clown and put him in the center of one of the greatest tragedies of modern history; Shakespeare in Love includes the bold and innovative casting choice of Dame Judy Dench in the role of Queen Elizabeth.

 

But Brenna, everyone said, Life Is Beautiful won best foreign film. Guess what, I do not give a shit. Shakespeare in Love was fine. It was entertaining. But it was not as good as Life Is Beautiful. These are not participation trophies, everyone does not get to take one home. Upon realizing at 14 that the Oscars were in fact totally arbitrary and had no value, I stopped watching.

And thank god I did because I don’t think I could have maintained when Chicago won best picture, beating Julie Taymor’s exquisite biography of Frida Khalo. Aah. Ok. Maybe, you didn’t love Frida. Fine. Maybe not all of us read Frida Khalo’s diary at the impressionable age of 13 and so it was not apparent to 100% of the population how inspired Salma Hayek’s performance was. So maybe Frida didn’t have to win.

But why Chicago? Ugh, world. Yes, there were some cool story-telling tricks. Yes, John C Riley is good at acting. Yes, we all like to see Queen Latifa doing well (especially because she’s doing so well without anyone in Hollywood having to come up with, say, original leading roles for ladies of color). But guys, this movie was stupid and boring. I’m going to use a minute example to illustrate what I felt was wrong with this whole movie: Catherine Zeta-Jones’ hair. How can you take one of the most beautiful women in the world, Mrs. Zeta-Jones, and give her one of the cutest haircuts of all time, the flapper bob, and somehow make her look terrible? So dumb and bad. Sloppy execution, no taste. And this deserves an Oscar?

I know it’s dumb to be angry about these awards. They are arbitrary and they do not matter. Beyonce does not give a shit about silly made up MTV awards. But am I so crazy for feeling like these awards should mean more? For being driven to ranting by evidence of bad taste? Is my impotent rage rediculous?

All I’m saying is that if I were in Kanye’s position, I would have wanted to do the same thing. Our only crime is caring too much (and, one imagines, in his case, lots of cocaine). I want good things to be recognized. I want shitty things to be called out for having inflicted their shittiness upon me.

Moral of the story: no one ever let me go anywhere.

*for that to make sense you should probably know that I’m not a soccer mom.

Pocky Day

Today is 11.11, and for some of us that means a day to celebrate Pocky, everybody’s favorite chocolate covered cookie stick (and also to celebrate veterans, obviously; the two are not mutually exclusive). Today I paid THREE WHOLE DOLLARS for a box of regular Pocky (Men’s Pocky is better, it has dark chocolate) that didn’t even have adorable arms with which to hold onto my bag.

Ok enough complaining. I gave up the land of Men’s Pocky for the land of Smart Food Popcorn and Chili Cheese Fritos. I have no regrets.

But anyway what I wanted to show you was this, an ad from 1981 with Seiko Matsuda. The things she’s doing here pretty much remind me of every day I spent in Nara—hanging out at the river, talking to old people. All pretty standard, and I really do miss it.

Enjoy your snack-themed holiday, kids!

Webcomics Weekend

So I skipped town to head to the New England Webcomics Weekend and see some family up north. I could tell you all about how cool and inspiring everyone is here, and maybe I will at some point, but for now all I wanted to share was this picture I took in the second floor ladies room of the old Eastworks building where the convention is being held.

"No pins you say??"

This defunct  vending machine assures me that there are no belts (ok, that’s important I guess) and no pins involved in its sanitary products. I didn’t even know that was something I had to worry about.