vote. please.

it's very important.

mostly a graphic blog, not too much text

my friend parker took me to see david sedaris read at the symphony. he said that something he likes to ask people at book signings is this: "if you were getting out of the shower and you saw a leprechaun next to the toilet, would you scream, or would you just innately understand that he meant you no harm?" that resonated with me, because that is a question i can both answer and imagine asking others. my answer is: innately understand, unless the leprechaun had an evil look on his face in which case i would throw my towel over him and then tie him up.

here is the view from where we sat, and a ridiculous picture of parker caught between picture-making faces (the iphone is particularly good for this):





then on monday (columbus day here, indigenous peoples' day in the bay area), we took a trip to portsmouth, new hampshire, just because! it's a town howard (and many of the other boy scouts, i think) enjoy visiting because it was the cool place to go when they worked at boy scout camp. howard and i went once over the summer - there's a nice bookstore, a great music store, a FANTASTIC diner which is clearly the hippest place in town, a coffee shop, a place where howard buys his hats and a place where he buys his messenge bags (he actually only has one, but i like parallel structure and sometimes mislead readers in order to maintain it). we went in ryan kelley's jeep. ryan kelley is a new best friend of mine, in case you're wondering. here are some pictures of foliage/a farm/bridges i took from the car, i boat i saw (portsmouth used to be a place where boats were built, although only the bridges part reminded me of portland), us fooling around at a fountain (i made them pose for this, knowing i would later put it on my blog; literary theory might call this a form of "colonization") and also some kazoos (this also):













obligatory zeppelin photos:

oh NO

mother's cookies is going under. mother's cookies is an oakland-based cookie company that makes my personal favorite cookie, the circus animal (which is actually also the personal favorite cookie of my best friend jordan pierce, one of the founding tenets of our friendship being a mutual affection for circus animals and an undying curiosity about what animal shapes the cookies are actually underneath the pink and white frosting; jordan once wrote to mother's to ask, and the framed response hangs on his wall to this day. if you want to know the answer, you can ask him, but let me just tell you it is not what you might think!):


this is terrible. really, really terrible. today i am going to go to the grocery store to buy as many circus animals as i can. this is the only thing i can think to do. i also thought about ordering this t-shirt for myself and jordan, but i did all my christmas shopping today (everyone gets soap, again) and still have to buy my airplane ticket home. so i think i will just eat cookies until i pass out. that is a fitting enough tribute, considering how often i have eaten myself sick on these cookies. for the record, i have always and will continue to enjoy every minute of it, including the lightheaded frosting stomachache that inevitably lingers long after the last sprinkle has been licked off the end of my sticky finger. goodbye, circus animals.

n conclusion, here is a little poem jordan wrote to accompany this sad news (maybe he didn't write it, but knowing jordan, he probably did):
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.