Gilliambaby

Gialliombaby is an aspiring writer.
Roughly every night a week I try to go get coffee and get work done, and more often than not I run into Gialliombaby who is doing his aspiring writer things.
My goal is to get Gialliombaby to write a short story about me. He hasn't done so yet which astounds me as I am so very amusing I don't see why one would not write a short story about me.
Usually our nights go like this
'Gialliombaby, why aren't you writing about me?"
"I will at some point"
"Not good enough Gailliombaby" I say
Then Gialliombaby calls me a harlot and I say I hate him and then he uses my cell phone to send texts that should really not be sent to Gus the worker making the coffee, all though this last  part only happens on Thursdays.
Then he speaks to me in Italian because he knows my Italian is non buono and I say 'No mi piace Gialliom-bambino' because that I can say.
For a bit I pretend to do work (talk to Phil) and Gialliombaby actually does work and then he gets distracted by my hilariousness that is hilarious enough to distract but not enough to be written about apparently.
Gilliambaby said he'll write about me before I write about him.
I'm writing about him on my blog.
Fail Giallombaby.

Here is what I love: Autumn.
I love leaves changing colours, and boots, and sweaters, and pashminas as big as I am.
Autumn is by far my favourite season out of the four.
Here is who apparently does not love autumn:
Texas.
I don't know if Texas just missed the memo that autumn is a season or if they just don't care but regargless of what happened it doesn't seem to be a season in Texas until roughly November 1st which on all accounts should be winter at that point.

It's sort of autumn at night. By that I mean it gets to be 70 degrees at night so I can wear a sweater.

I try to defy Texas and claim that it's Autumn anyway. This weekend I went to a party at a friend's apartment, it was raining and it was cold and I declared that I was going to wear my grey cold weather coat from H&M that I bought in Rome last fall, which makes it fancy even though it was only $20ish dollars. (I say 'ish' because I was always bad with euro/dollar conversions)
"You can't wear that" Will from downstairs tells me as I put it on
"Why?" I ask
"Because..." Will from downstairs tells me giving me the all too common stop being crazy Jessie look that I always get from him.

I wore it anyway. And I was stylish. Even in the rain

Will from downstairs wore his winter jacket too in the end. He saw my side of things.

Jessie: 1
Autumn and Will: 0

This weekend I spent my friday night hanging out with my best friend's daughter Bell.

The awesome thing about Bell is that she's Bell and she is a hoot and a half.

The problem with Bell is that she is way too cool for me.

Every time I say anything to her she gives me this look like 'What are you even talking about?" or "Go away Aunt Jessie, you're boring me" and scoffs at my jokes like they aren't actually clever when up until the moment I said them to her I thought they were immensly so.

She also never answers me when I try to have deep intellectual conversations with her, which I believe is  due to her cool factor and the fact that she is too smart to have deep intellectual conversations with me.

Of course this might also be because Bell is 15 months old and doesn't talk yet.

Still.

I realize now it would have never worked out.


He doesn't like dogs.

Learning New Things

We're in a predicament.
We being me and Michael the roommate
who yes! yes indeed is back in Te-jas after a summer of being an accountant without us.
The predicament is Michael's return has coincided with  Roomie J going out of town for two weeks, and Roomie J does all the cooking around here.
So Michael the roommate and I have been learning to cook for ourselves.
It's difficult but so far nothing has burned and no one has gotten salmonella.
Also we've eaten a lot of taco bell.
We're writing a cook book together for people like us
It's going to be called
"The Liberal Art Student's guide to Cooking: A delicious meal for every form of the soul"
Or
"One Million and One ways to cook rice"

So far we have fried rice, brown rice, chicken and rice, and stir fry rice which yes, is different from fried rice.

We've got this.

Recently I was going through the photos on my computer and I noticed something.
I have a lot of photos of me walking away in places.
I think there should be a coffee table called "Jessie walks across the world'
I would buy that book.
Who wouldn't want a coffee table book of my ass? I would put it on my coffee table next to my New Yorker comic coffee table book.

Juuuuust kidding.

It would look like this:

Jessie walking in Pompeii

Jessie walking up Mount Vesuveus in Naples

Jessie walking in London, England

Jessie walking in to the Mediterranean Sea

Jessie walking in Barcelona, Spain

Jessie walking in Geneva, Switzerland

Jessie walking in Nemi, Italy with her boyfriend

Jessie walking in Nemi, Italy with her boyfriend's best friend.

Don't worry about that last one.

•"No matter what happens in the end, I don't want to lose you as a friend" "I promise, I will never be your friend. No matter what. Ever"•

The Darjeeling Limited

Country Living

For the last two weeks I've been home visiting my family in Pennsylvania.
Which I am a fan of.
My parents live in the middle of no where Pennsylvania amidst mountains.
Apart from the obvious goodness of seeing my parents, and siblings who are still at home, it's also nice to be staying in the country amongsts mountains.
I live in Dallas which means not only do I live in a city where there are very few trees and even fewer hills but I also live in Texas, which is Texas.

Things in Pennsylvania are not the same as things in Dallas.
For example this type of thing does not happen in Dallas:

Once however, it did take me an hour to get home from whole foods down town because of stopped traffic.

I think that was because of construction though.

But who am I to say it wasn't because of cows.

Side note: Roger is my brother in laws dog. I should like to kidnap him except for I think Bra-in-law would notice. I actually took this video last time I was home over Christmas. 

Everything that is good about the world

A song to share for a baby wombat.

I saw the new Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris tonight and I really liked it.
It was just sweet and fun.

We went to see it at the  nice 'artsy' (as people say) movie theatre uptown, The Magnolia, which I love.
 And then afterwards we got rose and basil flavoured gelato and walked around the city that was full of lights in the trees talking and remembering our separate trips to Paris and all the things we love about Europe.

It was a very beautiful night and really a perfect way to spend a date with the BF.

And of course my BF I mean my Best Friend H.

Really H and I should be a couple.

We always have nice dates.

Art imitates life.

My sister Ellen sometimes says things like

"Jessie, if your life was tv I would watch it"

I don't really think my life is tv.

Except for some days when I wake up to a phone call from my friend Phil that says

"Jessie, come over for brunch, we're cooking elk meat"

So I go to Phil's apartment to find various boys sititng around in various stages of woken up and undress smoking and drinking beer eating elk meat.

"Do you want a beer" asks Phil
"Do you have coffee?" asks Jessie
"Well, I mean we are eating elk meat" says Phil

Plus the beer is on tap. So why not.

When asked where they got the elk meat Phil responds they just found it in their fridge.

This is my life sometimes, sitting in a kitchen eating elk meat and tap beer at 11:30 in the morning for brunch on a saturday with friends.

I'm not ashamed.

4th

We celebrated the 4th today with a party.
This is a big deal as we never have parties for real reasons.
Not like the 'Our Air-conditioning-is-fixed party' was not a huge success
or the Bloomsday party where no one had read Ulysses except for Will from downstairs who had written his thesis in college on it was not a delight.
But I think every now and then it's good to actually have a real reason for a party.
Which is of course why we're celebrating the liberation of South Sedan next week.

Tonight Will from downstairs came over to cook us dinner at our apartment.
This was a big moment because in our apartment recently we've been mostly eating taco bell sauce packets.
It was very hip of us. Will made black bean tofu and noodles all bought from a thai market.
It was all going well until the coconut.
Coconuts, it turns out, are immensely difficult to open.
After a hammer, multiple knives, and being dropped on the kitchen floor once or twice by Will from downstairs we made a small hole and were able to subtract some coconut meat.
In the end my roommate's boyfriend went and got us blizzards from Sonic.
It wasn't quite as hipster.
But it was a lot less work.

I'm what they call 'a disaster' when it comes to all things involving tools.
Luckily I have a very handy man roommate who assembles furniture for me.
Unluckily said roommate is gone for the summer.
So today I assembled my own book case.
I'm independent as they say. I'm a strong woman as they say.
It took me two hours.
And one shelf is in backwards.
Irrelevant I say.

Always Love this

Working Girl

Recently I started a new job working as an office assistant/ secretary/ person.

In my head my job looks like this:

In reality it's not quite as interesting, however, I do wear a lot of dresses and heels to work.

Also today I used the paper shredder for like an hour.

So that was pretty much fantastic.

Project

There are two things in life I really enjoy:
1) Crafting
2) and not wearing pants.

I found a really easy dress tutorial online recently that looked like even I could do, so tonight when I was bored I decided to try it out while watching Ryan Gosling movies. That's right, I live it up on Saturday night.
I don't actually have a sewing machine so I did the whole thing by hand which may be questionable. We shall see.

I bought the fabric for 5 dollars at wal mart and just had the a-frame already 

Holla.

When I marry my future husband Roland the big time buisness lawyer I'm going to live in a fancy house in highland park.
Only not, because my life plans do not include Texas forever.
And Roland and I have yet to meet and Roland may or may not not be real.
But seriously those houses are 'out of control' as they say.
Some people in Dallas are unhealthy rich.
I am not unhealthy rich. But sometimes I pretend I am.
Like today I bought a strawberry at Godiva.
Fancy shmancy.

In the bedroom

I moved into my apartment way back in January, but it's taken until roughly about right now to finish decorating it. And this weekend, magically, I finished my room.

It's not fancy.
but all I can say is
Ikea is your friend.
And not just because they sell baller cinnamon buns there.

A friend of mine was going to burn this couch but ended up giving it to me instead, which I appreciated because really, wouldn't you rather dramatically burn a couch if given the chance?

The fan is from Castel Gandolfo, Italy where the Pope has his summer residence. The paper cuts I did over Chirstmas

We bought athousand tea lights at Ikea so I've been trying to utilize them, lit by matches from my favourite bar The Grapvine in Dallas.

Far Wall

And a picture of my living room

Just because I like it.

For my birthday two weeks ago my older sister  sent me this cake topper that she made of me and my two roommates (I'm the one in the center)

She makes pretty snazzy wedding cake toppers too. We did not put this one on a cake, but instead we keep it on our counter for people to look at and comment on how fancy we are to have a cake topper that looks like us.

M, the male roommate, moves out today for the summer to go have an internship some where that is not here. It is a sad sad day and we marked it by one last trip to taco bell together, as obviously I ooze class

He'll be back in 2 and a half months but I chose the over dramatic approach and am pretending it's forever.

 However, in his absence we're subletting his room to a great girl who brought her gnome collection with her when she came, so I support that.

Cath-oh-lic

     Freshman year of college I was required to take a theology class called 'Understanding the Bible' in which we only had one book; The Catholic study Bible. This greatly confused me because obviously, as Catholics, we don't read the Bible, so a Catholic study Bible is a bit of an oximoron. (I was also confused because my University is Catholic affiliated and I didn't quite get how they didn't remember that we don't read the Bible. I may or may not have asked my Theology professor this, but he didn't really know what to make of me, nor could he figure out if I was kidding or not.)
 My sister Ellen once famously quoted 'It's not good for man to be alone' as being from Frankenstien and it's a known fact that the majority of my Bible knowledge is from the gospel of Matthew stemming from a production of Godspell I performed in senior year of high school. And most likely everyone in my family will follow in the footsteps of my older sister who chose the wedding of Canna as a reading for her wedding mass, because, let's be honest, it does have the word 'wedding' in the title.

I've kind of wondered for a bit though, why is it that every other christian denomination loves the Bible so much and we just don't read it? Why don't I have Bible quotes about family on the wall of my house or win arguments by pulling out Bible verses?

Ultimately in the end I got a B in understanding the Bible.
I could have gotten an A
But I didn't really do the assigned reading.

part one

"Once you reach a certain age you go from being 'Third wheel' to 'Family friend'. You're not just like that person that hangs out with them, you're that single friend they invite to dinner parties and hang out with their kids"

"Why would I marry her?"
"You guys have a great relationship!"
"I know, so why would I ruin that with marriage?"

"You're a lesbian aren't you? That's why you pretend to be obsessed with Tim's beard. Tim's beard is your beard"

My favourtie thing about babies

are their feet.

Today for lunch I ate Ramen noodles and munchy mix, I am so classy, and grown up.

 I bought them from the indian man at the gas station right next to my apartment.
He rang me up while telling me all about the drug dealers around here and how they always pay him with ones, that's how he knows they're dealers (I would have thought they were strippers or waiters but I trust his judgment). Then he told me the cops are out  so to watch out for them when I have my crazy parties, which I obviously always have.

We're pretty much best friends me and Raj. He's got my back.

Bambino Thomas found issue with the fact that there were no pictures of cats on my blog.


So he found this picture:

And then I found this one:

And we quickly fixed the situation. So don't worry, because I know you were worried.

We're really dedicated to doing work, and succeeding in life.


                      Obviously.

Thoughts on the matter

Do you ever wonder if you were famous what people would write about you in the Tabloids?


I do.


But mostly I think they would just print pictures of me wearing sweat pants in public.

When we were grown ups.

I am young
and I make a lot of mistakes
But my birthday is coming up soon
So at least I'm working on the young part.

I'm having a mustache party.

It's like a masquerade party.

But everyone wears mustaches.

Doesn't matter still counts

We've got ninety-nine per cent the same genes as any other person. We've got ninety per cent the same as a chimpanzee. We've got thirty percent the same as a lettuce. Does that cheer you up at all? I love about the lettuce. It makes me feel I belong.

CARYL CHURCHILL, A Number

If I were the kind of girl who got tattoos


Which I'm not, because I'm the kind of girl who changes her clothes four times a day because she cannot commit to anything on her body


I would get a tattoo like one of the ones on this website.


They please me greatly.


http://tattoolit.com/

Sleepovers

Why is it 


that only children are supposed to build forts out of the furniture in their dining room and sleep in them?
Why can't the twenty somethings do it too?


Jokes on you world, because I do it anyway.

Chug Dogs

How is it that I do not own one of these cuddly things??

Besides the fact that my apartment complex doesn't allow pets....

May or may not have seen a girl walking around carrying on of these the other day and stalked her until I could pet it.


I may be a crazy pug lady some day. It may be a real problem.
Don't judge.

Feet

Last night I acted in an expirimental production of a show called Feet.
The audience all sat under a table  and the action took place all around the table so that all you could see were the actors feet.


And when the actors weren't in a scene they sat on top of the table.


 And there were clothes on the floor at each different part of the set and the actors just wore their under wear and put the clothes on to signify new characters.


So it also looked like we were naked.


It was supposed to challenge the way people viewed theatre.


A lot of people were confused.


And jealous of how excellent we are.

Predictive Text Poem of the Day:

So now could we be awkward as he does not. Can it be earlier by men?

Life in the Te-jas apartment

I have recently moved into my first real adult apartment.
Of course by 'Real adult' I actually mean "apartment in general where I live with two other young twenty somethings who think we're adults even though we're not"
We do multiple adult things like watch the entire first season of skins in one day, eat rice out of bowls on the floor, spend money we don't have on beer, and recycle.
(But mostly the rice thing, as we recently bought a twenty pound bag of rice at Sam's club and have been spending the last three weeks coming up with every rice recipe we can.)

We eat dinner together every night because we hear families who do that are better off.

Our apartment is small and our neighbors are loud and we have no money for food, I sleep on a futon for now until my bed gets here, except for the nights I sleep in Roomie Js bed so that her and I can snuggle, and somedays we walk around wrapped in blankets over our pajamas all morning to stay warm.

And honestly I believe that is how twenty somethings are supposed to live. To get the experience of being young, and being ridiculous, and living in your first apartment.

And I rejoice in that fact.

This past week I tried my hand at stay at home motherhood when my mother went out of town and I stayed the week with my youngest sister Finn who is 14.
I imagined myself doing things like attending book club meetings and saying insightful things about Oprah's pick of the week.
I also secretly hoped that perhaps a teacher would wrong Finn in some way and I could storm into the principles office all dramatically exclaiming things like 'We do not pay for Private school education for this type of treatment!
My mother isn't actually in a book club, and apparently Finn likes to handle teachers on her own.
But I did take up crafting. I discovered a new favourite blog and after stalking it for a while wanted to try paper cutting too so I made this.

I think I could be a very sucesful stay at home mother.

At least the kind that does crafts.

oh how Stylish

When I am fancy I will have a pug dog with ribbons connected to my shoe just as the New Yorker portrays.


Potential names for the Pug dog are currently: Wes, Bartholomew, Richie, Attecus, Toby, Jere, and Paul.


Do not scoff at my dreams.

I have plans

I've decided I should like to live in Pompei please.

You would not even have to restore it, or make it a functional city, or do anything of that kind that might make it actually safe or convinent to live in.

I would get a matress pad, preferably a temperidic one because their softness astounds me.

And maybe a brita water filter, and I'd sleep on the floor of the villa of mysteries.

And keep one of the stray dogs as a pet.

This is a brilliant plan.

As long as that volcano doesn't errupt again, then we might have trouble.

Volcano aside.

This is a brilliant idea.