Just Admit You're Jealous

My friend CNash and I took a little road trip last Thursday:



That's right, Twilighters! We made the ultimate pathetic female pilgrimage to Forks, WA, the setting for Stephenie Meyer's bestselling tale of obsessive teenage-vampire romance. I think my first words to CNash that morning were, "I wish we would have planned ahead and made this a two-day trip." And I think my last words to her as I dropped her off were, "Thank heavens we didn't make that a two-day trip."

You see, kids, Forks is about as exciting as...hmmm...I'm trying to think of something not very exciting, but everything I'm coming up with is waaaay more exciting than Forks.

The trip there was lovely, of course, although I did have a moment of panic as we drove over this bridge. We survived, thank goodness. We also drove through Olympic National Forest, which is gorgeous. The road to Forks (Hwy 101) winds around Lake Crescent. Here is a shot I stole from Wikipedia:



And here's another shot of me and the lake. Neither picture really does the color of the water justice. It was so freaking turquoise. I swear I almost crashed the car a million times, the water was such a distraction.



Once you get into the city, there is a park with a big train on display:



It's supposed to be a big deal for some reason. Anyway, moving on...



Still very much a logging town, I guess. We saw lots of these around:



I still haven't decided if I feel happy or sad for the town of Forks. One minute it's a quiet little town nobody has ever heard of (and that includes other Washingtonians) and the next it's the epicenter of an absolute worldwide phenomenon. Check out this store on the main drag:

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You wouldn't believe the crap that was in this store, so I had to take some pictures to back up my story. I think my favorite was this line of lotions and body sprays called "Essence of Jacob." I think I'll leave that one alone, although I'm just dying to say more...



This I find truly horrifying:



And then there was this collection of greeting cards with pictures of Twilight vampires from their pre-vampire days. Here's a great shot of Alice in her straightjacket:



And a "portrait" of Carlisle in his mid-1600s doctor garb:



Awesome. Now here we are at the Cullen residence, which is a bed and breakfast in real life.



And here's the Forks Police Department, where Chief Swan works, of course:



Forks High School, which apparently is no longer Forks High School. Can't quite remember what it is now...but I think the current high school is somewhere nearby:



The hospital where Carlisle works. One of the parking spots has a sign that says "Reserved for Dr. Cullen."



Here are some Twilighters out taking pictures of significant Twilight loci. I know! Total freaks, right? It's like, "Hello! Get a life, losers!"



And here we are at the Swan house:



At the Chamber of Commerce building there is this lovely replica of Bella's truck:



And it's on to La Push!





CNash saw this dog and screamed, "Werewolf!"



Werewolf tracks?



Whew! That was a close call. It's dangerous for us vampire-sympathizers to be hanging out on the rez.



We saw a couple of bald eagles (or haliaeetus leucocephalus washingtoniensis, as I like to call them) hanging out on the beach, too. How cool is that? Certainly not something you see every day.



Jacob's high school:



Phew! What a trip! CNash and I would take pictures and then giggle like school girls, half excited, half embarassed by our own fan fervor. This is not the behavior of women in their mid thirties. But it's not like I bought any of that fan crap at the Dazzled by Twilight store or anything...

Cakes From The Hall Of Justice

I made this cake for my friend Sara's superhero-themed birthday party a few weeks ago. I thought it looked pretty dope, if I do say so myself.



Yes, that is Wonder Woman's golden "lasso of truth" around the base. Real ribbon--not fondant--'cause I got lazy.

Here's the birthday girl, after a busy day of fighting crime in the Seattle Metro region:

Open Mic Night: A Privilege, Not A Right

Last week, my peeps and I went to an open mic night at a local high school where my friend Carrie teaches. One of her students organized the event as part of his senior project, and it was really really really good. There was some singing and some dancing, but the vast majority of the kids read poetry they had written. I was struck by the sheer number of kids who a) had poetry to share and b) were willing to share it. As I sat there listening, I thought to myself, "This would never have flown at my high school." No way. If it were discovered that you wrote poetry back in my day, you could expect somebody to be waiting for you after sixth period with a baseball bat. At this particular high school, however, even the jockiest of jocks had a gut-wrenching, soul-bearing poem to share and everybody was cool with it. My, how times have changed.

Unfortunately, there was one part of the evening that left a bad taste in my mouth. Anyone heard of a nation-wide organization called Youth Speaks? It's a group of kids who get together to write bad poetry and perform it at open mics and slams near you. What is this group all about, you ask? I quote from their web page:


Vision
Shift perceptions of youth by combating illiteracy, alienation, and silence to create a global movement of brave new voices bringing the noise from the margins to the core.

Mission
Youth Speaks empowers the next generation of leaders, self-defined artists, and visionary activists through written and oral literacies. We challenge youth to find, develop, publicly present, and apply their voices as creators of social change.

"...through the medium of overwrought, heavy-handed, melodramatic, aimless, preachy, meandering poetry."

OK, so that last bit was mine. It is, nevertheless, true.

These kids bugged! There were four of them, and they showed up to recite a few crappy poems and plug their next poetry slam event. Each kid recited (from memory--gotta give them props there) a freaking epic poem that lasted like, ten minutes each. And they all were about the evils of society, and how each one of us is a perpetrator of said evils. In one poem, I heard some dude lecture me about:

American Idol
Sweat shops
Rape of Congolese women
Atrocities in Darfur
Aids
Poverty
Racial profiling
...and a million more societal ills.

It's like he opened up the newspaper, pulled 50 headlines from the "World News" section, and screamed them at me, one after the other. And I wanted to scream back "Oh yeah? And what exactly are YOU doing about the illegal trafficking of conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone, you freaking upper middle class CHUMP kid?" And as if it weren't annoying enough to be lectured by a bunch of privileged private school brats, while one kid was up reciting his/her poem, the rest of them were sitting behind him/her, slapping their chairs and snapping their fingers in the air whenever they found a part of the poem particularly poignant, as if to say "Preach on, my brother/sister! Remove those blinders from their pathetic, self-absorbed eyes! Show them a better path! Hearken, O ye wicked and perverse generation!"

Gag.

On a lighter note...one of my favorite poems of the evening came from a kid who wrote about his favorite cereal, Lucky Charms. I think his best line was:

I even eat them on the toilet.
Although it might smell bad,
It doesn't spoil it.

Now THAT'S a poem.

A Post Only Tim And Scott Will Care About

Last Tuesday was the first Mariners home game at Safeco Field, the day Griffey made his first appearance in Seattle as a Mariner once again. Big day...big day. CNash and I left Kent at 1:45pm--plenty of time to make a 3:40 game downtown. Or so we thought. We drove around for over an hour looking for parking. The lots right next to the field were $50. We scoffed at first, but after an hour of driving around, fifty started to sound pretty reasonable.

We eventually found a spot on the street and started the trek to Safeco as fast as our chubby legs would carry us. Right as we were handing our tickets to the dude to get in, we heard that Griffey was up. We ran up the stairs, two at a time, and tried to see over the shoulders of people in the aisle. Impossible. We had to watch it on the TV screen in the passageway. But I can tell you that the whole crowd was on its feet, chanting "Griff-ey, Griff-ey, Griff-ey." I don't care how many games you've been to, baseball or otherwise. You've never seen anything like it. I was so pissed. This was the moment I had been waiting for ever since I found out that my hero was coming back home, and I missed it. Junior, will you ever forgive me?

Anyway, we made it to our seats and proceeded to have a pretty good time. I say pretty good because we sat by some real freaks who kept trying to engage Carrie in strange conversations. One of the things I love about baseball (I suppose this is true of other sports, but I wouldn't know) is that you always make friends with the people around you. You crack jokes together, you learn each other's names, you share your licorice ropes. It's very convivial. This was not one of those games, unfortunately. The group of frat boys and their brainless girlfriends who sat in front of us also really brought me down. Besides, it was freaking cold and the lines for the garlic fries were WAAAY too long. BUT it was a good game. Mariners won in 10 innings, and it was pretty sweet. Too bad we didn't go to the next game, where Junior hit his 400th home run as a Mariner and Ichiro tried to remind Griffey that he was still the star of this team by hitting a grand slam. (A valiant effort, Ichiro, but it ain't never gonna happen. Try to start getting used to second place.)

Mariners win!

Do Yourself A Favor: Get On Board.

If you aren't already on board. The Flight of the Conchords. First season now available in stores.

Check This S*** Out

Sorry about the obscenity there, but I just can't help it! For real. Check this s*** out:

So every year, Tom Douglas (my boss) throws a managers-only Christmas party at his house. Last year's party was cancelled due to snow, so it was rescheduled for last week. I brought along my friend Carrie...



...to eat some good food and gawk at what a rich celebrity chef's house looks like. We schmoozed for a little while, drank some pop out of a lowball glass, and admired his impressive cookbook collection. Then Tom announced that there was going to be a competition.

Carrie's ears perked up.

Downstairs we would find a pile of pipe cleaners and plastic beads. Whoever made the coolest hat out of those two materials would win a trip to Chicago, luxury hotel accommodations, and dinner for two at Tom's favorite restaurant, Avec.

"That's cool," I thought to myself. It never really crossed my mind to compete. There were too many people there, and I wasn't feeling particularly creative. Carrie, however, was a shark and that Chicago trip was a bleeding sea lion in distress. "We're winning this," she said, and dragged me to where the pipe cleaners were. She came up with a brilliant plan: We'd make a crab, holding onto a cake, taking the L train to Wrigley Field. Crab, because Tom is famous for his crab cakes, and the cake, because I do cakes. It works on two levels, you see.

Anyway, for the next hour, we talked some major trash. At one point, Carrie was even heard to say, "Back up off of those pipe cleaners. They're for the winners," and, "If we don't win, we're pushing over the mini-bar and lighting it on fire." It was all in good fun, I assure you.

So we finished the hat, and although it wasn't the prettiest hat in the room (there were some amazing hats there that night) conceptually speaking, it was kick-ass. We all lined up and each of us got 10 seconds to model our hats and explain our design to the panel of judges.

I CAN'T HOLD IT IN ANY LONGER! WE TOTALLY WON!!! Can you believe it? We won a freaking trip to Chicago! How awesome is that? I gotta get us tickets to Oprah because with our luck, we'll show up on Oprah's Favorite Things Day. Maybe we'll drive home from Chicago in our shiny new Jaguars.

We kind of feel like shmucks, though, because now we look like some seriously ruthless competitors. You can trash talk all you want, as long as you lose in the end. Then it's all fun and games. But if you trash talk and then win? You look all kinds of arrogant. I feel bad about that moment when I squeezed past a co-worker and said, "Excuse me, I've got to go win a trip to Chicago," as Tom was announcing the results. That doesn't sound so good, in retrospect.

Oh well! You wanna see a picture of the winning hat? OK! Here it is!

To "Mr. Anonymous" Who Commented On My Griffey Post

"This is rediculous. Mariners fans dont be so easily fooled by the window dressings provided you by the Mariners Management. Ken Jr will have no impact in the coming year. All this shows is that the Mariners are not really committed to winning but blowing smoke in the faces of easily fooled Mariners fans across the country. Those of you in Washington State should be offended and hold the Mariners responsible for such a dismal record and not get so easily excited over something that will do nothing for the team's record."

Have you no heart? You obviously don't comprehend what Ken Griffey Jr. means to us here in Seattle. I understand that baseball is a business, and nobody likes to see their team lose. But you don't think the Yankees would jump at the chance to re-sign The Babe? They would dig his ass up and roll his bones out to right field if they could.

That's what Griffey means to us. He is our Great Bambino. When the Reds came to play at Safeco in 2007, the entire crowd CHEERED FOR THE OPPOSING TEAM. And although his stats aren't what they used to be, there are other factors--no less important--for which there are no stats. I'm talking about EXCITEMENT. LOVE. THE FANS, for crying out loud. Haven't you ever seen the energy of the fans turn a baseball game around? I have. It happens all the time. You cannot quantify that as a statistic, but it is very real.

But even if Griffey strikes out every damn time, I will still walk away a satisfied customer, because the thrill of seeing #24 on the field again is better than any World Series trophy. Ask any "easily-fooled Mariners fan." You will get the same answer.

You should come visit Seattle. We're nice here.